Dating sites failed him, hook ups by friends failed him, and chance encounters failed him. He just spun his wheels, mostly because at least once a week he had something like a relationship with any number of pretty girls. Usually for less than the price of dinner and a movie.
Then Dolly started working at the club.
Tomas was telling Lauren of a local guy who turned out Atari adaptations of all kinds of modern movies, when the frankly evil sounds of The Rolling Stones “Gimme Shelter” began playing. Girls danced to The Stones all the time, but usually the crowd pleasers. It was rare to hear something you immediately associated with murder, drug use and criminal empires, thanks to Martin Scorsese.
When Dolly stepped onto the catwalk there wasn’t a single person in the room that didn’t stop breathing. There had never been, and likely will never be, a more universally aesthetically gorgeous body than the one she slowly ground up against Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman’s rhythm section. Her skin was tan with a hint of gold that could have been any and all nationalities in the churning colorful lights.
Every muscle in her form was perfectly toned like a statue of Atalanta, the wild runner and huntress of Greek mythology. You could see the naked face of God in the lines of her arms as she peeled Audrey Hepburn-style gloves one by one.
She shed her top in layers, each climbing up her flat belly to reveal more and more of her perfection. Somewhere in the back of every man’s mind, he heard a relentless beat, as primal mating urges imagined the slapping of stomachs together in the rhythm of sex. Her breasts, when finally set free, were high and proud, with pink nipples hardened to bullets and shimmering from the body glitter.
Dolly moved far less than other girls on stage, preferring to make each motion as calculated as a cat. She showcased a few pole tricks, but was no acrobat. Just her leaning back against the cold metal, as she slid her panties down over her shaved and demure sex, was worth any Olympiad’s spinning.
It kind of made you forget that she had no head.
Just above her shapely shoulders a rudimentary neck ended in a strange, fleshy stump. There was just enough length to her throat to hold a black satin choker with a birdcage charm wrought in silver. Beyond that, there was simply empty space.
The headless condition is a rare, but not unknown birth defect. Most people die before the age of two, but the ones that live usually lead fairly normal lives. Tomas had seen something on the news about it, once. The story focused on a 16-year-old headless boy who had earned the rank of Eagle Scout. He understood that most of the headless people in the world usually lived on disability. Clearly, Dolly had other plans.
Tomas was in a daze after seeing her dance, and hoped she would come over to meet him. He was a little disappointed when she didn’t. She performed twice more that night, and always to “Gimme Shelter.” Each time, Tomas was lost in her performance. He had never been more turned on in his life.
That night, Tomas stayed till close, and knocked on Wade’s door. The manager had obviously just finished a line of cocaine, and was trying to play something on a guitar instead of counting the night’s earnings. It took Tomas several seconds to realize that, if the instrument had been in tune, the tune would have been “Gimme Shelter.”
“Give me that,” he said taking it out of Wade’s hands. “Fucking singers, never learn to tune.” With that he took out his smartphone and began turning knobs until his tuning app told him he had achieved the E God had intended.
“That new girl is something else, huh,” said Wade. “Man, I’ve got to tell you. I had some doubts about it, but I didn’t want to be, you know, racist or anything. I let her audition and I swear I almost poked myself in the eye with my own boner. Dolly… Dolly, Dolly, Dolly. That girl’s got a body you could peel potatoes with!”
“She’s… different,” said Tomas, finishing the tuning. He started to play “Gimme Shelter,” but decided instead that “Beast of Burden” might be safer. Wade started counting the money, his nerves soothed by the soft music.
“What did you think?” he asked. “The girls all like you. You’ve got a good eye. Do you think she’ll work?”
“She’s gorgeous, and the headless thing didn’t seem to bother anyone. Most of the guys that come in here don’t see the girls as anything but life-support for tits and ass anyway. I’m not sure if they even noticed she didn’t have a head, unless they were maybe using it to imagine a blow job. I think she’ll do just fine.”
