Hairy Legs and All
The Michellins on the Bel-Air purred like a kitten, nearly lulling me to sleep. I drove across the United States and was free as I've ever been since I was a kid. Like a dog off his leash.
I was on the way to Vegas because I was having a mental breakdown and this is what people do when they have a mental breakdown. They quit their job and take out all their cash from their savings account and drive to Vegas. I was wearing a shirt and tie, but no shoes. Two bare feet on the pedals which represented my freedom. My shoes sat beside me in the passenger seat on top of a newspaper ready to stand trial for their crimes.
Days before, I watched a picture with Cyd Charisse called "Meet Me in Las Vegas" and the movie poster burned vividly into my scrambled brain. I watched it four times in three days. Cyd Charisse's legs on a hot bed of yellow like a horny field of golden yarrow drove me wild. I bet she had a pussy to die for. I bet it was like a silk purse. A snug warm glove. I bet it purred like a cat like a brand-new Bel-Air.
I doubted that I would get to meet her, much less meet her cat, but the movie was more than a suggestion, I felt. It was a directive that I must follow. An order from a commanding officer.
I read somewhere that she was from Amarillo, Texas. I was in the Army with a fellow named Lou who was also from Amarillo. He once saved my life. Without Lou from Amarillo, who we called "Armadillo" for the uncanny resemblance to the animal he bore, I would have been run over by a Panzer tank. I would have been a permanent part of the French countryside. A mud puddle.
I have two twin boys. They are 12 years-old. Their mother has spoiled them rotten. They are like feral raccoons. They aren't cute, either. They look like sloppy chip-chop ham sandwiches doused with cayenne pepper. They stink like rats. They got eyes like deviled eggs. They have freckles and red hair and bad rat-like teeth. I never show their picture to anyone out of shame.
They were born when I was in Germany fighting the Nazis. This, in and of itself, isn't unusual. But they were conceived when I was on a boat in the Atlantic Ocean, staring at the costline of Normandy, France, not imagining that my wife Molly's vagina was being invaded, our bed rocking like the boat I was on full of seasick nervous soldiers. There were six giant concrete pillboxes staring back like angry gray faces saying welcome to Europe, assholes. My wife's pussy looked like Yogi Berra's catcher's mit. That was before the twins. I haven't seen it since.
They take after their mother. They talk and think like her. I bet they grow up to become serial killers. The kind that start out by killing birds and stray cats. Or maybe they will be captains of industry. Regardless, I will never know as I am on the lam.
It turns out they were the milkman's kids. This I can't prove, but they look just like him. I'm all they've known of a father. When I came home my wife was sitting there smoking a cigarette, her hair in curlers. She groused, without any shame, pointing at two ugly babies in a double bassonet.
"Stork dropped by," she said.
The neighbors, I'm sure, did the math. The way they looked at me made me feel like a bug. Carl the milkman delivers the milk still, but now just leaves it on the stoop. But maybe now that I am gone, he'll come in and say hello to his kids. Maybe I'm all wrong and he is a swell fellow and maybe now that I am gone it will hunky-dory.
There I was harrowed by war, twenty-two years old, suddenly a father. Molly looked at me like "so what?" Her eyes, I never noticed, looked like frog's eyes — like someone was squishing her head. She'd later say the usual things — What was I supposed to do? A woman has needs. I'm sure you were over there with all those French whores. On and on.
I didn't say anything back. We were Catholic, after all. We couldn't get divorced. Sure, I could beat the devil out of her. I could probably have even killed her. But I did enough beating and killing and I was tired of it. That's the way it goes. There are two types of guys in the world. There are guys who come back from war and are tired of killing. And those who come back and say fuck it, what's one more?
Besides, if I didn't get the electric chair for killing her, I'd be stuck with those goofy kids forever. So I went into the carpet business and sold carpet like my life depended upon it. Carpet was all the rage. Everyone was covering up their hardwood floors with soft luxurian carpet of all colors and designs.
Thirteen whole years I lasted. Every day, I drowned those kids in the dark lake of my mind, but I treated them well in real life. I tossed the baseball. Took them to games. Then I had the nervous breakdown. Shellshock, they call it. They say it was always there since the war, but I somehow managed to repress it for thirteen years.
I don't know if that is true. I don't know what's what anymore. All I know is that it is 1958 and I am in my car heading to Las Vegas to meet Cyd Charisse. I am sure there is a job out there for someone who is good at selling carpet. I don't know what it is about carpet, but I'm a natural born carpet man. When I die, I want to be buried in a casket made of carpet.
I am never going back to Indiana. The only thing I ever liked about that town was the movie theater. I like cornfields, but I seldom got to walk through them. And even the movie theatre was a piece of crap compared to other movie theaters like the one in Muncie. It is called The Royal. I masturbated in it a hundred times.
I would leave the carpet business behind and make it as a rodeo cowboy on a dude ranch. Or an actor in Hollwood. An extra. Maybe a stuntman because I certainly didn't care whether I lived or died. I could fall off a twenty story rooftop and all you'd have left of me was a smile to scrape off the pavement.
I was once told that I looked like a gorilla and it stuck with me. And ever since then I've had dreams about gorillas. They wear clothes and uniforms and talk like regular people. Then they began to appear in real-life. The guy selling tickets at the movie theater was a gorilla. The trash man. A cop on his beat. The butcher at the market. The ice cream man. The mailman. A school teacher at the kids' school. I'd try to pretend they didn't look that way, but they did and I often stared at them, chewing my nails, rubbing my red eyes. I began to see gorillas in my sleep.
I don't know if the guy who said I looked like an ape was being serious or not, or if I actually do look like an ape. And if so, what sort of ape. It was someone in the war — a German soldier who I killed.
My last name is Rappe, pronounced Ra-pay. I killed him in combat in Belgium. I shoved a knife into his guts in an old church. No one among all the worshippers in five hundred years could have imagined something like that would happen there. He was coming down a flight of stairs to protect the sniper in the bell tower I was sent to kill who we called "The Raven."
Two of my fellow soldiers had been shot and killed in that stairway and tumbled down like Slinkys. I was three of three. Swell way to die, I thought. I was sure I was going to die and become a human Slinky, as well.
I shot his gun from his hands and he lunged at me, grabbing my neck. He spoke broken English and cursed at me. He had evil eyes. As I twisted my knife in his stomach he began to laugh maniacally like I've never seen anyone ever laugh before. And then he curled his chapped lips into an O shape and made the frantic "ooo-ooo-ooo-ooo" grunting sounds of an excited gorilla.
"You look like — ape," he mocked, bleeding out onto my knife and clinched fist. "Private Ape! Ooo-ooo-ooo-ooo!"
He laughed as he died, sliding down that stairway like a sled. Though I killled him, he got the better of me and haunts me still, perhaps, as he intended. I catch glimpses of myself in the mirror now and then and look to see if I see it. Is it my long arms or my nose? Or what about my mouth or knuckles?
I have hairy legs. Every other part of me is relatively normal, but my legs are absurdly hairy and seem like they are covered in fur. When the other soldiers saw this, they nicknamed me "Wolfman." For the rest of the war, I was called Wolfman and they often howled at me or razzed me about full moons, gypsies, and virgins.
Ever since the war, I've been a chronic masturbator. I don't get erections thinking of women too often. But I do anytime I am overstimulated and, like a teapot, there's only one way to blow off my steam. My penis is my spout.
