The
sky was a blur of black and dark blues, and there were no stars to be seen. That’s how it was in the city at night. It was pollution. It’s crime, it's banner ads with beautiful vapid people hanging in splintered light, it's steam from cracks in the street and the
chemicals in the air still lingering from Ground Zero. Carbon monoxide. Arsenic.
Cadmium, burned and ground up into a fine dust…it causes pneumonia by
filling the lungs with debris. Asbestos
only causes cancer. Mercury, lead, and
hydrogen sulfide from the broken sewer lines. It’s all still in the air, it’ll
never dissipate, even as they rebuild, the smell will hang forever in that spot
like a dead man perpetually strung to the gallows. The air is thick with gray smog at night.
There is no moon.
I’m standing at a
payphone a few blocks from Prospect
Park, pretending to talk
on the phone. The
receiver is in my hand, but the voice on the other end keeps telling me things
like, “Your call cannot go through as
dialed. Please hang up, and try again.” I push a few numbers, and it tells me things
like, “The time is 11:27 PM.”
I’m
in Brooklyn.
I don’t live around here, but I know exactly where to go. I know where she’d go. There’s a car parked in between two buildings
on my left, and I’m watching the bumper bob lightly up and down in an unsteady
rhythm. The buildings are abandoned, a
grocery and a True Value. The car is a Lincoln, pretty new, with
a shiny new paint job, all shined and polished all around. The guy inside probably has very nice
teeth. He probably has a sixty-dollar
haircut, and $180 shoes. He probably has
a job on Wall Street, a house in Connecticut, and has a wife with Botox lips
and silicone tits, and two children who don’t know that their father is giving
a mouthful of cock to a hooker in Brooklyn.
She has six inch stiletto heels and a green tank top that probably top
out at twenty-five bucks total, and a neatly trimmed mound of pink pubic hair.
“I
miss you too,” I say into the phone, acting like a real person.
After
a while, the voice on the other end of the line had faded out into a dull,
steadily rising beep-beep-beep-beep, and I barely notice. The collar of my jacket is turned up, and a
Mets hat is crammed down low on my forehead, shading my eyes and my face. I am tucked deep into the corner of the
payphone kiosk, and still responding to the beeping as if it is a person. “Yes,” I say.
Pink.
Her long legs.
“Good,”
I say
beep-beep-beep-beep
The slight swell of her stomach,
and the tattoo, a black rose, just above her hipbone, just barely visible over
the rise of her preferred cut of jeans. This guy, I say to myself. This
guy probably has a wife.
“I understand,” I say.
A wife, four kids, a brand new lawnmower,
and a mistress.
The
car starts jumping faster and faster, testing the shock with short, hard hops
on brand new tires.
beep-beep-beep-beep
Four kids and a maid.
“I
know,” I say.
In
the car, in the window, peering over my shoulder…a woman’s shadow. She’s all shoulders and shoulder-length hair,
flying around…a head…thrashing around like mad.
My fingernails…dirty, dull, and ragged from biting, dig into the
composite plastic on the side of the payphone box. My cock an uncomfortable steel rod.
“A maid and a two car garage, and a
basketball hoop,” I tell myself.
I
start to hear her, and I’ve heard this one before. This is her Gold Membership, Preferred
Customer orgasm. All panting and moaning
like she’s been shot…like she’s been stabbed….that’s the standard package.
beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep
“I
miss you too,” I say. But she’s mixing
in the ‘Fuck me,’ and the invocations of God, and of Jesus and Mary and Joseph,
and Magic Johnson and the Magi, and someone named David.
“David,”
she screams, and this time, I hear her distinctly…that voice…deep and throaty
like Kathleen Turner before she was a drunk.
“Fuck me, David!”
I
grip the receiver like it’s about to fly away and she’s screaming like mad and,
beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep
my fingernails grind into the
rough, black plastic, and I shrink against the wall, and I’m on fire inside,
and I want a drink, and I want to pump a line of coke.
“I
love you too,” I say into the phone.
Her
screams begin to rise in pitch and volume, and my body starts to shake, and I’m
laying on the ground, pulsing and throbbing all over with the phone in my hand
going beep-beep-beep as the car comes
to a slow, bouncy stop, and a man’s voice cries out in orgasm, and I feel a brutal
shutter run through my system, and a warm wet spreading in my jeans.
I
lay, near crumpled on the ground for a minute, panting, breathing, thinking,
talking into the phone, which has a voice again now.
If you’d like to make a call…hang up, and
try again.
“I
will,” I say. “Just…give me a few
minutes.”
“This guy...”
The car door opens.
“…has a house in Connecticut and a lawn and
a son named Bobby and...”
…and Pink steps out of the
car. She has a small fistful of cash in
her hands. She’s wearing a tight-fitting
green top, and a black skirt, that she’s smoothing down her thighs with one
hand, while she stuffs the cash into a small arm bag with the other. She crosses the street and nearly walks past
me. On the ground, the front of my pants
wet and sticky from a convulsive sympathy orgasm, I stir when she walks past,
but I sink into the corner, away from her.
She doesn’t stop. She doesn’t
look.
The
Lincoln pulls
out of the alley, and drives off in the other direction. I watch it turn around its corner, and then I
watch pink…that rubber-band hip, exaggerated woman walk that only models and
hookers have. Her legs are long, trim,
firm, but fluid poles that, even in the dark, and under the sick yellow of the street
lights, glimmer…pale. There’s something
pure about that, and it makes me stand up as she turns her corner, and I start
to follow her. Even though I know she’s headed nowhere under a sky without a moon.
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