by J. J. Murray
The neighborhood around the Cube has a long and storied past but not much of a future. Davis Pizza used to crank out strange pizzas, even using peanut butter as a topping, but not many people ever went in there, because the weekly hotel next door became, well, a whorehouse. Young (and I use that term as loosely as they behave) ladies hang out behind the sliding glass doors of the hotel. Kind of reminds me of what I saw in the red-light district in Amsterdam, though those Dutch women were much hotter. I don’t know how many times I’ve whistled “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window” as I’ve passed by that hotel on the way to Ralph’s One-Stop to pay too much for beer.
I’m beginning to recognize these places. That nice-looking hotel on Williamson Road is a whorehouse? Here in Roanoke, Virginia, where the Bible Belt is always tightened to the very last hole? I’m finding this hard to believe, too.
The tattoo parlor that used to be next to Davis Pizza was once a booming business, as was America’s Cash Express, a check-cashing place. I’ll bet they were in business together. So many teenaged girls went first to the check-cashing place then on to the tattoo parlor to get pierced somewhere new: eyebrows, belly buttons, noses, and I’m sure even other more tender places. I’ve never understood that. Paying someone to give you pain.
You wouldn’t understand because you’re a man, and not much of one at that.
Wait a minute. I just paid for Beth’s meal. I’ve been pierced, too.
And no woman gets to see my tattoo until at least the sixth date. Actually, it’s more of a brand than a tattoo, forever preserved on my ass, courtesy of the delightful Private Sidney and her Golden Hot curling iron. “Turn around,” Sidney had said. Being naïve and dumb, I had turned around. And that shit had hurt. Twice she got me before I could wrestle that curling iron away. It’s faded some, but it still looks like an X on my left cheek. I’m a white boy with an X on my ass.
Charming. I’ll bet your doctor tells everyone about your behind.
I tiptoe down the linoleum-floored hallway, open the door to apartment #2, and enter as quietly as possible. As soon as I close the door with the tiniest little click, the door of the apartment across the hall slams opens, and I hear a knock. Stella must sit by that peephole all day. She needs to get cable or something.
“Mister?” Knock-knock. “Mister, have you seen my husband?”
“No,” I say through the door. I don’t look through my peephole at Stella’s face anymore. Very large pores and acne scars. Bags under her eyes. And she’s barely twenty. At least she didn’t bring her colicky baby, Tito Jr., this time.
“You sure?”
“Yes.”
“Okay.”
I look down at the two-by-fours I’ve had to pound into my door on the inside, praying that they’ll hold when her equally young husband, Tito, comes home from his drunk and tries to kick in the wrong door, looking for his Stella. It is one strange relationship. She looks for him all day, but when he comes home, she won’t open the door. And since Tito has no sense of direction and obviously can’t discern a number two from a number three when he’s tanked, he kicks in my door, shouting, “I loves ya, baby! Ya know I loves ya, baby!”
My neighbors across the hall: the happy couple.
And the author is going to bring Ty into this madhouse? I don’t think so!
I haven’t seen the man in #1 since he moved in, but I know he likes to order pizza. I trip over empty boxes that he just throws out into the hallway instead of carrying them to the Dumpster. Once I figured out that he never left his apartment—or ran much water for that matter, which is kind of gross—I took it upon myself to take out his trash.
My other neighbor: the unbathed garbage giver.
I look at the ceiling and hear my upstairs neighbors sloshing around in the tub again. Very thin walls and floors in the Cube. They can’t have much body hair left, the amount of time they spend squeaking around up there, and I’ll bet they never have to scrub the tub. One day I came home and found that a rectangle from my suspended ceiling had fallen to the floor, narrowly missing my La-Z-Boy, and a large puddle of water on my shiny gray carpet. I had then looked up through the ceiling into the eyes of one of the swimmers, who introduced himself as “Rob.”
“You okay down there?” Rob had asked.
“Uh, yeah,” I had said, as if being able to look through your own ceiling into the eyes of a man who humped his woman in a tub above your living room was a normal occurrence.
