Sunday, December 12, 2004

Somewhere Out There, cont.

XIV

She’s crying. Laurice stands at my open door, eyes irritated, gleaming with wet tears. It’s late at night, about 2 a.m. It hurts to look in the light, my eyes haven’t adjusted yet. She looks tired. I just stand there, waiting for her to say something, the sound of crickets chirping, the sound of night. It’s rhythmical.

She says nothing. Stands there.

I say, “Come in,” and push her back gently as she steps in, sobbing. I say, “What’s wrong?” She only stares at me, her eyes gleaming, her black hair. “Laurice.” “Laurice, what’s wrong?”

She shakes her head, saying no. “No,” she says. “No.” “No,” in a whisper. “No.”

I come over to her, play with her hair, twirl it around my finger, feel it. I look her in the face. She looks at me. “No.” It’s all she can say. She sniffles. I put my hand on her face, wetting my hand from tears. I move onto her pouty lips, and put my finger away. Still wet.

I say, “Let’s go lie down in my bed.” She nods her head, I hold her hand and push her over to my room, into my bed.

We lie there in darkness, from the window is moonlight. She says, “I’m sorry.”

I say, “Don’t be.”

“I won’t.”

She says, “Thinking into the future is a bad thing.”

“Is that what’s wrong?”

She only turns her head to me, and stares.

I say, “I know what you mean. It is scary to think where we will be in twenty years, or even ten.” She nods her head at me, the tears have mostly stopped from her. “The unknown is a scary thing,” I say.

“Yes, it is.”

We stare off into blackness, a wondering, asking blackness. “There are so many paths to choose,” I say, “so many different roads. But each leads to the same ending. And in every future – the farthest future you can see, the farthest away – we are all going to be forgotten. You, me, them, us, him, her, it – everything.”

She says in a whisper, “I know. Oh god, I know.” She seems on the brim of crying again. I move over to her. I play with her hair again. Twirl it, push it over my face. Pet it.

“Your hair is pretty,” I say.

She looks at me with defeated eyes. I eye her back equally defeated. She puts her hand around my face and moves it slowly along, then away. She moves her face closer to mine. We can feel each other’s breaths.

We kiss.

XV
When I’m not at school, not doing homework, not with Laurice, not doing whatever else my dull, inheld schedule causes me to have to waste my time with, I’m working. System slaving. Doing one for the world. Giving to this society that’s just given me so much. I’m earning the mighty dollar.

The dollar is my own something of a god. I was brought up like most every other American – as a Christian – but I long ago turned from that. Turned from this notion of “god,” but now I know he’s real. There isn’t a doubt – god is somewhat of a thing called money. It just has to be true, it even says it on the back of the goddamned thing – “In god we trust.” God is an avarice. a greed, an endless well of materialistic desires and needs which shall never be welted.

It’s just as Gatsby was in The Great Gatsby – and that is what we all are. We create ourselves, we make ourselves our own god. We seek for the American dream, the so-called myth, and get disillusioned towards it. Who we are is just kids that try to grow up and get lost and tangled up as hell. We end up making ourselves something but it is never us.

Where I work is a clothing store. It’s kind of a wonder I work there, but it’s where I work. I have no sense of clothing style – it is just more of a materialistic wasteland to me, where people try to satiate their wants with things. What clothes someone wears is something that determines how you view them, but I’m not into it.

The main reason I work there is there’s a lot of hot women who stroll their pretty way around the place. I just set my eyes on them and imagine things.

Oh, I might think – there’s Ms. Hot Blonde, she’s got a nice bosom, nice flank – and in my head we’ll be doing naughty things. She’ll be cradling her arms around me like I’m the only baby for her, and I’ll stroke her hair, tell her how fine it is, I’ll feel her breasts firmly pressed against my chest, then she’ll start yanking off my shirt, I’ll start pushing hers up, feeling the nice skin of her back as I do, and we’ll go in for a kiss, I’ll feel her fine lips on my lips—

What usually happens is I get lost in daydreams, lost in my imagination, and someone will come to the cash register, to purchase their items, and they’ll just appear there, with this look on their faces that says “Snap out of it and come back to earth,” and I’ll give them this stupid selling smile, tell them I am sorry, then proceed to scan up their pointless clothes they’ll wear to some place.

If the woman who I’m doing this for is hot, and maybe if she has a thong, I’ll tell her she’s going to be making some pervert happy. Sometimes I’ll even ask for their numbers if they’ve got some really promiscuous clothes and some really tight body you just want to make a flesh canopy around. I am turned down quite often, but it doesn’t ever hurt a crazy bastard such as me at all. You go with the punches, and don’t get hit down when they come, but dodge. Or fake dodge.

Plus you work with smoking burning itching sweltering hot women. They wear fine clothes too, and you just want to rope them all together in a herd and take turns at them day-by-day. On Monday, take her in the bathroom on break, get some action. Tuesday, her. Friday, her, Saturday her, any day of the week, her.

I’ve even snuck into the womens’ changing room a few times, and sneeked a peek at them stripping.

My job still sucks despite all the women. You just can’t be horny all the time, and you get ornery when people come up to you all the time asking you where you can find some pants, or a t-shirt, when it’s right in front of their faces. Or if they come up to you asking if “this looks good on me” and you have to supply some answer. It’s pitiful to answer such a question.

I’ll probably be at the godforsaken whore house of a place my entire life. I’ll probably not even pass college and just fade away into the back, a mist which people pass through. I’ll keep on being the crazy bastard, my Gatsby of myself, the person I really don’t care to be but am because I can’t be who I really am because I don’t know who that is. The truth is I really am nothing. I came from nothing, and I shall be expunged to nothing inevitably. Someone’s dying out there, maybe it will be me soon enough. Maybe I will be bartered over, away from this teeming place of pointlessness ticking and tocking its way around, careening about sinuously and mechanically.

Until then all you can do is keep on, and give other people strength, and use other peoples’ strength they give you. Keep spinning around with the world. Keep thinking about her and her crying that night and how I made her feel better, and how if I focus on her and making her happy I won’t have to worry about making myself happy, because I can never be happy. Keep giving the fake smile to the customers, dreaming off and coming to with them in front of you. Push aside your lust and give them their service, so they can have their fabric that they cover up their beautiful bodies with. Keep making the paper money, the fiat money – issued by government decree. Save it up, get enough to retire some day way off in hell. Die sometime and have everything pass away as a dream dreamt by some other dream within a dream within a dream all hazy and unobscure, lost within the lost.

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