Joey Cloudy online

TRAMP: Darling Nikki

“Do you want him?! Or do you want me?! ’Cause I want you!”

— Prince

“You can’t ask me that. You don’t have the right to ask me that question.”

Nathanial Percival Robertson III was getting more pissed off with each evasive syllable that came out of his fiancée Mona’s mouth.

“Yes, I can. And I did. And I do have the right to ask.”

“Nathan, before we moved in together, we talked about this. I told you I wasn’t interested in playing the boyfriend-girlfriend game. I never lied to you. I told you how things are with me from the beginning so that we wouldn’t have to have these kinds of conversations. Nothing’s changed between us. I just don’t understand why you don’t find someone else if this isn’t making you happy. If you’re so unhappy with me. If you’re no longer happy with having an open relationship, then you should just say so.”

“All I want to know is if you’re fucking that nigger? You claim that you, Sagittarians, are such a truth-loving people, then speak with love. Tell me—are you fucking Aaron? I’m not saying that I have a right to know, but he’s my friend, too. So if there’s any hanky-panky going on between the two of you, then I think you should at least be honest with me and not make me look like a goddamned fool. That much you do owe me. Who you fool around with out there in the world is your business. But when you start dragging them home, then it certainly seems reasonable to expect that it’s become my business also. So, are you fucking Aaron?!”

“No. I’m not fucking him. You happy now?”

Aaron had been celibate for months. Now, he would only eat her out, but no dick. On several occasions, Nathanial had nearly caught them mid-coitus, but that wasn’t what was making him so paranoid lately. It was the last time they went to a reading together. When she stupidly left wearing her sandals, she came home wearing a brand-new pair of steel-toed work boots.

Nathanial knew that a guy like Aaron wouldn’t just up and buy her shoes. That was the kind of thing he would only do for his woman. But this whole open-relationship thing could be damned. He paid the rent, bought food—well, at least his parents did; he did with his allowance. What the fuck did she ever bring home but the losers who chauffeured her all over town to pick up the crap she used to make jewelry, and the lame fuckers from the poetry readings?

Nathanial Percival Robertson III did not miss life on the ranch in the Panhandle, where he had spent his childhood. His parents wanted him to take over the family business after college, but Nathanial had his eye on the Big Apple or San Francisco. Any progressive major city would do, but the life he envisioned for himself would be impossible to live back on the ranch. The old man spent most of his time building a diversified stock portfolio with substantial holdings in real estate and a wide variety of defense contractors. He was a doctor, but he wasn’t a physician; he was a stockbroker with a doctorate in economics.

As far as the old man was concerned, war was good for the economy. The only real pleasure he felt was when he had his pecker inserted into any orifice of his nurse. He claimed to be descended from Russian royalty. But Nathanial always considered the notion of the old man being the descendant of royalty just another of many parts of his whole super-ego-fueled exaggerations. The Russian part was true enough, but he suspected their ancestors weren’t aristocrats but common merchants at best. The truth was not as exciting as the stories the old man liked to tell; they were Jews fleeing the Bolshevik barbarism that descended on their motherland after the fall of the Tsar. No one alive knew why they had chosen to leave during the time that marked the end of power for the Russian monarchy at the beginning of the last century.

Nathanial’s mother’s family had been in the cattle business for over a century. She had spent most of her life working on the family ranch, supervising the day-to-day operation. Nathanial learned to speak Spanish as a child, surrounded by the Mexican caballeros who worked on the ranch. When his mother began to suspect that there was something… unnatural about his relationship with one of the caballeros, being a practical Christian woman, she wasted no time with self-delusion. She immediately sent Nathanial to a private military academy. Fortunately for him, many parents of queer sons had the same idea.

