We sat on the edge of the big white bed. My feet couldn’t touch the hardwood floor which made me feel so little, every time. My thoughts were scrambled, no thanks to the tequila. I was drunk. This was against my rules. Liquor is poison in my veins, on my tongue. I say things and do things I would never do. But I was bored, it was raining, and I was lonely.
His apartment creeped me out by the lack of things he didn’t have. His detachment from sentiment noted while I fingered the ugly necklace around my neck. White glistening platinum. Generic. A gift a man thinks a woman would want or need but never does. It was becoming increasingly difficult to fake smiles and coo at him. My adoration for him was strictly enforced, designed for wallets. But now, I knew I never needed it. Didn’t want it anymore. What I wanted he could never give to me. I was falling in love with someone else, somebody I didn’t want to love. It was beginning to consume me, change me.
He started to tug at my clothing and I collapsed onto him, burying my face into his neck. My skin was crawling as he pawed at me with eager hands. He was demanding. I had to be freshly shaved, freshly showered, a specific perfume, even more specific lingerie. He had many fetishes and I played into everyone of them. He called me “good girl” and sucked my toes while he was inside of me. The kind of guy that performs cunnilingus not for a woman, but for the validation that comes from a woman’s orgasm. Which is so easy to fake when you are wet, it’s just a series of kegel exercises and manipulated shudders. He never really made me come, I just gave him what he wanted. How could I come with his grunts and intrusive fingers, lapping me like my pussy was a melting ice cream cone. There was no passion, it was all a show to keep his dick hard.
I stared at the ceiling with a fistful of hair. He liked to pull my underwear up so it was wedged between my lips, wrapped around my clit. That was painful. It never felt good. It was like bucking against sand paper. He had callouses and long fingers with rounded tips; in other words, a lung condition. He would finger me until I was dry and ask me why I wasn’t wet. His body was covered in thick keloided scars and terrible 90’s tattoos. He was denying his age, which still showed like weeds in the crack of cement.
He flipped me over and I was face first in the down comforter, smothering a growing annoyance in beautiful ivory feathers. He was the jackhammer type and I could only concentrate on the base of the condom slamming into me. A raw feeling that started in the pit of my stomach and ended with little pink dots on the sheets. That is all he got from me, drops of something that could be washed away. A wound that would heal.
He begged me for anal, forcefully prying my ass apart so he could stare at the pink of my flesh. I always said no, but this time I shrugged apathetically. It would be the last time I saw him. Go out with a bang so he would remember me sweetly kind of thing. He deserved a nice parting gift after a year of sleeping together. I felt bad. He had no idea how many men where in between the same legs he was, how many men I had played the same way. It was all a game to me, kill or be killed, you know?
He was drunk too and beginning to soften. How cruel. I finally caved to this one demand and his body wouldn’t allow him the gift. A pathetic reminder of his age. He fell on the bed in disappointment and tugged on the chain of the necklace, pulling my neck into him. Soon he was snoring and I quietly collected my clothes he had thrown around the room. I stared at him for a while in the doorway before I left, feeling slightly guilty for everything he had given me; the trips to Hawaii, the clothes, the purses, jewelry. His version of kindness, his darkness. His ultimate loneliness. But it wasn’t real. He didn’t want to know me, he wanted to own me.
After a while, I dropped the peach coloured thong on the floor and kicked it towards the bed. He could have that. I wouldn’t miss it. I stood in his kitchen with a throbbing headache or was it heartache? I thought of Bobby, swallowing more cool silver tequila and stared out the window for an hour or so. My throat and pussy burned. It was morning. The rain pounded on the windows so loudly I could no longer hear him snoring. The rain pounded on the windows so loudly I could no longer hear my heartbeat.
I left, knowing there was nothing good about me.
Secret letters:
I always think about you as if you are dying; but I know you are already dead. You lay dying as I was being born. You love me but I am far away, both in miles and age. A shell of a man as deep as a puddle, grief tattooed along trunks you call arms. Painfully applied scar tissue. Blue and black outlines wistfully compared to the Pacific Ocean’s crashing waves, violence that wipe footprints from the beach. Who am I in this tsunami? A casualty of lust, thrown against the jagged landscape of longing. The deep and bitter cliff of despair. A far reach from the other side of the coast. All you have is pictures and words while I lay with another, baking in the golden sunshine of everything you can’t have. What do you have left to sacrifice upon an obsessive altar? Not me, the patron saint of whores and junkies. Our Lady of Roses, our lady of danger. A womb full of bullets, black lungs. Skinny ribs lacking meat and compassion. The prayers of dead old men carved into my skin. Maybe there is room for you here, on my flesh. Maybe you should keep praying.
