by Eric Beetner
But at the next station a swarm of people entered the car. A man pushed between us like Plastic Girl didn’t exist. Rude behavior but he was taller and bigger than Plastic Girl and knew she would give him no trouble. Smiling sidelong at me like he knew me, or was pretending to know me, this was a game we’d played before, him and me. (Was it?) A woman seated close by decided to move to another seat, uncomfortable with Plastic Girl and now this new guy hanging above her, each of them drawn to me, as eyes were drawn to me generally, and right away the guy took her place before Plastic Girl could sit down. You could see that Plastic Girl was angry. Baring her teeth like she’d have liked to tear at someone with those teeth. I looked up at her appealing with my eyes, sorry! I was sorry!—but Plastic Girl shrugged and moved off, took a seat farther down the car that had just opened up. As the train lurched I could see her shaved head glowing like a bulb and the platinum-blond quills quivering like antennae. I knew: Plastic Girl would keep her eyes on me, she would not let me go so easily.
The man beside me nudged me—it was the first actual touch of this night, I reacted with a start—asking did I remember him? Huhhh?
Did I remember him? Dunk’s the name.
Dunk! I did not remember any Dunk.
Laughed to hear such a silly name—Dunk.
Sure you do, sweetheart. You remember Dunk.
Then realizing yes I’d met Dunk before. More than once before. Why I’d felt sort of strange seeing him, sort of protected-by-him, the way you do with some individuals, though not with most men, not ever. A few weeks ago we’d got to talking in the subway and he’d taken me for coffee (at Union Square). Possibly I’d been dressed then as I was dressed now. And Dunk in the fake-buckskin jacket he was wearing now, and his steel-gray hair pulled back in a little pigtail at the nape of his neck as it was now. (Had to smile at this little pigtail since Dunk was near-bald except for a band of hair around his bumpy-looking head he’d let grow to pull into a pigtail.) There was something old and comfortable about Dunk, pothead hippie from long ago. Dunk said he remembered me, yes he remembered Lorelei, hey, did I know I’d broken his heart? Dunk made a weepy jocular sound like a wheezing heart might make but mostly he was needing to blow his nose which he did in a dirty tissue, making a honking noise so I laughed. That was Dunk’s power: to make you laugh. The dirty wadded tissue in his hand was the sign for in my pocket was a dirty tissue stained with blood.
Dunk had been a psychiatric social worker for the city. Had to quit after twenty-three years and take disability pay to save his soul, he said. In the coffee shop at Penn Station he told me of his life lapsing into a singsong voice like a lullaby. You could see that Dunk had told his story many times before but Dunk had no other story to tell. He was very lonely, he would confide. His skin exuded heat like a radiator. Made me laugh—almost—how his right eye drifted out of focus while his left eye had me pinned. In the coffee shop Dunk paid for my coffee and for something to eat, Dunk believed that I was too skinny. He said that I would never mature if I was malnourished. He said that my organs would age prematurely and that I would die prematurely. He told me of his patient who’d threatened to kill him and he’d said what difference did it make, we’re all going to die anyway aren’t we. He’d been so depressed. And something terrible had happened to his patient, and Dunk was to blame though no one knew. Though Dunk would not confide in anyone except me.
Then, Dunk said, he got bored with being depressed. I was listening with just half my mind. The other half yearning for you. By this time I’d realized that Dunk was not my destiny.
This night, Dunk is asking would I come with him, we could have a meal together. Politely I said thank you, but I have an appointment with someone else.
Who is my destiny? You?
Whoever it was, I didn’t see. Never saw his face. Never saw but a shadow in the corner of my eye. Great bird spreading its wings. (I believe it was a man. I am sure it was a man. But even that fact, I can’t be one hundred percent certain of.) At the 14th Street station. My plan was to take the uptown to 57th Street. Past Times Square. I’d been disappointed in Times Square lately. The area around Carnegie Hall is very different. Lorelei would be more visible there. Now standing at the edge of the platform a little apart from a small crowd gathered for the next train. A few yards maybe. I didn’t believe that I was standing dangerously close to the edge. Something on the sole of my high-heeled sandal, something sticky and disgusting like a large wad of gum. And this gum was like a tongue. Ugh! Trying to scrap it off my shoe when I saw, or half-saw, your shadow in the corner of my eye, advancing upon me from the left. The thought came to me swift and yearning Please touch me because it was such a familiar thought, I did not believe that I was in danger. Touch me even if you hurt me. Oh please.
