by OVAL
"I'm just keeping her company."
I was sure that if I could just ask the right questions and say the right things, I could get the gates to the fortified compound where Alice was held, opened. "So who you guys are waiting for?"
"No, go ahead." She tossed the quip at me with her chin. Cute.
"Hah,” a feeble, polite chuckle, “‘Who are you guys waiting for?'"
"We're just waiting for another girl who has the room right now."
"You guys share a room? Why?"
"It's cheaper that way. We all pitch in for a night and just take turns."
"Does the hotel guy give you any trouble?"
"No, he's cool. There are a lot of girls here that do the same thing. He doesn't give a shit." Jessica pulled out a cigarette hidden behind her left ear and placed it in the corner of her mouth. She turned her body away from me in a gesture of faux-modesty and fished a lighter from her bra. It was flicked on skillfully and brought up to her face, the sickly yellow glow of the flame revealed a thick layer of caked-on makeup, and her attractiveness dropped another notch. She took a long drag from the cigarette and exhaled deeply as plumes of blue-tinged smoke shot from her nostrils.
"Wait so if you- if Alice just hangs with you, what does she do when you're working? She must do something to pass the time, right?" Slowly, I felt like I was inching closer to my goal. The gates of heaven were bound to part, revealing the mythic boudoir of the splendorous, angelic Alice.
"Um... she just stays in the living room."
"Wouldn't that be awkward?” I said, turning to Alice (I caught myself forgetting to look back at her chubby companion, Alice’s beauty was a bear trap for the senses, you couldn’t get away once caught).
"No, not really." They said, looking at each other.
As the conversation progressed, the two girls became more open and communicative. They seemed to have taken a liking to me. I figured it was because I was a kinder, less aggressive type than they were probably used to. The few areas I had seen of the town were populated mostly by thugs, dopes, and dope dealers.
Since hearing about Alice's age, I had forgotten about Candy and her maddening absence. The object of my desires had shifted shape, taking the form of an ostensibly unsoiled maiden. The question that was lurking in the back of my mind came forward. We had gotten close enough with each other for me to feel comfortable asking it, or at least in an oblique way.
"So Alice, what do you do for a living? Do you work with your friend?" She seemed unfazed by the question; as if it were something she was routinely asked.
Turning to look to her mentor for guidance, she responded, “No, I’m not. I ran away from home, and Jessica took me in. I live with her.” She looked down and fiddled with her fingernails.
In that moment, the illusion disappeared. She wasn’t at the center of the crosshairs of my swollen, turgid passion, but a girl, caught between the gears of the clockwork of a callous universe. It is a testament to the bewildering nature of the male libido that I felt for her, in equal parts, compassion and lust -manifesting as a lachrymose stiffy. And although half of me wanted nothing more than to petition her for a quick lay in the hay, the other half wanted to pull a Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver and save her from this wretched scene... (then petition her for a quick lay in the hay).
Before I could supplement that question with another, as if knowingly diverting my line of thought which had become apparent to her, Alice looked up at me and asked, "So who are you waiting for, anyway?"
"Oh, I was just going to meet this girl here. I drove from a town like two hours away, and I've been waiting here for almost as long. I've tried calling her, but she doesn't answer."
"Wow. She made you come all the way for nothing?"
"That's what it's starting to look like." The statement was colored with a disappointment I could not hide.
Jessica seemed to deliberate something and after a moment said, "You know, if you want, I'm available if she doesn't show up."
She seemed nice, but she wasn't exactly who I was looking for. I didn't want to have to do the same thing when on my own and dream of women, while with a woman. Before having to gratefully and apologetically decline her offer, I felt something stirring in my pants. I groped into my pocket to reach it, my cell phone. I had received a new text message. Finally I had gotten a response to my countless calls and texts.
"Oops. I must have fallen asleep," quo The Cunt. "Just give me fifteen minutes to get ready."
It was 1:30 am.
