Joey Cloudy online

TRAMP: B 4 We Were Poets circa: 1999

“I got a little black book with my poems in it.”

-Pink Floyd

Aaron leaned over his worktable, his shoulder-length hair tied back in a short dreadlocked topknot of a ponytail, revealing the shaved sides and back of his head, his round wire-framed glasses at the tip of his nose, lost in concentration as he peered through the round magnifying lens on a swivel arm with a fluorescent bulb encircling the lens. He was using a triple 000 Winsor Newton series 7 sable watercolor brush, applying a drybrush technique to deftly stipple the crimson color back into the 1956 first edition Playboy with Marilyn Monroe on the cover.

(The first Playboy appears December 1953 w the now legendary Marilyn Monroe cover. She had not posed for Playboy, Hugh Hefner purchased the infamous nude photo by Tom Kelley from the John Baumgarth Calendar Company, and initially called the picture featured inside “Sweetheart of the Month.”)

Right now, he is working on the cadmium red deep edge of the lettering of the title; later, he will return to work in the black and white image below. The magazine beneath his magnifying glass belongs to a collector we will, in all likelihood, never meet. Since the owner of the magazine has taken it to a dealer to have it restored, and the dealer is who we do our business with. Aaron reaches a stopping point as the phone rings; he had forgotten how much he missed working on these weird one-off jobs they got at his old mentor, Yvonne’s restoration studio. Restoring these old things called on all of his sagacious skill sets artistically as well as intellectually, and he enjoyed rising to the eclectic array of challenges the work offered. Yvonne Vogel approached his workstation with angry steps across the tile-covered concrete of the converted garage to the restoration studio.

“It’s for you.”

Said the 67-year-old unnatural redhead in a zinc white lab coat and heavy rectangular glasses with red translucent plastic frames. She spoke with a German accent that peeked out from underneath her Texas twang in a huff as she set the cordless phone down firmly on the table beside him before sulking off to her own work. Aaron wore a teal green lab coat over his long-sleeved black t-shirt, sat up straight, removed the round wire rimmed glasses, and massaged the bridge of his nose with his thumb and index finger as he picked up the phone with his other hand.

“Hello.”

Nathanial Percyville Robertson III replied,

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms, she was always Lolita.”

Aaron knew whose poetry Nat was quoting; he had grown up reading his mother’s fading, drab olive-green with a white border paperback copy of Lolita since he was half “Delores on the dotted lines” age. Vladimir Nabokov, I believe, Aaron asked, You did that from memory?”

“Indeed. Nathanial Percyville Robertson III retorted with a degreed thespians swagger. Christina Ritchie turned 18 today!” Chirped the adenoidal voice with a slight lisp on the other end of the line.

“No shit, Wednesday Adams is legal!?”

“Yes, she is indeed. My good sir. She is indeed on the cover of Rolling Stone. Nathanial was in a very good mood today. And you know what that means, don’t you?”

“I can sell her a pack of squares?” Aaron queried, feigning ignorance.

“You don’t have to feel guilty about fantasizing about screwing her anymore!”

“Wait, I was supposed to feel guilty?”

“You are one sick, twisted African American.” Nat declared with a chuckle.

“You one creepy mutha fucka. Hehehe.”

“We can smell our own sir.”

“So, what are you guys up to this evening?” Aaron asked, absentmindedly picking at the chipped black nail polish on his thumbnail with his index finger.

“Mona is still asleep. I, however, am preparing a French onion soup for dinner. You will be joining us for supper, good sir?”

“Of course, I’m just about finished here. I’ll pick up a box of white zinfandel on the way. Call me a Philistine. I don’t care, I drink what tastes good to me. Adui.”

“Much.”

Aaron hung up the phone, turned off the light, covered his work, and took his brushes to the sink where he began the ritual of cleaning them with ivory soap, then rinsing them clean under the running faucet before storing them brushes up hands in repurposed glass jelly, peanut butter, and old pickle jars.

“Was that that awful little girl?” Yvonne croaked.

“No, Ma’am, that was her fiancé, Nat.”

“Oh, what did that lazy bastard want?”

“We’re working tonight.”

“On that awful comic book, I suppose?”

“Graphic novel.” He corrected as he worked the lather up in the bristles of his brushes over the sink. Aaron wasn’t in the mood to listen to any of this wilted f@g hags’ bullshit today. Especially, after she and that old Donahue with a Village peoples mustache looking buddy of hers had started in on him about his dreads yesterday.

