[Wide angle: a motel bathed in the neon light of a huge number 6. As we pan into one of the windows, through the slight partition in between the curtains we hear the faint sound of Jimmy Scott’s voice.]
He grabs her from the back and brutally glides into her. I moan. His hands keep a firm grasp on her hips and leave imprints, and then they creep up to her firm breasts, so white. The hardened nibs of my nipples kissing the cold tiles, my back curves in ecstasy, like a bow it readies to shoot an arrow, I moan. He thrusts in and out with the mechanical precision of a well-oiled machine, tongue and groove, he pulls and digs into my flesh. Then his hands slide again across the deep valley of her smooth and heaving stomach to land in her mound of pubic hair. I moan, and start to grow, I can’t help it. He shrieks and recedes, pulls out of her in an instant, leaving me empty, his huge cock oozing angst, still throbbing. I turn around and his face in the twilight is a disgruntled mask of horror. He takes two steps back, lets out another shriek. You’re a . . .! But . . . how? You, fucking sonnovabitch! His big hands are coming towards me; his cock now is limp, shipwrecked. Instead of scurrying, I wrestle and push him hard against the wall, laughing aloud, my fists land on his contorted grimace and swiftly I kick him out of the motel room, naked, beautiful, wealthy brat, college jock, broad shoulders, cropped blond hair, a mercenary of lust, not inebriated any more, so awake, so startled. Out! Out into the cold northwest starry night, in the middle of nowhere. While he, panic-stricken, kicks the door, then calls lukewarmly pleeease, then yells in rage. Poor fool, a Fred Flint-stone, thinking fast but ineffectively about what to do, what to do and his poor butt getting colder. Inside, I look for his wallet, his gold watch, his BMW keys, his licence, and his credit cards. I’ll ditch them later; it has to look like a robbery. Not that he would tell anyone. Who would? Tell what? Too embarrassing. I get dressed in his grey sweat pants, wrestling team T-shirt and runners, a bit too tight to envelop my flab, and slump out the back window.
[Cut to: Corporate building, a three-storey high erection soothed by a balmy breeze. Minimalist décor reception desk and stick chairs flank the entrance where a well poised receptionist with a thin wireless headphone greets us good morning in a clarinet voice. Jimmy Scott pauses in his tedious task to ponder. His two glassy eyes vacant like TV sets beaming dead air.]
Day after day in the mailroom I look at the agile young man of slender architecture walk on by in the company of other gorgeous young men or silvery hawk-like CEOs or women in little Gucci or Prada numbers. He is slick, Armani, Hugo Boss, not charming, arrogant, he barely looks at me with those strange grey eyes, black eyelashes, maybe Eurasian, he is twenty-five. When I deliver the mail, the faxes, small UPS packages, his hands do not receive, his index points, put it there, his nail impeccably manicured. When he is not around I have taken to checking his appointment book, later I fiddle with his Palm Pilot, it’s never too hard to come up with a pass code – calculate his age, nine inches cut, and the number of fingers in his hands, add and subtract, and I got it – predictable, no one would think the moron-looking, middle-aged plump mail room guy could work that one out (or any piece of technology for that matter). I say never trust an ugly face. I find out he is on his way up the corporate ladder, his dates with several women look more like business meetings, at least as they are officiously logged, older women; he’s climbing, moving and shaking, only enough shaking, he reminds himself of the perfumes they like, memoes himself about the conversations that are successful, selected lines, the restaurants they like, the number of orgasms they fake, and small budgetary annotations, thrifty fellow he is, strategic to the max. I find out and memorize numbers, domicile, directions, and identifications. At times as I repeat the numbers like prayers I begin to sweat and I smell foully, “mendacity” someone once wrote in a play, mendacity. I have to pause; I turn the little gadget off and sneak out of the well-appointed office and hurry back to my fluorescent lair in the basement.
I pull my hair with desperation, it hurts, I pull harder until it has loosened about ten inches, I collapse in a decrepit sofa, cheap room and board, my hair is thinning, it hangs lovely, straight, later I will shampoo it with a temporary sensuous reddish tint that he will recognize because I know it is the hue he prefers, small amounts of money he will never notice have gone missing from one of the many company chequing accounts he manages. Later I will use hot wax, which exquisitely excoriates my skin leaving it smooth and sensitive to the slightest touch. I read In Style and Vogue and Cosmopolitan and about the lives of serial killers. I answer personality tests, examine culinary tips, aromatherapy, pheromones, aphrodisiacs, all the romantic stuff and I go about my tasks methodically. It’s the long weekend. With my thick hands I grab my chest and pull on my skin until it caves under the pressure, to form a turgid bosom, and polish it into two alert round nubs that will barely insinuate themselves under a thin and light velvet moss green blouse casually thrown over a demure deep wine medium-length skirt à la Julia Roberts. I massage my neck, my hands, my buttocks, my legs and my feet for hours, refining them, until they have adopted the desired silhouette, the enticing curvaceous lines.
