Joey Cloudy online

Isaiah Jones vs the Sea (A 21st Century Odyssey)

Full Metal Barbie / Queen of the Road*

“He told me, “I’ve seen it all before, I’ve been there

I’ve seen my hopes and dreams lying on the ground

I’ve seen the sky just begin to fall”

He said: “All things pass into the night”

Q Lazzarus / Goodbye Horses

San Bernardino was their first stop after leaving the marina in Long Beach that morning, Penny’s route had taken them north on I 710 through Compton to 605 to I 10 east to San Bernadino, where they stopped to visit Evan and Danni, old college friends of Aeon and Penelope. They had gotten married right after graduation then moved here to teach.

Evan was the shorter, pudgy fellow who always kept his face covered with a scruffy dishwater blonde beard. Danni was the taller of the duo, with darker hair and classically handsome Italian features. While he too was a bit overweight, he was not as fat as his husband. Danni kept his face clean-shaven, while letting his wavy black hair grow long until it hung down past his shoulders. Both were dressed casually in cuffed light cotton trousers. Evan sported a tie-dyed tank top, while Danni, as usual, was shirtless. His torso and muscular arms covered with vividly colored tattoos.

They had been part of a close-knit group of friends who did everything from studying to partying together for the two years Aeon and Penny attended the University of San Diego. Aeon introduced the couple to Isaiah, and Sybil, both men seeming to recognize them as they shook hands.

“Everyone knows who you are, Isaiah, Danni said with a wide grin, and we recognize our girl Sybil from that AP news article a few months ago when you popped up out of nowhere on a train in Tokyo.”

“It said she was one of your sister-in-laws from Egypt, if I remember correctly,” Evan added as he welcomed them into their home, a modest one-story wood-framed 2-bedroom house built in the late 1970s.

Evan headed back into the kitchen to finish preparing lunch while Danni led the group into the living room, where he plopped himself back down on the red camelback sofa.

“Soooo, what have you two spinsters been up to lately?” Danni asked coyly as he picked up a tray filled with keef and blunt wraps.

Penny and Aeon took the seats on either side of their host on the couch as Izzy walked around the room examining the thick Pollock-like acrylic paint covered canvases that hung on the walls, all signed by Danni. Sybil sat on a well-worn brown leather La-Z-Boy recliner and began to play with the wooden lever that controlled the chair’s angles.

“These two, Penny said, pointing to Sybil and Izzy, have never been to Las Vegas, so while they are in California getting his boat repaired, we decided to check it out before heading down south to Mexico.” Mua Mau, smelling lunch cooking, followed Evan into the kitchen. Danni glanced up from rolling blunts to peek at the humongous black dog.

“What kind of dog is he?”

“Mau Mau is a Cane Corso,” Penelope said, puffing on her mango and pineapple e-stick.

“He makes Hector’s humongous dogs look kinda puny by comparison. Danni observed. So, are you planning on joining us for lunch? Evan found a great recipe for ranch-style burgers online.”

“The secret is to add a package of Ranch dressing mix, minced garlic, onions and a raw egg into the ground beef before broiling the patties in a convection oven. The powdered dressing mix really makes the flavor pop.”

“It smells delicious, but I have plans for us to eat Naugles burritos when we get to Barstow,” Penny said apologetically. “We were just passing through, and I decided to stop by and say hi on the way.”

“Well”, we can’t let you leave empty-handed, Danni said as he passed a fist filled with blunts to Penny. When you get to Vegas, burn one of these fatties before you tour the strip.”

“Can we fire up one now?” Penny asked eagerly.

“Good God, woman, no, absolutely not.” Danni retorted. “This stuff is a medical-grade strain of cannabis with THC levels high enough to sedate a bull elephant. Never smoke this and drive or attempt to operate heavy machinery.” He cautioned sagely with a subversive giggle.

“Okay party pooper. We’ll wait until we get to our suite to spark one.”

“What are you watching?” Aeon asked, looking at the grainy black and white footage on the muted flatscreen mounted on the opposite wall.

“Oh, that, that is Evans’ hero Hunter S. Thompson’s biography, Danni said in a dismissive tone. ‘Gonzo’ Ugh.”

“Oh, Aeon said, looking at the flickering image of a balding old white man on the screen. He doesn’t look anything like Johnny Depp,” she said absentmindedly.

“He’s no Bill Murray either,” Danni added derisively.

“What?”

“Bill Murray played Hunter two decades before Depp.”