Tip me over and pour me out.
I nearly wrecked jerking off somewhere in Oklahoma. If I do one thing right it is jerking off. I am a pro. A marksman. I jerk off like some men smoke Lucky Strikes or play hoseshoes. I'm a deadeye dick. It is a nervous condition from the war, a doctor told me. He asked me if I had sex with my wife. I told her what her pussy looked like and asked what he thought. He couldn't believe his ears. The incredulous look upon his old face was more attractive than her pussy.
He asked me about the war. Then I told him what the German soldier said as I killed him. How he laughed in my face and called me an ape and all that.
"And what happened in the belltower?" he went on patiently.
There was an akward silence. It was the same sound as when a mortar exploded near me and I was temporarily deaf. A loud shriek of silence. Then my psychiatrist became a gorilla in a suit and I stood up, left his office, and never went back.
I got to the car and jerked off all over the steering wheel. I was losing my mind due to not one single event, but a combination of many. When I was in Belgium, a few nights before being called an ape by that skewered jerry, I met a pretty girl who must have been about 15. She seemed to like me and asked me to have dinner. I presume she asked me this because she didn't speak English, instead she spoke with her hands.
She made funny sounds and stuffed her mouth with her fingers, so I figured she was a mute. Then she stuck out a stump of a black tongue to confirm she couldn't ever talk, or French kiss, or lick a postage stamp. But she smiled and showed me how well she could whistle. She was to me like a bird. A bird with a broken wing that flaps around the dirt.
Her name was Anna Vadi. She wrote her name on paper in English. She kissed the paper and gave it to me folded up like a bird. I put it in my pocket. I was the only guy in the platoon that didn't get mail from home. My wife was too busy keeping the milkman happy. He must have been 4F. Flat feet or a bad ear. Maybe he was a retard.
I believe I could have had sex with Anna, but I was dirty and tired. She was very clean and pretty. She wore a pleated skirt and high thick socks. I gave her a guardian angel pin that an old lady in France had given me and she clipped it to her lapel and smiled touching the gold cherub's leg. You would have thought I gave her a million dollars the way her face lit up.
I didn't feel like getting something so pretty dirty. The world does a good enough job of sullying beauty. If I thought she would have slept with someone else, maybe I would have done it anyway because half of the platoon had an STD from our time in France. But she genuinely seemed fond of me for some reason, unlike anyone I've ever known and when I declined dinner, apologetically, she gave me a sad and awkward hug and went back inside her house where I presumed her family was.
I kept guard outside. Smoking cigarettes until I had no choice but to leave. I wanted her to come back out, but she didn't. I saw her later in an upstairs window, though. She smiled and waved as she took off her shirt and bra. She looked beautiful in the lamplight. She was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen.
What an awful messy business war is. How many buildings were ruined. History blown to bits. Artifacts destroyed. People dead. Their brains scrambled. Women raped. Babies orphaned. Evil is a contagion and human beings are the carriers. The same way the bubonic plague came with the fleas. We just can't help ourselves. We ruin everything. We are advanced cancer cells and the antibodies can't keep up.
When the sun gave out and the sky was tarred purple, I stopped at The Apache Motel on Route 66. I saw a gorilla driving a truck and another gorilla hitchhiking, so I knew my brain was sizzling like a fried egg.
It was late and I missed Leave it to Beaver. There was a TV in the lobby and a mannequin Indian lounging on a sofa wathcing it. But it was the old sign-off screen, which was amusing because the Indian was watching the Indian head on the screen, smoking a cigar that was never lit.
The desk clerk was an obese Mexicana woman who smelled like warm corn tortillas and ubiquitous misery. She wore a feather on her head as though she were a squaw, but her glum face betrayed the intended ambiance of its novelty and it was the saddest feather in the world, no doubt plucked from a slaughterhouse chicken and dyed blue.
She looked like she was tired of the gig. An aching brown bag of bones. Tired of the face paint and moccasins and the ridiculous brown suede dress that probably chaffed her haunches. Tired of double braids and all the beads that jiggled as she walked. I was somewhere in Nowhere, New Mexico. I had redrock dust up my ass.
I'd sleep here and go on. It was past eleven. I sometimes lose track of time. Leave it to Beaver was on at 7:30. The Beaver would have to do without me. He was probably into some sort of mischief. Why couldn't I have had a kid like The Beaver instead of the two rusty toadstools I got by way of the milkman's sour cream? Heaven help me.
The Apache sign was lit up with neon and looked pretty at night. The letters looked like arrows. There was turquoise and red neon bleeding all over the place. There were totem poles and a giant teepee on top where a giant stucco Indian with his arms crossed stood as though looking for a squaw out in the dark despair of the lonely desert.
In the history of the world, there has never been a more consistent fact of man than his persistence to find pussy. Some men find one and keep it, while others are on an endless search for a boundless buffet, or perpetually renting for the luxury of false freedom.
The room wouldn't do. There was a cockroach on the bed and I picked my bags up and went to the office and asked for a refund. I wasn't paying seven dollars to sleep with cockroaches. The Mexicana squaw acted surprised of my anathema towards bugs, leading me to believe that she ate them or something. But she returned my seven dollars and said so long with a scowl.
I pulled into the next motel I saw down the road — The Flying Saucer — which was clean and had a pool. There was an awning over the rooms and a different colored light above each door that blinked. On top of the office was a giant silver flying saucer that squealed while it spun like a tilt-a-whirl. The skinny young man in the office was a real poindexter. He had me sign the registry and I signed just below someone with a very beautiful signature.
Claudia Fuckalot
Richard Nobody
It must be French, I figured. That is how our names looked — only in cursive. I didn't use my actual last name, of course, hoping to remain anonymous just in case Molly hired a dick to find me. I didn't give much thought to her unusual last name. I assumed it was European. I didn't give much thought to anything other than sleeping and setting out for Vegas in the morning, and Cyd Charisse, who lounged in my brain.
The manager (Poindexter) filled me in on the rules before he handed me the key. No food by the pool. Swim at your own risk. No running. Room towels are to stay in the room and are not pool towels. Pool towels are to stay at the pool and to be deposited in the laundry bin after use. No pets. No this. No that. He was a hall monitor gone wrong. But he had to go through the spiel before he would hand me over the key which he held in his hand like the Holy Grail.
Finally, he gave it to me and I immediately walked to the room to inspect it. The key turned in the hole like a groom in a bride on the honeymoon. I couldn't find any cockroaches. They were nowhere to be seen. The room was clean as a whistle. Clean as Eleanor Roosevelt's pussy. It was so clean and wonderful I got overstimulated and jerked off to the scent of coconuts.
After I was comfortable, I unpacked. I went outside to get air and lizards were dancing on the concrete. I presumed they were looking for food. Reptiles search for food like man searches for pussy. They were twitchy little things that disappeared in the shadows as I walked past to the vending machine. They were smaller than a shoe and seemed to know what they were doing — what their exact purpose was. I realized it was under the vending machine where they all went. If I was some sort of lizard-eater, I could have a free snack by reaching under and grabbing a tail or two.
As I passed the pool, there was a woman floating in the water on an orange pool float. She looked like she was in a state of nirvana. She had a perfect body and wore big black sunglasses, looking straight up into the night at a blanket of stars. The orange neon light from the motel sign soaked her like artificial sunlight. The red vacancy sign beneath it flashed upon her skin and the surface of the water making it look sinful. I stood there by the fence and watched her. She appeared to me like the most peaceful and perfect thing in the whole universe.
