As we backed out of the driveway, the girls bit down on their burgers as Rosie came running out of the house, begging them to spit the animal remains out of their mouths. Neither girl did. Instead, they ran from their mom, shoving the burger into their mouths and squealing with delight.
“Here,” Christine said, tossing me a burger and unwrapping her own.
“We’re actually eating fast food burgers?” I asked, relishing the feel of the soft, warm bun in my hand.
“I don’t know about you Ang, but I think we can each have a burger without falling completely off the wagon now and eating a whole 10-pack of burgers,” she explained. “I want to keep losing weight, but Sergeant Sexy was right. It’s not about the image I see in the mirror. It’s about the one I see in my head. And lately, I like that image. I’m not going to destroy it.”
“Damn straight,” I said, tapping my burger with hers, like clinking wine glasses. “Let’s still lose more weight and keep getting healthier… but let’s stop killing ourselves to do it.”
The following morning, the constant ringing of my phone woke me from a great night’s sleep. Seeing that it was Matt, I took the phone into the bathroom and called him back immediately.
“Angelisa,” he answered after one ring. “I just got off the phone with Jerry.”
“Jerry who?” I yawned.
“Jerry Wilkes, you know the guy who comes and does work around our house,” Matt explained. “I wanted to get an estimate on putting a bathroom in the basement—ya know, for the boys when they get older.”
“Okaaayy,” I said, trying to flush the toilet without him hearing.
The fact that I was trying to be so discreet was odd, considering this was the same man who shaved in the morning before work while I went to the bathroom. Now, I was on the phone trying to hide the fact that I had to pee first thing in the morning.
“Ang, the boys left the utility sink on in the basement when they left—almost three months ago,” he yelled.
“Oh shit,” I said, sighing. “Our water bill is going to be astronomical.”
“Our water bill is the least of our worries. Evan’s hat was in the sink, caught in the drain—making it a stopper for the water to go down. Our whole basement is flooded—and has been flooding for almost three months.”
“No, no, no, no,” I cried, sitting in the bathtub. “Are you kidding? We just paid off that basement. No!”
“I know. Twenty grand down the drain,” he said, “and for what? So you can go gallivanting around the country like some college girl.”
“What? What did you just say?” I asked; the frustration quickly replaced by rage.
“I mean; if this is anyone’s fault, it’s yours. You’re the one who had to go play teenager for the summer,” Matt yelled, his voice screeching like I’d never heard it before.
“Playing teenager? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Come on Ang, you don’t think I follow you on Twitter and Facebook?” he said, accusingly. “Hell, even Kevin saw the antics at that frat party. How do you think that makes him feel, knowing his mother, his married mother is playing has-been sorority girl? Those kids are closer to his age than they are yours. Did you ever think about that?”
“I’m not playing sorority—”
“Then what are you doing? Other than making a total ass of yourself—and all of us?” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “What kind of self-respecting wife and mother takes pictures of herself wrapped around a pole and posts it to her author page? It’s bad enough you write that shit, now I gotta look at it on social media sites too?”
“Really? You want to go there? You want to have this battle? What about you? What about you Matthew?” I snarl, angrily. “You’re never home—even when you’re home, you’re not home. It’s no wonder I write about it—I sure as Hell don’t get romance in my everyday life.”
“Are you kidding me, Ang? I’m the most romantic and present husband you know,” he argued.
“Oh really? Every damn weekend in the summer you find some golf tournament or some event that you just have to go to. Then, you add the boys into the mix, and we spend every damn minute of our lives at someone’s sporting event. I went from being a wife to being a mother—and only a mother!”
“Oh, and that’s just so bad, right? It’s so bad being a mom that you have to go screwing around the country with some keg-standing woman I don’t even know,” he yelled. “Meanwhile, I’m taking care of your sons while you’re out doing God knows what—with God knows who?”