You have got to be kidding. This kind of thing doesn’t happen! This is getting to be like a TV sitcom.
“I’ll have this thing fixed and caulked in no time,” he had said.
You or your woman? I had thought at the time.
My upstairs neighbors: tub humpers.
This is so tasteless. Why would anyone buy this nonsense?
When I first moved in, I decorated as cheaply as possible, focusing first on my books. I used cinder blocks and two-by-fours for shelving, and over the past few years, I’ve added quite a few more levels. One day soon they’ll touch the ceiling. I don’t know how many books I own, but it has to number in the thousands. And unlike some people, I’ve read them all, some more than once. I don’t have them organized or anything anal like that. I just put them where they fit, and from the looks of things, I’ll need to get more cinder blocks in time for the holidays. For whatever reason, my family thinks that as a teacher I need more books to read. And because they’re all on the West Coast, and because they’re cheaper than me, they mail me books—book rate, of course.
Finally, Dan has something I can identify with. He reads and collects books, but being organized doesn’t make a person anal. My books are where they’re supposed to be.
Other than the La-Z-Boy, the books, a stereo with a turntable, a collection of records from when rap was young and contained no “bee-otches,” and a dusty thirteen-inch TV complete with rabbit ears antenna, there’s only an oak coatrack and a futon in the main room. No reason to be in here tonight. I have no one to squint at the TV with me, no one to help me warm up the futon.
Don’t try to make me like you, Dan Pace. So, you’re lonely. Big deal. Get over yourself.
I turn off the light to the main room and enter my kitchen/office. Instead of a kitchen table, I eat all my meals on an old cherry secretary, an antique with a drop-down desk. Not many women have had the privilege of eating on an authentic, century-old cherry secretary. It barely has room for a plate and a glass, and I have to eat the runny foods like Jell-O, mixed veggies, or anything with gravy first or the juices will run off the plate.
I’ve been planning to level it, but not tonight. Nothing is on the level tonight.
I may have to write a special letter to the publisher for even putting this crap—and it is crap—out there. No one on earth could live like this!
The sink holds one spoon, one knife, one fork, and one chipped china plate—as it should. Okay, it only holds those because they’re all I own. No sense in investing in more than I need, and I save a mint on dish liquid. I have one pot, one pan, and one dish towel, too. I am an army of one in the kitchen.
I have but one plant, a Ma Plub tree, which sits in the corner in a rattan basket next to the garbage can. It was a gift from Jewel over two years ago, and she told me that the Ma Plub tree has medicinal properties. “My mother’s people”—the Thai—“use it to treat diarrhea and stop bleeding.” How nice. I’ve been hoping that the tree would die a slow, horrible death. I don’t water it, haven’t replanted it, and haven’t done anything but curse at it. I even keep the kitchen window blind down at all times, yet there it is, flourishing, dropping leaves and small white flowers occasionally, sprouting fruit that I hurl at the alley wall. I’d offer it to Cat Stevens, but I don’t think she’s a vegetarian. I just don’t want to get rid of it in case Jewel should come back. That would be the first thing she’d notice. I know she’s not coming back, but if she did, I’d take her back in a second, even regive her the ring she threw at me.
A
fter I cussed her out for giving it back in the first place, of course.
The Kelvinator rattles on as I turn off the kitchen light and enter my bedroom, tossing my coat onto the king-sized bed. I don’t have mirrors on the headboard. I have more class than that. But because the room is so small, I have to edge around the bed to get to the walk-in closet and bathroom. And it isn’t as if I’ve been very busy on that bed. Yet, whenever a woman sees it for the first time, she automatically assumes that I’m some sort of a Rico Suave Don Juan out for a piece.
If a woman can stand, first, going to the Cube; second, walking down that nasty hallway; third, seeing your broken-down front door; fourth, marveling at your crummy book collection on cinder blocks; fifth, not laughing at your bachelor’s kitchen—if she can stand all that, she deserves you, Dan Pace.
“So I’m an active sleeper,” I tell them, but they don’t buy it.
And neither do I, and after my review, neither (I hope) will a lot of people.
