But, of course, I over compensated on the shifting of weight, lost my footing, and promptly fell down on Sara’s suitcase in my left hand, the duffel bag coming to rest on my crotch. I saw Flukey, by my feet, and used my toes to kick him to within arm’s reach. I grabbed him and started the process of standing up when the man, wearing nothing but a sheen of sweat and his underpants, walked up to me.
Jesus, what the hell is wrong with me? Why can’t I just do things like normal people?
“What in the fuck is going on?” he asked, staring down at me.
Well, sir, I’m just some guy lying on your hotel room floor, holding a stuffed bear to my chest.
“I, uh, thought this was my room,” I managed to say.
“This ain’t your room, goddammit,” he said, sounding more pissed off. Judging by his state of undress and his sweatiness, and the distinct sound of an unseen lighter flicking in the back, he had been involved with some company, and I suppose I would have been pretty pissed off, too.
“Sorry. I’m getting out now,” I said. I suddenly had the wise idea of standing up first, then picking up the bags and Flukey.
It worked, leaving me to wonder why I hadn’t been able to pull it off before. Why did everything have to turn into an ordeal with me?
I gathered myself and walked back out into the hallway, feeling amazingly stupid and embarrassed. Behind me, the man’s voice loudly echoed down the hallway, “You stay the fuck away from my room, asshole!” The door slammed shut.
Oh, well, at least that’s over.
I turned right, heading back toward 234, and I made the wise decision to knock on the door this time. As I looked up, I saw Sara poking her head out of a door, looking at me, bewildered.
“Adam, what’s going on?” she asked. “Did I hear someone yelling and cursing?”
“I, uh, had the wrong room,” I said, walking toward Sara, my smiling, beautiful beacon, and the correct room, which turned out to be 240. I would have been wrong either way.
“You’re so silly,” she laughed, and grabbed Flukey from between my arm and my ribs. “I told you room two-forty, and you repeated it back to me.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know,” I sighed. I dropped the bags on the giant, king-sized bed, considered telling Sara about the underwear man, and decided to just keep my mouth shut. I’d just have to make sure that we didn’t spend any sort of time in the hallway, other than walking in or out. Rapidly.
I flopped down next to the bags and lit a cigarette as Sara dug her toothbrush and toothpaste from her suitcase. She found the items, and walked into the bathroom.
To take care of those Sara teeth, I thought to myself, smiling.
“What do you want to do?” she called from the bathroom.
I grabbed the remote control from the nightstand and flipped on the TV. “Whatever,” I called to her, flipping aimlessly through the channels. “Think we could take a nap first?”
She poked her head out from the bathroom, her toothbrush in her right hand, white foamy toothpaste lining her lips, and said, “Hy oo ahha oo ah?”
I used my inner toothpaste-speak translation guide and told her, “I wanna do that because I’m tired from that long, long drive.”
She disappeared in the bathroom, where I heard her spit and gargle a few times. She came out of the bathroom smiling.
“Minty fresh for you again, dear,” she said, sliding onto the bed next to me, giving me a small kiss on the lips. I moved over to make room for her, and she grabbed the remote from my hand.
“No television,” she ordered, and turned off the Weather Channel.
“Okay, then, just a nap,” I said, quickly flipping over, turning my back to her, being an idiot.
I had just started fake snoring when she pinched my butt, causing me to jump, and said, “Not so fast, buddy. I think you owe me something.”
I flipped back over to face her, already feeling my adrenaline pumping with excitement. Though I knew exactly what she was talking about, I allowed the idiot demon to possess me, and I played dumb.
“What? I paid for lunch at the casino. Did the room cost more than we had planned on?” I raised my eyebrows, looking genuinely confused. “You know, I’m not made of money, Sara. Remember, I was born to poor sharecroppers…” I trailed off, unable to continue without laughing.
She laughed and out came the come hither look again. She reached to her waist and started unbuttoning her shorts. Other parts of my body began to feel the excitement.
