Straight up in a dirty glass.
OK, so I'm a big fan of the Pulp Fiction literary genre (you know -- the one that spawned Film Noir), and sometimes I have a lot of fun waxing over-the-top quasi-poetic in the style of a Chandler or a Hammett in my writing. Yeah, I'm a dork. Kiss my ass. Anyway, awhile back I posted a personal ad in this style, and started a back-and-forth correspondence with a woman who got my drift. It was ultimately doomed, because she turned out to be about five times my size -- but it was fun while it lasted. So I thought I'd share. Here's the ad and the correspondence it generated:
AD:
He was lean, tender, and clean-cut like a New York steak with blue eyes and he was tired. Tired of games. Tired of lonely nights. And tired of low-class dames with a chip on their shoulder. Where could she be? You know the one. Whip-smart. Pretty as a Christmas dinner. With eyes that burned her initials through the well-worn dirty cotton of his button-down dress shirt and into his soul. Was she a blonde? Brunette? Redhead? He couldn't remember. All he knew was that somehow she had stolen the air from his lungs until every breath was a longing sigh and every thought consumed by a face he had seen only in his dreams...
RESPONSE:
Who was this mystery man? She wondered as her fingers tapped away and the words floated out into the ether like an SOS from a ship's last known radio signal. And would she be able to get his attention? Her eyes could burn, alright; they were burning now, as she stared through this electric window and imagined him watching her from the other side. Who was he? What did he look like? She pictured him with leathery skin and smoker's rough hands and dark eyes. She thought of him sitting in some dive bar, offering her a drink as he looked up and down the length of her Liz Claiborne stretch pants.
ME:
He was the guy wearing his heart on his sleeve, right over there, across the bar. The one with the big soulful steel blue eyes, grimacing at the crap they're playing on the jukebox and wishing somebody hadn't broken the only pool cue in the joint. The eyes narrowed and reddened like a couple of streetlights just before another drunken dawn in the Big Easy, and he casually scratched at his nine-o'clock shadow with hands that trembled ever so slightly at the momentary thought of gently touching her with them...
He was watching the swirling black and blue where she sat, but it was too dark to see her and the smoke made him dizzy. He'd never been a smoker, and he wondered why she'd insisted on meeting him in the only smoky bar left on the whole Barbary Coast. For a bullet train second, the cheshire cat sat on his shoulder, a ghostly barracuda grin spreading whitewall-wide -- maybe she was hiding something, over there in the shadows and the smoke. Clever dame, he thought, waving a poorly self-manicured hand across his collarbone like a fly swatter. But she couldn't fluster him; his own killer instinct was too finely honed from all the years of female-inspired nail-biting to break on the waves of any mermaid's wake. No dame had yet to jump through his allegorical hula hoops before surrendering, spent, in his arms. He grinned, squinted, and waited for her to emerge from the dark like a polaroid so he could get a good look at that drop-dead moviestar mug of hers...
HER:
He knew how to write; she gave him that. But she was too shy to be the first to show her face. He was probably way too old for her, from the sound of his experience; after all, she was only thirty just last week. He was a stranger to her, and a lady didn't just show all her cards to a stranger without good reason.
ME:
Thirty, eh? Almost brand-new. He had a grizzled decade over her, and maybe that was too much. She moved closer, into the red light of the grimy bar lamp, and laughed at him. The girl had 'tease' written all over her. And the word hung like thick velvet drapes in the empty air, clinging to her invisible curves like a Porsche on the Autobahn in the fog. He could feel himself starting to sweat jacketed .44 slugs from his forehead and reached for a cool drink. But everything in the room had heated up as she whisked past him in the pitch black, and the last vapors of steam swirled out of the dirty tumbler as he vainly picked it up. Had he been intrigued? Sure. She could be a bombshell, but he'd been hit by his share of duds -- always gussied-up like high-society pinups, looking like Betty Grable but leaving him face down in a pile of Betty Rubble. But she had him at a disadvantage, and that didn't sit well. Would she fly straight, or wait til the bombay doors were open and -- blammo -- blow the whole flying fortress to Kingdom Come?