Secret letters:
You are an inherently creative person, but yr thought process is a series of aftershocks caused by a rolling divorce. You drink and smoke to calm down, so heavy from the high like an anchor in the sky. Love is a burden you seek to feed a growing hole down in the hidden parts of you. The girl in the mirror. Her diet of bad decisions and cigarettes. You spend the money you make so you don’t have to eat it. I love you I hate you I love you. You are beautiful. Resilient like the oleander, lush and green as booze and jealousy. Hard to kill and dangerous; poison from the ground up. Fire season is looming, but only I can tell yr starting to burn from the inside out.
The moment when my tongue locks against my teeth and molars grind into sand. Clicking minutes pass in silence. Ears pop with the rush of blood to the head. Thousands of words I don’t say. My never ending sadness. A handicap capable of ruining me.
I don’t know where to start. How to explain what it’s like to wake up with this shit on my plate. The struggle and strength it takes to get out of bed. To try to care about simple things; cleaning, eating, bathing. How do I explain I think about suicide all the time without alarming everyone? I learned the hard way in high school. Forced into therapy and medication was suggested, but that wasn’t the problem. Nobody ever listened to my argument. That chemicals won’t fix the part of my brain that was damaged when I was young and developing. Damage that was exaggerated by the trauma of losing both my parents, the incest and rape survived, the physical abuse my stepmother subjected me to.
My mind isn’t hurting. It’s my heart, my soul, my body. This overwhelming sense of dread. This crawling fear in the pit of my stomach. The nightmares. Panic attacks. Mood swings. Anger. Grief. It’s constant.
Nobody can fix that part of me. My sadness developed. It continues to develop. I am willing and open to the idea of growing further and further away from my unfortunate childhood. But I can’t ignore being wronged at the hands of strangers, being wronged by the circumstance of life. How my parents failed me, how lovers have hurt me.
This hungry monster. It follows me. On nights when I can’t sleep, it’s because of what I remember, what I have to live with, what I don’t have anymore. The future scares me, so I try to take it day by day, by the hour, the minute. It’s hard for me to articulate what is exactly wrong when everything is wrong. When everything has been wrong.
People applaud me for strength. Comparisons are made. These are hurtful. These are a reminder of how fucked up I feel. I know and you know what I’ve been through, so please stop saying you don’t know how I do it. Please stop making excuses for feeling like you have problems. Everyone has problems. Mine are not greater. They’re different.
An example from the other night: “I can’t make you happy, so yr on yr own.” We sleep together, we fuck, we share. Yet the obvious was thrown in my face. My toxicity. It hurt. My inability to tell the whole truth. The wake up call after six hundred days of learning how to be vulnerable again, learning to feel safe. Another love almost lost. Caught dancing with my demons. Because I hurt, I am hurting those around me.
No one will fully know what it’s like to be me. A lesson in sharing. Reinforcing the weakest parts of me. Accept my sadness, understand heaviness. Some shit you can’t escape. Some shit you just have to live with.
You were beautiful once, do you remember? You were like Billie Holiday on stage, takin’ shit to another level in front of strangers. You were adored. The boys loved yr pale skin, green eyes, long red hair. Little and curvy. Drove everyone crazy. You were gonna make it, you were gonna be famous.
Funny how much changes in ten years.
Who are you now? We’re not in Kansas anymore. Through the forest of empty spoons, down the yellow bag road to the city of H. Sold those busted ruby slippers and can’t find yr way home. Sold yr pussy and heart to the Devil to get high, to forget all the times the men beat you. Yr father, yr lover, yr pimp. Now the baby’s playing with knives in the kitchen, blind in one eye, brokenhearted. As long as the welfare check’s in the mail, you don’t give a shit.
Nobody feels sorry for you.
Somebody has to be toxic, right? Might as well be you. The victim crown suits you well, princess. It’s easy. Tap the vein hard enough to quiet the pain, to blur the faces of disappointment. The plastic beds in rehab aren’t as soft and comforting as six feet of dirt above you. Maybe you’ll get high enough and shoot yr way into heaven. Nobody wants to attend yr funeral, but everyone’s gonna be there. It’s gonna be the biggest show you ever sold out. You’ll finally make the papers.
You were gonna be somebody. You were somebody, once.
What if we had never met? You asked me this question, the only thing I can remember of you. Perhaps we would have made it, I said. I’m tired of thinking about how things could have been.
