The floor drops beneath my feet. The music spins itself into a thousand hysterical screaming banshees. The world falls away until there’s nothing but the men and their guns coming down the stairs in slow motion. Slowly. Slower. Silent. I notice the small bits. Shoes and the quiet way they walk in them. The one who wears no socks, his skin is the color of cinnamon and his shoes just a shade darker. One wears an avocado colored knit suit with hand stitching around the pockets and buttonholes. The buttons are brown and look like some kind of polished stone. The lights from the dance floor play on the dark oily metal of the guns and blue and white dots dance over everything, reflecting off the mirrored ball. Off their manicured, buffed nails.
I’m trapped in a series of close-ups. I can’t move. I can’t breathe. I can’t see their faces even though they’re right in front of me, only a dozen stair steps away, searching the floor with their dark eyes. I do not see a single face and I don’t think they notice me.
And then I feel Floyd’s chubby fingers bite sharply into the soft flesh of my upper arm. I drop my drink as he drags me away, wasting vodka as it soaks silently into the carpet. He pushes me ahead of him. The music is back and suddenly I panic. Everyone else is still dancing. And drinking. No one else seems to have noticed them yet.
And then we’re in the back. We’re up the stairs. Out on the sidewalk. Seconds only. Floyd throws me into a yellow cab and stuffs himself in beside me. I hear the first shots exploding like Chinese fire crackers in February as the car door slams closed.
“Drive. The Consulate Hotel. West 49th Street”, he says to the cabbie.
“Relax, J. It’s over,” he says to me as he drops a bloated pink hairless hand onto my leg and looks at me, the question in his eyes.
I owe him big time now, I think to myself. I don’t say anything. How bad can it be? He’s not mean. And I really do owe him now. I should be grateful. I should at least say thank you. I probably owe him my life I think.
“I need three hundred and twenty five dollars,” is what I say.
“OK, Jodi, three hundred and twenty five dollars it is then.” He smiles at me, rubbing that pink hand up and down my thigh. Abu Ben Taxi Driver is looking at us, at me, in the rear view mirror. Listening in. Deciding what I am. What Floyd is. The vodka from my last drink rises back up my throat and tastes awful and I wish I had more.
JJ’ll be proud when I drive into the city in the car I bought with the money from my first trick. How bad can it be, really? Okay, so he’s big. Fat. Instead of thinking about fucking one hugely fat middle aged man I imagine it will be like making it with two big beefy boys and that’s not a bad thought.
In the hotel room, the lights are out, but the blinds are open. The room’s lit romantically by a full moon above and the street lights below. Floyd lies naked across the bed, a great white beached sperm whale. His skin iridescent in the moonlight, broken only by an archipelago of eczema that dots his massive body, the likely source of the medicinal aura that floats around him.
I stand at the bathroom door, my clothes at my feet, trying to imagine the feel of his skin and the texture of that rash.
I leave my body. My heart and soul float across the room and settle sadly into a wing chair in the corner to watch. A sick voyeuristic pleasure makes it impossible to tear myself away, the same way you slow down on the highway to eyeball that car crash and take a moment to be grateful it wasn’t you. But it is me, and I watch myself, struck speechless by what I’m capable of.
There is barely any room for me on the bed.
This is not at all like getting wild with two beefy boys.
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Posted November 16, 2009 at 9:00 am, filed under the diary and tagged 1978, Bon Soir, dirty boys, dirty money, drinking, drugs, Greenwich Village, whores. Bookmark this post. Follow any comments @ RSS feed for this post.