Then I was falling. I was screaming, and I was falling. It happened so fast! Faster than I can recount. Though even then thinking You touched me at last. It was a human touch. You chose me because I am beautiful and desirable and young. You chose me over all the others.
But already my happiness has ended. I have fallen onto the track. I have fallen helpless, on my back. A smell of oil in my widened nostrils, something musty and cold. Out of nowhere the train is speeding. Oncoming headlights. My body is a boneless rag doll flopping and being crushed by the train. The emergency brakes are thrown but it’s too late, it was too late as soon as you moved up stealthily behind me smiling whispering Lorelei! Lorelei! in your way of cruel teasing. You pushed me from behind, hard. Swift and hard the palms of your hands flat against my back between my shoulder blades. As if you’ve planned the act, you’ve rehearsed the act numerous times to perfection, and in the very act of pushing you are turning aside, to the left, taking care that the momentum of your act doesn’t carry you over the edge of the platform and onto the track below with your screaming victim. And you are running, you are pushing past bystanders running and gone with your mysterious cruel smile as below the platform on the tracks inside the terrible grinding wheels my body is caught up, my legs severed at the knees, a wrenching of bone, my left arm is torn off at the shoulder, my skull crushed as you’d crush a bird’s egg beneath your careless feet, scarcely knowing you’d crushed it. The silly high-heeled sandals have been tossed from my feet and will be found a dozen yards away. My blood is rushing from my body to congeal with the cold oil and filth of the tracks. My body is crushed, disfigured. You would no longer stare at my beauty. You would no longer recognize Lorelei. On the platform above, strangers are screaming. I want to cry, these strangers care for me. In that instant, they care for me. Fellow passengers who’d disapproved of me in the trains have now forgiven me and are crying Help! Get help! Oh God get help! A tall husky girl who might be Plastic Girl runs to the edge of the platform, can’t see me because my body is hidden by the train skidding to a stop.
And Dunk, slack-mouthed in horror. Dunk with his bald-hippie pigtail gone gray. Dunk stunned and sick with grief he has lost me for the final time.
And you others who never knew me except to glimpse a girl pushed in front of a speeding train to her death, these others grieving for me, too. Never knew me in life but will never never forget me as I am in death.
Please love me? My eyes beg. Glancing at the window beside your seat, uptown train flying through the tunnel, lights in the car flickering off, back on, off again and back on like the sensation before sleep. Lights in the car so bright you can’t see outside, only your reflection in the grimy window, my own face, and sometimes you don’t recognize that face.
Please love me? I love you.
Back to TOC
SEESAW SALLY
Alec Cizak
She sat outside his house in her driver’s Town Car. Duran Duran or some other pop shit crackled on the radio. Holmes, the driver, shut it off. “Rock and roll took a dive the day Bonzo choked on his fucking vomit,” he said.
“Yeah, sure,” she said. She worked on a Carlton 120. Mr. Lime said the client sounded old, said he claimed
he had never called a service before. Either way, the job would suck. Were the client being honest, he would be coy and act ashamed, or something dumber. And, more than likely, had he lied, he’d be some geezer expecting her to roll over like a dog every time he peeled more cash off his dirty palm. She took one last puff and tossed her cigarette onto the street.
“Need some weed?” said the driver. He opened his chubby hand, showed her a joint that had been soaked in his sweat.
“I burned one down at home,” she said. Getting stoned helped her leave her body while a client made use of it. She’d close her eyes and see stars and planets and comets.
“Cool.” He opened his door. “Let’s make some money.”
