21- Frampton Comes Alive

            I spent an afternoon in the city today, just walking around and looking at tall buildings, and I was getting a latte I could barely afford in a little coffee shop in the Village called Cafe con Leche, waiting for Hot Pink when I spotted Peter Frampton.  He was wearing a tight-fitting knit shirt and leather pants but gone was that hair he was famous for as a teen idol rocker.  Acres and acres of heavily styled curls now gave way to receding hairline and a high forehead, over a wrinkled, middle-aged face.

            He was handsome, I thought.  He looked like a lawyer or an agent.  He’d look like an adult.

            Frampton bought a mocha latte and signed an autograph or two.  When he finally sat down, he was sitting at the table next to mine, reading a copy of Spin.  I could have talked to him.  I didn’t.  I could have asked for an autograph. 

I didn’t.

Someone came by and sat down next to him, a friend.  They talked.  This isn’t what they said…but it’s close.

“Were you waiting long?” asked the friend.

Frampton said, “There is some great tail in this town, Bobby.  I mean classy fucking women, man.”

“Yeah,” said the friend.  “It’s a nice town.  How was your flight?

“Look at the ass on that girl over there.  Look at it.”

“Our meeting with the record company is at two.”  Frampton’s eyes were still firmly fixed upon a young posterior.  The friend held a pair of fingers up in Frampton’s face as a reminder.  “Two, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Dude, two o’clock.  You can’t be late.”

“Man,” Frampton said, with a loud sniffle.  “Back in the day I could have nailed any chick in this room.”

He had to be fifty by now, probably older, and there he was, stuck in 1974.

It made me an awful kind of sad. He here was Peter fucking Frampton, bragging about pussy. Stuck in a time-frame of thought, that realistically completely sucked. Just like his music. Stuck frozen in time. This guy, a bullshit teen idol, from a million years ago, couldn’t take his mind, off stray gash.

He kept bragging. I kept drinking my overpriced coffee. I kept thinking about how completely frozen in time this asshole was, staring at him. Until I was watching his mouth move, but there weren’t any words coming out. It was just repetitive facial motions. Over and over- stuck in a loop in time. Over and over, his mouth up and down; his jaw creasing the same way, over and over. It was Frampton’s frozen motion, like a fish out of water gasping for air, until it stopped nearly completely.

I saw Peter Frampton stuck in this loop. It looked like Frampton on pause on some shitty VHS recording where the image would jump and bump around the frame, but stagnated in resonance. The last of any motion struggling to propel, to, well, move to complete the full range.

I turned my gaze to the people on the street. And they were all stopped, too. Frozen in whatever motion was their last. Like shitty VHS on pause. Some, holding their last step from the ground, other’s talking. Drinking. Eating. Living on pause within the moment. The patrons; all stuck on pause. The sound in the room- warped and gone. Everything on pause.

Except me. I was in full range of motion. I was the only moving thing in the “frame”. I sipped my coffee, shook my head. Still, I was the only thing with any animated range of motion within the entire place. Everything on pause- except me. Everything shaky and bumping around the room, staccato’d, not completely still, but stuck in small jutting erratic still ness. As if everyone was a tuning fork struck to that near still vibration barely visible, but in a way still perpetuating.

I closed my eyes, opened them, blinked in a cartoonish way. Still- everything on pause.

I closed my eyes again, flexed my jaw to the point where the pressure of the up and down of my mandible was audible within my ears- a stressed flex. Still- everything on pause when I opened my eyes.

One more time I closed my eyes.

I kept them shut for some time. I held my coffee, felt the heat on the palm of my hand. I took inventory of myself. I felt my torso with my coffee-less hand. I sent my thoughts to the tips of my extremities. Felt my heart beating and squeezed my eyes tight until the black behind my eyelids was sprinkled with those little spritely dots and lines of stressful close-ed-ness. I inhaled through my nose one giant breath. And gregariously, eyes still closed, exhaled that breath. And I consciously made the effort to keep my eyes closed to the beat of a three count.

1

2

3

Eyes opened.