He sent his mugshot and waited for the air raid siren...
HER:
She stared at his picture for a long time. Handsome, she thought. And younger than she'd suspected. This intrigued her; how could such a young face seem so worldly-wise? Nothing made any sense anymore; what was he looking for, anyway? She didn't know what to tell him; where to start. Maybe he was just out for a good time, and that wasn't what she wanted. She could have that at any gin joint in any town...
ME:
She'd called him handsome; she knew that would do the trick. Yeah, looking like a baby-faced kid was a double-edged sword. It meant he could get away with a lot of things, and yet it also meant he got away with nothing. Like a Pilgrim's gift of pox on a savage baby's blanket. Pass the cranberries. He'd seen forty-one Januaries so far, each one different like snowflakes or bone fragments, some leaving their imprint like icebergs in a riveted steel hull. He'd surprised her, he guessed; she wasn't expecting to see his face so soon. She wasn't prepared with her own; she kept it in a sealed envelope marked 'confidential', like a young black-veiled virgin waiting to show her new Afghan husband what he'd bought. He watched the ice melt in the tumbler and wondered aloud when the veil would glide spiraling to the dusty concrete floor like the first pitch of baseball season. For now, he'd assume she was worth the wait. After all, he'd been waiting forever already...
He'd been knocked around, put through the ringer, wore his best suit to a wedding that turned out to be a funeral. Made a fixer-upper-sized fortune and lost it to a bunch of ritalin-addled prospectors who'd forgotten their pans; built a skyscraper out of playing cards that fluttered to the floor when somebody dialed 911. But the game wasn't up yet -- that would have been too easy. Moved up and down the left-hand coast 'til the highway signs blurred into blue snakes spitting road rage reflectors at his halogen high beams -- and asked the dashboard a hundred times why he'd been asleep at the wheel when he wasn't even tired yet, not expecting an answer because after all, it was a rhetorical question.
He'd had it all and seen the empty underbelly of what 'all' meant. Now he just wanted somebody with sparkling eyes who'd kiss his hands when he brought her flowers in butcher paper soaked with rain.
HER:
She blushed at his words; they stirred something within her. She'd never done anything like this before -- writing to a stranger. She mostly kept to herself, staying out of trouble like a good girl. Sure, in her old short skirt days she'd been to the bars looking for that kind of trouble, but not anymore. She came from old-fashioned values. Lassie movies. Apple pie. Everybody had their rebel moment, but now she was back to her roots, and he could prove to be bad news. And yet she couldn't deny the trembling of her fingers as she searched the air for the right words to say to impress him, and she wondered if that was even a wise thing to try and do. So she took the chance; she sent the picture. It was a couple of years old and a couple of pounds lighter than she was now, but a man like him would see through all that, wouldn't he?
ME:
The blush gave her away, but she wore it like Coco Chanel in a Turkish bath. A little dollop of demure could be the icing on the layer cake now and then, but this wasn't the time for cake. Too easily sliced up and spread around. Besides, she was barely thirty. Still shiny, like a dime in the laundry. And yet her faraway misty-eyed reverie spoke like a gravelly-voiced veteran recalling the good old days on Canal Street. So she'd chased a lot of Trouble and she didn't want any more, eh? He'd bet dollars to donut holes she'd found more than a corner-pocketful of it. Short skirts are Trouble magnets; just ask any young girl's mama and see if you don't get sucker-punched for even thinking about it.
She probably had one of those names you'd expect to see on the Beantown Social Register, right between the local parrish priest and guy who inherited the hardware chain. But here she was, in his mailbox, talking about hard-boiled gimlets and moviestar dogs. All dripping goodness and virtue on his secondhand mud-stained Sears and Roebuck welcome mat -- yet her eyes told a different story, one that would no doubt send Lassie running for a stiff drink and two pair of concrete shoes...