You, in yr working class glory, with calloused fingers ground to the bone. A blue collar stained with sweat and circumstance. And then there was me, a pretty box full of fragmented glamour and loss. Somehow I became reduced to letters blotted with lipstick, dirty panties sprayed with perfume. I became larger than life with my flaws, yr own flaws. You thought I was perfect in a fucked up way, yet I continued to hold onto a hope that soon you would grow tired of rose-coloured glasses and see me for who I really was.
It didn’t matter how many times I explained you were gambling with trouble, like every man before you. You wanted to bargain my shortcomings, as if you could get a better deal. You happily walked the fine line between redemption and failure. A walking disaster. All the while I stood on the other side, beckoning you with a pointed finger dipped in poison. You let me pluck the weakest parts of you like those guitars that never made you famous. It was easy to fill yr willing ears with false truths. Even I knew they sounded so good they had to be real, somehow, somewhere.
You were starved for attention, eyes wet with longing. My reflection staring back at me was too much to bare, so like all those before you, I turned my back and ground my hips into that longing. I placed those big, paw-like palms over my breasts and made you squeeze the only thing about me that was real. You actually believed you were a respectable gentleman, that you were different but sadly, you were just a man. Just another man with a lap I found myself straddling in disappointment.
Nothing about you could have changed the fact that I was disposable, that I was willing to be thrown away. I didn’t need anything from you. What I wanted I was sure to get, and it took everything in me to stifle laughter as you handed over that hard earned money with dirty fingernails. The way you laid beside me on worn sheets in a shitty apartment over the boulevard. The same room that I had been in a million times before you; they are all the same. Nothing could have made me give a damn as you told me about the absent parents that never raised you, or which woman broke yr heart. As far as I was concerned, I was the same as them. Detached, unattainable. Bought.
Before we met, I knew I could never love you like how you imagined I would, or could. I knew I would never be able to find coincidence in the broken childhoods you thought mirrored each other. No, I knew all along.
Still, you bought the respect I feigned as I let you say everything you felt needed to be said. I owed you what you paid for, what you expected from me. You bore a scar deep inside that would never heal, a wound freshly opened as I parted my legs. In yr hunger you mistook my lean limbs for a feast, as if flesh could be filling. I engulfed you in pale thighs you thought you could splatter trauma onto like a blank canvas, my eye on the clock the whole time. There was no link between rhythmic muscle movement and a quickened pulse. I wiped away the come like tears from a child’s face, without a thought. Children we would never have, discarded tissue in the wastebasket.
What if we never met? You asked this question, the only thing I can remember of you. Perhaps we could have made it, I said. I’m tired of thinking about things that could’ve been, things I have already forgotten.
pull-out:
An ongoing epistolary correspondence made public between Siren (californoir) and I:
This morning I awoke to find myself entrenched in a deep mud trench in my bed. I had to turn all of the lights on because although the snowstorm they promised to come down last night did not indeed come,…
What I could do for you, shall I count the ways? Do you know by now? Wait, let me start by saying what I can’t and won’t do for you.
What I can’t take it back is when yr father left without a reason while you were so young. I can’t make that hole inside close up after widening all these years. I won’t try to figure out why you won’t (or can’t) see me in a way without fears but hold onto me like a possession. I can’t see that place you stuff the hatred down where nobody can reach. I won’t quiet the monsters perched on heavy shoulders that struggle against getting high or finishing a bottle. I won’t try to understand the hours in front of a television, how you were raised by a box of broken promises or how you fell asleep while a single mother cried in the next room. I can never understand the pain of being a man without a role model, like an animal in the wild. I can never understand why women are yr source of loneliness, because I am a woman that makes you so lonely.
What I could do for you is meet you on the corner of some block in Manhattan in the middle of the night and sit on yr lap during peepshows. I can roll my panties down in the middle of crowd and let you fuck me on the subway while we end up in a new town. I could hop a plane and land in a different time zone, maybe Australia. I could pretend to like the heat and understand foreign currencies while you show me the belly of the world. I would listen to yr secrets with an open mind and tell you all of mine in time. I could become familiar in yr world of strangers. I would be patient in yr times of self destruction, through the women and booze, although my comfort isn’t southern and my tits are real. I would watch you spend all the money you had and still be happy with my empty bank account. I would keep my body lean and womb empty, lest I stir up any fears of abandonment and contempt. I would never take for granted the talent and potential you have. I would never let go if you wanted to hold my hand. I would lick the blood of fresh track marks and kiss a mouth soured by whiskey. I could forgive you if you wanted to leave, as I see you are still hurt by old wounds. If I could not make you happy, I understand something could, one day.
For you, I would do anything it took to keep loving you, no matter how fucked up you are.