Ten years is a long time to work with someone. Aaron’s days at the shop typically started with a thick slice of Yvonne’s fresh-baked bread with butter and local honey provided by Aaron’s drunken beekeeper friend Avi. He would even put the honey in his cups of Constant Comment tea. Today, he dug through the racks of vintage vinyl to play one of his favorite plays, Dante In Hell. He adored Agnes Morehead’s performance in this production. Other mornings, he would turn on public radio. On other days, Tennessee Williams would fit his mood; he knew he was under the spell of old Hollywood movies. It was a good spell to be under. Othello, a Moor in Venice, Julius Caesar, all performed by the great actors of the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. This was how he cultivated his mind while he worked. Aaron Moore always has a plan.

It’s the sort of thing that happens when you work closely with people for too long and they forget where the boundaries are. Things get blurry, they start to think of you as family for better or for worse, and they don’t hesitate to share their opinions on subjects that they really have no say in.

“What planet are you two assholes from, where you think that I would need to be lectured about my appearance by a 67-year-old white bitch and a 59-year-old log cabin republican? The day that either one of you starts thinking that I look good would be one of the seven signs.”

“I can’t believe that you two pasty old farts have the nerve.”

“Aaron,” Terry standing up to his full 6 foot 2 inch height in starched and creased Calvin Cline jeans over a pair designer Italian loafers straitened the front of an untucked white button down shirt with the palm of his hand as he spoke all sad eyed and remorseful, his vowels round and wet in the manor of pseudo aristocratic affectations taken on by old southern poofs a laconic drawl with a hint of derision and ironic detachment very Truman Capote-ish, “you do not look right with such a radical hair style.”

“Ya’ll wouldn’t have shit to say if I straightened my hair, but neither one of you are aware enough to see that that would have been the radical hair …”

Terry interrupted, Aaron, “Sweetie, you’re just not good-looking enough to get away with wearing your hair in such an extreme hairstyle as dreadlocks.”

“LIBERTINE!” His old mentor hissed.

“republican!” Aaron cursed venomously.

Aaron put up his brushes, fired up a ‘port as he headed out the side door. He exchanged his real glasses for a pair of wrap-around mirror-tinted shades that he kept on the dashboard of his truck. One foot on the brake, the other on the clutch, he started up the old red Chevy, slid her into reverse, and got the fuck outta Dodge for the day.

“…Ya’ see, I was right about you getting along with Nathan.” She spoke in a soft voice with her head on his chest as they lay on their backs on her black futon. Mona puffed on the joint, then blew a smoke ring within a ring, then meditated on the ever-widening circles of smoke as the soft white transparent circles floated up towards the ceiling, slowly fading as they dissipated.

“Your fiancé is a smart and funny guy. And there is a part of me that admires anyone who puts in the work to graduate from a real four-year college.”

Mona was happy that Nathan and Aaron had gotten to be pretty cool over the last few months, especially since they invited Aaron to join them playing D&D on the weekends. He could help her escape when it was time to play Dungeons and Dragons. He knew how to play and had all of the books and dice, but he hadn’t played in several years when Ashlee invited him to play with her boyfriend and his buddies in Addison.

Ashlee and Scot broke up a few months later, but Aaron was still friends with the guys. They hung out to watch movies, shop for comics, shoot pool, normal, boring guy stuff. None of us had girlfriends at the time except Markus, the little brown haired kid with oily skin and coke-bottle glasses. Now here he was again, pulled back into the world of RPG gamers by a woman. But only temporarily, Aaron had recently shown Mona some of his poetry, and now the two of them were making plans of their own that had nothing to do with wizards and lizards.

“Look, Momo, all gaming is not the same. I’m more into PlayStation games, Final Fantasy Seven, and other massive open-world role-playing games, and because, well, I have a real life, I’m never going to get as into the tabletop game as deeply as Nat and his buddies.”

Mona spoke in a low hiss; “I loathe role-playing games.”

“I don’t hate them, Aaron offered, but I figure it’s better than hanging out in the Grove with my cousin Robbie or the Southside with the old man. The rest of my kinfolk that I run with still in the pen.”

“Gaming is completely useless, Aaron.” Mona stated flatly.

“Well, Aaron interjected, I have learned a few things about character design from my limited experience playing D&D.”

“What exactly did you learn?”

“I discovered the reason I hate Superman, it’s simply because he is all-powerful, and that makes him boring. The most exciting characters are stories of ordinary people thrown into extraordinary circumstances. It was the thing that illuminated his reason. I hate the big blue schoolboy for the reason that I abandoned my first attempt at the graphic novel, because the hero was too powerful to be interesting, he had no human weaknesses, no frailties, we couldn’t relate to him for the same reason we can’t relate to god.”