“That is correct,” Evan said as he sat in one of the chairs near the end of the couch.

“Bill starred in ‘Where the Buffalo Roam’, and Johnny played him in ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’.”

“Oh, I don’t like Bill Murray or Hunter S. Thompson. Aeon confessed. They both come off as entitled creeps to me. They set off my asshole alarm.”

“Well, Evan said with a sigh, your instincts are correct. They both made a career out of being smug entitled asses. But, since the victims of their shenanigans tended to be middle and upper-class white sensibilities. I find their tweaking the noses of bourgeois proprieties’ antics amusing. Besides, if we’re being honest, most great writers are some iteration of asshole.”

Aeon and Penny both laughed as Mau Mau; having finished devouring the hamburger patty Evan had given him, trotted back over to take a seat next to the recliner beside Sybil.

“I have to take your word for it, English major. The rest of us had to take a real major and didn’t have the luxury of taking fluff courses like you guys.”

“Ouch bitch, that hurt,” Danni said with a mock tone of wounded pride.

“Oh, please, you know I’m jealous. You have summer breaks, and teaching literature to children is a vocation I respect. Hell, Aeon retorted both my parents are professors, and so are Izzy’s.”

“Well, I have some sad news for you, Evan said solemnly. Danni no longer teaches English in the public schools. We weren’t even making enough money to repay our student loans, so he now works for the Department of Sanitation.”

“Doing what?” Aeon and Penny asked in stereo.

“I worked my way up from gunslinger to driver of a garbage truck, and now I earn three times what I made as a public-school teacher.”

“Damn.” Penny retorted, doing her best ‘Friday’ impersonation.

“I only work 4 days a week, so I have plenty of time to work on my paintings, plus, I don’t have school shooter drills anymore.”

“What’s a gunslinger?” Penny asked, puffing her e-stick.

“The guys hanging on the back of the truck who toss the trash into the truck’s compactor.”

“Coolness, Aeon said as she rose from her seat, Well, thanks for the smokes and feeding Mau Mau, but it’s time for us to hit the road.”

As they milled around in the front yard, saying their goodbyes, preparing to leave, Danni asked.

“I count one, two, three motorcycles and one, two, three, four of you so, who’s riding bitch?”

“No one, Aeon retorted. Izzy and Mau Mau are in that pop-top camper van over there, she said, pointing to the white RV parked on the other side of the street.” Just before they got back on the Riverside highway, they topped off their gas tanks. Then stopped once more in Victorville to walk the dog, before driving across the Mojave desert into Barstow, arriving in time for a late lunch of humongous beef burritos at Naugles.

It was just over a 2-hour drive from Barstow to Vegas; they were on the strip an hour and a half later, pulling up to the entrance to the Flamingo Hotel. They parked their vehicles, then made their way into the lobby of the old hotel. Sybil found the automated check-in machines that printed keys to their room.

Aeon looked at the vintage hotel, now the oldest hotel on the strip and laughed. “I’m surprised you didn’t book a suite at one of the 5 star hotels like the Bellagio or Caesars.”

“This is Vegas, baby, you have to go to a 3 and a half star spot like this to really get a feel for the city. We reserved the best room in the hotel, the Metropolitan Suite. Look at this place, the pink neon signs, the cheesy decor, the corny shows. Take it all in. This place was built by real old school mafia guidos back in the 1940s, babe.”

“I like it, Sybil said as they exited the elevator on the top floor and made their way down the corridor to their suite. It feels like it has secrets.”

“Ya’ see, Penny grinned, she gets it. Those other places may have state-of-the-art electronics and fancy new furniture, but this place is more than just nostalgia; this place has real history. This hotel has bodies buried in the cement under the foundation. That’s getting pretty rare in America. Now, everyone get cleaned up, we are having dinner at Bugsy and Meyers Steakhouse, then hitting the strip.”

“I counted 4 vehicles following us since we left Long Beach. Do you have any idea who they are, Izzy?” Aeon ask feigning innocence.

“I know one is my AUA secret service detachment, one would have to be the feds’ CIA or FBI and the others I have no idea.”

Sybil solved the mystery of the fourth car. “You are correct, brother. The one furthest back is your Secret Service detachment, the other 2 are the FBI, and the fourth car is with Beijing. And you can’t see it without binoculars, but the high-altitude drone is NSA. They have all been following you since you docked in Marina Del Rey last week.”

“Creepy,” Aeon said with a visible shudder.