Claudia Fuckalot, I presumed. I was standing under the overhanging roof in the shadows like a lizard under the vedning machine, not thinking that she saw me. A blinking orange light over my head. I was perfectly content to just to stand there and watch and do absolutely nothing else. But then she spoke. And she spoke at such a distance that it puzzled me how I could hear her so clearly.
"It's a beautiful night for a swim " she said to me. Her voice was clear as a bell though she was fifty feet away. I realized I had lost my mind long ago, so there was absolutely nothing I could see that offered any sort of shock. It was all what it was and my eyes relayed the information to my placid brain like two imperturbable couriers. My brain glibly received both the astonishing and the mundane with the same phlegmatic glance of an old war-hardened general.
The one exception to that rule was what was before me. The sight of a beautiful woman, upon which my head explodes like the 4th of July. But despite the ballyhoo, my body remains inflappable. The masturbation wasn't compelled by women or sexual desire. It was simply the result of my brain being overstimulated and it being a regulatory act to control it. It all began, once upon a time in a belfry.
"Come here," she called.
So I went. I stood at the side of the pool in my black slacks and white dress shirt. My black tie dangling down my chest as though it were my tongue. My shoes back on my feet and in need of polish because of the red dust. I looked over her, floating there, and all the saliva in my mouth seemed to evaporate. I was incredibly thirsty. I was hungry.
"How long has it been since you've been with a woman?"
I didn't know how to answer. I began to rapidly feel overstimulated. I could smell chlorine and Chanel No. 5 rising from her and having a sleazy affair in my nose. I realized, without speaking, that it had been a long time. Well before I left for the war.
In all the years back, I never fucked my wife. I did it all myself. I know what she did. Her bridge club was not actually bridge and she got more than her hair done when she said she was going to the salon. The milkman was a skittish ginger fellow with bad skin. Maybe they had numerous rendezvous in the town's only cheap motel. Maybe she was doing the black man who seemed to ogle her every time we went to the filling station like he could smell her infidelity. Walt, he was called.
I don't know. I don't care. Maybe he was just being kind or felt I neglected my wife in a way I shouldn't. I don't know, but that rusty milkman and Walt the filling station negro and my bimbo wife were a thousand miles away — 1,274 miles to be precise. I imagine she was having an orgy. A good old-fashioned gang bang. The kids were probably at camp eating hot dogs and trampling through poison ivy. And there she was on the bed, spread eagle, her legs up like a V and men standing in line to have a go. The bed post was a toll booth. She might have advertised. Or it was all word of mouth. She was a worst kept secret.
I wanted to kill them in my mind because they had no manners and no respect. People with no manners or respect shouldn't exist. What a man would destroy given the opportunity would shock the conscience, especially if no one knew about it. I spent a year in Europe killing perfect strangers when I could have been at home killing people who deserved it. Dirty scoundrels and inveiglers. Rotten ginger milkmen.
"That long, huh?" she said awaking me from my trance.
I smiled. What else was I to do? She gracefully slid off the pool float and into the water natural as a frog. Then she disappeared underneath and reemerged at my feet, slowly climbing out as I backed up to give her space. There was no one lovelier, I was quite sure. Not alive, anyway. Not even Cyd Charisse or Betty Brosmer. Not even Donna Reed holding a thousand kittens.
I realized then, due to lack of experience, I didn't know how to make small talk. I didn't know how to introduce myself or say anything witty, clever, or interesting. Words were not my gift and I had no flirtatious bait to attach to a hook because I found it all preposterous that anyone in this world would even mate and risk creating another human being in all that I had been through and seen with these two weary eyeballs. From two people can come so much grief and pain. Adam and Eve started it all. They had no idea what they were getting us all into.
Much less, I couldn't imagine pretending to procreate for pleasure. To fool that innate desire to continue this godforsaken species as though it is worthy of continuation. That, I assure you, it is not. We would all be better off if our vaginas shriveled up and our penises fell off. If they were unusable ornamental parts. Man is a plague. And we've practically destroyed the world with our gluttony, stupidity, and hedonism. What a dump full of lazy good-for-nothing people. No amount of foolish optimism or lying to oneself can ever make that any different. No self-bestowed divinity. If God gave us this world, He must be some sort of sadist who was in need of a good joke who watches us like we watch The Three Stooges.
Maybe I am jaded because of the war, or because of my whore wife who had Grand Central Station between her legs. Maybe it is because of a number of things. Maybe I need therapy. Or to do drugs and choke out the rest of life in the haze of a drug-induced psychosis, drunk and drooling, dragging my knuckles. Maybe I need to watch more TV. To eat more junk. Go fiddle around with a car in a garage or adopt some some sort of hobby like fishing to reassure my masculinity. Or an occupation that consumes me until I realize the mercy of a heart attack. That is it. I am bereft of an obsession. I need horse racing or baseball. Or women and gambling. I need something to fool my brain to believe that life is worth living.
"Where are you from?" she asked.
"Indiana. You?"
"Around. I'm Claudia Fuckalot."
Foo-ka-lo, she pronounced it.
"I saw your name on the registry."
"The T is silent."
"French?"
"Not exactly. But I have been to France. And I do fuck a lot."
"I'm Richard. Richard Rappe."
"Oh, I know."
She was dripping wet and my body reverted back to its primitive state. It was as though I had been rebooted. I stood at attention. And though I had jerked off less than an hour before, I was cocked and reloaded.
She was in a silver bikini that seemed painted on. She wrapped a towel around her silver-glistening body and said come with me. So I followed. She walked perfectly, one foot in front of another with her footprints on the concrete in perfect symmetry. She was flagrantly breaking one of Poindexter's rules — taking a pool towel back to her room. But at least she wasn't running. Or spitting.
Her room smelled wonderfully of something I've never smelled before. Some indescribable fruit or flower I could not liken to anything else that had ever tickled my olifactory nerve. I forgot all about Vegas and Cyd Charisse. I forgot about the world and it's problems. All the muck and the gloop. All the pain and misery that gets swept under the rug of conscious thought and sugary pleasantries. Nothing outside of her motel room existed after she shut the door — I was certain of that.
She stripped and stood there naked as a jaybird. A faint smell of chlorine mingled with the redolent bliss of the room in my nostrils. Nothing left to the imagination at all but what her insides would feel like wrapped around me. She asked me if I wanted a drink. I said yes. I didn't care what. I would have drank gasoline poured from her hand. Fortunately, it wasn't gasoline and it tasted something like brandy, though I am no connoisseur of alcohol. I am not an expert on anything other than carpet and maybe killing.
Claudia put on a white silk robe and smiled. She poured herself a drink and held her glass up for a cheers. Cheers to love and happiness. To new beginnings and happy endings. To peace and prosperity. Blow jobs and cunnilingus. To this and that and that and this. All that sort of thing, spoken not in words, but in a single and simple grin and eye contact. In four eyes that were in our heads like olives floating in a glass of human euphoria.
Then she disrobed, layed upon the bed and spread her legs open and all of the universe suddenly became clear to me. However dumb I was before, suddenly I was brilliant. Dull to sharp. Dirty to clean. Glutted, deadened, benumbed to revived. In the words of the old hymnal, "I saw the light." But I not only saw it, I felt it. It was as though I was staring at something mind-perplexing yet simple all at the same time. A path to a different world where I had never been. A world I had never known to exist. I forgot about my troubles and the word's troubles and all the pain and suffering that made me morose. That part of me was put out of its misery by indulging in the feast that was offered. By just by looking at it. She was my Garden of Eden and I was reborn.