Mona listened to his words. He had a point.

“Let’s go see the Stanley Kubrick films at the Inwood Theatre tonight. They have The Shining and A Clockwork Orange. Do you care for Kubrick?”

“Only the movie A Clockwork Orange. I pretend to like the rest so the cool kids will like me.”

“Don’t feel bad, I do the same thing with Nathan and Star Wars.”

“Me too, they get so excited like puppies. I don’t have the heart to tell them the writing is trash.”

“Star Wars isn’t even science fiction; it’s Dungeons & Dragons in space.”

“I just ain’t feeling it.”

“I know exactly how ya’ feel.”

They lay staring at the three smoke rings she blew with the pot smoke.

“Eyes Wide Shut is showing there next week.”

“Nathan squanders a formidable intelligence by lending it to a task of no more import than calculating THAC0 (To Hit Armor Class Zero) and modified saving throws versus death magic and disintegration. But he is genuinely nice, although he’s a bit naive about the world outside of RPGs and Broadway musicals.”

Mona continued. “Outside of what little he’s gleaned from film and books, like you, he’s absolutely clueless about how the average person views the world. You never read Nathan’s award-winning play?”

“No, but I figured it must have been pretty good for it to not only win awards but also be put on by a real college.”

Aaron had helped them move into this place from Nathan’s parents’ house, and on several occasions since, he had come downstairs from taking a shower to find Mona with her head bobbing up and down over Nat’s crotch.

She had previously confessed to Aaron about her bisexual fantasies. It seemed to be a recurring f@g hag dream common as men’s two-girl fantasy, amongst girls of a certain age group, since it was the most difficult sexual encounter for them to experience, due in large part to their boyfriend’s homophobia. It seeming to be the last bastion of forbidden sexual encounters left amongst consenting hedonistic adult epicureans of all ages caused many young women to obsess over this particular fantasy often going to great lengths in an attempt to see the only thing that they hadn’t experienced sexually, the only combination of people that they hadn’t tried to enjoy what men took almost for granted these days.

Sex with bisexual men; to watch two men have sex with each other before they joined in the fun. They weren’t any more interested in seeing a couple of f@gs pack each other’s shit than guys were interested in seeing a couple of fat ugly middle-aged butch d@kes go at it. They wanted to see two otherwise straight guys go at it the way the girls did at these group gropes when there were numerous girls and guys just for the fuck of it.

Aaron liked fucking Mona, but Nat, with his fat fish belly, bald head, and mole-covered hairy back, was the antithesis of erotic. But while Mona stared at him as he stood in the bathroom doorway watching her go, he began to get turned on. As Aaron’s erection grew more visible beneath his towel, Mona fucked Nat harder, never taking her eye off of Aaron. He had already caught Mona pegging Nat with that huge strap-on dildo that they kept in the stereo cabinet downstairs. It was a massive plastic thing that looked like a gigantic lavender anemic earthworm, a delicacy in some Amazon tribes, where women with small, pointed breasts sat nude in the jungle, but comfortable because they were wearing their beads. Without their string of beads, they considered themselves to be undressed and were quite shy.

There had been other strange days when Aaron visited, entering their living room to find Nat with his wrists over his head shackled to the wall in the antique manacles that up until this point, he had always assumed were purely decorative, naked from the neck down. His balding pate was completely covered with a jet-black leather bondage mask, complete with Alizarin crimson rubber ball gag in his mouth, the eye holes stainless steel zippers shut. Mona had on previous occasions talked to Aaron about the time she lived with a musician in LA. He was the first one she ever used a strap-on on, but since then she had aggressively violated the anus of numerous other men with that 7 pounds,18-inch latex dildo cast from the pedigreed genitals of a Derby winning stud horse, Nathan simply being the latest. This being his favorite way to get off.

The thing that Aaron and Nat had in common was a shared visual aesthetic, a preference for a particular type of dark-haired woman. Bettye Rubble over Wilma Flintstone. Mary Anne over Ginger. Both of them had grown up with a crush on Wednesday Adams and her mother, Morticia. Carrie Anne Moss as Trinity in the Matrix, Helena Bonham Carter as Marla Singer in Fight Club, and they both agreed that Uma Thurman was hot in Pulp Fiction, but without the black wig, she was just another scrawny, flat assed Hollywood blonde.

-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.