She'd never done this before, she said. Maybe he was Bad News, she said. That's when he noticed how hot it had gotten in this fleabag joint...and he fixed himself a cold glass of irony.
Still, there she was, looking like a brand new car in a bad neighborhood. He knew a gamble when he saw it. But that never stopped him before. Her hot breath smoldered through the dark strands of her hair as she stared back at him; she did look familiar, like someone he'd seen in a movie...or a dream. He took a long look at his aging, but still handsome reflection in the blacked-out window of the bar. A wry grin began to crack across the unshaven glass.
Staying out of Trouble, she had said. And yet she had just walked right up and tapped Trouble on the shoulder...
HER:
His words sounded so perfect. Too perfect. She had to ask. Did he borrow them from somebody? The words were just so familiar, like she'd read them before in some dime novel. Was he playing her for a fool?
ME:
So the dame had the nerve to ask him where he 'borrowed' his words.
Plagiarism? He laughed out loud. If he was gonna steal something, it would stack neatly in his well-worn billfold. Or beat feverishly behind a woman's breasts. He glanced over at the past-its-prime creaky futon he called a bed. Hell, it had never had a 'prime'; in all likelihood that's what 'futon' meant in Japanese: Bed That Never Was. Goddamn sneaky Japs. First Pearl Harbor and now they'd sold him an imaginary bed. For a San Francisco minute he imagined those Liz Claiborne stretch pants of hers in a crumpled yet still somehow stretchy pile on the floor next to it. His XXX imagination was getting the better of him again.
X. X. X. There was that letter again. It haunted him, filled him with a thousand crisscrossed memories like arms folded over the chest of a former head of state. His life was filled with Xs, from the XX of the eyes of the men who'd crossed him, to the X-wife that gave him most of his scars, to the X next to the signature of every contract on which he'd signed his life away in exchange for a few bucks that lasted a week and a half.
His words flowed and coagulated like sour milk from the leaky squeeze bottle in his ribcage and the noisy typewriter in his skull. 'Borrowing' somebody else's would make about as much sense as Porky Pig eating a ham sandwich. He grimaced at the bad pun, but sent it anyway; after all, she wanted the real deal, right?
And at this point, so did he.
HER:
An ex-wife, eh? She knew there must be a story there; a painful one. She must have done him wrong; she must have been like a drug that was cruelly taken away and left him alone with the withdrawals. She wondered if he was over that pain, and if he would be ready for a girl like her. Or was he still addicted?
ME:
Yeah, it was an addiction. The smell of her skin, the shine of her hair in the reflection of the neon moonlight outside the third-floor window where he gazed into emptiness and saw the swirling smoke from the street begin to dissipate and form a face. But it was only a night like all the others. The peeling paint around the window brought the reality of his solitude home, and he turned to switch on the fan and blow the fog back into the chilly soup it came from. In the other room the aging refrigerator hummed a dissonant etude; downstairs the crazy neighbor shouted at ghosts. But the night swam slow laps around him like it always did, and the unspoken longing sat beside him like an old friend. Withdrawal symptoms on an endless loop, almost comforting in their familiarity. Yet there were no tracks in his arm. The tracks were on his soul...
The pillow was soaked through to the well-worn mattress when he woke up. Dazed, he ran his fingers along his temple and glanced at his hand. Sweat. Not blood. Relieved, he grabbed the other pillow; the one that always sat with its smiling creases like a sated vampire against the cracked plaster above the futon. It still smelled like her. The one that got away.
What time was it? How long had he been out? He stood over the cheap cultured marble sink and looked in the mirror. His face looked like the linoleum floor of a Chinatown laundromat. Taking a nap was supposed to be good for you, or so they said, whoever they were. He stepped into the shower and coaxed the leaky pipes to pay their chlorine-scented liquid tribute. Within moments he was back to normal, whatever that was.