And the world; this VHS on pause world, filled with jutting staccato’d everything. (And Peter Frampton) had taken on a hue, a filter, as if I was looking out from the inside of a bottle of 7-Up. Green colored transparency, with bubbles floating from the bottom to the top, in front of my eyes, through my longitudinal line of sight, disappearing at the top of my field of vision.

And the sound of nothing except the stress of the pressure of my jaw muscles, audible within my head as the room bent fish-eye lens style. Green still. Bubbling still. A view of a VHS world on pause though an emerald something.

Oh my God. I’m having a fucking stroke. I thought quickly. This is what it feels like.

But that wasn’t it. I just knew it wasn’t. It wasn’t a stroke. It wasn’t the drugs I may or may not have been on, or had leftover in my system. I wasn’t tripping another trip off anything that may or may not have been stored up in my spinal fluid. I was literally existing like this. This was real, and it was happening.

And through the sound of my stressed muscular jaw, within it actually, in a tiny spot in the crook of that sound. Were the words, the phrases:

You are the gateway.

We need to know how you did it.

Who gave you this information?

And then instant extraction from the moment laced by those phrases and back to a world where time was normal and motion was clean and nothing was anything other than the color it needed to be and my expensive coffee was cold, and I was pissed and holy shit that was a rush. And I don’t know shit about what I just heard though the sound in my head.

I sat down and Frampton and his business partner were leaving, Pink arrived, wearing a long, gray fur coat and an impossibly short, pink skirt.  She sat down across from me, smoking a Newport, even though this was a no smoking establishment, and crossed her legs.  Her lipstick was all over her face and her eye-shadow was runny.  “Get me a decaf mocha-latte right now or I’m going to fucking scream,” she called out to no one in particular.

And I sat in focused silence.

            She, ashed her cigarette under the table, and looked at me and said, “Laird, baby, I think I just saw Peter Frampton.”

            “You did,” I said, “I could tell you about what I just saw. But I’m still digesting it.”

            Pink just shook her head in that huh? kind of way and skipped over what I was saying completely.  “Baby, there is no way he should be wearing those leather pants unless he’s willing to put more work into tread climbing. You know what I’m saying?”

           I said I did. And I felt focus nearing capacity within myself.

            She let out a long sigh.  “I guess I’d fuck him anyway.  Just for the sport of it.”

            “In case of emergency,” I said to her.

            “What?”

            “Nothing,” I said.  “I didn’t say anything.”

           

20- James Spader and the Sensory Depravation Tank

            I was laying in bed, watching a movie on TV.  I was on about five Xanax and a half a bottle of Nyquil, and I was trying to follow the plot, but it was a little too heavy for me.  James Spader was a doctor or a medical student, and he happened across the murder of some old girlfriend or something, some chick that looked like a hooker.  I think it was James Spader, anyway.

            This guy, this big, tough-looking guy wrapped a fucking rope around Spader’s neck and strung him up, killing the fucking star of the movie like, twenty minutes in.  The only thing is that then Spader woke up and I didn’t know if it was a dream or what the fuck was going on.  All of this had something to do with some fairly standard Jack the Ripper type who was killing prostitutes in L.A.

            I don’t know.  Like I said: Xanax and Doxylamine Succinate, the active ingredient in Nyquil.  The effect was, lay down on a bed, or a couch, which was where I was, and float.  I was watching James Spader stalk around with a little bit of menace, a little bit of nice guy, a mop of sweaty straw-colored hair hanging all over his brow.  I had a vague notion of what my name was when Vermin called me.

            “Laird,” he said.

            “Who?”

            “Laird,” he said.  “Fuck, I don’t know your first name.  Is that you?”

            “What?” I said.

            “It’s Verm,” he said.  “What are you up to, man?”  There was music playing in the background, something bluesy.

            “I’m on cough medicine and Xanax and watching James Spader have a beer with some chick, but I think he’s already dead.  Why?”

            “Man, I’m at the Tank, and the music here is just…just fucking killing.  Do you know this place?”

            “Verm…”

            “Laird, man, there’s Jimi on the box, and there’s a band playing everything from Otis Redding to James Brown.”

            I looked at the clock, but I couldn’t even see it.  I looked at James Spader and he was starting to give me the creeps.  “Verm,” I said, “it’s late.”  I guessed.