I was afraid that I might freeze. The same fear I had in the war when it came time to killing someone, which was the entire objective of war no matter what they tell you. Kill or be killed. To kill more of them than they kill of us and to move further inland and capture territory that didn't give a damn who won. People might give a damn, but the dirt doesn't. The trees don't. The cows and pigs and chickens don't because they'll be slaughtered either way by either side. How stupid animals must think we are. What hatred they would have for us if they could possess it. I tend to think that although grief, love, pleasure, and happiness are emotions every living thing has, hatred is uniquely human.
But she was amazingly patient and kept her legs spread wide so I could gaze into that mystifying oracle — that lovely abyss. She was a prophetess. A teacher. A healer. A lover. The dreamer and the dream. She was everything in the world all at once. And there I was, hairy legs and all, suddenly naked as a jaybird ready to part with my soul for that brief and only time that humans ever part with their souls. And deep inside of her, I felt a euphoric overdose of natural sublimity and resplendence which intensified with every tight inch.
Ravaged is a tasteful word.
I ravaged her like the Allies ravaged the Axis. Like the Axis ravaged back and ravaged first. Like Hitler ravaged the Jews. Like the Japanese ravaged the Chinese and their Zeros ravaged Pearl Harbor. I kamikazed her battleship and she took it and fired back. Retaliatory. Hateful. Choking. Slamming. Biting. Blitzkrieg. Black billowing clouds. Thrashing. Smashing. I stormed her beaches. I torpedoed her hull. I was lost in her. For a while, I was her POW. Then she was mine. I was blown up. Blown to bits. Pulverized. Run over by her Panzer. So much pleasurable hostility that my senses were overloaded. It is cleansing — war and sex. There was a brief ceasefire and then there was the steady ominous hum of a B-47 and Nagasaki. And damned if she didn't get Hiroshima out of me, too. The old elusive double nut.
I lied in bed with her under me afterwards like a sunken battleship. And she purred as though everything I put inside of her was boiling. It was all my fear. All my pain. All my hate. Her eyes rolled back into her head and she was steeping like a cup of tea in her pretty porcelain body. Her slight seizure at first perplexed me because I was so foreign to good sex. I was foreign to sex at all.
It was part of the elusive female orgasm which was like a snow leopard in my world. I made her insides bubble and pop and whir and whiz like a pinball machine. And then she said thank you in a long and winded gasp, which made me feel that I had proudly done my duty. It was the way the pinning of war medals on my chest should have made me feel but didn't at all. Standing there with all those gorillas in uniform saluting me and each other. No one smiling. I had never been more proud of myself than I was in that one moment as my cock slowly became the Hindenburg.
The awkwardness of aftersex, a term I developed just then, never had occurred to me before but was quickly assuaged by her pleasantness and her fingers which gently painted a still life on my back. She thanked me again and thanked me for "giving her life." I never had a child of my own, so the thought that I had put a baby inside of her made me feel wonderfully paternal but impalpably nervous.
"Relax," she explained. "It isn't a baby like that. It is a child who will be born only to the universe that is inside of me. I am — not of this world."
"Are you on drugs?" I asked.
"No," she whispered. "I am drugs."
And then she fell asleep. I didn't know what else to do besides to pull up my pants and carry on. To go back to my room and go to sleep and wake up in the morning in search of another adventure. That elusive something else, or the next thing.
The morning came as expected with little fanfair. With little ado. Just the usual orange sorbet sunrise and birds mucking about. The indolent lizards were basking on a hot strip of sidewalk by the pool. I awoke as I had awoke countless times before, but I was not the same animal. I changed. My penis changed colors and bore the same unmistakable silver-glittery sheen of Claudia's skin.
For the first time ever, I didn't have the dream about The Raven. The incident was finally gone and I had tossed the grenade into that belfry for the last time. Only then to look in and see an abstract painting of the human being I only briefly knew as Anna, who undoubtedly I loved. I still had her name written on the paper she had folded like a bird. The beautiful girl with no tongue was The Raven, lo and behold, who I unwittingly turned into a Jackson Pollack painting.
Why was she a sniper? Who ever cleaned her up? Did they bury her? I'll never know. That beautiful face on a head rolled free like a bowling ball. Her arm over there. Her leg here. Knees and knuckles rolled around like bloody marbles. Cartilage strewn about like confetti of a parade passed. I had my answer as to why the sniper hadn't shot me earlier that day. Two soldiers had been shot beside of me on the ground. But, by the Grace of God, or so I had thought, the sniper skipped over me. So I was ordered to go up to the belltower and kill the sniper we all were to assume was a man because only men could destroy life in such a heartless way.
No one in war is hated quite like a sniper. The grenade, I'm to presume by the damage I witnessed, had been blindly tossed right on top of her. I threw it in without looking. I found the guardian angel pin I had given her. She wore it on the lapel of her coat. I put it in her charred clasped hand in hopes they'd bury it with her.
But then she was gone. Like a dream fades from memory as the conscious mind awakes and the day progresses leaving the mind with only a faint sense of strangeness. The German soldier who mocked me as though I were an ape took leave of me as well. And the bad memory of my wife left with them — as though she packed her bags and went. And the milkman's kids were erased from my responsibility. And all those gorillas I saw in public, in place of random people, I saw no more. They were all pages turned in a book burned in my mind's pyre.
I saw Claudia the next morning as I carried my bags to the car. She was back at the pool and sipping on a mimosa, floating there. I went over to say goodbye thinking it was the proper thing to do. Maybe I'd say thank you as well. I wouldn't have ever thought that goodbye would be so immediate. But as she lied there, floating as she was the night before, with giant black sunglasses and the mimosa resting on her stomach, I could feel that it was time to let go. That some things weren't meant to last forever. And brief love affairs are often more consequential than those that last for fifty years.
"Do you feel better, Mr. Nobody?"
"I do. Thank you."
"It is what I do," she grinned. The two black ostrich egg lenses where her eyes ought to be gave nothing away.
"Where is it that you said you're from?"
"I didn't," she replied. "I'm from Everywhere but vacation in Nowhere. I usually just say I am from the cosmos."
I couldn't think of anything else to say and so I nodded and walked towards my car with my bags in hand.
"Oh, and Mr. Rappe," she called. "Give Ms. Charisse my regards. But should you have no luck in Vegas with Ms. Charisse, or find no satisfaction at the poker tables, please, do come back. I will be here. And while I hope your dreams of silver screen beauties are fabulously fulfilled in every way you've dreamed them, I would love to again experience that which we knew last night. Only one night seems criminal. Oh, and I am very attracted to your hairy legs — Private Wolfman."
I smiled standing there on the hot tar. My shoes melting. Las Vegas be damned. I knew she was something I'd never be able to comprehend. Some otherworldly thing. It must have amused her to stay at The Flying Saucer motel on Route 66 in Nowhere, New Mexico. That's the only way I could figure it.
I turned around and walked back and put my bags back in the room. Then I stopped by the office and paid for another week which pleased Mr. Poindexter who said something of the "surest compliment of a motel's hospitality is the extended stay of a guest." Then by the poolside as Ms. Fuckalot (foo-ka-lo) smiled, with absolutely no certainty of where I'd be tomorrow, I stripped down to my white boxers and jumped in, hairy legs and all.