The day rolls on sluggishly and I am anointed by the purring of Billie Holiday, a day of frugal eating, only grapes and drops of water give my skin the complexion and the paleness I know he finds desirable, the anorexic heroine chic look he falls for, Uma Thurman, Winona Ryder, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jewel, girls he adores, petals. Finally, I am ready for the conclusive touch. The suffering is excruciating as I press hard, with all my might, on my cock with one hand, with the other on my Adam’s apple, inwards into my skin, past the bones, until they amalgamate into my body, a process only soothed by my acidic tears. I am now complete and my voice is that of Kathleen Turner and Lauren Bacall, my eyes are not red any more, my luscious eyelashes, exquisite cheeks, my tears have evaporated into a subtle perfume of roses, old-fashioned yet not overwhelming in the least, a scent that will surely cast a subtle and elusive veil upon the senses of anyone who draws near.
[Close in on a renovated heritage house in a narrow street, quiet, under a roof of magnolia trees sweetly rocked by a slight breeze. A clicking of high heels approaches gently from the end of the street, a cab speeds away, a cat purrs on a nearby branch, two shapely legs walk up to the house, the living room light is on.]
It’s late spring, evenings can be cool, deceiving, evenings can be dark but I soon take shelter in his front porch, quickly knock at his door, no one else in sight; slightly agitated, he opens, wearing evening pleated dark pants, dry-cleaned and pressed to perfection, no shirt on, a compact triangle of ribbed muscles gets lost down his leather belt that hangs undone. He is to meet with some middle-rank manager woman, I know, my timing is perfect, my eyes widen with a glimpse of fear, I utter a nondescript little sound, I deliver a heavenly mirage. I’m sorry, I say, he says, May I help you? I’m sorry, I barely pronounce. I begin to turn around to go back down the flight of stairs and exit from his life for evermore. He can see my petite waist, my slender calves, and the thin nap of my neck, damsel-in-distress, illuminated by the sepia light of the Chinese lanterns hanging in his porch. I slowly pause and turn to face him again, I didn’t mean to bother you, I whisper like a rustle of leaves, I wonder if you could call the police for me, 911 that is, my well-rehearsed lines, Blanche Dubois’ revenge. I will not be taken for granted. Is everything all right? He says and I know I am an intriguing creature under the pallid double moon of his eyes. Confidently, I explain to him who I am, where I work, about my co-worker, who lives down the street and invited me for drinks but wanted more, he said he thought that neighbour was gay, with undisguised smugness. I say that so did I, but he had tried anyhow, to force himself on me, my voice breaking like a small wave, I can’t go on, choked, my car didn’t start, I show him the BMW keys. In the meantime, he has run to the bedroom to put his pressed white shirt on and has poured a glass of ice water for me, I sit like I was taught, pressed against the soft brown suede sofa – I mean as if I had been trained in a finishing school – the wholesomeness of my legs barely showing.
A spring interlude, some Debussy, sensible meals, Jenni Craig, Martha Stewart, Oprah blessed be the many goddesses of good living, clean-cut love-making, missionary style, initially, hardly a sigh, a tremolo, the beginning of a lot of learning, unquestioned, unwrapping him layer by layer, imperceptible abrasions in the skin, with restrained drama, without extravagance because I wasn’t just anyone, I was an adorable woman fascinated by his potency, his formidable chest, barren of all primeval hair, only glistening essential oils, his insistence in ingesting hormones for the body tone, the elimination of fatty tissue, lies, lies, tell me sweet little lies. The fact is that he was left spent every night, but greedy as males are he would come around for more, with eclipsed eyes, and found me like one finds a little orphan Columbine in a nest, vulnerable to any contact. I always came to him, told him how my ex-boyfriend had gone mad, stalking me, I showed him his notes asking me for the car he had given me back, in careful typing “I will not tell anyone about us”. I cried, see how he denies my existence and what happened between the two of us, those cherished times, no, don’t pick me up home, I’m sure he is around, stalking me, I’ll see you this evening. He would hang up the phone with a smirk expression at first; happy to bail me out, to help so he can help himself to me that very same night. A minute later Jimmy sees the agile young man of slender Eurasian architecture shift the buttressing stud in his pants from the corner of his eyes as he meekly delivers crisp stationery.