            “It’s not even nine-thirty, man.  The singer looks like Denzel Washington, and he’s got a set of pipes like Otis, man.  I’m telling you.  This is the place to be, man.  Aqueduct, man, near the baseball fields.  There’s a big neon sign that says Live Blues and R&B Shows Every Night.  Call a fucking cab…”

            “I can’t afford a cab.”

“Then steal a fucking car.  You cannot miss this place.”

            I considered my options.  I looked at the clock and it still didn’t tell me anything.  I looked at James Spader, and he was looking right at me.  “What are you waiting for,” he said.  He lit a cigarette and stared at me, big blue eyes.

            “Otis, man,” Verm said.  “I’m sitting on the dock of the bay here, and you’re watching James Fucking Spader.”

            “Do it,” James Spader said.  Everything around him had stopped.  The music, the cigarette smoke, the whole bar.  Every single person was caught in a freeze frame, except for the girl he was sitting in the bar with, a cute little 80s number I’d long since forgotten the name of.  She was looking at Spader, expectantly.  He was looking at me.  “Well do something.  You know, I’m not sure how much longer I can stand the sight of you.”

            I put on a pair of shoes, Chuck Taylor's with holes in the canvas.  I put on my fatigue jacket.  I picked up the shitty little remote control that came with my shitty little TV and I looked at Spader and he looked at me.

            We looked at each other.

            “And I didn’t die, you fucking retard.  That was my twin brother.  It’s a fucking plot device.”

            I was already out the door.

***

            A half an hour later, I was walking past the baseball fields near the aqueduct, and way on up the street I saw a little sign that said Live Blues Music Nightly in bright blue neon.  Ozone Park at night.  Shops were closed up, boarded up with big metal gates covered with spray-painted tags that said things like “Street Thunder is Alive” and “Turk 182” and I hadn’t known that the film students from NYU ever left the big island.  These were covered with padlocked gates.  There were dirty men lurking around in the darkness, huddled against the chill in the air, drinking away the day’s profits and not paying income tax.

As I got closer, I saw the name of the bar, The Sensory Depravation Tank.  It said that Clive “Otis” Owens and the Love Makers were playing all this week.

            I went inside and it was all smoke and mood-lighting.  There were pretty, white waitresses, and a smiling, old, black barkeep, who looked in charge.  At tables, patrons were sitting, smoking, talking, drinking black label scotch and tapping their feet while the band was flying and “Otis” and two back-up singers were singing “I Second That Emotion” by Smokey and the Miracles.

            Otis looked more like Richard Pryor than Denzel Washington…Prior after setting his face on fire freebasing, as opposed to before.  He did sound like Otis though. His back up singers both oddly resembled Grace Jones and I thought for a moment how weird that was because I’d never seen anyone who looked like Grace Jones, not one single person- ever, and this guy has two Grace Jones’ backing him up on the mic.

            I said hello to a waitress and looked around the room.  Otis was trying to tell me that if I felt like loving him, he’d second that emotion, and I saw Vermin sitting in the front row.

            He was clapping his hands and tapping his feet.  He was wearing a dirty sweater, but with a gleaming white shirt and a tie with a half Windsor knot.  That, and an ugly pink bathrobe.  Nobody was staring at him.  He had a Kool dangling from his lips.  There was a pack on the table next to his drink and a lighter emblazoned with a single playing card- a Joker.

            Verm nodded at me and I sat down.  I took a smoke from his pack without asking, and I used his lighter to light it.  “What took you so long?” he asked.

            “I had to talk things over with James Spader,” I said.  “That and I couldn’t find my way off my block.”  I smoked and he smiled.  The song was upbeat and so was the mood in the place.  Everybody was wearing a smile.  “You gonna buy me a drink?” I asked him.

            “Jack,” he yelled to the white-bearded man behind the counter, “get my man here a double of black label.”  Verm was all smiles.  He took a short drag from his cigarette and spit out a chimney of smoke.

            There was a beat then, a few moments of Verm looking at me and me looking at him, both of us were waiting for the other to say something.  Right about then, I noticed that Vermin had a bruise on the right side of his face, down around his jaw and his cheek.  It was about the size and shape, well, at least the shape of New Jersey.