I was on the way to Vegas because I was having a mental breakdown and this is what people do when they have a mental breakdown. They quit their job and take out all their cash from their savings account and drive to Vegas. I was wearing a shirt and tie, but no shoes. Two bare feet on the pedals which represented my freedom. My shoes sat beside me in the passenger seat on top of a newspaper ready to stand trial for their crimes.
Days before, I watched a picture with Cyd Charisse called "Meet Me in Las Vegas" and the movie poster burned vividly into my scrambled brain. I watched it four times in three days. Cyd Charisse's legs on a hot bed of yellow like a horny field of golden yarrow drove me wild. I bet she had a pussy to die for. I bet it was like a silk purse. A snug warm glove. I bet it purred like a cat like a brand-new Bel-Air.
I doubted that I would get to meet her, much less meet her cat, but the movie was more than a suggestion, I felt. It was a directive that I must follow. An order from a commanding officer.
I read somewhere that she was from Amarillo, Texas. I was in the Army with a fellow named Lou who was also from Amarillo. He once saved my life. Without Lou from Amarillo, who we called "Armadillo" for the uncanny resemblance to the animal he bore, I would have been run over by a Panzer tank. I would have been a permanent part of the French countryside. A mud puddle.
I have two twin boys. They are 12 years-old. Their mother has spoiled them rotten. They are like feral raccoons. They aren't cute, either. They look like sloppy chip-chop ham sandwiches doused with cayenne pepper. They stink like rats. They got eyes like deviled eggs. They have freckles and red hair and bad rat-like teeth. I never show their picture to anyone out of shame.
They were born when I was in Germany fighting the Nazis. This, in and of itself, isn't unusual. But they were conceived when I was on a boat in the Atlantic Ocean, staring at the costline of Normandy, France, not imagining that my wife Molly's vagina was being invaded, our bed rocking like the boat I was on full of seasick nervous soldiers. There were six giant concrete pillboxes staring back like angry gray faces saying welcome to Europe, assholes. My wife's pussy looked like Yogi Berra's catcher's mit. That was before the twins. I haven't seen it since.
They take after their mother. They talk and think like her. I bet they grow up to become serial killers. The kind that start out by killing birds and stray cats. Or maybe they will be captains of industry. Regardless, I will never know as I am on the lam.
It turns out they were the milkman's kids. This I can't prove, but they look just like him. I'm all they've known of a father. When I came home my wife was sitting there smoking a cigarette, her hair in curlers. She groused, without any shame, pointing at two ugly babies in a double bassonet.
"Stork dropped by," she said.
The neighbors, I'm sure, did the math. The way they looked at me made me feel like a bug. Carl the milkman delivers the milk still, but now just leaves it on the stoop. But maybe now that I am gone, he'll come in and say hello to his kids. Maybe I'm all wrong and he is a swell fellow and maybe now that I am gone it will hunky-dory.
There I was harrowed by war, twenty-two years old, suddenly a father. Molly looked at me like "so what?" Her eyes, I never noticed, looked like frog's eyes — like someone was squishing her head. She'd later say the usual things — What was I supposed to do? A woman has needs. I'm sure you were over there with all those French whores. On and on.
I didn't say anything back. We were Catholic, after all. We couldn't get divorced. Sure, I could beat the devil out of her. I could probably have even killed her. But I did enough beating and killing and I was tired of it. That's the way it goes. There are two types of guys in the world. There are guys who come back from war and are tired of killing. And those who come back and say fuck it, what's one more?
Besides, if I didn't get the electric chair for killing her, I'd be stuck with those goofy kids forever. So I went into the carpet business and sold carpet like my life depended upon it. Carpet was all the rage. Everyone was covering up their hardwood floors with soft luxurian carpet of all colors and designs.
Thirteen whole years I lasted. Every day, I drowned those kids in the dark lake of my mind, but I treated them well in real life. I tossed the baseball. Took them to games. Then I had the nervous breakdown. Shellshock, they call it. They say it was always there since the war, but I somehow managed to repress it for thirteen years.
I don't know if that is true. I don't know what's what anymore. All I know is that it is 1958 and I am in my car heading to Las Vegas to meet Cyd Charisse. I am sure there is a job out there for someone who is good at selling carpet. I don't know what it is about carpet, but I'm a natural born carpet man. When I die, I want to be buried in a casket made of carpet.
I am never going back to Indiana. The only thing I ever liked about that town was the movie theater. I like cornfields, but I seldom got to walk through them. And even the movie theatre was a piece of crap compared to other movie theaters like the one in Muncie. It is called The Royal. I masturbated in it a hundred times.
I would leave the carpet business behind and make it as a rodeo cowboy on a dude ranch. Or an actor in Hollwood. An extra. Maybe a stuntman because I certainly didn't care whether I lived or died. I could fall off a twenty story rooftop and all you'd have left of me was a smile to scrape off the pavement.
I was once told that I looked like a gorilla and it stuck with me. And ever since then I've had dreams about gorillas. They wear clothes and uniforms and talk like regular people. Then they began to appear in real-life. The guy selling tickets at the movie theater was a gorilla. The trash man. A cop on his beat. The butcher at the market. The ice cream man. The mailman. A school teacher at the kids' school. I'd try to pretend they didn't look that way, but they did and I often stared at them, chewing my nails, rubbing my red eyes. I began to see gorillas in my sleep.
I don't know if the guy who said I looked like an ape was being serious or not, or if I actually do look like an ape. And if so, what sort of ape. It was someone in the war — a German soldier who I killed.
My last name is Rappe, pronounced Ra-pay. I killed him in combat in Belgium. I shoved a knife into his guts in an old church. No one among all the worshippers in five hundred years could have imagined something like that would happen there. He was coming down a flight of stairs to protect the sniper in the bell tower I was sent to kill who we called "The Raven."
Two of my fellow soldiers had been shot and killed in that stairway and tumbled down like Slinkys. I was three of three. Swell way to die, I thought. I was sure I was going to die and become a human Slinky, as well.
I shot his gun from his hands and he lunged at me, grabbing my neck. He spoke broken English and cursed at me. He had evil eyes. As I twisted my knife in his stomach he began to laugh maniacally like I've never seen anyone ever laugh before. And then he curled his chapped lips into an O shape and made the frantic "ooo-ooo-ooo-ooo" grunting sounds of an excited gorilla.
"You look like — ape," he mocked, bleeding out onto my knife and clinched fist. "Private Ape! Ooo-ooo-ooo-ooo!"
He laughed as he died, sliding down that stairway like a sled. Though I killled him, he got the better of me and haunts me still, perhaps, as he intended. I catch glimpses of myself in the mirror now and then and look to see if I see it. Is it my long arms or my nose? Or what about my mouth or knuckles?
I have hairy legs. Every other part of me is relatively normal, but my legs are absurdly hairy and seem like they are covered in fur. When the other soldiers saw this, they nicknamed me "Wolfman." For the rest of the war, I was called Wolfman and they often howled at me or razzed me about full moons, gypsies, and virgins.
Ever since the war, I've been a chronic masturbator. I don't get erections thinking of women too often. But I do anytime I am overstimulated and, like a teapot, there's only one way to blow off my steam. My penis is my spout.
Tip me over and pour me out.
