Joey Cloudy online

chapter 14 

TRAMP: Dean Moriarty is an Asshole 

“Dean Moriarty is a first-class asshole.” said Tavah to no one in particular after reading the last words of ‘On the Road’. She closed the book and laid it on the poolside table next to her 151 Texas tea. She picked up the brown and green plastic bottle of suntan oil. She tanned easily, unlike Mona, who didn’t tan so much as she turned red and then peeled. But still she loved the pool and the sun.  

Tavah kept her deck chair in the shade of the big teal colored canvas umbrella that rose up out of the center of the table. She rubbed the sunblock all over each of her arms, sliding her hand slowly up and down the length of her arm. Aaron watched as she began at her toes, over her feet, up past the slender ankles, up her shins, around the well-defined calves, up over her knees, up her thighs, carefully covering every inch of pale skin on the front of her body. He watched as she slathered the oily liquid all over everything except her back. 

Tavah lifted her gaze until it landed on Aaron, as he lay stretched out on his belly by the pool. She was not really into the ass thing, but she felt herself getting hotter as she rubbed the liquid into her skin. She had always been into guys with long hair, not the ones that looked androgynous and elfin like a young David Bowie, more pretty boy than handsome man. But, more metal head, headbanger, scooter trash look. Still, she had to admit that now, looking at the sleek lines of Aaron’s body with beads of water glistening in the sun, he was definitely getting her motor running. 

Tavah lay on the slightly raised deck chair, one hand unconsciously lingering on her breast, the other drifting down past her navel to disappear beneath the thin fabric of the bikini bottom for a moment before she called out to Aaron. 

Hey, Baby Boy, she said, a hint of desire in her breath, do ya’ mind doing my back? 

Aaron lay prone by the side of the pool, his ever-lengthening dreads going out from his skull like nappy black halo, the cement warm against his abdomen, the sun drying the chlorinated beads of water on his body. 

This was nice sitting here now as Mona’s bikini-clad body drifted around the pool on the inflated green float. Funny, the things one thinks of looking at a pretty girl in a Sheena Queen of the Jungle leopard print bikini floating around in the clear azure water of a swimming pool.  

Aaron rolled onto his side as Tavah’s voice pulled him away from his distracted contemplation of Mona. Sliding an arm that he had been resting his head on up to place his palm against the side of his face as he looked at her for a lazy moment, as if contemplating whether or not he was in the mood to even acknowledge her, cradling his face with his hand before he stood, adjusted his thickening package in his baggy black swim trunks that hung down just below the knee.  

He strolled lazily over to the lounger where Tavah lay on her back, her sunblock-armed skin slick and glistening in the hot light of the noon sun. He straddled her hips as he reached down and took the mint-colored plastic squeeze bottle from her outstretched hand. 

Roll over. He commanded with a sarcastic grin, kneeling over her. Tavah smiled sweetly as she rolled over onto her stomach. She felt herself getting moist before he even touched her. 

Mona reclined on the fluorescent green plastic float, watching Tavah adjust the pitch of the umbrella. Mona looked at Tavah, studying her body like an abstract. Slavic features her pale skin was made to seem even paler because of the long hair that hung down in loose coal black rings. Her skin was nearly as pale as an albino’s. Her face was with its sharp angles at her cheeks, the pointedness of her nose, and the squareness of her jaw and her wide chin, her eyebrows were thick over her deep-set eyes, and her forehead high and broad, almost masculine. Tavah was not cute; puppies are cute. Nor was the word pretty accurate to describe her appearance. What she was was a remarkably handsome woman. 

There was a lean predatory aspect to her being. You could see it sliding around behind her eyes, but you were never certain whether she was hurting or if she wanted to hurt you. Tavah’s’ six-foot frame’s leanness exaggerated the length of her physique. Her eyes were the color of midday clouds with winter light burning through them. Something lethal glinted behind her pale grey-blue eyes. Her face looked as if she had just stepped out of a Bergman film. There was a severe quality to her beauty, an aura of something brutal strained to escape her. 

Mona missed swimming in the raw like she did during the summer when they were kids. She and Naomi would feel trapped in their rooms on those hot August nights with the humidity so high even the walls sweated. When they tired of broiling in the stagnant heat of their bedroom, Misfit tee shirts and cotton panties soaked with perspiration, the still air stale, sheets musty and wet with sweat. They lay there staring up into the sweltering darkness of their room, the broken air conditioner only lengthened the misery of the Texas summer nights. 

Restless, bored, and too hot to sleep, they would sneak out of their tiny apartment. How old were they then? Eleven? Twelve years old? Climbing out of their bedroom window, repressing their laughter, giggling into their pale palms, way past midnight, they would creep barefoot through the corridors, disappearing into the darkness of a breezeway only to reappear in the next cone of light. 

They crept quiet as kittens on carpet through the complex until they reached the locked gate. They would climb the low black wrought iron fence to skinny dip in the cool cerulean rectangle. The pool’s lights undulate beneath them, its serpentine beam on the waves causing their skin to glow with an alien pallor, eerily in the cool cube of water beneath the dark mystery of the night sky. She missed the feeling of absolute freedom she used to experience, then floating nude through the chlorinated water beneath the flat blackness of the night. 