He wondered what the dame was doing right now; whether she was out painting the town red or staying home blue. He wondered what she looked like up close, and if he'd recognize her from someplace. He wondered if she'd be the one to finally take him down.
* * *
AD:
He was lean, tender, and clean-cut like a New York steak with blue eyes and he was tired. Tired of games. Tired of lonely nights. And tired of low-class dames with a chip on their shoulder. Where could she be? You know the one. Whip-smart. Pretty as a Christmas dinner. With eyes that burned her initials through the well-worn dirty cotton of his button-down dress shirt and into his soul. Was she a blonde? Brunette? Redhead? He couldn't remember. All he knew was that somehow she had stolen the air from his lungs until every breath was a longing sigh and every thought consumed by a face he had seen only in his dreams...
RESPONSE:
Who was this mystery man? She wondered as her fingers tapped away and the words floated out into the ether like an SOS from a ship's last known radio signal. And would she be able to get his attention? Her eyes could burn, alright; they were burning now, as she stared through this electric window and imagined him watching her from the other side. Who was he? What did he look like? She pictured him with leathery skin and smoker's rough hands and dark eyes. She thought of him sitting in some dive bar, offering her a drink as he looked up and down the length of her Liz Claiborne stretch pants.
ME:
He was the guy wearing his heart on his sleeve, right over there, across the bar. The one with the big soulful steel blue eyes, grimacing at the crap they're playing on the jukebox and wishing somebody hadn't broken the only pool cue in the joint. The eyes narrowed and reddened like a couple of streetlights just before another drunken dawn in the Big Easy, and he casually scratched at his nine-o'clock shadow with hands that trembled ever so slightly at the momentary thought of gently touching her with them...
He was watching the swirling black and blue where she sat, but it was too dark to see her and the smoke made him dizzy. He'd never been a smoker, and he wondered why she'd insisted on meeting him in the only smoky bar left on the whole Barbary Coast. For a bullet train second, the cheshire cat sat on his shoulder, a ghostly barracuda grin spreading whitewall-wide -- maybe she was hiding something, over there in the shadows and the smoke. Clever dame, he thought, waving a poorly self-manicured hand across his collarbone like a fly swatter. But she couldn't fluster him; his own killer instinct was too finely honed from all the years of female-inspired nail-biting to break on the waves of any mermaid's wake. No dame had yet to jump through his allegorical hula hoops before surrendering, spent, in his arms. He grinned, squinted, and waited for her to emerge from the dark like a polaroid so he could get a good look at that drop-dead moviestar mug of hers...
HER:
He knew how to write; she gave him that. But she was too shy to be the first to show her face. He was probably way too old for her, from the sound of his experience; after all, she was only thirty just last week. He was a stranger to her, and a lady didn't just show all her cards to a stranger without good reason.
ME:
Thirty, eh? Almost brand-new. He had a grizzled decade over her, and maybe that was too much. She moved closer, into the red light of the grimy bar lamp, and laughed at him. The girl had 'tease' written all over her. And the word hung like thick velvet drapes in the empty air, clinging to her invisible curves like a Porsche on the Autobahn in the fog. He could feel himself starting to sweat jacketed .44 slugs from his forehead and reached for a cool drink. But everything in the room had heated up as she whisked past him in the pitch black, and the last vapors of steam swirled out of the dirty tumbler as he vainly picked it up. Had he been intrigued? Sure. She could be a bombshell, but he'd been hit by his share of duds -- always gussied-up like high-society pinups, looking like Betty Grable but leaving him face down in a pile of Betty Rubble. But she had him at a disadvantage, and that didn't sit well. Would she fly straight, or wait til the bombay doors were open and -- blammo -- blow the whole flying fortress to Kingdom Come?
He sent his mugshot and waited for the air raid siren...