She got out on her side. In her head, she repeated, over and over, They’re all chumps. The clients, the driver. Her father, of course. Only thing better than flying through space would be going back in time and throttling the bastard before he got his hands on me.
“You okay?” said the driver.
“Give me a break,” she said. After checking her small, kidney-shaped purse for mace, she tugged on the bottom of her skirt. Made sure no one could see her panties without permission. Client might get a glimpse, think that’s enough to spark his imagination, and slam the door on her. Holmes would pound the windows, promise to break the guy’s legs. If the client threatened to call the police, she and Holmes would have to book. And she’d be out of an hour’s pay and possibly subject to a slap in the mouth from Mr. Lime.
Just looking at the client’s house revealed he had no wife. No girlfriend to tell him to fix the chain link fence out front, bag the dog shit on the lawn, and for Christ’s sake, wash down the white, aluminum siding covering what she suspected were rotted, wooden walls. Hounds barked inside the client’s garage. At least he had been kind enough to put them away. On her third or fourth job—she couldn’t remember—her driver had to tear off a Doberman’s jawbone.
The gate leading to a walkway of cracked cement blocks hung crooked, one of its rusty hinges missing a bolt. She waited for Holmes to open it so that she wouldn’t get her hands dirty or break a nail, or worse, cut herself on some vagrant sliver of metal. As she stepped through, Holmes said, “I’ll hang back.”
“Cool,” she said. The straps on her high heels dug into her ankles as she hobbled up the front walk. She pulled a screen door back and knocked. The client fumbled with a chain on the other side. She assumed he had taken it off, but then the door opened a smidge and a man well over forty poked his snout through the crack.
“Mercedes?” he said.
He looked familiar. She couldn’t place him, though. “The one and only,” she said.
The man swept the chain aside and opened the door to a living room cluttered with magazines and newspapers stacked like buildings on a hardwood floor. Against one wall was a ripped, mustard colored couch, against the opposite, a slim piano with no bench. The man stepped away, allowing her to enter. She looked him up and down, still wondering where she had seen him in either of her previous lives. “You got to pay Holmes,” she said.
He didn’t move.
She nodded over her shoulder. “Holmes,” she said. “My driver. He collects the fee.”
“Oh.” The man produced a thin, faded wallet. “Um,” he said, “Hundred-fifty?”
“That’s right.”
“That covers everything?” He counted the bills twice.
“Excuse me?” she said.
“One-fifty, that’s for everything?”
“That’s the fee, honey,” she said. “What we do now depends on how much you want to tip.”
“Really?”
She motioned with her fingers, hurrying him to fork over the dough. Best to get it to the driver. If the client chickened out or squawked about the tip schedule, she and Holmes and Mr. Lime would at least get something for the trip. And the risk.
The man gave her the once-over. As all men did, he stopped for a moment too long at her breasts. “Okay,” he said.
This fat ass hasn’t been laid in a century. She marched down the walkway to give the money to Holmes.
He told her he’d be in the car. “Shout if things turn to shit,” he said.
“No sweat,” she said. “He’s a chump.”
The man did what all rookie johns did—he offered her a drink and a seat on his grungy couch. “Thanks,” she said. She sat so that she wouldn’t wrinkle her skirt.
He called from the kitchen, “Wine okay?”
“Sure.” She had no desire to see what kind of pigsty the man cooked and ate in. She hoped he wouldn’t want full service. At least, not in his bedroom. Not on his bed. He probably hadn’t washed his sheets since the 1970s. She scanned the magazines and newspapers. Stacks of browning, folded copies of The Indianapolis Star and The Indianapolis News and education magazines.
A fucking teacher.
Of course.
The man returned. “Carlo Rossi,” he said as he handed her a plastic wine glass.
“Perfect,” she said. A little alcohol on top of the weed would give her a nice spin. When she closed her eyes, she would see roiling star clusters and supernovas. Before she got it to her lips, however, he stopped her.
“A toast?” he said.
“What for?” she said.
“Who knows?” he said. “Momentary romance?”
“This isn’t romance, ah,” she paused, “what’s your name, by the way?”