“They do not want an international incident, so the feds are running interference, keeping local law enforcement from pulling you over for driving while black, as well as monitoring the alphabet soup of white nationalist groups. You, being a member of the Ghanaian government, as well as your guards, all have diplomatic immunity, so they are working hard to be sure that you don’t have to use it to leave the country after killing a local cop or civilian.”

“Aw, Penny said sarcastically, tying her pink and purple dyed hair into a French braid. That’s mighty white of them.”

“Wait, Aeon ask, how many federal agents are here now?”

“Eight, Sybil said dryly. There were four agents in the two FBI cars following us here, and there were four more waiting in the lobby when we checked in. They are in the room across the hall, your AUA agents are in the rooms next door, and the Chinese are next door to the feds.”

“Is this how your life is now, Izzy? Aeon asked only half jokingly. How can you remain so calm?”

“It’s not like the cops wouldn’t be watching me even if I were a civilian. It’s like this whenever I am on land. And I have rarely been in any place where they can find me for almost a decade.”

“Okay, Penny said, enough, forget about it, eh.”

“Uggh. Aeon groaned. Your ‘Good Fellow’s’ impersonation is terrible.”

“That was my best ‘Godfathers’ voice.”

The suite was massive, with two-bedroom and a gigantic living room, a fully stocked bar and a breathtaking view of the strip. Sybil opened the blinds to take in the view over the amber, scarlet, and pink flashing neon lights of the hotel.

“Are you going to gamble?” Aeon asked Sybil, suppressing a giggle.

“No, if either I or Izzy start gambling while we are here, we will be asked to leave within a few hours. They know who Isaiah is, so they would politely ask him to leave. Being a world-renowned mathematician with an eidetic memory, he could easily bankrupt the casino in a single evening playing blackjack or poker. I, on the other hand, could even win playing the slot machines or roulette. So, for me, it wouldn’t be gambling as much as it would be stealing their money.”

“Whoa, Penny said, stepping out of the shower with a towel covering her wet blonde hair. Roulette is completely random. How can you beat the game?”

“I’m a cyborg, a machine that simple is easy for AI brains like mine to predict, and if they try to cheat, I can hack their devices.”

“That sounds pretty boring,” Penny said, turning to step into the bedroom to get dressed. Aeon began to take her hair down, undoing the four large plaits Ariella had helped her put her hair up in before they left the marina.

“Can I help do your hair?” Sybil asked.

Aeon looked up suspiciously. “Ok fine, just be careful, don’t pull too hard.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll be gentle.”

Sybil reached up and began to help her get her afro styled after they finished untying her braids.

By the time they finished, Penny returned dressed in a Dior dress, a long crimson off-the-shoulder gown with a split halfway up her thigh. Aeon hadn’t seen her in this dress before.

Aeon dressed in an emerald minidress and a pair of turquoise sandals, even wearing the 6.9 karat Tiffany engagement ring. While Sybil wore a pair of vintage slate grey dress slacks with suspenders, a white button down shirt, necktie and a chartreuse plaid vest, giving her an almost Annie Hall, with bubble gum pink Bantu knots look. Isaiah was the last to use the bath, and he returned to the living room wearing an ivory Tom Ford Dyllan Satin-Trimmed Tuxedo Jacket with a hematite bolo tie, carbon colored linen trousers and a pair of hand woven Bottega Veneta noir leather karakas. It was the outfit Penny had given him to wear on his birthday celebration in Cancun.

Penny fired up a blunt and crossed her legs as she stared at Isaiah.

“Would you fuck me? I’d fuck me… I’d fuck me hard… I’d fuck me so hard…”

The room erupted with laughter as they headed out of the suite to take in the sights of Las Vegas.

“Come on nigga lets go.” Mau Mau hopped up from his spot lazing in front of the window where he had been resting in the sunlight and followed Izzy out the door.

“Goodbye horses, I’m flying over you

Goodbye horses, I’m flying over you

Goodbye horses, I’m flying over you

Goodbye horses, I’m flying, flying, flying over you”

[Note 1 “It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era — the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run… but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant…

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning…

And that, I think, was the handle — that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply PREVAIL. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave…

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high water mark — that place where the wave finally broke, and rolled back.”

― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream]

-About the author:

JD Cloudy’s poetry has disappeared in the literary journals: Fatfizz, Mad Swirl, Texas Beat Anthology, Danse Macabre, Du Jour, and Death List Five. He has won no literary awards, entered no slam competitions, and never completed college. He lives to write in Dallas, TX.