I drained out every ounce of his anxiety, he was grateful, I tinged his dreams, contaminated like a metastasis; he was cautious at first but like the good rock climber in a sterile indoors he was, strong and adventurous, he yielded to the challenge, in the summer he would go back to windsurfing he said, so many dangers besiege the modern man, life is so fraught with dangerous desires. I smiled as he slowly let go of his hands, his selfish thick lips, his pristine teeth, his tongue, his words, his lukewarm saliva, the misty suburban memories of his life (that we all learn to describe as repressed childhood recall of abuse), nothing to shout about, and his juvenile ambitions (and his wallet, his apartment keys, his car keys). I taught him secrets, intimacy, to give in, to trust me, I should know well that shattered dreams, chard and turds can be satin, velvet or silk, it’s all about lightning and location, location, location. I initiated him in the perverse secret of my flowers, the poisonous vibrations of the raging stems that can keep an erection solid for hours, the roses with thorns gently scratching his back until it bleeds, just barely, his bound wrists, his legs spread apart until the abductors are slightly strained, my lips around his shaft, careening his ravines, descending into every little crevice. One day my fingers fondled his sensitive ass, timidly, another rose that was, slowly blooming, a few seconds at first, later some more, longer, until finally bathed in that strange summer early morning light, the window wide open, the calm breeze blowing through it and through my lips like the fluttering wings of a hummingbird, his back tensed, his hands trapped in cuffs, his eyes blindfolded, his mouth gagged, his ears covered, deliciously moaning like the precious male animal that he was, that he is, and I couldn’t hold my shape any more.
[Cut to: Inside the young businessman’s gentle period house located in the shaded street.]
I say, you will kill for me, he says he doesn’t understand her, that he will not drink what he drank last night (and the night before and the night before) on the rocks, that it gave him nightmares, a bad headache, that he felt strange. How strange that is? I ask. He admits that he rather not have her play with his ass like she did, it hurts, in fact, it is ablaze now. How good is it? I ask. He is befuddled. Good? He doesn’t want to understand but for the time being we have more important things to occupy our minds, his life crisis, leaving that silly career job, getting more fat into his body, beer and fries, getting used to the sudden swings in my mood and the inflections in the sound of my voice, my late-night vanishings leaving him alone in the bed, wanting more, puzzled and in pain; we have to deal with the eviction notice slid under the front door, the concerned calls from cut-throat colleagues, ex-girlfriends, and faraway American relatives.
One day he says he doesn’t know how it has all happened that everything seems to be tumbling down . . . but she is in his life and that is all that matters, that he knows that he loves her, that he wants to lose himself in her, kneel down in front of her, keel over, his eyes uncovered to see the things she does to him, how she tattooes bluish graffiti on his body. The atomic iron doors that barricaded this sanctuary have swung open, drums resounding in the sky of my soul, and the feelings imprisoned inside now overflow. He says he would do anything for her. I say, just wait until you come away from this neighbourhood into my house, no, you’ve never seen it, I seem to be here all the time, that’s right, all the time, wait then, you say you would do anything for me, wait. In front of his eyes almost coming out of their sockets, I return to my original shape.