HER:
She stared at his picture for a long time. Handsome, she thought. And younger than she'd suspected. This intrigued her; how could such a young face seem so worldly-wise? Nothing made any sense anymore; what was he looking for, anyway? She didn't know what to tell him; where to start. Maybe he was just out for a good time, and that wasn't what she wanted. She could have that at any gin joint in any town...
ME:
She'd called him handsome; she knew that would do the trick. Yeah, looking like a baby-faced kid was a double-edged sword. It meant he could get away with a lot of things, and yet it also meant he got away with nothing. Like a Pilgrim's gift of pox on a savage baby's blanket. Pass the cranberries. He'd seen forty-one Januaries so far, each one different like snowflakes or bone fragments, some leaving their imprint like icebergs in a riveted steel hull. He'd surprised her, he guessed; she wasn't expecting to see his face so soon. She wasn't prepared with her own; she kept it in a sealed envelope marked 'confidential', like a young black-veiled virgin waiting to show her new Afghan husband what he'd bought. He watched the ice melt in the tumbler and wondered aloud when the veil would glide spiraling to the dusty concrete floor like the first pitch of baseball season. For now, he'd assume she was worth the wait. After all, he'd been waiting forever already...
He'd been knocked around, put through the ringer, wore his best suit to a wedding that turned out to be a funeral. Made a fixer-upper-sized fortune and lost it to a bunch of ritalin-addled prospectors who'd forgotten their pans; built a skyscraper out of playing cards that fluttered to the floor when somebody dialed 911. But the game wasn't up yet -- that would have been too easy. Moved up and down the left-hand coast 'til the highway signs blurred into blue snakes spitting road rage reflectors at his halogen high beams -- and asked the dashboard a hundred times why he'd been asleep at the wheel when he wasn't even tired yet, not expecting an answer because after all, it was a rhetorical question.
He'd had it all and seen the empty underbelly of what 'all' meant. Now he just wanted somebody with sparkling eyes who'd kiss his hands when he brought her flowers in butcher paper soaked with rain.
HER:
She blushed at his words; they stirred something within her. She'd never done anything like this before -- writing to a stranger. She mostly kept to herself, staying out of trouble like a good girl. Sure, in her old short skirt days she'd been to the bars looking for that kind of trouble, but not anymore. She came from old-fashioned values. Lassie movies. Apple pie. Everybody had their rebel moment, but now she was back to her roots, and he could prove to be bad news. And yet she couldn't deny the trembling of her fingers as she searched the air for the right words to say to impress him, and she wondered if that was even a wise thing to try and do. So she took the chance; she sent the picture. It was a couple of years old and a couple of pounds lighter than she was now, but a man like him would see through all that, wouldn't he?
ME:
The blush gave her away, but she wore it like Coco Chanel in a Turkish bath. A little dollop of demure could be the icing on the layer cake now and then, but this wasn't the time for cake. Too easily sliced up and spread around. Besides, she was barely thirty. Still shiny, like a dime in the laundry. And yet her faraway misty-eyed reverie spoke like a gravelly-voiced veteran recalling the good old days on Canal Street. So she'd chased a lot of Trouble and she didn't want any more, eh? He'd bet dollars to donut holes she'd found more than a corner-pocketful of it. Short skirts are Trouble magnets; just ask any young girl's mama and see if you don't get sucker-punched for even thinking about it.
She probably had one of those names you'd expect to see on the Beantown Social Register, right between the local parrish priest and guy who inherited the hardware chain. But here she was, in his mailbox, talking about hard-boiled gimlets and moviestar dogs. All dripping goodness and virtue on his secondhand mud-stained Sears and Roebuck welcome mat -- yet her eyes told a different story, one that would no doubt send Lassie running for a stiff drink and two pair of concrete shoes...
She'd never done this before, she said. Maybe he was Bad News, she said. That's when he noticed how hot it had gotten in this fleabag joint...and he fixed himself a cold glass of irony.
