A Perfect Romance

by Layce Gardner

  She jerks away, surprised, and offers me her ass instead. It takes a couple more twenties to get her tits back this time.

  She’s no fool. She plays keep-away from me for the next three songs. Three songs is how long it takes to empty my pockets.

  Two grand, every cent I have, gone in the space of fifteen minutes. Did I mention I’m a sucker for a nice pair of tits?

  “What’s your name?” I ask when she bends down near me again.

  “Ginger,” she whispers.

  “Ginger, what time you get off?”

  “I’ll get off right after you take me home,” she answers with a bump and grind aimed right at my face.

  I’m sure the bump and grind seems like a good idea. What Ginger doesn’t know is that her answer gets me so excited I lean forward. Just enough that my nose smashes into her bump and her grind makes sure it’s broken but good.

  I gush blood all over me, all over her and all over the dance floor. I guess the smell of blood gets her all excited, because the next thing I know, she’s pulling me by the collar out the back door.

  I stand in the employee parking lot like a fool with two tissues shoved up my nose while she yanks on jeans and a T-shirt. She throws a leg over the back of a Harley Fatboy, fires up the engine and yells over the pipes, “Get on! You’re riding bitch!”

  Ginger makes me ride bitch for the next six months. I clean the house, do the laundry, mow the lawn, wash the dishes, I even re-shingle the roof. If I’m good, she lets me ride her Harley. If I’m really good, she lets me ride her.

  I haven’t been so good lately.

  This morning Ginger finally drags home about ten o’clock. She’s wearing her favorite T-shirt. It’s red with big letters across her tits that read ‘I like to fuck.’ Talk about your red flags.

  “Where you been?” I ask.

  “Last time you stuck your nose in my business I broke it,” she says, crawling into bed and turning her back to me.

  I catch sight of that little birthmark on the inside of her thigh and my thinking gets all cloudy. I get in bed, reach over and caress her ass just the tiniest bit and she turns and slaps the shit out of me.

  “What the hell?!”

  “I’m tired of being touched,” she snaps. “Everybody’s always got their hands on me.”

  “Am I the only one who finds your T-shirt ironic?” I mumble.

  She whips the shirt off over her head, wads it up, and throws it in my face. “You like to fuck so much, you wear it,” she says, burying her face in the pillow.

  “I think your idea of much and my idea of much are two different things,” I say, crawling out of bed. I slip my jeans on over my boxers and a T-shirt over my wife-beater. I throw on my leather jacket and my boots. I have my trusty pocketknife in my front pocket, forty bucks in cash and my driver’s license. I pat my jacket pockets because I don’t go anywhere without my journal and my well-worn paperback, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

  I’m walking out of the room when Ginger leans up on one elbow and says, “If you’re going riding, bring her back with a full tank.”

  I nod goodbye to her nipple rings and walk out the door.

  There’s just something about the vibration and rumble of a motorcycle that lifts my spirits no matter how low they are. I’m flying down the highway at eighty miles per hour with my feet only three inches off the ground, the rising sun on my back, and chasing my own shadow. Ain’t nothin’ sweeter.

  I check over my left shoulder and swing into the passing lane. I open the throttle to ninety plus and breeze right by the semi-truck in the right lane. He honks at me as I whip by and I toss him a small wave before I edge back in his lane.

  I’m not a speed-aholic, I just like to go fast. I laugh a little at that thought. I’ve met many a drunk who says, “I’m not an alcoholic, I just like to drink.” Who knows, maybe I am a speed-aholic. Speed jolts me full of adrenaline and when I hear my heart pounding in my ears, I know I’m for sure alive. Besides, speed limits are just that—limits. Me and limits, we don’t get along so good.

  I like that ad that tells you to think outside the box. Life is too full of boxes as is. You watch TV, it’s a box. You go on the computer, it’s a box. Phones are boxes. A car is a box on four wheels. People go to work and sit in little cubicle boxes. Houses and offices and stores are just big boxes. When you die they stuff you in another box. A motorcycle is not a box. That’s what I like about them. Riding a motorcycle is life outside the box.