“You can call me Sam.”
Mr. Duncan.
Her sophomore lit teacher. Benjamin Harrison High.
Fuck.
Please don’t recognize me.
“Well, Sam,” she said, “this is business. It has nothing to do with romance.”
He smirked. “Sure.”
Mr. Duncan had been one of the saints, one of the sorry sons of bitches who tried to save her when it had already been too late. He had told her that he knew what the students called her in the hallways and bathrooms and locker room—Seesaw Sally. She couldn’t help it. Spreading for any boy who asked seemed an appropriate revenge after what her father had done to her. Mr. Duncan told her the best medicine was success and the stones in that path were set by education. The real American Dream, he said, required physical and mental labor. Once upon a time, maybe. Against Mr. Duncan’s pleas, she dropped out in the middle of the semester and started dancing at Sugar Cookie’s, a strip club on Madison Avenue. Didn’t take long to get to the next, obvious step, mostly thanks to Mr. Lime.
“So,” said Mr. Duncan, “how does this work?”
Why doesn’t this bastard recognize me? When she was in his class, he sure put on a good show, pretending he cared. That was only four years ago. Whatever. She went into her sales routine—“Your entertainment depends on your investment, Mr.,” she stopped herself. “Sam.”
“Okay.”
“So, for instance, if you want me roll the top of my dress down so you can look at my tits and get yourself off, well, that’s going to run you a hundred dollars.”
“Really?” He looked offended.
She continued. “I’ll lose my dress and panties for two.”
“And I’m supposed to take care of myself?”
She nodded toward a box of tissues on a stack of Life magazines. “Yes, sir,” she said.
“I don’t mean to be rude,” he said. “You see, I haven’t actually, you know, done it, since my fiancée left me.”
“Jerked off?”
“No,” he said. “It.”
As much as she hated chumps, she knew they couldn’t be happy if they didn’t plow a woman at least once or twice a year. Even the ugly ones, the fat ones, and the old ones. “When did your fiancée leave you?”
“Nineteen-sixty-eight. November. Seventh. Thursday. Somewhere between eight in the morning and four-thirty.”
“Wow,” she said. “You haven’t gotten laid in fifteen years?”
“Right,” he said.
Crap. The chump wanted full service. Hell, he needed it. Who knew where he worked these days. She’d heard that Harrison High closed a year ago. Wherever he taught, his students might benefit if he got some trim, shed some stress. She imagined what he looked like naked. Glanced at his paunch. Most of these middle-aged guys had loose skin in bad places. Some of them could barely get it up. And then they complained if they didn’t get off. Refused to pay. She didn’t want Holmes breaking Mr. Duncan’s arm.
“Well,” she said, “we’re really not supposed to do that. This is an entertainment service.” Standard bullshit designed to protect Mr. Lime.
Mr. Duncan’s shoulders slumped.
“However,” she said, “if we agree that the arranged date is over, then we can make a deal on the side.” Mr. Lime claimed this piece of dialogue would fend off any charges an undercover pig might stick her with.
“Okay, good,” he said. “Good, good.”
Putting her hand on his knee, she said, “It’s quite a bit more expensive.”
A puppy couldn’t have nodded faster. “That’s fine, really.”
“One time on the Love Boat,” she said, her hands hovering over her breasts and her thighs, “will run you six hundred. Twice, well, that’s a thousand.”
He sat back. Grimaced.
“And I’ll spend the night,” she said, “with unlimited access, for two g’s.” She tapped her thigh, made little white circles that disappeared right away.
Mr. Duncan sighed. He put his forehead in his palm. He opened his wallet and counted the remaining bills. “Could we do one time for four hundred?”
“I don’t haggle, Mr.,” she stopped herself again. “Sam.”
“Well,” he said, “if I’m going to spend a fortune, might as well be worthwhile.” He stood and started for the hallway. “I’ve got some money stashed away.”
“Shall we do it here?” She patted the couch. Please?
“The bedroom’s the appropriate place for that.” Then he disappeared down the corridor.