I tried to sleep in a single bed when I first moved in, but I kept falling out. Living in a tent in Saudi messed me up that way. I need space when I sleep.
After peeling down to my underwear and sliding into bed, I pick up my well-thumbed copy of the collected works of William Shakespeare, hold it out in front of me, and drop it into my lap. It opens to Act I, scene five of Twelfth Night. A romantic comedy. How fitting. I’ve been using Willie’s writing as a kind of horoscope ever since I read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn when I was a kid. I close my eyes and play “eeny-meeny-miney-mo” with the pages, ending on the right. I scan down the page looking for anything remotely relevant to my day.
And I get an eyeful.
In this scene, Olivia, a countess, is unveiling her face to Viola, a young lady posing as a young man. Willie’s on tonight. A countess and a she-boy. Shakespeare and his cross-dressers. Anyway, Viola the she-boy describes Olivia’s face as “beauty truly blent” yet says the countess is “the cruell’st she alive.”
The cruelest “she” alive, her beauty truly blended. Here’s Jewel Mekla Manowong once again, that ungodly mixture of Thai and black, that marriage of Southeast Asian and African that made her the most exquisite, most exotic woman I’ve ever known. Her mother named her Mekla after a Thai goddess who used a crystal ball to blind Ramasura, her almost lover. I guess that makes me Ramasura the Second. Mekla soon became “Jewel” once she and her mother moved to Cleveland without her father, a young American soldier who left Thailand in the early seventies without even knowing he had a daughter.
I keep reading and see the countess listing her features: “two lips, indifferent red…two grey eyes…”
Jewel’s eyes weren’t gray. They were so dark a blue they were almost purple. Maybe Willie is referring to Cat Eyes. Her eyes were light, but were they gray? I should have stared longer.
The word “rudeness” jumps out at me from Viola’s lips: “The rudeness that hath appeared in me have I learned from my entertainment. What I am, and what I would, are as secret as maidenhead; to your ears, divinity, to any other’s, profanation.”
Yeah, I was kind of rude, staring at Cat Eyes’ legs like that. She didn’t seem to mind; I mean, she nodded in my general direction, right?
No. You are mistaken. Though I kind of like an intelligent, well-read man, this man is too freaky and too flaky for me. Using Shakespearean plays as a horoscope? Give me a break!
I reread the page and realize that Willie’s nailed me again. Here’s Jewel, Beth the she-boy, and Cat Eyes staring up at me from a 400-year-old play. William Shakespeare was a clairvoyant.
I shut the book and turn out the light, juggling three women in my mind, none of whom I have an ice-cream sandwich’s chance in hell of ever getting with. Jewel’s gone, end of story. When a woman says, “Don’t call or write to me or try to contact me ever,” and throws an engagement ring at you, she means it. Beth’s gone, too, but she was gone long before I met her. When a woman wears flannel shirts and boots and hangs out at Hooters, she means business, and it doesn’t involve men. And Cat Eyes—I guess she’s long gone as well. As if she’d ever think of even speaking to me after I stared so long and hard at her legs, nodded at her, and waved at her.
I hear Cat Stevens howling away beside my bedroom window.
“I know what you mean, girl,” I whisper. “I know what you mean.”
And a few seconds later, I hear the sounds of wood splintering in my living room, a Hispanic voice shouting, “Stella, ya know I loves ya, baby!”
The next howl I hear is my own.
Instead of reading Ty’s next installment, I go to my library and get out my thesaurus. I look up “ridiculous” and find “ludicrous, preposterous, absurd, silly, nonsensical, farcical, foolish, daft, strange, illogical, meaningless, bizarre, incongruous, outrageous, outlandish, unreasonable, unbelievable, laughable.” I circle the words with the most negative connotations: “preposterous,” “foolish,” “illogical,” “meaningless,” and “laughable.”
I think I’ve found all the words for my first sentence of this travesty of a novel.
I also write down “travesty.”
Time to give Ty her last chance to save this novel.
4: Ty
Ooh, shoot, these contacts are driving me crazy.