“Don’t play dumb with me, Mister Fluke,” she said, kicking her shorts off so hard that they landed on top of the television. She leaned over and turned the lamp off, sending us into darkness. In the darkness, she grabbed the front of my t-shirt and pulled me closer and said, “You know exactly what I’m talking about.” I could smell the toothpaste on her breath.
“Okay, jeez,” I moaned, as though it were all sorts of trouble. “I guess I can help you out, if it’ll make you happy.”
“It’ll make us both happy, trust me,” she said. Her warm legs pressed against mine, and I started kissing her, moving south.
I bet I’ll be happier.
Four hours later, we sat in a little Cajun restaurant in the Quarter. Neither one of us were all that hungry, after our slight binge at the casino that afternoon, so we just ordered a huge plate of spicy Cajun fries and beers. Most of our efforts had been focused on the beers, and I made the occasional joke to Sara how my beer money fantasy had come true.
“Hey, Sara, think we could have the bathtub filled with beer?”
Several hours were spent playing, napping, dreaming, and, well, menstruating.
After I returned the favor I owed Sara, which I did with such vigor and passion that she was forced to grab a fistful of my hair and pull me away from her, both of our bodies soaked with sweat, we smoked cigarettes in the dark, and then drifted off to sleep for approximately an hour and a half.
In that time, I had a dream that Flukey and I were back in room 224, only this time, instead of panicking on the floor, terrified of being beaten or shot, we were sitting in chairs around the man’s bed. The man and his female companion, who sort of reminded me of Heather due to a similar hairstyle, were lying on the bed naked, while Flukey and I each had our own chairs, facing the bed from the foot corners.
We were both smoking cigarettes, and by both, I mean Flukey and I. He was puffing away, with a strange enthusiasm…of course, any enthusiasm on a stuffed bear’s part while smoking would be strange, I suppose, but he seemed very into it, even for a stuffed bear.
Flukey and I were talking while the man and woman on the bed were kissing, their naked bodies pressed against each other. The beautiful thing about dreams is that this seemed like the most normal situation in the world for me.
“You know, Adam, it’s really not so bad,” Flukey said to me, in a very deep, bassy voice that you wouldn’t expect from a small teddy bear. He tapped his ashes over the arms of the chair onto the carpet.
“What’s not so bad, Flukey?” I asked.
“That,” he said, motioning to the couple on the bed, who continued kissing and rubbing hands over each other’s bodies.
“No, I don’t suppose it is,” I agreed. I leaned forward a bit, after noticing marks on the bottoms of the naked couple’s feet.
On the bottom of each of their right feet, there was a stamped UPC code, like they put on products in the grocery store. They were identical, from what I could tell. Beneath each of the UPC codes, stamped in stenciled characters was a red letter “I,” just the right shade of red as to be considered scarlet.
“Flukey, are those scarlet letter ‘I’s?” I asked.
“Yep, they are, Adam. And, it’s not so bad, is it?” he turned his shiny black plastic button eyes to me, and I sensed he was trying to convince me more than query me.
I awoke in a start from the dream, confused, as I always am when I have strange dreams. I looked over at Sara, barely able to make out her form. She was sleeping soundly in her panti
es and t-shirt, serene and peaceful looking, probably not dreaming, I guessed.
Okay, I thought to myself after seeing Flukey sitting on the dresser next to the television. Maybe there are still issues.
It was pitch black in the room, other than one thin slit of sunlight, which sliced its way between the not-quite closed curtains. I fumbled for the pack of cigarettes on the nightstand and lit one, smoking quietly and thinking about the dream.
A scarlet letter I. I had seen enough movies in my life to know the importance of a dream sequence, often as some sort of meter of the dreamer’s sanity. Although, in the movies, the complex mysteries involved with dreams were normally played down to make it easier for the average moviegoer to comprehend, so as to not interrupt the popcorn munching or making out. In real life, dreams were rarely that obvious.