“Yeah, 100, 200, 300, 400, I think she will, too, 700, 800, 900,” replied Wade, counting. “There’s one thing that bothers me, though.”
“Yeah?”
“That song,” said Wade.
“It’s the Stones. They play the Stones in every strip club in America. Hell, probably every strip club in the world.”
“Oh, sure, sure,” said Wade. “But they play ‘Brown Sugar’ and ‘Jumping Jack Flash’ and shit like that. You get a goth girl, every once in a while, who wants to try out ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, but ‘Shelter’ is just fucking eerie, Tom. It’s about an ever-present and skull-fucking death. You know the legend?”
“No,” smiled Tomas. Wade never made much of a musician, but he was a walking encyclopedia of bizarre pop rock knowledge. Just because he snorted cocaine through rolled up magazine pages didn’t mean that was all he got from them.
“Alright, let me lay it down for you,” he began. “It’s the late sixties, and all around you are war and death and protest, but mostly the first two; because it takes a whole fucking lot of evil to make self-righteous entitled college kids get the hell out of bed to march. There’s like, I don’t know, Shiva hanging overhead waiting to clear the path for Brahman to create anew. It was like Y2K, except theirs didn’t suck.
“I’m paraphrasing, but that’s how Keith said it in an interview. Just the violent state of the world coming through in an apocalypse soundtrack he and Mick were working on. Now, Jimmy Miller is producing Let it Bleed for the Stones, and he hears this track. Miller gets the idea that they need to get a girl to back up Jagger on the song, and you’ve got to admit it’s that fucking waiiiiiiiiiiiil of hers that makes it. It’s pretty much the definitive contribution by a female artist to the Stones catalog.
“That girl was Merry Clayton, just some singer you’ve heard in the backing tracks of a thousand songs that Miller liked. Well, she comes into the studio and her and Jagger just fucking dance, Tom. They skip to my lou all over that motherfucker.”
“That’s the legend?” asked Tom, smiling.
“No, that’s Wikipedia. This is the legend: listen to that song again, and pay very close attention around the three minute mark. You can hear Clayton’s voice break from the strain. It just shatters from the power of Sister Clayton’s notes, and Jagger makes a little, ‘Whoah’ sound because he’s obviously impressed. It’s number four of the top five incidental moments in classic rock history.
“But later… well, Clayton was pregnant at the time she was hitting those incredible notes. Right after this performance that has gone down as one of the greatest in recording history she suffered a miscarriage brought on by the singing. She lost her baby making that song, like some kind of evil omen. I don’t like it.”
Tomas was silent for a minute wondering if it was true. Wade was well-read, but his interpretation of things could be skewed.
“Know what the worst part of that story is?” asked Wade.
“You’ve got something to top ‘dead baby?’” said Tomas.
“Yep,” smirked his friend. “All that, and when Let it Bleed came out they misspelled her fucking name. She aborted human life for that record, and they couldn’t even get her name right. That’s why I don’t like that song, and don’t necessarily like the girl who insists on it to dancing to it to the exclusion of all else.”
Tomas couldn’t sleep that night. He continued drinking when he got home and watched increasingly more violent pornography until he finally achieved an exhausted release. When he fell asleep, he dreamed that ev
eryone was pointing and laughing at him but, whenever he tried to see what was so funny, the mirrors wouldn’t show his reflection.
He went back to the Gold Room the next night, the first time he had visited twice in a row since he started. Tomas tried for the same easy atmosphere he’d grown to enjoy at the strip club, but he was on edge and drinking faster than usual. Word of the new attraction had spread quickly, and the club was far more crowded than normally. The waitresses were irritable and busy; the dancers could sense the apathy of the crowd as they waited for the showcase. Wade sent Dolly on early and often, and always to “Gimme Shelter.”
Michelle brought Tomas his screwdriver, and he told her to get herself a martini while she was at it. Her dishwater hair was limp from hoofing it for so many riled up horny drunks, and, since the Gold Room’s policy was to always allow the girls their drink with the patrons, she was grateful for the rest.