I knew it! Ty is fake, too. D. J. Browning, you’re making this too easy to hate!
I can’t wait to get home and take them out. I just can’t believe I left my rewetting drops at home, knowing good and well that I’m going to a bar where the cigarette smoke clouds are heavier than the ones outside dropping rain by the bucketsful. The clouds outside are not the only things dropping rain. My right eye is so irritated it’s raining buckets of tears, thus the heavy foot on the gas pedal. I normally try to be extra careful driving in the rain, but right now, I’m having an eye crisis.
With my right eye closed and tearing, I make a sharp left onto Summit Hills Lane. I drive about another hundred feet and make a right into my driveway, hop out of the Beamer, hit the alarm, and race up to the front door of my town home, being careful to keep my mouth closed so I don’t drop or swallow the contact lens that I rubbed out of my eye on the way home.
After slamming the front door closed, tossing my purse on the sofa, and kicking off my shoes, I hit the light switch on the wall and run upstairs to the bathroom. I squirt some solution into the contact lens case and put the lens from my mouth into the solution first. After removing the left lens from my eye and placing it into the solution, I throw myself on my queen-sized bed, close my eyes, and cover them with a cool, damp washcloth from the bathroom. It’s ironic that I paid four grand to have Lasik eye surgery to get perfect vision and to get rid of the hassle of contacts, yet I still wear them. No, it’s not that the surgery was a bust. I just want to have a different eye color to match my mood and sometimes my outfits. I wonder how I would look with blue eyes. Probably like a damn fool.
But that guy at Hooters wears them well. Dan has some of the bluest eyes I have ever seen. They are a Pacific blue, just beautiful. They had to have been contacts. So at least he has good taste in eye color, but that outfit he was wearing wasn’t hitting on anything. I mean, the flannel shirt he had on, I wouldn’t let my scarecrow wear that out for Halloween. It was red, which clashed with his beautiful blues, and the stripes, checks, or whatever you want to call them, were black, white, and yellow. The black corduroys he wore were a little too faded and badly worn. I could see the wallet outline in his back pocket, and from the looks of his knees, he must spend a lot of time on them, hopefully begging and praying that the fashion police will come and put him out of his misery. And, of course, everything he wore was in dire need of an iron. I chuckle a little, thinking about what a mess he was.
Then I frown because I can’t believe I’m at home thinking about this man.
I can’t believe it either. Dan is a mistake in so many ways, and anyone reading this book is making a mistake. I know I’m supposed to suspend my disbelief, but there are limits. This
book is an insult to anyone’s intelligence.
I add “insult to intelligence” to my list of synonyms for “ridiculous.”
Speaking of man, I notice the light on my Caller ID unit is flashing, which probably means that Charles has called. I check the box and notice that both he and Kevin have called. I also see that there is a message waiting. I hit the speaker button on the phone base and say, “Check messages,” and the phone dials my voice-mail service.
“Welcome to Verizon’s voice-messaging service. Please enter your pass—”
I interrupt by putting in my pass code.
“Two new messages—”
I interrupt again by pressing one to listen to my messages. “First new message, today, eight-fifteen P.M…. Hi, Aunt Ty, it’s me, Kendra, and I made the AB honor roll at school. I even got an A in Mr. Pace’s class! When are you gonna come take me shopping again? I love you. Bye.” My niece and her Mr. Pace. The only thing she says about school is Mr. Pace this or Mr. Pace that.
No…way. Dan Pace? This is how they’re going to meet? As if this would ever happen in real life! The author needs a reality check. I mean, it’s almost like having two people meet in a library to start some romance!
It never happens!
Wait. Didn’t Uri and Lara meet by chance in a library in Dr. Zhivago? Oh, and didn’t Streisand and Redford meet in a library in The Way We Were? Hmm. I mean, I guess it works for white folks. The only black librarian I’ve ever seen in a movie was in that Men of Honor flick I saw a few years ago. And she was only part-time, helping Cuba Gooding pass his tests. Only in the movies. That kind of stuff would never happen for me.