            “Otis” started singing Brownie McGhee’s “Rainy, Rainy Day” while playing an old acoustic guitar; and Verm was all smiles.  “I wanted to talk to you about your boy Kevin.”

            I smoked.  Jack brought me my double of black label and I took a little swallow.  “He used to fuck Pink and he doesn’t live around here anymore,” I said.  “How’s that?”

            “Where did he go?” Verm asked, his hands intertwined with a cigarette burning in there somewhere.  “Did he tell you anything?”

            “No,” I said.  “Why are you asking me this?”

            “No reason,” he said.  “I just figured I could offer you some good shit at an affordable cost if you had some good info.”

            “I haven’t seen him,” I said.  “Why does everyone ask me about Kevin?”

            He shrugged.  “My man Getch is in the way of needing to talk to your boy Kevin, and I just figured it would score me a few points with his crazy ass if I could tell him.”

            “Getch the one that did that to you?” I asked, not really liking my cigarette.

            Verm shook his head.  “Nah,” he said.  “It was those aromatic bodyguards he’s always rolling around with.  Those motherfuckers wear too much cologne.  Shit, I can still smell it.  I asked him if he’d heard anything about Kevin and he had one of ‘em crack me across the face with his gun.”  He felt around his jaw.  “It could be worse.  I think he loosened a tooth or two though.  I guess I shouldn’t have asked.”

I told him that I was sorry.  “I don’t know anymore than anybody else, man.  You try Pink?  They were fucking for like…years.”
            He smiled.  “She told me that he wasn’t circumcised.  That wasn’t really the kind of information I was looking for, but, well, at least it was information.”  I tapped off some of my ashes and I noticed that there were at least a dozen butts in the tray.  I also noticed that Vermin’s hands were shaking.

“You okay, Verm?”

“Yeah, man, I’m cool,” he said.  “You want some coke?”

            Next thing, the two of us were standing in the men’s room, which was all imitation marble countertops and blue tile and creepy fluorescent lights, the kind that stutter like Daffy Duck when the bulb is a little loose.  Verm put a three by five vanity mirror on the sink with four lines of really good coke and he took down two of them with a rolled up twenty dollar bill. All very cheesy 1980’s all very cheesy Verm. And I snickered and he shot me a “look”.

            “You know,” he started to say as I snorted one line of coke, followed by another, “some day soon, someone’s gonna mention that fuck’s name to Getch and get his fucking skull cracked open.  I just hope it isn’t me.”

            “How much does Kevin owe him?” I asked.

            “Dude,” he said, “I don’t know.”  Outside, “Otis” was playing something by Aretha, and Verm’s feet were dancing underneath him even as he looked so damn serious.  “I think if he woke up with my dick in his ass he’d hate me only a little bit less than he hates Kevin, man.  So I’m thinking it’s a fucking lot.”

            I reached into his breast pocket and I took another of his cigarettes and I lit it and blew smoke at my reflection in the mirror.  “I’m not exactly a big fan myself,” I said. 

            “Dude,” he said, “this whole thing has been going down hill since Kevin left town.”  He looked over his own face in the mirror, checked his teeth with his finger and looked up his nose, clearing a few grains out from under.  “You may not want to listen to that, but it’s true.  Ever since he split with all that debt, Getch is getting crazier and crazier. Like weird fucking crazy. Not even the good kind of crazy. I’m talking dark ages crazy. You hear about that shit he did to Nicky Divine?”

            I said that I had.

            “A fucking shin-vice, man?” he asked.  “Back in the day, Getch’d have one of his cologne motherfuckers put two in Nick’s head and have done with it.  Business, you know?  Two in the head, and a lonely grave, and it was ice cold and a good kind of crazy for that line of work was left in the wake of the event- as a reputation type thing.  That, or break his hand or something.  Business.  He got mean, you know?  Real mean. Like wacky fuckin’ sixteenth century mean, since your boy Kevin fucked him, man he’s been Googling new and interesting ways to fuck people up on the dark side of bizarre…”  Verm shook his head, and he took the cigarette from my mouth and took a puff and gave it back to me.

            “The television keeps telling me that these things are bad for you, you know?”  He smiled and I smiled.

