Running On Empty_Crows MC

by Cassandra Bloom

  “That’s nice, Dan,” I said, already starting to walk away. “You make that same promise to the old man about Michael?” I felt myself wince around my late brother’s name and was thankful Danny could only see my back. “‘Cause I don’t think whores would’ve helped him when he was getting his throat cut by the Carrions.”

  I could only faintly hear Danny as he said “That’s not fair,” but by that point I was already out the door and heading back for my chopper. Once again I found myself glad that he couldn’t see my face. He would’ve seen the regret there; he would’ve seen that I agreed with him.

  I made it a whopping seven blocks—seeing her standing at the end of each one, waving and smiling ahead of me until I could stand her no more and turned onto the next stretch of road—before I finally had to stop. I was in the middle of making excuses for my moist eyes and blurred vision when I saw the “GOING OUT OF BUSINESS” sign hanging in front of an old media outlet shop. Seeing a potential distraction, I dismounted the bike, wiped my face on my arm, and hurried inside.

  A small bell on a bent copper spiral sang like a breaking wine glass as I pushed through, and an aging hippie with a tied-back rats’ nest of cloud-colored hair regarded me behind rose-tinted, wide-rimmed glasses.

  “You alright, brother?” he asked in a voice that sounded half-choked on bad weed and good snacks.

  I managed an eloquent “Huh?” in response as I half-stumbled to a stop on my way past his counter.

  “You know, man…” he urged, nodding back towards me.

  I frowned, now fully stopped, and regarded him coldly. “No, man,” I challenged him, “I don’t know.”

  The old hippie, starting to look flustered, waved an open palm over his face in a mimed effort to illustrate my own face. I realized that I hadn’t done such a great job of wiping away the (tears) sweat, and I fought the urge to add a blush to the mix.

  “The fuck you expect?” I demanded, hurrying past him. “It’s hotter’n Hell out there!”

  “That it is, my man;” the old hippie was just as quick to agree with me, obviously just as eager for a way out of that conversation as I was. “That it is.”

  I allowed myself to be swallowed by the tall, narrow rows of shelves. “Westerns” occupied my left; “Sci-Fi” the right. Every few steps brought me past yet another neon-bold cutout of paper with equally neon yet aggressively contrasting ink reminding me that “EVERYTHING MUST GO!!!” and that “ALL TITLES 90% OFF!!!!” in varying phrasings and exponentially rising numbers of exclamation points. It seemed that for every five steps I took the urgency that I heed their call became that much more demanding. I was certain that, should I dare to venture further—perhaps be so bold as to even turn a corner—I might find an entire wall glowing like fluorescence with an army of punctuation poised to ululate their bargain-themed war cries at me.

  Daring to turn and start down another aisle, I was stopped by no such obstacle. I was free to browse, and my mind was free to wander.

  Whether it was the browsing or the wandering that compelled me to pause on a lonely looking copy of “Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” sitting at a cocked angle beside an abandoned, half-empty cup from 7-Eleven. While I felt an irrational kinship with the cup, it was the DVD that had stopped me. Without meaning to, I found myself holding the case in both hands, staring down at it through a fresh veil of wet, blurring tears.

  Somewhere in the shadows of my childhood, I heard my father say “Gentlemen! You can’t fight in here! This is the War Room!” around an already amused chuckle as he fed the cassette into our VCR for yet another viewing. Though I’d been too young to understand much of what was happening in the movie, I remembered doubling over with laughter each and every time it was playing. That my uproarious wails were shrill, childish echoes of my old man’s own laughter had mattered little then and, in hindsight, mattered even less there in the dying store run by the nosy old hippie.

  There was just something about finding a movie from your childhood…

  Clutching this as one might a treasure, I hurried away from the cup and its silent taunts. Each step carried me deeper into the store and, likewise, deeper into my memories. “Strangelove” playing on the TV—Dad seated in his recliner and kicking his bare feet with each bout of laughter and me lying on my belly the floor, dancing my own feet in little pedaling cycles as I matched his reactions—while Mom and Michael did what they could to ignore the two of us; Mom burying her nose in whatever new vampire novel she’d picked up at the supermarket and Michael furiously mashing buttons on his Game Boy. Each round of laughter would earn a pair of sighs from the two of them, their own mini-ritual played out against ours, and more than likely a shared look of “What are we going to do with them?”