“Matthew Stone, don’t you fucking talk to me like that. I don’t want to hear what you have to do. You don’t do shit. You just sit back, and let me take care of the house, the kids, fucking everything,” I roared, standing up in the tub. “Well guess what? Fuck you. So our basement flooded. Big Goddamn deal. I don’t care. I could not care less. How about this? For once in your life, you figure it out. You fix it. You handle it.”
“Jesus Ang, what the Hell?” Matt questioned.
“What do you mean ‘what the Hell’? This is the kind of crap I’m sick of. I’m sick of being your sounding board, your scapegoat,” I screamed, the sounds echoing off the tile. “Ya know what? Our basement wouldn’t be flooded and ruined if you hadn’t walked out—if you hadn’t left. What kind of man leaves his wife and kids to go work out of state? Before you start blaming me for shit that has nothing to do with me, why don’t you take a long hard look in the mirror first? It takes two people to destroy a marriage, Matt.”
“Ang, I’m sorry,” he said quietly. I heard him sigh. I knew he was rubbing his forehead as it pulled tight. I knew his every move, his every gesture. “I never should’ve said—”
“Ya know what? No! Don’t even. We haven’t been together—in the same place for almost five months. And look at us—we’re still fighting and screaming. I’m not going to do this anymore. I can’t. I won’t,” I said, tears falling down my face. I took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “I’m done, Matt. Done.”
“Ang, no! Wait! I’m sorry. I love—”
I pressed “End.”
It was the end.
Twitter: Xanax, Ambien, and a red room of what? What happens in New Mexico, stays in New Mexico. #LetMeSeeYourStrapOn #FightClub #WrongTurn
“A Xanax and an Ambien!” I announced into the cell phone. “And she’s been out cold for the last seven hours.”
“Is she still breathing?” Jake asked in a worried tone.
“Yes! Listen!” I pulled the phone away from my face and jammed it in front of Angelisa’s. A loud explosive snore ripped up through her airways and filled the small interior of the car. After a few more rounds of the high decibel nasal repetition, I placed the phone back against my ear. “Do you hear that racket? Seven hours. Seven,” I whined into the phone. “Plus… she keeps creepily mumbling about toilet plungers.”
“What? Toilet… plungers?”
“Don’t even ask. You don’t want to know,” I sighed.
“But why did she take a Xanax and Ambien so early in the morning? Doesn’t that make you sleep?” he asked.
“Ya think? I don’t even know the whole story. Only that she and Matt got into a fight and she keeps mumbling about being done,” I explained.
“So where are you?” The GPS was taking me through a small dusty town that held a landscape of cracked dry dirt and crumbling rock. A few lone tumbleweeds rolled and danced in slow spiraling loops. I pressed the window open and breathed in the dry hot air. It smelled of baked earth, worn leather, and sage.
“I have no clue, somewhere in Utah. We found out about this open mic lounge that’s on the way to Vegas, and we wanted to try it out and stay there for a few nights.”
“Open mic? Like singing?”
“Ah. No. I can’t sing at all. No, this place is called Tantalizing Tongues Lounge and you get to present erotic poetry. Our next thing to conquer. Just putting our words out there in front of an audience and improvising. Can you imagine? This is going to be so
much—”
“Eight-hundred feet ahead, you have reached your destination,” the sexy voice of Jake’s GPS cut in.
Huh?
There was no way. It was impossible. We weren’t supposed to get there for another few hours. I couldn’t have driven that fast. “Hey, Jake? I gotta go, your electronic skank is telling me we’re here.”
“Call me later.”
“You’re not the boss of me,” I laughed, while straining my neck to look out the window. Where the Hell were we? It looked like a ghost town.
“Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Don’t get into too much trouble,” he said.
“Trouble? Me? Ha!” I teased, pulling the Jag over into a spot in front of a row of stores.
We said our goodbyes as I sat and gawked out the window at the storefronts: three pawn shops, a few thrift shops, a second-hand bookstore, a handful of bars and a rundown motel nestled on the corner. The entire town was colored some sort of brown hue. Mud and dirt baked everything into a colorless beige, beaten down and muted by the dry air and heat.