  I work on and rebuild old motorcycles. I find old pieces of junk and restore them. I don’t just put them back the way they were, I make them better. It’s not a great living, but it’s living the way I want. And how many people can say that?

  I have a car, too. It’s a necessity of life. You have to haul something somewhere or it’s raining, you have to drive a car. I own a 1976 black El Camino. I named her Hell Camino. She looks like a beater, but I rebuilt every little piece of her engine myself and she’s pristine.

  Two drops of cold rain splatter me in the face. I dump the throttle to sixty-five and scan the streets for any familiar landmarks. I really have no idea where I am. I’m not lost as far as general directions go, but still I don’t know exactly where I am. I take the next exit and plan on working my way back on surface streets and that’s when the rain blasts me from about three different directions all at once.

  That’s Oklahoma for you. If you don’t like the weather just wait a minute ’cause it’ll change. Right now half of Tulsa’s sunny, but the half I’m unlucky enough to be in is like being under a waterfall. And when you’re on a bike going sixty mph, it feels like a swarm of bees stinging you all at once.

  I notch down the gas even more and the wind blows me three feet to the left. I lean into the wind, guide the bike back over and hug the white stripe before it throws me back to the middle of the road. I must look that toy, the Weebles. I keep wobbling, but I don’t fall down.

  I scour the road ahead looking for a way to get out of this battering. I slide into the nearest parking lot and, of course, it turns out to be a Walmart.

  I kick the bike down right near the front in one of those spots where you’re only supposed to park if you have a sick kid and you’re getting them medicine, but who’s going to argue with me over whether I have a sick kid or not? I unzip my jacket and hold the sides up, scrunch my head down like a turtle and run right through the double doors of Big Blue. I stand over by the carts and shake myself off like a dog.

  Huddled directly across from me is a troop of green-clad Girl Scouts behind a folding table that’s loaded down with boxes of cookies. All their little faces are shut down and miserable- looking. They all stare at me with their little lifeless eyes and this one Girl Scout, the biggest, boldest one, waddles over to me, looks me up and down and asks in a dead voice, “You a woman or you a man?”

  I hold out the sides of my jacket, showing her my boobs, but she has the gall to look at my chest and make a face like she considers my wares negligible. Okay, so my boobs aren’t even big enough to be called tits, but being insulted by a ten-year-old still pisses me off.

  “Buy some Girl Scout cookies,” she orders.

  Now it’s my turn to look her up and down and wonder when did little kids start getting so fat? If you ask me, she’s not a very good advertisement for cookie sales. “Looks to me like you’ve been eating all the profits,” I say low.

  She sticks the toe of her brown loafer in the puddle around my feet and smears a streak across the floor. She cocks her head up at me and orders again, “I said, buy some Girl Scout cookies.”

  “Do you all take credit cards?” I ask, feeling guilty about my earlier remark.

  She snaps her head back real sassy-like and does that neck roll thing that black women are so good at and says, “What’m I gonna do with a credit card? Swipe it in my ass-crack?” She snaps her fingers at me for emphasis.

  I laugh. Good for her. She may be as wide as she is tall, but ain’t nobody going to pu
sh her around.

  I buy forty dollars worth of thin mints.

  Ten minutes later the sun is beating down bright and I’m back on my way, forty dollars poorer, but cookie rich. I’ve no more than ridden a couple of miles before the floodgates open back up and water is gushing out of the sky. I’m in the middle of open country on the outskirts of town and there’s nowhere to hide. Even the cows are circled together with their back ends pointing to the storm. Finally, I see a scraggly stand of trees alongside the road and figure I may as well hunker down there until the storm passes.

  I ease the bike over under the trees, cut the engine and slip the key in my front pocket. I un-ass and peer through the sheets of water. Damn. I’m in the middle of a cemetery. I don’t like cemeteries. Probably because there’s always dead people in them.