  Though I’d never actually seen this from either my mother or my brother when I was transfixed on the black-and-white ongoings playing out before me, it seemed like just the sort of reaction either of them would have had.

  A small, synthetic squeal drew me to the present, and I realized I’d begun rubbing the pad of my thumb across the DVD’s case. I lingered on it a moment longer, taking in the sight of the conniving-looking man behind his shaded glasses staring down at a round table populated by tense men in suits, before forcing my gaze away. I wanted to try to escape the tight grip of nostalgia it had over me.

  I only succeeded in leaping out of the frying pan and into the fire as I came face-to-face with an ashy-gray rendering of Gary Oldman. The bust, featuring a heavy-lidded and undead vision of the actor as he greedily lapped at a blood-caked straight razor, seemed to stare back at me; thick slash-like letters that all-but cried out “Dracula” staring out beneath a leering, demonic face set into the base of the statue. Then, just like that, I was thinking of my mother and her bookshelf which, along with all the books, housed any number of other vampire-related knick-knacks. Whether she’d owned this particular trinket was something I couldn’t bring myself to recall, but I knew with absolute certainty that, if she had come across it, it would’ve had its own claim on that shelf. With a trembling hand—vampires still creeped the ever-loving hell out of me after all these years—I snatched it up, being careful to keep my fingertips away from Oldman’s fanged and waiting mouth.

  Then, with a fresh set of distractions (none of them wholly uplifting), I made my way past the neon cutouts plastered with neon boasts and salted with neon exclamations to the aging hippie at the front of the store.

  “—system’s been cleared out, I’m afraid,” he was saying to a young woman leaning across the counter. “But what I can tell you is that, if we got it, it’s on the shelves somewhere.”

  “Any idea where?” she asked, sounding eager but not impatient.

  The old hippie shrugged. “Folks been coming and going all day; picking things up, carrying them around, and then setting them back down wherever. Used to be we’d try to put everything back where it belonged, but…” another shrug, “Most of my employees left the day they found out the place was going under. The rest have enough to worry about with trying to keep people from leaving their trash lying around or having sex in the back, where we keep the ‘after dark’ vids,” he made a point of air-quoting the words “after dark” with two pairs of arthritis-chewed fingers.

  “That’s disgusting!” the girl exclaimed. “People are actually leaving their trash lying around?”

  “I know,” I said absently, “I actually had a stare-down with a to-go cup back in the ‘Sci-Fi’ section.”

  “Uhg!” the girl made a face, but a grin that had begun to form as she caught sight of me abandoned her effort to feign any sense of nausea.

  “Yeah,” I went on, setting my DVD and the Dracula bust on an available clearing of counter space in front of me. “Worse yet, the cola they left in it was warm.”

  The girl gave a giggling half-squeal of “ewww!” before breaking out into an all-out laugh. Then, seeing that I was waiting to pay, she stepped back and motioned for me to cont
inue.

  Without any prompting, the old hippie started punching at the keys of his register as he offered a “hmm” at each of my selections.

  Not wanting to try for another conversation with him, I turned back to the girl and asked, “So what is it that you’re looking for?”

  Though I did my best not to seem rude, I felt my mind begin to wander again the moment she said the words “Air Bud.” As she went on, smiling mouth spouting something to do with how much she loved dogs, I leap-frogged through my memories—watching old movies with my dad, cowering under the many threatening gazes of my mother’s vampire shelf, sneaking downstairs with Michael to watch R-rated Schwarzenegger movies after Mom and Dad went to sleep…

  And then to simply watching the clouds ride across the sky with Anne.

  “Hey!” the girl’s voice rose to a nearly painful level, cutting through the memories with a shrill pitch. “Are you okay?”

  Both she and the old hippie were staring at me, and I realized I was staring back at them through a familiar haze of blurry wetness.

