Once upon a bottle of wine, there was a man, and there was a woman, and they did things to each other that no one but them cares about in a place which no longer exists.
She remembers that his hands were rough and he smoked. He remember that she smelled like pecan pie with vanilla ice cream. There was no logical reason why she should and there has never been another woman since but the scent remains all things feminine in his mind.
They both recall the dust that coated everything, forming mud in the moisture of two for the first time, rivulets of black sweat, hand prints and furrows. The attic was delicious with sin that steamy afternoon and from that blessed union of filthy love, came truth.
Well, truth and Caliente'
She called herself Caliente’, though Shannon was her name. She smoked roll-ur-owns and drank a lot of vodka. If she liked you she would let you touch her. She smelled of oranges. She had collection of vinyl classic jazz and always won at Scrabble. She spoke with bohemian inflection. Born in Sedona and raised by new age crystal healing wiccan priestesses. She never met her father who allegedly disappeared on a mountaintop while on a spirit quest.
“Oh, horseshit, Momma,” was her contemplated reply to that story so many years ago. Of course she was correct. Truth was, her father disappeared after catching his wife in bed with another woman. So when Momma and “Aunt” Diana tried to shovel that horseshit in her lap that particular Sunday breakfast, she already had an idea. She was only six then.
She stood in my doorway, a horrifying visage of death and violence. The blood, dried and caked and flaking on her slender hands was enough to send chills up my spine. However it was the gore around her grimace stretched mouth that gave birth to the survivalist need to run screaming into the night. Chunks of something better left inside the human body coated the hair on the right side of her head. Excuses built inside my mouth along with involuntary bile and I kept my mouth shut to keep them both in.
“Help me” she whispered before rushing into my apartment. I could argue and did later, that I really had no choice in the matter. I have never been afraid of much that this brutal world has strewn on the dirty sidewalk at my feet but I was suddenly terrified of this tiny woman covered with the remains of…someone else. Did they say no to her? I didn’t want to know.
I caught my breath and closed the door after first glancing toward the parking lot out front. If she had been followed, her shadow was hiding for now. After deadbolting the door, I leaned my forehead against the frame and listened to her cleaning herself in my kitchen sink. I prayed she took extra care with her face.
What did she do?
I turned and there she stood, very near. Too near for my terror to be comfortable with. Barely five feet tall, dishwater blonde, slim and wet from the scrubbing. I felt my bowels loosen as she fixed me with her impossibly emerald eyes. I found the door with my backside to try to increase the distance.
“I killed the bitch and ate his heart, Sonny. Does that answer your questions?”
I nodded, mouth agape, and slid down to the floor. I couldn’t look at her. I squeezed my eyes shut against the horror movie onslaught of the possibilities of what she was saying and where I might fit into this. She squatted in front of me, still holding the towel with pink stains on it. She was wearing a short skirt. I absently snuck a peak between her thighs and realized that her face and hands were not the only place that she had smeared this other person's blood. It was then that my bladder gave up the fight. I immediately shut my eyes again, losing my tenuous grip on reality.
She slapped me hard enough to rock my head against the hard wood of the door.
“Snap back, you pussy. It’s done and I can’t take it back. I don’t want to and now you are going to help me or I will bash your fuckin’ head in, too.” With that she reached around and pulled the bloody claw hammer from the back of her denim skirt and began tapping me on the forehead softly with the wooden handle...
There were a dozen reasons I should have seen through her bullshit. More still were the reasons that I couldn’t. None of them were good. The least rational but most persistent was I just didn’t have the strength not to believe in happily ever after. It wasn’t my fault. Ancestral preconditioning, I suppose. We, as a cultural glob, are taught, nay…indoctrinated to believe in 30 minute resolutions and the inevitable rightness built into the Universe’s hard drive. Everything WILL be alright, we preach to ourselves in song, motion pictures, and prose. We, as a cultural amoeba, HAVE to buy that old saw. We haven’t a choice. To not love the illusion is to accept a central flaw in the program.
Happiness is NOT guaranteed. Joy is NOT included in the package that we bought. She WILL break your heart, she WILL steal your future, and she WILL try to kill you with your own gun.
Ain’t life grand?
Everything is fine now. She has been dealt with and the day has been won. It’s just that, well, I kind of miss her. She was good for me, I think. Made me stronger, braver. Taller somehow. I walked with more swagger, like my cock was bigger, or my clothes fit better. It felt as if life suddenly had a Tarantino soundtrack. A smoldering shoot me or fuck me Latin vibe. I was a bad ass. I bought cowboy boots. Actually, she bought them, with a stolen credit card. I picked them out. Sharkskin. Black. The toughest motherfuckers around. Completely ruined at an Allman Brothers concert less than a year later. She made me feel like Waylon Jennings. There were a dozen reasons that I should have seen through her bullshit. That fact that I was a large part of her bullshit had escaped me until just now.
I find myself out of cigarettes. She always used to keep me in cigarettes. Cigarettes and weed. This new girl is ok but forgetful. She always forgets my smokes. An ass like a cheerleader but unless it involves a blowjob, has no idea how to keep a man happy. She tries, God help her, but she is dumb. Caliente' knew I needed my smokes to stay normal. She bought them by the carton. This chick goes to the store and comes back with two packs. Every day. Two fucking packs. It is redundant. A deep seated need to be seen is what that is. No one enjoys going to the convenience store EVERY day. Now that I think of it like that, it’s probably best to keep an eye on her. She might be pathological.
Caliente' left her cop husband for me the very day we met. I often wonder what she said to him. We met through friends earlier that morning, made love all afternoon, and by evening she had broken into my home, with groceries and her assorted belongings, and had cooked me a comfortable dinner of chicken fried steak and gravy. She stayed for a long time. She never really left. Real love is like the herpes. I never met the man but feel a certain empathy now that the dance is over. I often wonder what she said to him. What condition she left him in. Did she bother to tell him or did she just empty his accounts and disappear? Was he crying and screaming? Did she laugh at his tears and call him a pussy? Was he even breathing?
I wanted the dark side. I wanted the perversion, the grit, the raw. She delivered with aces. I wanted Mexican midget naked knife fights. She found a way to include pharmaceuticals, baby oil, and fire.
Sometimes the best part of a thing is the very end of it. Not when she walks out the door for the last time, not when you first receive the pink slip from the crappy job you have held for 9 years, not the moment a loved one dies, not when the bottle is empty. No, not then. Later. Much later. When you come to realize that you were just obsessing over the girl in the elevator, erect, for ten minutes and SHE never crossed your mind, when you get a better gig as a freelance writer, when you can finally breathe without worrying about death, when you wake up for the first time in years without a hangover. When you can finally admit to yourself that you are better off without them. And they are much better off without you. When you can finally accept the finality of it all. Only then is the beauty of the moment revealed.
In the Grand Scheme of Things, I barely knew her. She was a Stranger who found a way in for a minute. We all create our own little dramas, scenarios in which we play A-List celebrities in a B-Movie world we didn’t write. Damn our agent! Our fantasies have us believing that we are Soulmates, bound to each other for all of time. And then some. I call bullshit...
TBC...