  I catch sight of a pole tent whipping in the wind about a hundred yards away. A bunch of people are herded under the tent, shoulder to shoulder, backs facing the wet. I un-bungee the boxes of cookies from the luggage rack, stuff them as best I can under my jacket and work my way through ankle deep mud all the way to the tent. The people all watch me approach with big eyes, but none of them dare say a word. I have to nudge and poke, muttering some polite ’scuse me’s before I make some room for myself. I’m about a head taller than everyone else here, what’s new, and a few people glance nervously at my dreadlocks. Which is exactly what I like about my locks; they give me a cushion of space around myself that most people are afraid to enter.

  Well, this is about the last place I thought I’d be when I started out this morning. Teetering on the edge of an open grave, my boots sliding in the mud, clutching the damn thin mints under my jacket, with all these social-climbing, golf-playing, country club martini-drinking fat-asses ogling me like I’m the weird one.

  I scan the crowd of faces and realize most of these people are my age, they just look way older. I don’t get it. Why do women in the midwest hit thirty and automatically lose all sense of style? It’s like hormones (or lack of) kick in and create an insatiable appetite for polyester flowers and capri pants. I pride myself on not having much fashion sense, but I don’t have to read any fashion magazine to know that capri pants do not make fat legs look thinner. And somebody should pull these women aside and tell them that more makeup doesn’t mean more beautiful. I once saw lipstick on a pig, but that didn’t make it pretty.

  I’m just wet and cold and pissed off. These people don’t deserve shit from me. I remind myself that these people are actually out there running in the rat race. I’m just sitting on the sidelines watching. Besides, somebody they loved died and here I am making fun of their damn clothes.

  I take a deep, ragged breath and try to think respectful thoughts.

  I overhear snippets of the conversation whirling around me: ‘Plop, plop, fizz, fizz,’ ‘Instant implosion,’ ‘Homecoming Queen.’ A paunchy man about half my height leers at me and for a moment I think he’s eying my boobs before I realize he’s actually drooling over my cookies. I edge over and nonchalantly hide my cookies behind the closest large woman. I glance toward the sky, looking for a break in the weather and hopefully a break in my future.

  And just like that...the rain stops, the clouds part and a golden spotlight of sunshine illuminates the most gorgeous woman I’ve ever seen.

  Well, okay, not really.

  It’s still raining and the woman I left behind in bed is actually way more hot. But there’s just something about this one... Maybe it’s the fact that she has long red hair the color of hot copper pipes right after you weld them together. Or maybe it’s her eyes which are more purple than blue like the color of pvc pipe glue. And her tits... She has them sitting right out there like a window display. (I have this weird thing where I nickname women’s tits after famous couples in history. So, right away I name this pair Sonny and Cher.)

  She’s standing out in the open a good twenty yards away from everyone under the tent, getting soaking wet and paying no never-mind to the foul weather. She sucks a long, hard drag off her wet cigarette and flicks it like an ace into the nearest puddle.

  Something about that little flicking gesture warns me she’s a woman to be reckoned with.

  Too bad she’s a hooker. I think that because she’s dressed like one. Not like a sleazy hooker, more like a hooker who takes pride in her work and respects the power of advertising. I’m thinking about how most hookers are really gay (so are strippers and playboy centerfolds. It’s true.) when I realize I’ve been gawking at Sonny and Cher for the last fifteen solid seconds. And the Hooker’s piercing me with her purple eyes like she knows the dirty thoughts I’m thinking.

  I offer her a small smile, but she tilts her head to the side a tiny bit and squints at me. She’s either nearsighted or thinks I’m weird.

  The double-wide woman I’ve been hiding behind turns around in her wet, wedgy shoes, slips in the mud and starts to topple. She makes a tiny little squeaky noise in her throat, “Eee eee eee...” She holds her arms out to the side and makes those little circles with her arms that most people do when they’re about to take a big fall. Her eyes meet mine and I recognize sheer panic. You know how you lean back in a chair on its hind legs and that split-second fear you have right before you fall over backward? That’s what her eyes tell me. I have a decision to make: help her out or save my own butt.

  I jump back and let her take the spill on her own.

  She kerplunks into the mud, splaying flat on her back and splashing water up knee-high. She wallows around, heaving her considerable bulk from side to side, trying to gain some momentum to get up before a paunchy man grabs her by her flailing hands and hefts her back upright.