After informing my two companions about the development, I bid them goodbye and went back to my comparatively warm car. Not long after, a pair of greasy, hooded thugs emerged from the hidden darkness on the second floor. They sleazed their way towards the girls -waddling as thugs with thug pants often do- shadows obscuring everything but their leering villainous grins. The scum-hounds wrapped the girls under their arms and towed them towards an unknown place up the stairwell. Unaware of what their situation was or what had actually transpired, I was left with the vague impression that I had just witnessed something terrible. The girls, lost and damned, vanished back into the nocturnal ether along with the two hideous cackling goons.
Twenty minutes passed, and I was left sitting in my car half-drunkenly flipping through an old issue of Esquire, listening to the radio. As I sat, with my patience on trial, I looked up from my magazine at my surroundings. A moment of clarity, as those living in the nebulousness refer to it, I was able to take a step back and ask myself, what the hell am I doing? Why do I need to do this? Is this really how I want to do this? A voice from within, with an intonation of dejected renouncement, assured me that there was no other way. I had spent the past few years tracking the movements of Eros, in any form. All the roads I followed had led me either to dead ends or places where she had once been, but was long gone from.
I suppose that the drive to lose the unfortunate “Virgin” label came from a tacit social expectation. Sex was everywhere. I saw it on TV, in the news, on the street, written across the forehead of every blond bimbo with nothing more to offer; I saw it advertised on billboards and in conversations, in the voice of the automated fem-bot operator who tells me I got the wrong number. It was an inherent part of life everywhere, and I was missing out on it. This was something that needed to be done.
Even after waiting for another ten minutes, there was still no sign of The Cunt so I sent a text message asking what the deal was. That is when the real mindfuckery began. We began a virtual game of ping pong, with her sending me cryptic, enigmatic messages and me countering with confused and increasingly annoyed ones.
"Which car are you in?" she would go. "There are a few things I have to take care of first." “I’m at a different hotel, meet me there.”
It was becoming quickly evident that there was some serious chain-yanking going on (and not in a good way), presumably for little hooker giggles. I felt like I was fishing for diamonds in a sewer, and not unlike a sewer, the whole thing reeked of shit.
Before going ahead and blowing seventy bucks on single hour just for the fucking room, I wanted assurances that she would not leave me hanging with Smurf-like blue balls. Soon enough, assurances were made and I set off for the suggested hotel with my optimism renewed slightly.
Unlike Cheap Hotel, the name for the Luxury Inn, where The Cunt wanted to meet, was most definitely ironic. Right as I pulled into the parking lot, I realized that the last hotel seemed utterly steeped in decadent opulence when compared to this dump. One could feel the presence of the same aura of failure and desperation that permeated the last hotel but while that aura was faint and transparent, this one was opaque and tangible. After parking my car, I walked towards the registration office, secretly hoping that it was closed. Sure enough, it was open and I superstitiously (read, stupidly) wondered if it would have been closed had I wished for the opposite.
The door of the office (the term used in the loosest sense as the place was really more of a broom closet) was rigged with a
small whiny bell that got the attention of the man on the other side of inch-thick bulletproof glass. The man was a large, heavyset Arabic man with frizzled jet-black hair shooting out from his chin and head. He looked at me with tired, bloodshot eyes. The man seemed to personify the very essence of the place. I checked the time and was not surprised that it was past three A.M., It actually felt later.
"Good... morning sir... How may I help you today?" The man said in a low raspy timbre, an accent hiding in between the words.
“I’d like to rent a room please."
"You certainly could. And… for how long will we be pleased by your… presence, young sir?" Despite the weary, oddly-paced delivery, he spoke in a surprisingly grandiloquent manner ill-befitting his surroundings, and indeed, his appearance.
"I'd just like to stay for a night."
"Very good. May I have… seventy five dollars and an ID please?"
"Seventy five? The sign outside said it was seventy." I said, slightly impertinently.