I’m down to my last twenty bucks. Literally. I’m fine, I guess. The cats have food, I have smokes. Got black marks on my pinky finger from filling out weeks of unemployment forms. Milked my severance for two months. What’s next? Wait for the book advance cash. Stand in the welfare line. Pray that there is a God and shit will fall into place before the landlord comes callin’ for the rent he ain’t seen.
I’ve never been so calm before in my life without having money. I’m not really sure where this tranquility has come from. Calm before the storm? Before I get my ass kicked out onto the street? I’ve got such big dreams but that don’t mean shit on an empty plate.
Been sick for days. Layin’ around with a fever and weird, wild dreams. Scenes from movies I’m starring in, eating hot dogs at the track, riding a motorcycle up to Big Sur, New Orleans graveyard tours, afternoon sex as the sun sneaks in through the blinds. In these vivid scenes I swear on my tits they’re real as hell. And I wake up covered in sweat, cold, hungry. Everything I eat comes back up violently, reality staining the porcelain king I’ve been a slave to.
None of this is preventing me from wearing my leopard print fur coat, my diamonds, going up to Big Bear for the weekend, letting my lips travel and land on his body where they will. Little wet kisses instead of tears.
He sings with his guitar, the whine of the slide drowning out my blues: “I done been everywhere that there is to be, and I’ve done all there is to do, but all I wanna do is just lay around here with pretty little blue eyed you.”
So I ask myself these questions when my mind starts to wander: Am I sad? Yup. Am I mad? Like a dog. Will it pass? Maybe. Will I live?
Well, I guess you could say I like to live dangerously.
I was around 3 in the afternoon when I woke up in Vegas. Thick blooded from swallowing Valium and whiskey until the morning, it was a struggle to sit up. I just wanted to go back to sleep. The bed was warm and the afternoon sun was beginning to cast shadows from the casinos. It would only be a matter of time before the freaks and drunks would be crawling along the sidewalks.
My trunk was a tightly locked felony: 1940 Mosin, 440 rounds of Romanian millsurp ammo, duct tape, an old cop maglite, 20 ft. of rope, a Serbian cold weather mask, and bleach. Essential supplies for surviving the heartless ways of the desert, my outlaw road of freedom. My assignment was simple, prove there is no romance in the wild.
The freeway was packed from a death on the split yet I drove dangerously, swerving around paramedics, the blood on the pavement, and people who had nowhere to go with their big pockets and empty dreams. Suddenly the sand and mountains loomed before me, thousands of years of secrets and raw beauty with a big open blue sky.
Unreal pleasure comes from shooting guns in the desert; sheer power in the palm of yr hand, gripping the power of death. It is heavy, raw and awesome. You could kill a man the right way and bury him out here, nobody would notice. Maybe I would. Songs of the doomed, the soundtrack of pop pop pop and rat tat tat, a sociopath’s lullaby in the background. You can wipe the blood off yr hands, but memory remains.
There are three stages of the Clark County Shooting Range, a labyrinth of maniacs with driveways facing shooting pistols, shotguns and rifles. It’s almost impossible to obey the speed limit while dodging bullets in the wind. It’s almost impossible to concentrate on anything except unloading a few rounds while the butt of the rifle kicks you in the shoulder like a pissed off horse.
After being forced to watch a safety instructional video conducted by a cryptkeeper from the 70’s, ear plugs shoved deep and aviators as my eye protection, I walked the long line to my lane. We were all in a row, everyone with a different gun. Class warfare at it’s finest. Some of these people had rifles that cost more than my rent, my yearly salary, but I didn’t care. For $200 I got me a 1940 Mosin, a real Nazi killer that had been collecting cobwebs in a warehouse for years. Waiting to be unleashed after years of silence.
The first shot almost knocked me on my ass but I hooped and hollered as I watched the dust break off the mountains, hundreds of rounds whizzed around me. My shoulder was red and the pain tickled, like a teasing lick from a feather. The smoke unfurled from hot shells bouncing and clicking on cement slabs beneath my feet, brilliant metal in the cold air. Red flags waved every twenty minutes and we had to put our guns down to collect our targets, and senses. Busted shells stuck in my boots as I stumbled across a graveyard of ammunition. The sun was beginning to set and as it lowered across the never ending horizon of the Nevada desert, I could see reason for miles and miles. The view left me breathless.
Gun powder is like an aphrodisiac. The sulphur, the heat, the residue. The danger held in my hands seemed to quicken my pulse with each shot, surrounded by men holding guns bigger than their cocks. I was alive. I had become the hunter, the survivor I have always been. Big talk for a little lady with a big fucking gun.
This is why so many people love America; the audacity of freedom in this country, the madness.