  She leaves an angel imprint in the muddy ground.

  I laugh. God help me, I laugh. I can’t help it. Ever since I was a little kid, I get a kick out of people falling on their asses and I never grew out of it. I try to stifle my laughs by burying my face in my shoulder, but I end up snorting real loud and that just cracks me up harder.

  Another peal of laughter joins in concert with my own and I look over to where it’s coming from. The Hooker is laughing so hard she’s actually slapping her knee with one hand and pointing at the fat woman with the other. I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen somebody slap their knee when they laugh but, by God, she really is.

  Our eyes meet and this sends us both into fresh bouts of laughter. The Hooker laughs so hard, she doubles over, grabbing both her knees. I stop laughing. Not because it’s not funny anymore, but because when the Hooker bends over like that Sonny and Cher strain against her tight shirt, threatening to make an early entrance and I completely forget to laugh.

  “How dare you!” hisses a lady right at me, causing me to jump a little. “How dare you laugh at my sister’s funeral!”

  Oh, shit. Now I feel bad. “I’m sorry,” I mumble to the hissing lady. And just to show my remorse and goodwill, I hold out my cookie boxes and offer, “Want some cookies?”

  I hand the boxes over to couple of kids and they start ripping into them right away. I back away from the hard stares of the mourners, turn around and see the Hooker walking toward me.

  Women who are so self-assured in their sexuality thrill me and scare me at the same time. The scared part usually comes first. So, I hook my thumbs in my belt loops and try out my John Wayne stance. That doesn’t feel right and so I shift, hoping to strike a more Rebel Without a Cause pose.

  The Hooker’s high heels sink in the mud with each step and make slurping noises in the earth as she pulls them back out, but she doesn’t seem to notice. She lifts her knees higher in the air and keeps on marching.

  She stares straight at me and I get this eerie feeling that her stare is really a stab. I blink hard and look away. A spinning vertigo washes over me and I feel like I’m on a merry-go-round going much too fast. I inhale and hold my breath, hoping to God I don’t faint when she finally sucks her way over to me.

  When I open my eyes, she’s standing right in front of me wearin
g a little smirk at the corners of her mouth and for a long, slow second I’m lost in her perfume and in her long, red hair and in the little rivulets of rain dripping into her cleavage. She’s soaked through and through and cold, too, because her nipples are hard and aimed right at me. The logical part of my brain takes over and I say, “You’re wet.”

  She laughs in a throaty, unsettling way, looks like she’s about to say something, then takes it back. That’s when I get what I just said. I didn’t mean it that way, but I think that’s how the Hooker took it.

  I try to cover with a quick question, “You want a Girl Scout cookie?”

  She flashes her eyes at me and looks away. I guess that’s a no.

  “I’m not a real Girl Scout,” I blurt.

  She lights a cigarette, mumbles something I don’t quite catch, and hands me the lit cigarette with her lipstick marks on the butt. For some crazy reason I kind of like this and I put my lips right where her lipstick marks are.

  The first drag off the cigarette scorches my throat. I don’t usually smoke or drink or get high or anything anymore unless somebody hands it to me, but lately, it seems like people have been handing me lots of stuff.

  There’s an awkward pause and I take a few drags while pretending to watch the cattle graze on the cookies, but in reality I’m checking this woman out. She’s obviously bored and you can tell she’s somebody who doesn’t deal well with boredom. She’s got an entire animal print theme going on with her outfit, even the shoes, and I wonder what that means. Does it mean she has a wild side? Or does it mean if you get too close she’ll eat you alive? She feels me looking at her and tilts her chin up at me, looking my face over real careful before looking away again. I get a brief flash of something familiar, but there’s no way I’d have encountered this woman and not remember, so I just shrug it off.

  Another drag off the hot cigarette and I blurt, “I used to be a Girl Scout. But I got kicked out for eating a brownie.”

  She looks at me a little startled and before I know what I’m doing, I just keep blathering on and on. “Sorry. Bad joke. You know that little mechanism between your brain and your mouth that keeps you from blurting? I don’t have one.” I take another drag. “I think they call it Tourette’s.”