“Are you okay?” she asks, and her voice has lost its timidity. She sounds like another person entirely—her voice is almost husky and somewhat out of control. I fake a casual attitude, but inside, my soul is whipping like a flag in a gale.
“Yeah, I’m good,” I lie.
“I’m glad,” she says, but the words have more attached to them than if she were merely pleased about my current state of mind. She moves into the room and closes my door. Oh yeah, there is waaaaaay more going on here.
“How’s Jo—” I begin.
“She’s sleeping,” she interrupts and moves farther inside the room.
Okay, I’m seriously in over my head.
There is that pregnant pause again as we face off where the train honks and the cold coyote calls, etc., etc.
Then she reaches up behind her back and I hear a long zipperunzipping sound. It’s almost comical, it’s so loud and so blatant. But I am not laughing. Not at all. I go cold . . . hot . . . I don’t even know anymore.
Her scrubbed, Reverend’s-wife dress falls to the floor and she is completely naked underneath. She’s not even wearing some mildly modest underwear, a petticoat or some unnamed and secret church garment à la the Mormons. Nothing. She is BUTT NAKED!!! Although I am confused, nervous, and scared, Woody is paying serious attention and she seems to sense this. A slight smile—one could actually say a “devilish smile”—curves one corner of her now quite moist mouth.
I have never seen a live, completely naked, full-grown woman before and most certainly not in my own bedroom. I am in awe. She’s frigging naked!!! In my room!!! With me!!! Even as freaked-out as I am I take note of her attributes. She has very white, almost translucent skin. Her frame is thin and her breasts are only slightly larger than mine, but they are larger, so I note this as a major plus, now that I’m a man of the world! There is a thick, dark patch of pubic hair between her pale thighs that kind of scares me, but I finally learn what the phrase “the carpet doesn’t always match the drapes” means. Blond hair, dark pubes. Noted.
As she comes closer and sits on my bed, I realize I have been holding my breath since she entered the room.
This is no longer the demure, numinous acolyte I thought was tending to my sister. She is now a supreme, fire-breathing, chest-heaving succubus intent on, apparently, seducing me. Instead of her usual awkward sideways glances, she is staring right into my eyes. Through my eyes. It’s pretty intense. And freaky.
Her hand goes under the covers and finds that Woody has been paying very, very rapt attention to the proceedings. She leans in and kisses my neck, then slides the covers down, climbs up onto the bed, and straddles my hips, handing Woody a skilled shiatsu at the same time. I’m thinking this woman has some serious talents that her ecclesial community may not be aware of. I feel her naked skin against MY naked skin. I have NO idea what to do or what is going on, but she does. “Am I about to actually get laid??” is the only thought I can register as my head swirls and I feel the pressure and weight of her body on mine. I watch, absolutely flabbergasted as she reaches between her legs, takes authoritative hold of the Woodman and, saints be praised, guides him up into the saddle like a champ. She moans and begins to ride me up and down, eyes closed, head swaying back and forth, and I hear her muttering softly, breathlessly. And what I hear is, unbelievably, “. . . She played the whore in the land of Egypt and lusted after her paramours there, whose members were like those of donkeys and whose emissions were like that of stallions . . .” and other crazy shit I never even knew was in the Bible. She is reciting it all from memory between gasps, sighs and whimpers as she rocks her hips back and forth. It is a heady cocktail for yours virginally.
I don’t yet realize what it means but she is as wet as a Vietnamese monsoon down there and Woody throws his nut after a dozen or so strokes, such is the inexperience of youth. It is a magical moment. Yes those words actually form in my brain as I orgasm for the second time under someone else’s power. “Whoa!” is pretty much all I can squeak out verbally. The Reverend’s wife—should I call her Virginia now?—seems to sense I can do no more (at least not right away) and disconnects us. She leans in and with that weird husky voice I don’t recognize whispers in my ear, “This is just between us, okay? No one else needs to know.”
“Uh-huh!” Again, all I can manage.
She rises silently, dresses quickly, and is gone out of my room before I even land back on planet earth. Un-spanking-believable. There is a moment of rustling, a chair squeaks, a sigh, a beat, and then in her original voice (the one the Reverend’s wife usually uses when she isn’t naked) I hear her once again begin strafing my sweet sister’s brain with the “non-rude” verses of the Bible.