I pushed open the door of the Jag and stood on numbed tingling feet. Squinting my eyes, I gazed up at a weathered sign that creaked and squealed as it swayed with the wind. The faded gold letters read: “Tantalizing Tongues Lounge.”
Well, that was the place I typed into Jake’s Super Sonic Global Position System. I shrugged my shoulders and did my best to wake Ang up. My best seemed to be pouring a bottle of water over her head, so that was the highlight of my day so far.
It took her ten minutes to come to full awareness.
A dry lifeless wind seeped through my clothes making me feel tired and heavy. It felt as if I stepped into a vat of thick dense soup. And everything was tainted with the scent of beef jerky.
Ang and I dragged our feet to the small motel on the corner and dropped our bags in the lobby as soon as the icy air-conditioned interior hit us. After a few minutes of moaning our appreciation for all things air-conditioned, we lugged ourselves to the desk and asked for their cleanest room. That request was met with a smirk.
I slid my ID and Scott’s credit card across the countertop while Angelisa threw herself heavily onto a chair in the waiting area. “Si, Mamas. You from far a… way. You drive all the way here?”
“Yep,” I said narrowing my eyes at the clerk. “You sure these rooms are clean?”
“Eeee, yeah.” He slid Scott’s card through the register and had me sign. “Well, welcome to New Mexico, then.”
“New fucking Mexico?” Angelisa shrieked from behind me.
“I am getting so wasted tonight. So wasted!” Ang was still yelling at me three hours later. “New Mexico. New Mexico. You drove four hundred miles out of the way. Who does that?”
“It’s not out of the way. It’s just still very east of where we’re supposed to be,” I laughed. I leaned into the mirror (a clean one) and dabbed on some lip-gloss. “You helped me plug in the name and address into the GPS, so this is just as much my fault as it is yours,” I stated.
“No chance!” she screamed. “Did you not notice signs on the drive that said, ‘such-and-such miles to New fucking Mexico?’ And you say I’m a bad driver!”
“First of all, you are a terrible driver. The worst in history maybe,” I clarified. “And who cares? Neither of us has ever been here anyway—wrong turns are what adventures are made of. Who knows? Maybe the address on the flyer we got for Tantalizing Tongues Lounge had a typo on it—so sue me.”
“New fucking Mexico,” she grumbled as she jammed her makeup supplies into her little carry case and yanked out a brush.
“And, you always say you’re going to get wasted, and then you sip at your drink all damn night. Let’s just go and have fun and perform some wordy erotic stories.”
“Oh, I’m getting drunker than a house full of frat boys. Anesthetized. Assed up. Bazookaed out of my damn mind. Bent. Fubar’d. Glazed over like a three-dollar whore. Liquor lubed. What the fucked up. I’m talking totally tanked—turnt even,” she snapped, raking the brush violently through her already brushed hair.
“Well aren’t you the Synonym Skank? Is there an award for that somewhere in the Indie world?” I joked, trying to make her life.
“Screw you!”
Okay.
“Are you going to tell me what happened? Or are you just going to be bitchy and make yourself go bald by brushing your hair five hundred times with a force nobody should ever use on her hair?” I asked picking up my clutch and giving myself a quick once over in the mirror.
“Nothing happened. Nothing. I’m done—just done,” she sputtered, slamming down her brush. “Let’s go and tell erotic stories. Ones that will make a husband ashamed to have you as a wife.”
“Wait… what?” I asked, following her out of our small motel room.
“Nothing,” she huffed walking down the hallway. “Ironically, the Xanax just put me in a bad mood. Ignore me.”
She stormed out of the building and down the scorching sidewalk on a mission. Holy hell, how in the world was I going to get her to talk to me about what was going on? I wasn’t an idiot. Obviously, she and Matt had some sort of a fight. I jogged to keep up with her.
Tantalizing Tongues Lounge wasn’t a large place, yet it was very crowded, packed full of people sitting around, drinking and talking in quiet whispers. Ang and I sat beside the deep cherry wood bar that ran along the entire room in one loop of a circle. Stationed in the middle of the room was a wide stage that held a long wooden bench covered in a silky, plush cloth.