Still, there she was, looking like a brand new car in a bad neighborhood. He knew a gamble when he saw it. But that never stopped him before. Her hot breath smoldered through the dark strands of her hair as she stared back at him; she did look familiar, like someone he'd seen in a movie...or a dream. He took a long look at his aging, but still handsome reflection in the blacked-out window of the bar. A wry grin began to crack across the unshaven glass.
Staying out of Trouble, she had said. And yet she had just walked right up and tapped Trouble on the shoulder...
HER:
His words sounded so perfect. Too perfect. She had to ask. Did he borrow them from somebody? The words were just so familiar, like she'd read them before in some dime novel. Was he playing her for a fool?
ME:
So the dame had the nerve to ask him where he 'borrowed' his words.
Plagiarism? He laughed out loud. If he was gonna steal something, it would stack neatly in his well-worn billfold. Or beat feverishly behind a woman's breasts. He glanced over at the past-its-prime creaky futon he called a bed. Hell, it had never had a 'prime'; in all likelihood that's what 'futon' meant in Japanese: Bed That Never Was. Goddamn sneaky Japs. First Pearl Harbor and now they'd sold him an imaginary bed. For a San Francisco minute he imagined those Liz Claiborne stretch pants of hers in a crumpled yet still somehow stretchy pile on the floor next to it. His XXX imagination was getting the better of him again.
X. X. X. There was that letter again. It haunted him, filled him with a thousand crisscrossed memories like arms folded over the chest of a former head of state. His life was filled with Xs, from the XX of the eyes of the men who'd crossed him, to the X-wife that gave him most of his scars, to the X next to the signature of every contract on which he'd signed his life away in exchange for a few bucks that lasted a week and a half.
His words flowed and coagulated like sour milk from the leaky squeeze bottle in his ribcage and the noisy typewriter in his skull. 'Borrowing' somebody else's would make about as much sense as Porky Pig eating a ham sandwich. He grimaced at the bad pun, but sent it anyway; after all, she wanted the real deal, right?
And at this point, so did he.
HER:
An ex-wife, eh? She knew there must be a story there; a painful one. She must have done him wrong; she must have been like a drug that was cruelly taken away and left him alone with the withdrawals. She wondered if he was over that pain, and if he would be ready for a girl like her. Or was he still addicted?
ME:
Yeah, it was an addiction. The smell of her skin, the shine of her hair in the reflection of the neon moonlight outside the third-floor window where he gazed into emptiness and saw the swirling smoke from the street begin to dissipate and form a face. But it was only a night like all the others. The peeling paint around the window brought the reality of his solitude home, and he turned to switch on the fan and blow the fog back into the chilly soup it came from. In the other room the aging refrigerator hummed a dissonant etude; downstairs the crazy neighbor shouted at ghosts. But the night swam slow laps around him like it always did, and the unspoken longing sat beside him like an old friend. Withdrawal symptoms on an endless loop, almost comforting in their familiarity. Yet there were no tracks in his arm. The tracks were on his soul...
The pillow was soaked through to the well-worn mattress when he woke up. Dazed, he ran his fingers along his temple and glanced at his hand. Sweat. Not blood. Relieved, he grabbed the other pillow; the one that always sat with its smiling creases like a sated vampire against the cracked plaster above the futon. It still smelled like her. The one that got away.
What time was it? How long had he been out? He stood over the cheap cultured marble sink and looked in the mirror. His face looked like the linoleum floor of a Chinatown laundromat. Taking a nap was supposed to be good for you, or so they said, whoever they were. He stepped into the shower and coaxed the leaky pipes to pay their chlorine-scented liquid tribute. Within moments he was back to normal, whatever that was.
He wondered what the dame was doing right now; whether she was out painting the town red or staying home blue. He wondered what she looked like up close, and if he'd recognize her from someplace. He wondered if she'd be the one to finally take him down.
* * *
posted by brioSphere at 1:27 AM
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