I nearly wrecked jerking off somewhere in Oklahoma. If I do one thing right it is jerking off. I am a pro. A marksman. I jerk off like some men smoke Lucky Strikes or play hoseshoes. I'm a deadeye dick. It is a nervous condition from the war, a doctor told me. He asked me if I had sex with my wife. I told her what her pussy looked like and asked what he thought. He couldn't believe his ears. The incredulous look upon his old face was more attractive than her pussy.
He asked me about the war. Then I told him what the German soldier said as I killed him. How he laughed in my face and called me an ape and all that.
"And what happened in the belltower?" he went on patiently.
There was an akward silence. It was the same sound as when a mortar exploded near me and I was temporarily deaf. A loud shriek of silence. Then my psychiatrist became a gorilla in a suit and I stood up, left his office, and never went back.
I got to the car and jerked off all over the steering wheel. I was losing my mind due to not one single event, but a combination of many. When I was in Belgium, a few nights before being called an ape by that skewered jerry, I met a pretty girl who must have been about 15. She seemed to like me and asked me to have dinner. I presume she asked me this because she didn't speak English, instead she spoke with her hands.
She made funny sounds and stuffed her mouth with her fingers, so I figured she was a mute. Then she stuck out a stump of a black tongue to confirm she couldn't ever talk, or French kiss, or lick a postage stamp. But she smiled and showed me how well she could whistle. She was to me like a bird. A bird with a broken wing that flaps around the dirt.
Her name was Anna Vadi. She wrote her name on paper in English. She kissed the paper and gave it to me folded up like a bird. I put it in my pocket. I was the only guy in the platoon that didn't get mail from home. My wife was too busy keeping the milkman happy. He must have been 4F. Flat feet or a bad ear. Maybe he was a retard.
I believe I could have had sex with Anna, but I was dirty and tired. She was very clean and pretty. She wore a pleated skirt and high thick socks. I gave her a guardian angel pin that an old lady in France had given me and she clipped it to her lapel and smiled touching the gold cherub's leg. You would have thought I gave her a million dollars the way her face lit up.
I didn't feel like getting something so pretty dirty. The world does a good enough job of sullying beauty. If I thought she would have slept with someone else, maybe I would have done it anyway because half of the platoon had an STD from our time in France. But she genuinely seemed fond of me for some reason, unlike anyone I've ever known and when I declined dinner, apologetically, she gave me a sad and awkward hug and went back inside her house where I presumed her family was.
I kept guard outside. Smoking cigarettes until I had no choice but to leave. I wanted her to come back out, but she didn't. I saw her later in an upstairs window, though. She smiled and waved as she took off her shirt and bra. She looked beautiful in the lamplight. She was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen.
What an awful messy business war is. How many buildings were ruined. History blown to bits. Artifacts destroyed. People dead. Their brains scrambled. Women raped. Babies orphaned. Evil is a contagion and human beings are the carriers. The same way the bubonic plague came with the fleas. We just can't help ourselves. We ruin everything. We are advanced cancer cells and the antibodies can't keep up.
When the sun gave out and the sky was tarred purple, I stopped at The Apache Motel on Route 66. I saw a gorilla driving a truck and another gorilla hitchhiking, so I knew my brain was sizzling like a fried egg.
It was late and I missed Leave it to Beaver. There was a TV in the lobby and a mannequin Indian lounging on a sofa wathcing it. But it was the old sign-off screen, which was amusing because the Indian was watching the Indian head on the screen, smoking a cigar that was never lit.
The desk clerk was an obese Mexicana woman who smelled like warm corn tortillas and ubiquitous misery. She wore a feather on her head as though she were a squaw, but her glum face betrayed the intended ambiance of its novelty and it was the saddest feather in the world, no doubt plucked from a slaughterhouse chicken and dyed blue.
She looked like she was tired of the gig. An aching brown bag of bones. Tired of the face paint and moccasins and the ridiculous brown suede dress that probably chaffed her haunches. Tired of double braids and all the beads that jiggled as she walked. I was somewhere in Nowhere, New Mexico. I had redrock dust up my ass.
I'd sleep here and go on. It was past eleven. I sometimes lose track of time. Leave it to Beaver was on at 7:30. The Beaver would have to do without me. He was probably into some sort of mischief. Why couldn't I have had a kid like The Beaver instead of the two rusty toadstools I got by way of the milkman's sour cream? Heaven help me.
The Apache sign was lit up with neon and looked pretty at night. The letters looked like arrows. There was turquoise and red neon bleeding all over the place. There were totem poles and a giant teepee on top where a giant stucco Indian with his arms crossed stood as though looking for a squaw out in the dark despair of the lonely desert.
In the history of the world, there has never been a more consistent fact of man than his persistence to find pussy. Some men find one and keep it, while others are on an endless search for a boundless buffet, or perpetually renting for the luxury of false freedom.
The room wouldn't do. There was a cockroach on the bed and I picked my bags up and went to the office and asked for a refund. I wasn't paying seven dollars to sleep with cockroaches. The Mexicana squaw acted surprised of my anathema towards bugs, leading me to believe that she ate them or something. But she returned my seven dollars and said so long with a scowl.
I pulled into the next motel I saw down the road — The Flying Saucer — which was clean and had a pool. There was an awning over the rooms and a different colored light above each door that blinked. On top of the office was a giant silver flying saucer that squealed while it spun like a tilt-a-whirl. The skinny young man in the office was a real poindexter. He had me sign the registry and I signed just below someone with a very beautiful signature.
Claudia Fuckalot
Richard Nobody
It must be French, I figured. That is how our names looked — only in cursive. I didn't use my actual last name, of course, hoping to remain anonymous just in case Molly hired a dick to find me. I didn't give much thought to her unusual last name. I assumed it was European. I didn't give much thought to anything other than sleeping and setting out for Vegas in the morning, and Cyd Charisse, who lounged in my brain.
The manager (Poindexter) filled me in on the rules before he handed me the key. No food by the pool. Swim at your own risk. No running. Room towels are to stay in the room and are not pool towels. Pool towels are to stay at the pool and to be deposited in the laundry bin after use. No pets. No this. No that. He was a hall monitor gone wrong. But he had to go through the spiel before he would hand me over the key which he held in his hand like the Holy Grail.
Finally, he gave it to me and I immediately walked to the room to inspect it. The key turned in the hole like a groom in a bride on the honeymoon. I couldn't find any cockroaches. They were nowhere to be seen. The room was clean as a whistle. Clean as Eleanor Roosevelt's pussy. It was so clean and wonderful I got overstimulated and jerked off to the scent of coconuts.
After I was comfortable, I unpacked. I went outside to get air and lizards were dancing on the concrete. I presumed they were looking for food. Reptiles search for food like man searches for pussy. They were twitchy little things that disappeared in the shadows as I walked past to the vending machine. They were smaller than a shoe and seemed to know what they were doing — what their exact purpose was. I realized it was under the vending machine where they all went. If I was some sort of lizard-eater, I could have a free snack by reaching under and grabbing a tail or two.
As I passed the pool, there was a woman floating in the water on an orange pool float. She looked like she was in a state of nirvana. She had a perfect body and wore big black sunglasses, looking straight up into the night at a blanket of stars. The orange neon light from the motel sign soaked her like artificial sunlight. The red vacancy sign beneath it flashed upon her skin and the surface of the water making it look sinful. I stood there by the fence and watched her. She appeared to me like the most peaceful and perfect thing in the whole universe.