"It is seventy, you will be returned the extra five dollars, if you bring back the… key before ten thirty tomorrow."
For a second, his facade of tired dignity cracked and revealed a glimmer of rage in his eye. This was clearly a man capable of great horrors; a man whose mask of gentility made his underlying monstrousness all the more frightening. Wanting to put as much time and distance between the man behind the bulletproof glass and myself, I quickly gave him what he requested and asked no more questions.
All rooms smoking rooms, claimed a worn plaque on the door of the hotel room, as if the owner knew precisely what its occupants would want to do after whatever illicit romantic trysts they engaged in. The thing that first struck me (and struck me hard) as I opened the door -the thing that lingers with me to this day- is the smell of the place. I can honestly still smell it. The pungent, musky stench of a thousand ghosts of cigarettes long forgotten clung to the cheap walls like a bad memory. The scent is forever etched into my mind and will always remind me that no matter how bad my surroundings are, there is always somewhere worse.
Apart from the overpowering miasma of gloom and despair that intermixed with the air -hell, that was the air- the room was a fairly straightforward one. It consisted of basically two rooms: a bathroom (which included a shower one could use to try to scrub off the sad) and a bedroom with a mattress that looked as if it had weathered its fair share of sexual deviancy. Old, time-beaten wooden things furnished the less-than-capacious pit. The room was made smaller by the wallpaper. The paper, a vile shade of yellow, spottily covered the wall and had a strangely dizzying effect. The pattern on it was an abomination of design; the asymmetrical loops, curls, and abrupt twists led the eye towards somewhere evil, a place of abject intensity. That room, and the hotel at large, was designed with one thing in mind: to provide limited refuge for troubled souls from a world that set out to crush them. Time and use had rendered it less of a refuge and more of a focal point, a nexus, for lingering remnants of sorrows past.
As I lay on a bed fit for a bum, I began to question the existence of the aforementioned Cunt. It was four o’ clock in the morning, a good five hours since arriving, and I had still not heard of or seen that stupid sexy slug. I turned on my phone to see if there were any missed messages and found that there was. A solitary message from said Cunt claimed that she was getting ready and was going to walk down the street to where I was. The message had been sent about twenty minutes before it had been read, so my deeply erroneous logic concluded that enough time had passed for her to be on her way towards where I was. In a fit of desperation/frustration, I myopically decided to drive back down the street to see if I could find her and maybe give her a ride. Since arriving at the hotel, I had been constantly sipping from my bottle of sweet, caustic nepenthe and was certainly beginning to feel it. I never once questioned my ability to drive though, and besides, it was just down the street, not even a block away (so my rationalization went).
I grabbed my keys from the dilapidated bedside table and headed outside. No sooner than I turn onto the road that, from my rearview mirror, a pair of wailing red and blue lights signaled the presence of a fucking shiteater (that's "cop" for those not up to date on modern thugspeak vernacular). Turns out that what I had previously assumed to be a slight ramp from a parking lot onto a road was nothing less than a slab of sidewalk jutting from the side of the road. Needless to say, I was promptly pulled over as feelings of fear and dread basted my brain like a viscous fluid (although those feelings were somewhat mitigated by the rising level of alcohol in my blood).
The cop exited his vehicle with a big swinging step, and approached my car with a punishing lack of haste. As he neared, I looked straight ahead onto the wide, empty road, conscious that this did not bode well but aware that if I kept my head about me there was a small chance of getting off scot-free.
I heard a sharp rapping on my window. The cop stood on my blind spot and was tapping the glass with his magnum flashlight. It produced a sharp popping noise which, like the cocking of an assailant's handgun, signaled the beginning of the end for me. The motor on the power window on my side was broken however, so I was forced to open the door of the car instead. Realizing how it would look, I held out the palms of my weapon-free hands and told him through the gap of the narrowly-opened door that my window did not work. This failed to reassure him though, as he took a step back and beamed his domineering flashlight in my face. A visually deafening beam of white light forced me to shut my eyes in recoil.