  “Y-yeah,” I managed, working to free a fifty dollar bill from my wallet and leaving it on the counter. “Just… It’s just really hot out.”

  Leaving that and my money—despite the more than thirty bucks in change I had coming—I snatched up my new belongings, remembering what I’d said to Danny about buying things that one didn’t really need, and hurried for the door and, beyond that, my chopper. Though the young lady and the old hippie stayed and stared after me, the memories followed; them, and Danny’s words:

  “Least I know I got some enjoyment out of whatever it was.”

  Looking down at the DVD and the bust, I couldn’t help but see them in the same light I’d seen the nearly suicidal turn I’d taken earlier—arguably fun and dramatic, but morbidly self-destructive and pointless in the long run.

  The vision of a smiling, waving beauty was waiting for me at the end of the road even before I’d gotten the bike started…

  Through the haze of heat and tears and the blurred line between the “then” and the “now,” I heard my voice as I once again uttered “fuck.”

  Chapter 2

  ~Mia~

  I was half-asleep in front of the cracked and fluorescent-lit reflection in my and Candy’s so-called “vanity” mirror. Fuzzy and distorted as it was, it was impossible to deny the subject wavering in its not-really-silver frame was, in fact, myself. I had mixed feelings about that. If I’d been looking at somebody else—staring, for example, through a window instead—then I’d have to pause and appreciate the image of sensuality cosmically set before me.

  “Gee whiz!” I’d say in such a fanciful scenario (though, no, not really), She sure is a pretty girl!

  Of course, in any situation where one starts a statement with the words “Gee whiz,” I’d have to imagine I’d be dolled-up to look like Audrey from “Little Shop of Horrors” and inflecting the words “sure” and “girl” so they sounded like “shoo-ah” and “gal.”

  I’d still probably be using about a gallon of hairspray, though.

  Maybe that was why I was feeling so—

  “DAMMIT, MIA! HURRY YOUR TIGHT, PINK KIESTER UP!” Candy screamed through the bathroom door, giving it a few hearty THUMPS for good measure. Her voice and the violent knocks accompanying it were enough to cut through my aerosol-induced haze and wake me up…

  A little, at least.

  If I could wear a watch on the job, I’d likely have given it a not-really-checking-the-time glance to punctuate my otherwise entirely internal flare of panic. Instead, I muttered “Shit!” under my breath and, using my forearm to sweep my makeup off the counter and into my waiting bag, forced myself to turn away from the cracked and fluorescent-lit subject staring out at me through the not-a-window. If it were a window, I’d have been able to appreciate her for how beautiful—dare I go so far as to say “sexy”—she looked.

  But it’s not a window.

  And that meant I was staring at myself: the whore.

  Tough to appreciate your own “outer beauty” when it was nothing more than an ad campaign. As I stumbled for the door I could almost see the starter kit in the back of my mind:

  “INSTANT CASH! JUST ADD FISHNETS AND CORNY PICKUP LINES!” it’d say.

  But it’d be a useless starter kit without a box of tissues for wiping up tears and a bottle of Scope to wash away the taste of latex, I thought bitterly as I yanked the knob and threw the door open.

  An immaculately manicured and perfectly tanned forearm hung inches from my face, a fist that was, for lack of a better word, perfect and handjob-ready poised to start banging on the door again. Candy nearly wound up delivering a few of those aggressive knocks directly into my forehead. I figured I would have had it coming for hogging the bathroom for so long.

  Candy didn’t hit me, though; she only smiled a perfect, pearly-white smile and tossed a bundle of curled red hair over her shoulder before saying, “From now on, I go first.”

  I rolled my eyes at her, moving to step aside so that she could pass. “Like you even need it,” I countered. “Look at you! You’re perfect!”

  “Perfect is who’s talking, girl,” she said, gliding into the bathroom like good sex—the sort of sex we’d likely see none of that night. “This mug represents about an hour’s worth of hard labor in my room,” she went on, “but if I don’t powder my pussy before hitting the streets then I wind up walking like a bad Western hero for a few days.”