Claudia Fuckalot, I presumed. I was standing under the overhanging roof in the shadows like a lizard under the vedning machine, not thinking that she saw me. A blinking orange light over my head. I was perfectly content to just to stand there and watch and do absolutely nothing else. But then she spoke. And she spoke at such a distance that it puzzled me how I could hear her so clearly.
"It's a beautiful night for a swim " she said to me. Her voice was clear as a bell though she was fifty feet away. I realized I had lost my mind long ago, so there was absolutely nothing I could see that offered any sort of shock. It was all what it was and my eyes relayed the information to my placid brain like two imperturbable couriers. My brain glibly received both the astonishing and the mundane with the same phlegmatic glance of an old war-hardened general.
The one exception to that rule was what was before me. The sight of a beautiful woman, upon which my head explodes like the 4th of July. But despite the ballyhoo, my body remains inflappable. The masturbation wasn't compelled by women or sexual desire. It was simply the result of my brain being overstimulated and it being a regulatory act to control it. It all began, once upon a time in a belfry.
"Come here," she called.
So I went. I stood at the side of the pool in my black slacks and white dress shirt. My black tie dangling down my chest as though it were my tongue. My shoes back on my feet and in need of polish because of the red dust. I looked over her, floating there, and all the saliva in my mouth seemed to evaporate. I was incredibly thirsty. I was hungry.
"How long has it been since you've been with a woman?"
I didn't know how to answer. I began to rapidly feel overstimulated. I could smell chlorine and Chanel No. 5 rising from her and having a sleazy affair in my nose. I realized, without speaking, that it had been a long time. Well before I left for the war.
In all the years back, I never fucked my wife. I did it all myself. I know what she did. Her bridge club was not actually bridge and she got more than her hair done when she said she was going to the salon. The milkman was a skittish ginger fellow with bad skin. Maybe they had numerous rendezvous in the town's only cheap motel. Maybe she was doing the black man who seemed to ogle her every time we went to the filling station like he could smell her infidelity. Walt, he was called.
I don't know. I don't care. Maybe he was just being kind or felt I neglected my wife in a way I shouldn't. I don't know, but that rusty milkman and Walt the filling station negro and my bimbo wife were a thousand miles away — 1,274 miles to be precise. I imagine she was having an orgy. A good old-fashioned gang bang. The kids were probably at camp eating hot dogs and trampling through poison ivy. And there she was on the bed, spread eagle, her legs up like a V and men standing in line to have a go. The bed post was a toll booth. She might have advertised. Or it was all word of mouth. She was a worst kept secret.
I wanted to kill them in my mind because they had no manners and no respect. People with no manners or respect shouldn't exist. What a man would destroy given the opportunity would shock the conscience, especially if no one knew about it. I spent a year in Europe killing perfect strangers when I could have been at home killing people who deserved it. Dirty scoundrels and inveiglers. Rotten ginger milkmen.
"That long, huh?" she said awaking me from my trance.
I smiled. What else was I to do? She gracefully slid off the pool float and into the water natural as a frog. Then she disappeared underneath and reemerged at my feet, slowly climbing out as I backed up to give her space. There was no one lovelier, I was quite sure. Not alive, anyway. Not even Cyd Charisse or Betty Brosmer. Not even Donna Reed holding a thousand kittens.
I realized then, due to lack of experience, I didn't know how to make small talk. I didn't know how to introduce myself or say anything witty, clever, or interesting. Words were not my gift and I had no flirtatious bait to attach to a hook because I found it all preposterous that anyone in this world would even mate and risk creating another human being in all that I had been through and seen with these two weary eyeballs. From two people can come so much grief and pain. Adam and Eve started it all. They had no idea what they were getting us all into.
Much less, I couldn't imagine pretending to procreate for pleasure. To fool that innate desire to continue this godforsaken species as though it is worthy of continuation. That, I assure you, it is not. We would all be better off if our vaginas shriveled up and our penises fell off. If they were unusable ornamental parts. Man is a plague. And we've practically destroyed the world with our gluttony, stupidity, and hedonism. What a dump full of lazy good-for-nothing people. No amount of foolish optimism or lying to oneself can ever make that any different. No self-bestowed divinity. If God gave us this world, He must be some sort of sadist who was in need of a good joke who watches us like we watch The Three Stooges.
Maybe I am jaded because of the war, or because of my whore wife who had Grand Central Station between her legs. Maybe it is because of a number of things. Maybe I need therapy. Or to do drugs and choke out the rest of life in the haze of a drug-induced psychosis, drunk and drooling, dragging my knuckles. Maybe I need to watch more TV. To eat more junk. Go fiddle around with a car in a garage or adopt some some sort of hobby like fishing to reassure my masculinity. Or an occupation that consumes me until I realize the mercy of a heart attack. That is it. I am bereft of an obsession. I need horse racing or baseball. Or women and gambling. I need something to fool my brain to believe that life is worth living.
"Where are you from?" she asked.
"Indiana. You?"
"Around. I'm Claudia Fuckalot."
Foo-ka-lo, she pronounced it.
"I saw your name on the registry."
"The T is silent."
"French?"
"Not exactly. But I have been to France. And I do fuck a lot."
"I'm Richard. Richard Rappe."
"Oh, I know."
She was dripping wet and my body reverted back to its primitive state. It was as though I had been rebooted. I stood at attention. And though I had jerked off less than an hour before, I was cocked and reloaded.
She was in a silver bikini that seemed painted on. She wrapped a towel around her silver-glistening body and said come with me. So I followed. She walked perfectly, one foot in front of another with her footprints on the concrete in perfect symmetry. She was flagrantly breaking one of Poindexter's rules — taking a pool towel back to her room. But at least she wasn't running. Or spitting.
Her room smelled wonderfully of something I've never smelled before. Some indescribable fruit or flower I could not liken to anything else that had ever tickled my olifactory nerve. I forgot all about Vegas and Cyd Charisse. I forgot about the world and it's problems. All the muck and the gloop. All the pain and misery that gets swept under the rug of conscious thought and sugary pleasantries. Nothing outside of her motel room existed after she shut the door — I was certain of that.
She stripped and stood there naked as a jaybird. A faint smell of chlorine mingled with the redolent bliss of the room in my nostrils. Nothing left to the imagination at all but what her insides would feel like wrapped around me. She asked me if I wanted a drink. I said yes. I didn't care what. I would have drank gasoline poured from her hand. Fortunately, it wasn't gasoline and it tasted something like brandy, though I am no connoisseur of alcohol. I am not an expert on anything other than carpet and maybe killing.
Claudia put on a white silk robe and smiled. She poured herself a drink and held her glass up for a cheers. Cheers to love and happiness. To new beginnings and happy endings. To peace and prosperity. Blow jobs and cunnilingus. To this and that and that and this. All that sort of thing, spoken not in words, but in a single and simple grin and eye contact. In four eyes that were in our heads like olives floating in a glass of human euphoria.
Then she disrobed, layed upon the bed and spread her legs open and all of the universe suddenly became clear to me. However dumb I was before, suddenly I was brilliant. Dull to sharp. Dirty to clean. Glutted, deadened, benumbed to revived. In the words of the old hymnal, "I saw the light." But I not only saw it, I felt it. It was as though I was staring at something mind-perplexing yet simple all at the same time. A path to a different world where I had never been. A world I had never known to exist. I forgot about my troubles and the word's troubles and all the pain and suffering that made me morose. That part of me was put out of its misery by indulging in the feast that was offered. By just by looking at it. She was my Garden of Eden and I was reborn.