            I thought about James Spader, watching me make decisions, being the nice guy one minute and menacing the next.  I thought about my TV talking to me.  “Shit must be true,” I said.

“There’s a whole lot of check yourself before you wreck yourself going on right here, and I’m telling you Getch is ready to wreck shit.” Verm said, pushing his finger into the center of my chest.

“And?”

“And watch your shit. Getch is a mad dog. He isn’t having anyone else do the dirty work here. He’s gotten very hands-on. He’s boiling. He’ll pop off soon enough, like Krakatoa, all nasty and dirty. And do you want to be in the blast radius of his shit?”

“Well, I can’t just not be. I do what I do. I’m not hiding. I have to make money Verm, you know that more than anyone.”

“I know you’re not hiding. I’m just saying, game is changing- be prepared for change.”

“You know man, “change”, fuck, if you knew half the shit that was going on right now, in my head, you’d understand that I understand change more than any motherfucker you know.”

Verm threw me a quizzical look, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“What?” I said.

“In your head, what are you plotting something?”

“What- No.”

“C’mon man, don’t be fucking around here. Don’t think stupid shit. These are stupid times. Getch has a hard-on, a fucking blood lust. If you’re plotting some bullshit, just deep six it, right now.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

White lines…blue paper…and a searing pain right through the center of my skull.

“Then what the fuck is it man?” Vermin asked, and it was genuine too, as genuine Verm could be full of coke and standing in the here and now. He was asking me, as of all things, a friend. And I was taken back a little bit and I threw him the same quizzical look he’d just given me and thought about revealing everything that was going on in my mind, all the details. Thinking about just serving it up to him on a platter. Really giving it to him, the hallucinations. The Aurora Project. All of it. Not knowing if he’d actually buy it, but feeling almost comfortable enough to talk about it because I really didn’t give a shit about his perspective on me, or him, or anything. And I know this fleeting moment of Verm actually giving a fuck was fueled more so by drugs rather than any real concern on my fucking behalf.

“Well, what the fuck is it?” Verm asked.

And now he’s prying. Is this genuine concern? Or was the coke too good to make a rational read on Vermin.

“It doesn’t matter.” I back pedal, because this isn’t the time or the place to get into anything in my head, especially with this guy. Vermin may be being real right now. But in all actuality, fuck him he’s a piece of shit, even more than I am. He’d sell me down the river in a nanosecond, and just like Pink, if I furnish him any information, I’m giving him the means to the end of a transaction and I’ll get fucked for this- some how some way. Plus, he wouldn’t understand it, because he’s just plain old fucking dumb.

“All right then, man. Just have your shit on lockdown. Because Getch is pissed- and you and Kevin are tight.” Verm gives me the eyes of serious.

“Were tight.” I say, deadpanned.

“Ok, “were tight.”

There’s a pause here, the kind of awkward pause that happens when two men are doing pretty decent cocaine in a bathroom and things take a turn from warning your sometimes hustling pal Laird about some kind of impending doom, to the kind of heart to heart you’d have on a camping trip with your father.

White lines…blue paper.

“What now?” Verm says; he feels it’s awkward, too.

“Now, I just want to get the fuck out of this bathroom, enjoy your cocaine.”

19- The Girl with the Bottle of Cough Syrup

           

          “What do you do?” I ask her.  We’re sitting in some bar in the village called Fin du Monde, which is, I think, French for ‘men who pierce their lower lip.’  All around us are these people.  The ones who slap paint across a canvas and stick an old, yellow toenail into it and pretend that they’re Jackson Pollack.  She’s sitting across from me, Julie.

            I had been buying Nyquil at an all night druggist a few blocks down.  Doxylamine Succinate, the active ingredient in Nyquil, is also commonly found in sleeping pills.  At about $5.00 for the biggest bottle they had, it was the cheapest bender I could find.  Fingering the Hamilton in my pocket, I thought about buying Nyquil gel caps to wash down with it when I heard this polite little gasp of a sneeze.

            Walking up the aisle was this slinky little brunette, with long, long legs and a mop of thick, dark hair.  She had walked right up to me, pulled a bottle of the Doxylamine Succinate-flavored beverage, and asked if I was sick too.

            “Huh?”