"License and registration!" the cop exclaimed. In a way designed to establish his authority at once.
Without uttering a word, I pulled out my wallet and squintingly dug through it for my license, handing it to him once I found it.
"Registration!"
The registration took a bit longer to find; it was hidden in a stack of various unimportant documents in the glove compartment. While I was searching for it, the cop's radio cackled and he muttered something unintelligible into it.
I gave him the registration and he studied it for a second before asking me, "Do you know why I pulled you over?"
"No, sir" I said, still trying to shield my eyes from the light particles brutalizing my corneas.
"Were you aware that you drove over a sidewalk?"
If I said no, I was fucked. If I said yes, I was doubly fucked.
Not having the wherewithal to find an alternative, I told him the truth, "No officer."
Then came the $1,740+ dollar question, "Have you been drinking tonight?"
"No" I lied, wondering if anyone but the drunkest of the drunk ever actually said yes.
"Sir, I can smell it."
Could he? I thought. I don't smell anything but maybe I'm just used to it... or maybe he's lying. Then I remembered about the open flask tucked away in between my seat and the middle divider which my previous, pseudo-alcoholic-self left hours prior. Godfuckingdamnit!
"Sir would you like to step out of the car for me." An order in the guise of a question.
Grudgingly, and with coldness in the pit of my stomach, I obliged. When I stepped out, I noticed a hitherto unseen officer standing on the other side of my car. With the flashlight finally out of my face, I finally got a good look at the two perpetrators. The one on my side of the car was a clean-cut Asian man a good three inches above my 5'9". His rigid posture and meticulously arranged accoutrements suggested he enjoyed using rods as suppositories. The other cop was a doughy middle-aged man with a receding hairline and an advancing waistline, the archetypical police officer.
"Okay, here's how this is going to work. I am going to give you instructions, and you are going to follow them, got it?"
I nodded impotently.
He made me walk up to the sidewalk and read me the instructions for the field sobriety test with the same enthusiasm one would read a grocery list consisting entirely of different types of cat food.
"Alright, so here's what's gonna happen, You are going to touch each of your fingers to your thu
mb and count to four. When you finish at your pinky, you will then do the same but in reverse." He mimed the test, like an impatient special-ed teacher. "One, two, three, four, four, three, two, one. You are going to do this three times, understood?"
Although a little cloudy, the surge of adrenaline produced from this ordeal ensured that my dexterity and enunciation had not been affected. The cop seemed displeased that I had passed with such ease.
"In this next test, you are going to put one foot directly in front of the other and walk in a straight line. You will take eight steps, turn around, and return with another eight steps. Understand?"
Again, I passed the test with relative ease. In all sixteen steps, I only flubbed one, because of nerves more than anything else. I was a poodle, jumping through hoops for its abusive master's entertainment.
The next test was also easily done, but apparently passing all three tests was not enough for the overzealous bastard to not want to give me the breathalayzer. Wanting to know why he was going to give me the test, I asked him how I failed and he was not able to give a satisfactory answer. He motioned the other cop, and like a well-trained dog, the cop fetched a small case from their car. As the police car flashed its red and blue lights bombastically, it drenched the sidewalk in strobing red and blue lights, like the worlds shittiest rave. The two police fiddled with the case and eventually produced a handheld device. They unwrapped a small envelope containing a fresh mouthpiece and attached it to the machine.
While the Asian cop was lecturing me on the use of the thing, my eyes tiptoed over to the gun in his holster. I imagined myself stepping behind him in a swift, decisive move, and snatching it from him deftly. I imagined taking off the safety and firing round after round into the two meddlesome pricks, each bullet hurdling through the air and wreaking all sorts of havoc upon impact. Then I would dash from the scene in their car and later, commandeer a small jet and fly it out of the country. Take that Uncle Sam.