  I stared after her, speechless, as she opened the cabinet under the sink and retrieved the baby powder. Then, without a hint of shyness, she swung one of her stilettoed feet up onto the counter, yanked her panties to one side, and squeezed a healthy cloud of the stuff between her thighs. Still unabashed, she worked the dusting around until all trace of the whiteness was but a memory. Then, humming with satisfaction, she set her panties back into place, thought better of it, and pulled the fragile-looking band up enough to bury the material between folds of flesh.

  “There,” she mused, though she seemed to be talking more to the subject behind her own not-a-window than back to me, “That’ll work!”

  I tried to speak, found my throat dry, and forced myself to clear it. This, Candy mistook as a call for attention, and she glanced back at me with a beautifully tweezed eyebrow curved inquisitively.

  “Hmm?” she asked.

  “I… uh,” I caught myself stealing a glance at the baby powder, still sitting on the counter, “Why did you do that?”

  Candy let out a half-scoff, half-hum. “Nearly four weeks living and working with me,” she scolded in her suddenly maternal tone, “and you’re still sashaying the streets like a pretty girl at prom. It’s a job, girl! Men got hardhats and gloves and aspirin for their tough gigs; we got our own tools for the trade. Now,” she began as she held up the powder and gave it a shake for emphasis, “plenty—PLENTY!—of girls go out and sell tail, but most don’t have clue-one about how to do it. Shit, most wouldn’t even own up to selling in the first place. But, make no mistake, Mia, any girl you see in a tight little number and wagging what her momma blessed her with in a club or bar is most certainly a saleswoman in her own right.”

  I stifled the urge to giggle at that—I still hadn’t gotten used to Candy’s preference for calling those in our line of work “saleswomen.”

  “Sure, sure,” she went on, “they’re not always down to get down, but they’re putting on the same show—same exact song-and-dance—as us when we’re on the corner. Only difference is they’re working for drinks and free rides in fancy cars and we’re cutting straight to the nitty-gritty: cold… hard… cash.”

  “So you’re saying all women are either whores or gold diggers?” I challenged.

  Candy shrugged and checked her eyeliner in the mirror. “Not all,” she admitted. “Some are in convents.”

  I groaned and said, “Now you’re just being crass.”

  “Says the college girl ready to join my fine ass on the corner,” she coun
tered.

  “I’m not exactly doing this by choice,” I reminded her.

  “And what would you be doing if you weren’t?” she asked before answering on my behalf: “Throwing on a sexy little red dress, doing up your hair, and going out so you can gyrate on a dance floor to remixed European music in the hopes that some ponytail-wearing stud with a thick wallet will throw down for a bright, sweet-as-candy drink?”

  My sneer at the idea started deep, deep in my gut and found its way soon after to my face. “Ew! God, no! Ew!” I repeated, still shaking my head as I said, “I’d probably be staying in, watching bad 90’s reruns on Hulu and eating a pizza.”

  Candy regarded me as though I’d just landed a giant saucer in the middle of her bathroom and emerged amidst a cloud of dense fog as a green-skinned being from the Foreskin Nebula. “And what about a man?” she demanded, as if being reminded of the existence of men might totally obliterate the fantasy I’d just described.

  I shrugged. “If one happened to be present then I guess he’d better have had the foresight to order his own pizza.”

  Candy’s stare shifted just enough to change the quality of my alien-esque persona as one from the Foreskin Nebula from one straight out of the galaxy of garlic-farts—confusion moving over just enough to include space for disgust. Seeming to accept that maybe—MAYBE!—her hypothesis regarding the nature of other women wasn’t entirely accurate, she gave a passive shrug and leaned against the counter.

  “Anyway!” she stretched the word, sounding indignant for the digression, “While some other girls might casually go out onto town and flaunt the goods, those doing it professionally—and, by that, I mean those like me and you—know that all that walking, wagging, and… well, all that has a nasty way of chafing the thighs and coochie.”

  I considered this for a moment, remembering a few of the busier nights where I had, indeed, gotten back with a fair amount of irritation between my legs.