            “You know, sick.”  She shook the Nyquil bottle at me.  “You must have a cold.”

            “Yeah,” I said.  “In a way, yeah.”

            She looked me up and down.  Her in her designer jeans ripped at the knees, her in her skimpy black top and worn-at-the-shoulders leather jacket.  Suddenly I felt bad that my clothes were dirty and that I had five days of beard on my face.  “Do you live around here?” she asked.

            “Queens.”

            “I live in Queens, too.  I was just about to hit the subway, but I figured I needed some cough syrup.”

            “You know that Doxylamine Succinate is the active ingredient in Nyquil?”

            She smiled.  Her teeth were white like an unused bar of soap, and they were unnaturally straight.  Except for one.  In her mouth, I could see one tiny incisor, lower right hand corner of her mouth, which came to this tiny little point, and sat crooked amidst her row of perfect teeth like a kicked-over grave stone.  “Do you want to get a drink?”

            I wanted to run my tongue over her crooked tooth.

            “Isn’t that what we’re doing right now?”

            “I mean a real drink.”

            “I can’t afford too many real drinks.”

            “What if I pay?”

            “Maybe I’ll let you,” I said, smiling.  There was a single clerk behind the counter up front, Indian or Pakistani.  The druggist had gone home for the night.  The place was going to close soon enough.  We were both wearing dirty clothes and had greasy hair, and between us, we were holding enough liquid sleeping pill to snuff out a thoroughbred.  I think the guy was getting nervous.

            “So it’s a date?” I asked.

            “I don’t go on dates,” she said.

            “Then it’s a drink with a pretty girl.”

            “Do you think I’m pretty?”

            “Do you still want to buy me some booze?”

            An hour and a half later, we’re sitting in this shitty village bar with all of these leather jackets and cigarette smoke and Beck on the juke, drinking cheap beer and eating complimentary pretzels, the most I’d eaten in two or three days.

            “I’m a filmmaker,” she says.  “Sort of.”

            I pretend that I’m interested.  “What kind of films do you make?”
            “None yet,” she says, sipping her beer.  She has this small face, and with each sip it all just sort of contracts together in a squint at the taste of it.  Still, she drinks eagerly.  “I haven’t done any yet.  But I’ve made a few short films.”

            “What kind?”

            “What do you mean?”

            “I don’t know.  What kind?”

            “I think…gosh, I don’t even know.  Just…nothing…something different, you know?  I want to make movies that break down genres, you know?  Like…like fucking Jim Jarmusch, you know, like Ghost Dog.  Did you ever see that?”

            “Never heard of it.”

            “It’s like this fusion of gangster movies and hip hop and samurai culture…just fucking bizarre.  And that’s what I want to do,” she says.  “I want to make a gangster film with vampires in it, or a family drama with an action movie inside it.  I just…a sci-fi movie set in the past…and yet at the same time, have it be set in the future.  Do you know what I mean?”

            Actually, I don’t.  I think about sedatives.  I think about Nyquil, about Doxylamine Succinate and about spiking my beer with absinthe.  I think about Hemingway and “Hills Like White Elephants.”  I think about high school and remember why I forgot it in the first place.  I think about that story and a couple talking about an abortion.  I think about what absinthe can potentially do to an unborn fetus, and I wonder exactly what it could do for me. I think about white lines on blue paper and I get scared, but I reel myself in, because I really want this moment to be something outside of that shit.

“I just want to blend different genres together.  I want to create something completely new and different.  I want to make important movies, movies that really matter.”

“Do you have an agent?”

“No.”

“Do you know anyone in the industry?”

“I served a drink to Robert DeNiro once.  He likes scotch.  I hate scotch.”

She runs the tip of her finger, affixed with a long, sharp, black nail and runs it along the neck and the mouth of her beer bottle.  She smiles at me flashing her white teeth. They have that vacuum cleaner commercial, just greased with Vaseline look.  “What do you do?”

I take and sell drugs, and that seems to take up most of my time.  Sometimes I have sex with men for money. I’m a two bit hustler on the brink of popping a paranoid aneurysm. I may or may not be in tune with some kind of signal from a future, past, present, unknown “something”. I think about how my rent is due in three days and how I already owe twenty to Tim Tim.  “I’m between jobs right now.  That kind of thing.”