I lie there listening, trying to piece together how this could all possibly have happened. And it is, for me, another good, hard, and permanent tie to sex and religious freakdom. A further melding of the crash, heat, and intoxicating power of the forbidden. An intense fettering of aberrant sexual ties to organized faith.
Amen, Sister.
God
At one, as the OSB is, with the universe, he/she can simultaneously experience the methane hydrate ice volcanos on the high plains of Kwoffle 5 and the atmospherically condensed and precipitated moisture falling on a side street in Hollywood, Earth. “All right!” thinks the OSB to his/herself. “Everything’s moving along nicely.”
Bobby
We are all squished into my super-lame rent-a-car because it has now started to rain. Alice with her hyperactive, forbidden-fruit hotness alongside me in the front seat while the behemoth takes up most of the back. It’s a small, low-end-model Kia, and Goliath’s knees almost touch the roof. I think momentarily of my ex, driving around in my/our/her C class Mercedes (possibly with a staggeringly hot guy resting his brawny and restlessly roving hand on her upper thigh) and I get momentarily deeply depressed. So I look over at Alice, the alluring human Prozac.
“I just realized I don’t know your last name,” I say apropos of nothing.
“It’s Young. Alice Young.” She turns to our titanic new friend and extends a hand. He takes it in his giant paw. “I am Lexington Vargas. It’s very nice to meet you, Miss Young.” He seems less like a homicidal maniac cannibal and more like a fat Hispanic house cat right now.
“I’m Bobby Cotton,” I conclude the introductions. “Can we see your book?” Lexington Vargas hands his copy to me. Same cover, same title. I open it to the first page and there, in a familiar hand, is indeed a phone number. “Did you call it?” I ask. Really, where do you start with this?
“Yeah,” he answers and briefly regards the skunk stripe down the center of my head.
“Did you reach anyone?”
“I did,” answers Lexington Vargas as he tugs on a long, snow-white, Shirley Temple–like curl that has been tucked behind his ear till now, to let it hang free in all its Ten Commandments glory, no longer lost amidst his quite prodigious perm.
“And . . . ?” I ask. Dude, it’s like pulling teeth.
“A voice said, Lexington, go get yourself a cup of java,” is his reply.
“That’s it?” I feel instantly way more significant than I truly should, given that I had a fairly lengthy though extremely weird conversation with the entity we think we have identified as God. But then I realize that God didn’t mess with this Vargas guy like he/she did with me. And actually, now I come to think of it, he/she seems to have taken great pleasure in wigging me out. But Lexington Vargas is fairly okay with the fact that he might have talked to possibly God.
“The voice also told me a couple of things that happened when I was a kid back in Mexico that I’d forgotten about. Stuff no one else really knows. It scared me a little,” he continues. “But it made me think it was legit.”
Alice and I are waiting for more.
“So, I went out into the night and started looking for a coffee joint,” he says, slightly wonkily.
Alice gives me a furtive sideways look that if you weren’t paying attention you mi
ght have missed.
“I didn’t really know where I was going so I got on a bus, walked, got on another bus, walked some more, got a ride, walked again, and ended up in the same place you both did. I was sitting there wondering what the hell—excuse my language, ma’am—I was doing there and then I seemed to tune in to the two of you talking. And when you, Miss Young, pulled out the same book I have, it all made sense. Well, not really, but kind of.” He finishes with a loud sigh and in the close confines of the small Korean auto his breath is quite stinky and almost asphyxiating.
“Can you drive me home?” Lexington Vargas asks.
“Where do you live?” I answer distractedly as I whip out my cell phone and light it up. I have a new number in front of me and I intend to see who is on the other end of the line now that the number I have is not available from my calling area and if I feel I have reached this recording in error I should check the number and try my call again.
“La Crescenta.”
“Where’s that?”
“Just past Glendale.”
“Seriously? That’s like an hour and a half away! It’s—” I look at the illuminated clock on the dashboard of the death trap known as the Kia—“almost two in the morning.”
Alice finally speaks. “I think you guys are focusing on the wrong fucking things.”
I sense a stiffening of Lexington Vargas’s body that intimates he is not used to a woman with a potty mouth. I, on the other hand, knowing that she’s still connected to the Nunnery or whatever it’s called, am exceedingly aroused by it. She is oblivious to both our reactions.