Wow.
Ang ordered us two drinks while I tilted my head behind the strangely dressed bartender to a sign that hung directly over the lights that gleamed down on the various bottles of liquids.
House Rules:
1. Personal hygiene is of the utmost importance.
2. No always means no.
3. Leave your inhibitions at the door.
4. No cameras or camera phones.
5. What happens in the lounge stays in the lounge.
Ummm. What the… what?
I smacked at Ang with the back of my hand, but she was already asking the bartender, who was dressed from head to toe in leather and chains, when the fun began. The man bowed his head bashfully at us and remained silent as he made our drinks.
Holy submissive crap.
“Ang!” I hissed, pinching her outer thigh.
“OUCH! What the Hell?” she screamed.
“This isn’t an open mic club. Look around. Look up at the house rules,” I said pointing and giggling.
Her eyes widened, and her jaw dropped.
The bartender/slave slid two enormous neon colored drinks across the bar toward us. I instantly sipped at the crazy straw that jutted out of the top of the fruity, icy concoction. My throat was parched, and the sweetness ached at the back of my teeth.
“What should we do?” she asked me, sipping at her own crazy straw.
“We should stay,” I said, wincing at the head-splitting brain freeze I was suddenly enduring. She nodded her head and blankly stared at the guy who sidled up to the bar, dressed strangely like Thor. I kid you not; he was even holding the hammer.
“We should,” she said, gawking at the man’s muscles.
“Yes. For, you know, research purposes,” I said.
“Yes. Let’s do some… research,” she said, poking her index finger into the man’s bicep.
“You know,” Thor said, bending down. “When it’s my turn to poke, it won’t be so soft.”
“Holy fuck,” I breathed.
Thor looked up from staring down into Angelisa’s cleavage, “I prefer Master. But Holy Fuck has a nice ring to it.”
I’ll just keep my mouth shut now.
Angelisa giggled nervously and wiggled around on her seat. Without words, Thor (like Hell I’d call somebody Master) grabbed onto Ang’s hand and walked her to a dark corner of the bar, sat her down, and hovered over her like some predatory beast.
Well then.
Above the cro
wd, the lights flickered and dimmed. The whispered voices grew silent, and a strange hum of electricity seemed to float through the room. From behind the bar, a man and woman entered the stage area and positioned themselves on the sleek material that covered the low piece of furniture in the middle of the room.
Please let them start reciting poetry.
Please let them start reciting poetry.
Nope. Not even close.
They kissed hungrily for a bit, and the dude yanked the woman by the red collar she wore and pushed her down to her knees.
There was a sucking of the penis then.
I continued to sip at my drink.
The Master receiving the blowjob closed his eyes and leaned back onto his elbows and smiled. People stepped toward them, holding their drinks, forming a circle around the performers. Glassy-eyed middle-aged men were gawking. I had to be honest; it wasn’t very sexy—at all. It felt staged. Perfunctory. The Master wasn’t even fully aroused, and the woman was just so indifferent toward his little flaccid friend. I kind of felt bad for it.
“Do you like what you see?” a deep voice asked next to me. I glanced at Ang to see if she was still safe; then shifted my gaze to the new voice.
Oh my God.
The man needed to be photographed and smacked on the cover of a book. He was gorgeous. Dressed from head to steel-toe in a soft worn leather and some sort of hard plastic armor, his face a field of angles and shadows with honey-colored eyes, he looked like… holy crap… he was dressed like Batman.
He even wore the cape and utility belt.
I couldn’t help myself and ended up laughing at him, committing social suicide for the night.
The man smiled a brilliant white-tooth smile that lit up his entire face. “That’s not the answer I was looking for,” he smirked.
“Sorry. I’m just…”
“Overwhelmed?” he interrupted. “Excited?” he said tilting his head closer.
“More like let down,” I explained, peeking a quick look at Ang, who was still safely talking to Thor.
#TripleX Page 19