I guess I had dreamed up my own scarlet letter, thinking of the book by Nathaniel Hawthorne. I had read the book for my sophomore English class in high school, and was bored terribly through most of it. (I struggled when reading most of the 19th century “classics,” and out of frustration, often railed out against what society had deemed “classics.” I mean, could it really be a classic if all it did was torture high school English students?)
At the time, I had trouble caring about Hester’s plight. The language used, the old style English, made it virtually inaccessible to me, and it wasn’t a fun read. In fact, I probably wouldn’t remember anything about it at all, had it not been for the movie version that was made out of the book.
Her scarlet letter was an ‘A’ for adulterer, since she had screwed around on her hubby a bit. Those uptight ass-heads made her sew the big letter on her clothes, so she would be publicly shamed, which, admittedly was a pretty good idea…I mean, how many people would be proud of wearing a scarlet ‘R’ on their clothes if they had been convicted of rape, for example?
That was neither here nor there, though…I had my own issue to deal with, my own scarlet letter. I started trying to solve my subconscious’ riddle of what my scarlet ‘I’ could be.
Ignorance? Idiocy? Inanity?
Those traits were definitely Fluke-isms; I had plenty of all three. But, they didn’t quite seem right. Those were obvious traits of mine, and I was fairly certain my subconscious was more creative than that.
Insanity? Incontinence?
I felt a little insane sometimes, but never more serious than moments like falling over in strange men’s hotel rooms, or when the sensory overload at carnivals became too much to process (I think that hearing “You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet” about forty times in one night over a Tilt-A-Whirl’s giant speakers would be enough to push most people to the edge). I doubted I was more insane than your average disgruntled-pizza-guy-turned-madly-in-love bookstore clerk. As far as incontinence went, yes, I had problems sometimes with the famous Fluke bowels, but they have remained mostly under my control.
The next ‘I’ word that skated across my brain did so rapidly, without much warning, as it had at one recent beer-and-oyster-filled afternoon at PJ’s:
Incest.
It didn’t carry the effect it had that first time, that sucker punch effect, but it was still disturbing. It yanked me out of my perfect little road trip mood that I had been in, and brought me back to the reality and the reason behind the road trip.
I decided to let it go, as much as was possible, anyway, and not worry about it. It had the potential to make me crazy if I thought about it too much. And there was no point to feeling crazy when not a thing had been proven.
We’ll find out soon enough though, I thought, stubbing out my cigarette. Hopefully.
I went to the bathroom and flipped on the light, intent on washing my face. After the initial, near-blinding glare of the fluorescent lights, my eyes adjusted, and I reached down to turn the faucet on.
And that’s when I noticed the red stains on my fingers.
Huh?
I glanced up into the mirror, ignoring the twisted up hair on my head, the crust in the corner of my left eye, and focusing on my chin and cheeks.
Stained red, just like my fingers. A faded red, smeared down my chin, off the corners of my mouth, like I had had on too much lipstick and tried to smear it off.
Or, like you’ve been eating blood, Adam-boy.
“Fuck!” I hissed.
I grabbed the small bar of hotel soap, tearing off the paper, and turning the hot water on full blast. Furiously, I worked up a thick lather and washed my hands and face, scrubbing with my hands, then grabbing a washrag from the silver rack over the sink. Once my face was clean, I worked on my fingers and nails.
My toothbrush was still in the suitcase, so I grabbed the complimentary bottle of mouthwash, and poured half of the blue liquid into my mouth. The minty, mediciney taste immediately burned my mouth, but I rinsed thoroughly, gargling and spitting. After repeating the process, I rinsed with water, and inspected my face and hands, making sure I was blood-free.
Jesus Christ, man. How’d you miss that one, Adam-boy?
It had been dark; I hadn’t seen–or noticed–anything out of the ordinary. Of course, when I was involved with that activity in particular, I always zoned out, so busy concentrating on what I was doing, determined to perform my best. I had zoned myself right out of the fact that Sara had started her period.
Blech.