Truth be told, Nathanial was raised by their housekeeper, Ms. Hazel, a diminutive Black woman who always wore her hair in a severe ponytail and whose age he was never sure of—over thirty but under sixty was his best guess. While Nathanial’s mother was not a bridge-playing, Junior League, Rotary Club, martini-lunch-drinking socialite, Ms. Hazel had always been more of a mother to Nathanial than his own mom. It was something he had in common with the majority of the gentry of the city’s old southern money. Black and brown women had raised them all. They had played with their children as children themselves; they had eaten the food that they had cooked, worn the clothes that they had washed, lived in houses that they had cleaned.

Abigail, his mother, took care of the day-to-day overseeing of the ranch, while his father spent most of his time in New York or overseas traveling abroad to check on his investments. It didn’t really matter. He was usually “away on business”—the household’s euphemism for gone somewhere with his nurse, probably drunk. When Nathanial was busted by the police in Lee Park in the backseat of his car with a rather well-hung Negro transient’s cock in his mouth and arrested for public lewdness, he called Ms. Hazel to post his bail. Ms. Hazel had known since he was three years old that the boy was funny, but she was never asked, so she never mentioned it to anyone, figuring what folks did in bed was their private business. So it went without saying that she would never discuss his homosexuality with anyone in his family.

When he left for college, his father moved to New York. Nathanial moved into the family house in Dallas after he finished college, with his mother, who was occasionally visited by his father.

Nathanial was oblivious to poverty. He was not stupid, greedy, or cruel. He simply had no concept of money. Having led a rather unchallenged life, he did not care about anything except kicks. He ate too much, drank in excess, and smoked two packs of cigarettes a day. He never really cared about school. Hell, he wasn’t even a Methodist—his family had raised him Episcopalian, which he lovingly referred to as Catholic-lite.

Even his pagan leanings were simply a matter of metaphysical fashion, rather than the result of any genuine belief in the supernatural or valid religious leanings. Even though two of the buildings on campus were named after members of his family, he wasn’t the least bit concerned with anything other than pleasure in the most hedonistic sense. Nathanial knew he was worth millions, but he acted as if he didn’t care.

Nathanial Percival Robertson III defined himself by his hates, and he hated the rich. He surrounded himself with the most impoverished students at the school. Not out of any altruistic sense, but because he had made it his business to know the best way to covertly piss off his family, along with the bigoted pricks and snobbish twats that surrounded him in the Park Cities and Highland Park neighborhoods near the SMU campus.

University Park and the Park Cities are where the old moneyed families live, on an economic, if not actual, island. The Uptown neighborhoods of Park Cities and University Parks: the Manhattan of Dallas; are two affluent little pseudo-cities surrounded by a real city. The neighborhoods of University Park, Highland Park, and their country club were all there was to the Park Cities. Located a few miles north of Downtown, they were not really cities but neighborhoods within Dallas that had enough money to pay for two private police forces in the middle of the city.

The two small neighborhoods sat side by side just west of I-75 Central Expressway, separated from the city by a wall of money and political power. It was not as if they were walled cities; they weren’t; there was no need. The owners of the Tudor, Jeffersonian, and Mission-styled mansions of the two neighborhoods, with delusions of municipalism, had their housekeepers, groundskeepers, and various contractors out before dark.

There were no Jews or Catholics in this part of the city, and the niggers and spics had better have packed up their brooms and shovels and gotten out of the city limits before dark. With its own police departments and an unwritten “no nonwhites tolerated in the vicinity after dark” policy, its country club members and residents with their “no Jews, no Negroes, no Mexicans, no Catholics” clauses in their homeowners’ affiliation, sat fat and comfortable, unaffected, surrounded by invisible walls of class bought with generations of inherited wealth.

Nathanial didn’t care if they were only his friends because they were poor and his family was loaded. Would it make it better if they were rich pricks who only hung out with him because he was also an opulent dick? Not really. After all, it was only with these bohemians that he felt himself a part of something useful. So what if they were using him? He doubted that, even if it was what everyone else thought. He was having a ball, and in the end, nothing mattered except pleasure; no matter what the mitered pontiffs claimed. No matter what the moralists pretended.

-About the Author: JD Cloudy’s poetry has appeared 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.