In my long life of foster homes, petty crimes, convenience store hold-ups, run-aways, screeching old tyres in the greasy pavement of road gas stations, I went scurrying from trailer park to trailer park like an itinerant circus freak show, eating road kill, for so long, couldn’t let anyone see the real me, so whimsical, so damaging. Since I was a child I was looking for God, but there was no God for those like me and I understood I had to create my own. So I came, not looking for mister right, just looking for the right one for me, couldn’t let the police get near me, the social services, the scientists, the counsellors. When it got too close for comfort I’d disappear and go and settle in the next squalor, amble around the fancy area of town, the towers, the wall-to-wall fantasy, do my little facts-finding, and proceed with extreme caution, handle with care, sheltered by the shadows. Shady identities I created, ghouls lifted right out of B-movies I watched late into the morning, being one of those who don’t need to sleep much, did menial work, underpaid, until I found the next suitor, always hoping this would be the one, emotional mobility, transient, instability as noted in the psychiatric diaries. One by one I faced the many disappointments, a personal trainer in an uptown gym with expansive hands crowned in ten killer fingers, a roller coaster of bulging muscles, feet odour, I excused that, a small member, I excused that, it is not that I wanted children, voracious appetite for the kinky, there was my loophole, I thought I would hang on to that psychological handle, exploit that vein, but no one is as twisted as they would like to believe they are, that is why they watch movies, to compensate for what they don’t dare to do, hesitant, envious, even in their fucking fantasies. Or the dutiful middle-class entrepreneurial father, Fatal Attraction’s victim, still so gullible after so many years of horror tabloid headliners, ready to fuck the baby sitter at the mere sight of her small cup bra. Don’t these affluent businessmen read The Enquirer? Enchanting innocence is the innocence of these otherwise respectful citizens. Or the police chief in his early fifties who would eventually introduce me to his half sisters, half his age, whom he fucked avidly. Oh, sweet perversion, tailored and seamed into the staunchest uniforms! They became an acquiescent audience in one sultry evening viewing inside a 1950s motel room; two pairs of mesmerized owls they witnessed me, perched on top of him, something grotesque and alive, drying breasts, immersed in the delicious agony of metamorphosis that yielded no butterfly out of a cocoon but another worm, bigger and better, Aliens, the umpteen sequel, an improved “Me” in neon fucking lights pumping meat into this venerable patriarch, the keeper of the law and order, his generous sweat covering his heroic and medalled chest and his glistening ample forehead, imploring for his women’s forgiveness, hard panting, as I completed my ferocious ramming up his ass with triumphant colors, the crying of the women, the Greek choir to his futile tragedy. With stories like these and so many other stories was cluttered my life before he came along, to all the men I loved before, big and strong, like songs, like clichés, like long and drawn puffs of smoke.
[Cut to: A decrepit and untidy trailer in a noisy suburban park. A radio blasts Meat Loaf.]
But men, they say, are like buses, they come every fifteen minutes, at least if you are in the city, they pick you up and you move on with them only to get off at your most convenient stop. Tired of the house in the shade of the magnolia trees, the number of distressed calls from friends and family, the number of people who have seen way too many reruns of “The Silence of the Lambs” I needed to move on myself, so I called the jock, fine, I’ll give you back your fucking BMW and I will stop the threats of sending an anonymous letter to the bride-to-be, lovely she is indeed, barren though . . . yeah, I saw the gynecologist’s report . . . never mind how I saw that, fuck I’ve almost been inside her fucking cunt! Got pen and paper? You got something out of school after all, pretty boy. Did I mention you tasted positively good? A jawbreaker the crazy piece of yours is. No, I said tasted as in your oozing precome not tested as in HIV positive. Please, don’t gag. Write this address down. Hey, you’ll get to meet the real improved “Me” in neon fucking lights . . . click. How rude!
I dance for him the lewdness of a cheap 1980s punk song, endless love, each night the last, spirits rise, late into the morning light, every day a beginning, lap dance, and the dance is unrehearsed, a little stream of beer flows from the end of his lips, through his rough beard to his gut. The monumental energy of his early thirties help him lift me from the floor, shove his cock inside me, as if lifted by a huge crane and crashed against a brick wall, again and again until a gush of fermented liquid empties inside me, like the blood hurrying through the thick veins in his neck and the storm of his alcoholic breath as enraged as his temperament all deposited inside me. I had to teach you so much, my puppy love, now you love me for what I am, a bit of this and a bit of that.
As in the movies, the way I like it, the jock comes in as told, pushing with terror the door ajar and he finds us in the stinking room, he on top of me having his way, damsel in distress, and he goes to my help once more like that night I had been left behind in the highway near the motel where the he found me. He has found me again, he cannot see the resemblance, masqueraded I am by his own petty arrested adolescence desire, he sees a woman being devoured by a monster, a damsel properly saved is a sure shot damsel in the sack. Keep your eyes on the prize. Poor jock, so gullible, reaches fast for the fireplace tool and spears him good in the back. I fall back on to the suede sofa. Thank you. I cry inconsolably, monster blood, sweat and tears dripping down my lovely dress, with trembling hand I point out at the BMW keys, I sob that he was driving that when he picked me up in the nearby highway where I was stranded. I search for my cell phone, the monster hid it, I have to call my new job in the steel minimalist tower, I just started there, and they might be wondering what has happened to me. The jock finds it and hands it to me, frail and sitting on the floor in a corner of the revolting trailer. I dial 911. Police? Firefighters? No. Paramedics, from the closest station. Jimmy knows. Jimmy knows that Jag, 24, the one with the cinnamon skin, the turban and the dagger, has begun to work as a paramedic in the third shift a month before. Jimmy hopes to be moving on.