“Big crowd tonight,” said Tomas. “The new girl is shaking it up. You think she’ll last?”
“I don’t know,” said Michelle with a little bit of exasperation. She’d clearly been having this conversation all night. “She just showed up out of nowhere like most of us do, dances, collects her check, and goes home in her little blue car. She’s polite, I don’t think she’s got a habit, but keeps to herself. Maybe she’ll stay, maybe not. The head thing is creepy. She’s like an anti-zombie.”
Dolly danced three more times before Tomas realized he should probably get home or he’d be broke and way too drunk to navigate the street. He settled up and headed for the bathroom. On the way the door to the backstage area was slightly ajar, and he had just enough time to see Dolly and Michelle pressed up against a wall. Michelle had one hand under Dolly’s shirt, while Dolly’s left hand was slid wrist deep into the band of Michelle’s mini skirt, rubbing slowly. They weren’t kissing, obviously, and the look in Michelle’s eyes as she stared intently at the black painted wall was pained and disturbing. It was mad.
When Tomas came out of the bathroom, Dolly was gone and Michelle was crying. He went home.
Over the next several months, Tomas degenerated. His trips to the Gold Room came no less than once a week, and he even, to his own horror and shame the next morning, used an excuse of running out for milk for the kids to stop in for a few minutes to watch Dolly dance. He no longer walked to the club, not wanting there to be any time for reflection as he strolled. He drove instead, and dared the world to exact vengeance for drinking and driving.
The crowds dwindled as the curious left, and normalcy returned for the club. Girls came and went. Beth was auditioning for some singing reality show. Tonya started dating a man who’d come in during the initial rush of Dolly’s popularity and had quit dancing to write scathing political blogs. Olena just left, and was replaced by a Hispanic girl named Sharla.
All of this passed Tomas by. His routine was gone, his easy-going nature as well. He no longer took an even cursory interest in the waitresses or the other dancers, and bought their drinks only to ply them about Dolly. He asked what she drank, but she didn’t drink anything. She didn’t do lap dances or circle the room. There was simply no way to get to know her and it was driving him crazy.
She was an impossible event of arousal, offering nothing at all beyond her shapely form. The walls of mutual affection, playful desire, and sexual equality that he had built for himself in the Gold Club were tumbling down. All that remained were lust and desire, with no outlet and no pretentions.
Dolly would dance her dance, each time drawing him closer and closer to the stage until he was hurling cash at her as hard as possible in hopes the outmost extreme of his reach would brush electrically against her skin. In the strobing lights the empty space above her throat would seem to fill with a variety of faces. He saw Ellen’s haughty glare, old high school girlfriends, movie stars and, in one horrible drunken hallucination, his own daughter’s red curls atop her writhing form. Horribly, he realized it was right when Wade claimed Merry Clayton supposedly ended her child’s life with a high note. Tomas Reynolds was lost.
That night, after the club closed, Tomas sat in his car in the parking lot, crying. He heard the patrons leave, the DJ, the waitresses, and the girls, one by one, until he was terrified to go home. All that was there for him was the packaging of an existence, not the product. He couldn’t face that.
There was a knock on the window, and he looked up to Dolly. She was dressed in pink sweats with little rhinestone designs. She carried a plain black duffle bag full of her stripper wear and used her thumb and fore finger to ask if he was OK. They were the only ones left in the parking lot.
Tomas got out of the car and stood in front of her, surprised to find how short she was. On stage, even missing a head, Dolly seemed huge, towering. In the gravel parking lot, in flat shoes, her shoulders barely reached his chest.
He didn’t know what to say. Dolly touched his arm and made her sign again.
“I don’t know…” he replied. “I… you… who are you?”
Dolly let her bag slide to the ground and stood with her hands on her hips. Without a face it was impossible to tell if she was portraying thoughtfulness or anger. She stood this way for a second, tapping her foot, then placed her hand on his shoulder. She pushed him lightly so he sat on the hood of his Mazda, and sat next to him. The swirling motion of her hand indicated he should keep talking.