I was afraid that I might freeze. The same fear I had in the war when it came time to killing someone, which was the entire objective of war no matter what they tell you. Kill or be killed. To kill more of them than they kill of us and to move further inland and capture territory that didn't give a damn who won. People might give a damn, but the dirt doesn't. The trees don't. The cows and pigs and chickens don't because they'll be slaughtered either way by either side. How stupid animals must think we are. What hatred they would have for us if they could possess it. I tend to think that although grief, love, pleasure, and happiness are emotions every living thing has, hatred is uniquely human.
But she was amazingly patient and kept her legs spread wide so I could gaze into that mystifying oracle — that lovely abyss. She was a prophetess. A teacher. A healer. A lover. The dreamer and the dream. She was everything in the world all at once. And there I was, hairy legs and all, suddenly naked as a jaybird ready to part with my soul for that brief and only time that humans ever part with their souls. And deep inside of her, I felt a euphoric overdose of natural sublimity and resplendence which intensified with every tight inch.
Ravaged is a tasteful word.
I ravaged her like the Allies ravaged the Axis. Like the Axis ravaged back and ravaged first. Like Hitler ravaged the Jews. Like the Japanese ravaged the Chinese and their Zeros ravaged Pearl Harbor. I kamikazed her battleship and she took it and fired back. Retaliatory. Hateful. Choking. Slamming. Biting. Blitzkrieg. Black billowing clouds. Thrashing. Smashing. I stormed her beaches. I torpedoed her hull. I was lost in her. For a while, I was her POW. Then she was mine. I was blown up. Blown to bits. Pulverized. Run over by her Panzer. So much pleasurable hostility that my senses were overloaded. It is cleansing — war and sex. There was a brief ceasefire and then there was the steady ominous hum of a B-47 and Nagasaki. And damned if she didn't get Hiroshima out of me, too. The old elusive double nut.
I lied in bed with her under me afterwards like a sunken battleship. And she purred as though everything I put inside of her was boiling. It was all my fear. All my pain. All my hate. Her eyes rolled back into her head and she was steeping like a cup of tea in her pretty porcelain body. Her slight seizure at first perplexed me because I was so foreign to good sex. I was foreign to sex at all.
It was part of the elusive female orgasm which was like a snow leopard in my world. I made her insides bubble and pop and whir and whiz like a pinball machine. And then she said thank you in a long and winded gasp, which made me feel that I had proudly done my duty. It was the way the pinning of war medals on my chest should have made me feel but didn't at all. Standing there with all those gorillas in uniform saluting me and each other. No one smiling. I had never been more proud of myself than I was in that one moment as my cock slowly became the Hindenburg.
The awkwardness of aftersex, a term I developed just then, never had occurred to me before but was quickly assuaged by her pleasantness and her fingers which gently painted a still life on my back. She thanked me again and thanked me for "giving her life." I never had a child of my own, so the thought that I had put a baby inside of her made me feel wonderfully paternal but impalpably nervous.
"Relax," she explained. "It isn't a baby like that. It is a child who will be born only to the universe that is inside of me. I am — not of this world."
"Are you on drugs?" I asked.
"No," she whispered. "I am drugs."
And then she fell asleep. I didn't know what else to do besides to pull up my pants and carry on. To go back to my room and go to sleep and wake up in the morning in search of another adventure. That elusive something else, or the next thing.
The morning came as expected with little fanfair. With little ado. Just the usual orange sorbet sunrise and birds mucking about. The indolent lizards were basking on a hot strip of sidewalk by the pool. I awoke as I had awoke countless times before, but I was not the same animal. I changed. My penis changed colors and bore the same unmistakable silver-glittery sheen of Claudia's skin.
For the first time ever, I didn't have the dream about The Raven. The incident was finally gone and I had tossed the grenade into that belfry for the last time. Only then to look in and see an abstract painting of the human being I only briefly knew as Anna, who undoubtedly I loved. I still had her name written on the paper she had folded like a bird. The beautiful girl with no tongue was The Raven, lo and behold, who I unwittingly turned into a Jackson Pollack painting.
Why was she a sniper? Who ever cleaned her up? Did they bury her? I'll never know. That beautiful face on a head rolled free like a bowling ball. Her arm over there. Her leg here. Knees and knuckles rolled around like bloody marbles. Cartilage strewn about like confetti of a parade passed. I had my answer as to why the sniper hadn't shot me earlier that day. Two soldiers had been shot beside of me on the ground. But, by the Grace of God, or so I had thought, the sniper skipped over me. So I was ordered to go up to the belltower and kill the sniper we all were to assume was a man because only men could destroy life in such a heartless way.
No one in war is hated quite like a sniper. The grenade, I'm to presume by the damage I witnessed, had been blindly tossed right on top of her. I threw it in without looking. I found the guardian angel pin I had given her. She wore it on the lapel of her coat. I put it in her charred clasped hand in hopes they'd bury it with her.
But then she was gone. Like a dream fades from memory as the conscious mind awakes and the day progresses leaving the mind with only a faint sense of strangeness. The German soldier who mocked me as though I were an ape took leave of me as well. And the bad memory of my wife left with them — as though she packed her bags and went. And the milkman's kids were erased from my responsibility. And all those gorillas I saw in public, in place of random people, I saw no more. They were all pages turned in a book burned in my mind's pyre.
I saw Claudia the next morning as I carried my bags to the car. She was back at the pool and sipping on a mimosa, floating there. I went over to say goodbye thinking it was the proper thing to do. Maybe I'd say thank you as well. I wouldn't have ever thought that goodbye would be so immediate. But as she lied there, floating as she was the night before, with giant black sunglasses and the mimosa resting on her stomach, I could feel that it was time to let go. That some things weren't meant to last forever. And brief love affairs are often more consequential than those that last for fifty years.
"Do you feel better, Mr. Nobody?"
"I do. Thank you."
"It is what I do," she grinned. The two black ostrich egg lenses where her eyes ought to be gave nothing away.
"Where is it that you said you're from?"
"I didn't," she replied. "I'm from Everywhere but vacation in Nowhere. I usually just say I am from the cosmos."
I couldn't think of anything else to say and so I nodded and walked towards my car with my bags in hand.
"Oh, and Mr. Rappe," she called. "Give Ms. Charisse my regards. But should you have no luck in Vegas with Ms. Charisse, or find no satisfaction at the poker tables, please, do come back. I will be here. And while I hope your dreams of silver screen beauties are fabulously fulfilled in every way you've dreamed them, I would love to again experience that which we knew last night. Only one night seems criminal. Oh, and I am very attracted to your hairy legs — Private Wolfman."
I smiled standing there on the hot tar. My shoes melting. Las Vegas be damned. I knew she was something I'd never be able to comprehend. Some otherworldly thing. It must have amused her to stay at The Flying Saucer motel on Route 66 in Nowhere, New Mexico. That's the only way I could figure it.
I turned around and walked back and put my bags back in the room. Then I stopped by the office and paid for another week which pleased Mr. Poindexter who said something of the "surest compliment of a motel's hospitality is the extended stay of a guest." Then by the poolside as Ms. Fuckalot (foo-ka-lo) smiled, with absolutely no certainty of where I'd be tomorrow, I stripped down to my white boxers and jumped in, hairy legs and all.
Comments
Post a Comment