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.