“Obviously we were meant to meet. Maybe we should try to figure out why,” she says with some vexation.
I see her point. I think so does Lexington Vargas. He sighs again. We hold our breath and I crack a window.
Reading off the inside cover of our brand-new acquaintance’s copy of the book, I begin furiously dialing with loud beep, beep, bippity, beeps echoing around the inside of the plastic car while the face of my phone flashes like a crack-crazy munchkin’s discotheque. I am calling God. Yes sir, I am. Possibly. Alice reaches over and smacks the front of my phone closed to disconnect the call. (Yep, I ended up with this cheesy cell phone because my ex, who is probably delta-deep in the throes of passion at this moment with Mr. Studly Roving Hands, took my new iPhone, too.)
“Wait a minute,” says Alice, the burning Prioress. Okay she may not actually be a Prioress, but I am in love with all those intensely religious and sanctified words, names, and phrases. “Let’s discuss this before you place any more calls, okay?”
It’s a fair request, and I concede, although I’m thinking she must be on fire to talk to God, I mean considering her vocation, even as up in the air as it may be at this point.
Just then, as if in answer, the heavens open up with a muffled, rolling detonation and a very rare burst of Los Angeles–based thunder echoes over the Hollywood Hills as the rain truly starts to come down in earnest. Regrettably, to keep dry, I roll up the car window, hoping Lexington Vargas has no more sighing or serious exhaling to do. I can at least introduce him to humanity’s finest invention for the single man, the breath mint. I begin searching the cheesy polymer center console in the Kia for the Listerine tab dispenser I know I have. It’s amazing how at great and meaningful moments I can only focus on trivialities and insignificant shit. An avoidance mechanism, possibly, or could it be that I just don’t like funky breath? Nope, it’s probably avoidance—and/or my ADD. I do have that in spades.
“Has anyone actually read this book?” asks Alice, holding up Lexington Vargas’s copy, and I stop my rummaging for the mints, such is the obvious yet totally overlooked import of her question.
“No,” says I.
“No,” says Lexington Vargas.
“Yeah, me neither, but don’t you think we should at least check it out?” It’s a legitimate query from Alice.
Lexington Vargas opens his mouth and we instinctively flinch. Thankfully he does this to speak and not to sigh. “I don’t read English so well. I speak it but I never learned to read it,” he says. “I live in LA. There’s no real need.”
I have to ask. “Why would you buy a book written in a language you can’t understand?”
Our large new friend wears an expression that seems to suggest he hasn’t thought to ask himself this question. There is a perplexed beat, then:
“I don’t know. I liked the cover,” is his honest reply.
And I realize that’s the same reason I bought (sorry, stole) my copy. It seems like a staggeringly inconsequential rationale—because the cover isn’t really that great.
I look at Lexington Vargas’s book, which Alice is still holding aloft to make her previous point.
“Motherfucker,” I exclaim for the third time tonight. I really need to watch my language or at least curb it a bit. Then again, Alice did drop the very charged—and from her mouth, stunningly sexy—F-bomb a minute ago. “Damn it, focus, Cotton, focus!!! And damn you, too, accursed ADD. To hell with you and your petty distractions,” I think to myself.
But I am back on track, and I point to the copy of Magnificent Vibration she still holds. The title now reads Magnifica Vibraciόn, with the subtitle “Descubre tu verdadero propόsito.”
The ample dude in the backseat emits a slight gasp, grabs his book from Alice’s hand, and begins flipping through the pages.
“It’s all in Spanish now,” he says with childlike wonder.
I am suddenly amped, “It’s a miracle. It’s a friggin’ miracle, right? Doesn’t that qualify as a miracle?” I turn to Alice. She is the resident expert after all. “Well, doesn’t it?”
Alice is stunned. “Wow. What’s going on here?”
“Read some of it. What’s it say?” I urge Lexington Vargas, having unfortunately left my own copy at home. He begins to scan it in silence, lips moving slowly. Apparently he’s not so good at reading Spanish either.
“Where did you get your copy?” asks a slightly dazed Alice while the big guy painfully peruses his text.
“Some bookstore on Melrose.”
“By the high school?” Alice again.
“Yeah, just across and up toward Fairfax. You know which store I mean?”