She laughs, she thinks I am joking.

We talk about the beer, how she thinks the tap is busted because the beer doesn’t taste right.  “It tastes like copper,” she says.  We talk about her favorite movies.  She thinks Bartolucci is underrated, and I nod and don’t tell her that I don’t know who he is.  She says that Tarantino is overrated, and I nod and don’t tell her that she’s wrong.

Three hours later we’re in her apartment, listening to Radiohead, and I don’t understand a word of it.  I take off her shirt.  I haven’t had sex in months.  Maybe years.  Not without getting paid.  The swell of her breasts under my fingers, the feeling of the hard nipple brushing against my palm.  Twenty minutes later, she’s completely nude, her lean, thin body, smooth and hairless all over.

We’re listening to Bjork and I don’t understand a word of it.  I have my face between her legs.  Her fingers dig into my hair and my scalp.  Her thighs are lean, and smooth and they brush and bristle against the side of my unshaven face, and she moans soft, and reaches over and she turns up the music.  Her fingernails dig into my shoulders and I can smell and taste her, ripe, pungent, feminine smells surrounding me as my pants slip off and I slip into her.  Slow, rough movements in the dark of her apartment, on her couch.  She has a roommate…she could be home at any second, but I don’t care.  Tingling, sweating sensations.  She tells me not to use a rubber.  “I can’t have children,” she says, and it turns me on.

“I was raped when I was fourteen,” she says, and it turns me on more.  Harder, faster movements, slick, sweat, body fluids.  She moans into my ear.  She smokes Red Apple cigarettes and I can smell them all over her and that turns me on more than anything.  “I had to have a hysterectomy.”

            I think about little tiny rooms filled with people looking at me, studying me.  I think about the phrase “Aurora Project” and about John F. Kennedy Jr.’s accident that might not have been an accident it all flashes thru my mind so quickly with a painful ache.  I think about Kevin Costner drinking his own piss, processed through filters on a raft in Waterworld and try to forget that while I don’t remember what my mother looks like (other than that her hair was a kind of shoe-polish black that people either find attractive or frightening), that I do remember going to see that movie and I hate myself both for having gone to see it and for remembering it.  I try to think about anything but sex, anything but this girl, Julie. I try not to wonder how a guy like me, ended up inside a muff like this.

            Her fingers are digging into my back and I’m thinking about Vermin’s dirty couch.  Her left hand grabs onto my side with force and sharp fury as she lets out an enormous moan and I can feel that I’m bleeding, and I try to focus on the song that’s playing.  The lyrics ricocheting around my brain like a bullet, “You feel it till you’re dry.  You feel it till you’ve had enough.  And you don’t understand.”  I’m counting sheep, gorillas, manatees, fucking unicorns- anything to keep my mind off the sex. I think when her entire body stiffens up, from her crooked little toes to the single crooked tooth in her otherwise perfect smile, it all tenses up.  “This leads into a high pitched scream and her crying, “Oh my God, oh my God,” and her pussy tightening around me until she lay still.  The world is all bright light and ringing bells, and the muscles tighten and spasm, and I close my eyes, and the rush of it, oh God, the rush of it, and when I’ve come, I can feel my life draining out of me, and we collapse together, sweating and panting.

            A half hour later, she’s laying next to me, awake, an arm across my chest and stomach, her face pressed against the flesh of my arm.  “If I fall in love with you, could you pretend to love me back?”

            “What?”  All I want to do is sleep.

            “If I do fall in love with you, which I don’t think is going to happen,” she’s trying to reassure me, “but just in case it does…you don’t have to love me back.  All I want is for you to pretend.”  I don’t feel reassured. Is this some reverse psyche job?

            Her hand is on my chest, twirling the hair with a lone finger.  “I’m not very good at pretending things,” I say.

            She smiles at me.  “Well pretend to pretend.”

            “I’ll see what I can do,” I say.

            This is me meeting and falling in…something… with a girl who only went into a cheap little drug store for some cold and flu relief and came out with me.  I don’t even remember if either of us bought cough syrup.  She kisses me.  This is me catching a touch of the flu from a pretty girl named Julie.