“I just don’t know what to do,” said Tomas. “I used to come here, drink, flirt with the girls, and then it was better when I got home. I felt… I felt like I used to feel playing music. Like I had a purpose. Like it all meant something.
“All the girls wanted something from me, and it was nice. It was nice even if in the end it was just money and booze. Because I felt like I could give them something they desired.”
Dolly sat with her hands in her lap, listening to Tomas pour out his heart to a woman for the first time in more than a decade. She would occasionally put her hand on his heart or her own to indicate feeling and understanding.
At this point, part of him wanted to yell at her. It was all fine until you came along, he wanted to scream, but that was a lie. It was all a lie, and the fact he couldn’t use her to further it infuriated him. He had no friends, no love, and his heart wasn’t broken. A long, slow disconnect from need, want, thrust and pull had allowed it to rot, not shatter.
Instead, he just said. “Nobody needs me. No one here. No one anywhere.”
Dolly was silent and still. Tomas reflected on how pathetic this must look from the outside. He was confessing his deepest secrets to a stripper in a dirty parking lot, all because he was afraid to go home and be alone. He was glad she had no face to express her disgust.
She stood and faced away from him for a moment before turning around. She pointed to the club then ran her hands down her body in a sexy way before pointing to herself.
Then she placed her hands on his shoulder and leaned in. She waved a hand over her stump and shoved herself away from him, hugging herself and looking very small and scared. She waved her arm in a wide arc, stabbed with two fingers where her eyes would be and finished with a stinging smack to her own chest.
“I dance here,” she was saying. “Because I can see that nobody sees me. Nobody sees me, really.”
Tomas got up and moved to her. She stiffened at the embrace, but returned it. She led him back to his car, and manoeuvred him into the front seat. He pushed the front seat back and reclined as she slid off her top and pants in the parking lot with the stars above her looking down.
Dolly lithely arranged her body over his and, with no preamble, opened his pants to guide his cock inside her. Everything happened so fast that Tomas’ head spun. Dolly ground herself against him, her movements as liquid in the throes of sex as they were on stage. Her fingers gripped his shoulder hard and she pressed her breast to his chest as her rhythm increased.
For one terrible second, Tomas looked straight ahead, and saw nothing but himself in the sun visor mirror of the car. All h
is pent up self-loathing and misguided lust registered over the stump of Dolly’s neck. Before he could stop himself, he found himself reaching to close his hand on her throat. To choke if possible. To hurt.
Dolly never saw that. She felt only his hands on her stem, and in an exuberant joy placed the palm of her hand across his mouth in the closest thing to a kiss she could offer. Tomas lost himself again in her touch.
Time meant nothing to either of them. They might have been in the car for minutes or hours. Twice Tomas felt Dolly shudder as if in a seizure, holding herself close to him as her orgasm waved over her. Finally, unable to hold back himself, he felt his own climax erupt into her. He wasn’t wearing a condom; he had no idea if she was on any sort of birth control. It didn’t seem important. Nothing did.
They stayed like that for some time, Dolly reluctant to break the connection and him unable to move. Tomas felt himself slipping into sleep. Vaguely he was aware of Dolly finally disengaging from him, and stepping out of the car. He heard her dress, felt her close his pants, and leave a final finger kiss on his lips, before she got into her own car and drove away.
He woke up when the dawn sun shined through his window. Amid the morning dick jokes and news, he heard Simon and Garfunkel singing about silence. It was just finishing when he pulled into his driveway. When he went inside to the bathroom, he stared deep into the mirror. A man stared back at him, and smiled, lips still traced with the glitter of a kiss.
The Evil that Children Do
by Danielle Farman
No man, woman or child is like God. No one can take His place as the almighty. We can, however, stand by His side. My name is Michael and I am a ‘great prince who stands up for the children of your people.’
“So why did you do it, Mikey?”
I grunted at his pathetic attempt to relate to me. I hated that nickname. My name was Michael. This was a name to be proud of.
Broken Mirrors, Fractured Minds Page 4