“That’s where I bought my copy,” is the not unexpected reply from the babe-nun. I don’t tell her I stole mine in a fit of pique at losing most of my financial power in the divorce, though why I would take that out on some poor guy trying to make a living selling books is beyond me. Kick the dog I guess. Terrible human trait.
“I too got mine at that store,” says Lexington V.
I jump the gun a bit and show what appears to be a little back-end racism. “What the heck were you doing on Melrose Avenue?” The question is out of my mouth before I can slap a hand over the offending orifice.
Lexington Vargas seems to take no offense.
“I work at the school there. Fairfax High. I’m a groundskeeper, janitor, handyman, anything they need.”
I babble to cover my faux pas, “I just meant since you live, like, what, forty miles away, wouldn’t you go to a bookstore a little closer to home—but I see your point . . . I didn’t mean anything about, y’know, you being ah, foreign or . . .”
“Don’t worry about it,” says Lexington Vargas. It truly seems not to have fazed him at all, and I’m beginning to like this guy who recently scared the piss out of me and whom I thought was bringing my doom by way of me being his late night snack.
“I’d really like to go home soon,” moans Lexington Vargas, but his lips move silently as he scans his copy of the book.
I’ve started up the gerbils or whatever they are in the Kia’s engine compartment that under-power this thing and am already heading in the direction of Glendale and its environ known as La Crescenta to drop off Big Boy.
It’s actually not as far as I’d first lamented. The traffic is pretty skinny this time of night, given the weather. I think Angelenos worry about melting in the rain.
&
nbsp; “We should check out that bookstore tomorrow,” I opine, but Alice is lost in her own thoughts while we wait for Lexington Vargas to deliver his book report. I am already speeding (well, “speeding” is a bit of a misnomer considering what I’m driving) to the 101 freeway.
“What’s the gist of the book?” I ask as we barrel through the fairly deserted city, sending the odd, meager rooster-tail of water into the opposing lanes.
“What’s the what?” asks the Leviathan.
“What are you reading about? What’s it say?”
“It’s about me,” is his reply.
Wait . . . WHAT?!! I bark incredulously.
“The first few pages are about me growing up in Morelos. My home town in Mexico.”
“Magnificent Vibration is a book about YOU?!” I am flummoxed.
“I guess,” is Lexington Vargas nonchalant reply.
I slow the car. I can’t drive and process this kind of information. Multi-tasking has never been a strong suit.
Alice perks up and dives into her bag to retrieve her copy of the book as I pull over onto a side street near the Hollywood Boulevard on-ramp. The rain beats down like the ghost of Keith Moon is drumming away on the roof of the vulnerable Kia. Alice opens her pages. Silence. I am hoping she reads faster than Lexington V.
“Oh my God,” she says to no one in particular.
“So it’s a book about this guy?” I toss a dispirited and slightly disappointed thumb in the direction of the man mountain in the backseat.
She looks up at me, eyes like saucers. “My book is about me,” she says breathlessly.
My face betrays disbelief or some neighboring emotion. I don’t actually feel disbelief, but I am feeling something. Definitely feeling something.
She turns back down to her copy and there is a moment of restless quiet as she continues to peruse the pages. She raises her head and looks out into the rain, lost in a memory.
“I just read about,” she takes a sharp and shuddering breath, “when I was eight years old and I was in the kitchen of our old house in Ohio, and my father was angry and cursing and beating my mother. I jumped in between them screaming for him to stop and he hit me against a wall and knocked me out cold.” There are tears in her eyes now. “I’d forgotten he did that. My father. Punched his eight-year-old daughter unconscious,” she sniffles. “My mom hid her bruises, black eye, and other damage from the neighbors but I had a concussion for three weeks. I’d completely erased that part from my memory. I didn’t . . . I . . .” she stumbles to a stop and hangs her head. Tears drip onto the open book, staining the pages. She looks again like she must have felt at that long-ago moment. Sad, frightened, pathetic, broken, lost. I put a hand on her shoulder. Lexington Vargas lays a meaty palm on her back and rubs gently. Her pain is palpable. We sit in tableau for a few moments, three strangers strangely connected. Then without a word, but my mind whirling like the growing storm outside, I kick-start the Kia’s gerbil and we head onto the freeway in the direction of La Crescenta, wherever the hell that is.
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