Once I worked through the preliminary issue of cleaning myself, then the insight of the source of the blood, I went through a brief inner dialogue, deciding how I felt about the knowledge. Deep down, I felt a tentative sense of relief.
Does that make me an asshole? I asked my reflection in the mirror.
The question hung out in the air, unanswered, and I went back into the room to wake Sara up.
I sat on the bed next to her, and gently shook her. Her eyelids lifted halfway, and I said, “Sara, honey, wake up.”
Her voice, all mumbles and cottony sounding, came out. “Did we sleep too long?”
“No, no, that’s not it,”
“Okay,” she mumbled. She lay completely still, and her eyes closed again. I was just about to shake her again when she reached her fingertips to her eyes, inhaled deeply through her nose, and said, “I’m awake.”
I turned the lamp on and asked her, “Are you with me now?”
“Yeah,” she said, nodding with her fingers still pressed against her eyes, moving in small circles, like she was trying to massage her eyeballs awake. “I’m here, honey.”
“Okay, here’s what I want you to do.”
She moved her fingers and opened her eyes, allowing her hands to drop on the bed at her sides. She looked at me sleepily, and I realized how sexy she was when she first woke up. I had seen it countless times by now, but was continually and pleasantly surprised.
“I want you to go to the bathroom and check your…umm…” I fumbled, not knowing how to put it.
“My what?” she sat up.
“Your, um, self,” was the only thing I could come up with. She appeared confused, so I tried again. “Your parts.”
Wow, that’s classy, Adam-boy. Parts? Why not just tell her to check her meat curtains? Or tell her that her junk is bleeding?
Articulation: not always my strong suit.
“My parts?” she knew what I was referring to and stood up, her hand moving to her crotch region. “Was something wrong down there? You didn’t—“
“No, no, just go in the bathroom, Sara,” I said.
She walked into the bathroom, wavering slightly, holding her hand slightly out for balance, in the way that people do when they first wake up and are a little confused and fuzzy. It was cute, I thought, watching her.
There was no sound for several seconds. I was about to call out to her and make sure she hadn’t fallen back to sleep when she called out, “Adam, honey, can you go into the zipper pocket inside my purse and bring me a tampon, please?”
I did as I was told.
****
To say that our moods were different after our b
loody encounter would be an understatement. While we were both willing to face the music and be responsible adults, neither of us were, in reality, ready to be parents.
We talked about our earlier discovery while sitting in the restaurant, both of us haltingly agreeing with the general sense of relief that the other admitted to, feeling each other out, until we reached a point where we just let our individual worries about the other’s fragility go, and the dinner ended with both of us happy as hell that “Aunt Flow” decided to visit.
The night had taken on a decidedly festive aura for us, what with the casino winnings and Aunt Flow. New Orleans was a welcome sight to our eyes. Without a fertilized egg lurking within Sara’s depths we had no reason to go easy on drinking was what I thought to myself as we embarked from the hotel.
“I think we should head to Pat O’s first,” she told me as we rounded the corner on to Bourbon Street. “I like their Hurricanes.”
“Am I going to have to carry you back to the hotel, Sara?”
“Definitely,” she replied. She laughed then, and her cheeks got just the slightest bit of color in them with her excitement. I loved this woman, and I would have gone anywhere in the world she wanted.
“Then Pat’s it is.”
We made our way through the throngs of people slowly, hollering at each other to be heard. The city was as alive as ever, even though there were no festivals or holidays that I was aware of. People walked around with strings of beads hanging from their necks, some small, some huge, all wildly colored, and most likely acquired through the display of various body parts. We checked out the people that passed us by, and Sara and I exchanged knowing looks of humor at many of them. Transvestites, men in drag, people in costumes. A man on a unicycle came dangerously close to hitting us as he worked his way down the street and we laughed. Eat your heart out Barnum & Bailey, I thought to myself. I wouldn’t have been surprised if I had seen a trapeze, strung across the old buildings, with people doing acrobatics in the air above the crowd.
Nothing would have shocked me in New Orleans.
Fluke Page 17