Mona owned a black one-piece; she only wore it when diving. Right now, she was wearing Tavah’s tiger print bikini. Tavah’s choice in bathing suits were little more than shoelaces wrapped around a few small strategically placed triangles of thin fabric. Mona was certain they used more fabric to make a single bandana. She would never have purchased such a thing under any circumstances, and she definitely wouldn’t have worn it in public. But here in this pool in Nathan’s parents’ backyard, with only her closet friends around, she didn’t seem to mind being nearly naked. 

It’s not as if they didn’t know what she looked like naked. While it was true that Tavah was a head taller than she was, Mona was a little wider in the hips and rounder in the breasts and ass. The bathing suit looked obscene on Mona as it barely covered anything on her body, and what little it did cover clung to so tightly that she might as well have been nude. Mona’s hair was in two long black pigtails that floated out to either side of her as she drifted around the pool on her back. Her ensemble was completed by a pair of fire engine red cat woman sunglasses. 

Mona watched Aaron slowly massage the greasy suntan oil into the soft skin of Tavah’s back, beginning with her long neck and out across her traps, over the gently rising caps of her delts, down into her shoulder blades. Tavah lay flat beneath him, purring under his long fingers as they stiffly pressed into the soft flesh of her back. His wide palms were firm as he kneaded her flesh on either side of her spine; his body straddling her thighs definitely generated sensual heat as if he had a fever. She knew that he was always like this, with a high metabolism, and he explained it. So high that his body temperature was always a few degrees higher than normal. 

As a child, Aaron had always had the hots for the actress who played Pippi Longstocking. And, if he ever thought about what it was, he dug about her; he had always thought it was the red hair. Now, looking at Mona lying in the pool as he leisurely massaged Tavah’s neck, shoulders, back, thighs, and calves down the full length of her body and up, then back down again, he rubbed the lotion into the firm flesh of her body. All the while, Aaron kept his eyes on Mona as she floated casually around the pool on a bed of air trapped within the thin neon green plastic. Now, he realized it was the pigtails that he had been turned on by as much as the color of Pippy Long Stockings’ hair. 

It was easy to forget how lovely Mona’s twenty-five-year-old body was to look at. It was easy to forget her body because she was so good at camouflaging her true form, preferring oversized tee shirts and baggy jeans to the tighter fitting more provocative clothing favored by many of her peers whose bodies weren’t nearly as well formed as Mona’s. Aaron was also attracted to her because she rarely wore makeup, and he had never seen her use her appearance in that demeaning way that he found so repellent in many attractive women. 

Tavah, on the other hand, was of the “if you got it, flaunt it” school of dress. While she dressed as conservatively at work as any other lawyer, she was never what you’d call a girly girl. Being six feet tall, possessing strong facial features with a gaze that could only be described as penetrating, she had learned to use her size and appearance as a weapon, leaning in close to make a point, while she locked her eyes with yours eyes. 

In Tavah’s case, it wasn’t all just acting; she had spent her youth in the mosh pits of the grungiest clubs in New York City. While the occasional well-placed elbow had knocked her out before, she had given as good as she got, having given out her share of bloody noses and busted lips. She was psychologically and physically built for confrontation. When she wasn’t dressed in her business professional dark blue suits for work, she was in jeans and snug-fitting tee shirts around the house, shopping, out running errands, or checking out the sights of the city. Often with a bandana on the top of her head as if she were auditioning for ‘Fiddler on the Roof’. 

But when heading out for a night on the town when the mission was to get laid, she had no qualms about breaking out the little black dress. Although hers was a candy apple red number with the thinnest of spaghetti straps to maximize her cleavage and cut short to accentuate her long legs. Next to her big brain, these were her greatest assets. The get lucky red dress held her body’s promises like gift wrapping paper covering a goody sack. As far as she was concerned, that’s what having big tits and a nice round ass were for, attracting the right guy when you needed to get dicked down properly. She didn’t do all of those palates, eat rabbit food, and drop all that weight to run around in oversized tee shirts and sweatpants. This wasn’t high school, and she wasn’t the fat chick anymore. 

Nathanial set his drink down on the cement next to his flip-flopped feet, the ever-present Marlboro Red dangling between his chubby fingers, with the other hand he combed his fingers through his beard as he spoke in his most scholarly tone,  

“I always thought that Kerouac should just suck Cassidy’s cock and get it over with. I mean, come on, it’s so obvious that he gets more excited about men than he does about women.” 

Tavah agreed,  

“I never bought any of the Beat chicks that he wrote about. The women were just cock ornaments.”  

“Exactly! You notice he only remembers what this man said or that man said. He never remembers anything about a woman except whether or not he wishes he could fuck her.” 

“Yeah, but even that seems like an afterthought. He loves men. He idolizes women to the point that he cannot really write about them except as objects.”

“Objects of desire are objectified, nonetheless.”
 

“But it’s not just the way he writes about women; it’s really a boy’s adventure story. More ‘Tom Sawyer’ and ‘Huckleberry Finn’ than ‘Of Mice and Men’ or ‘The Stranger.’”  

“I find myself fascinated by his technique, but his subjects and characters are uninteresting and, in the end, he moves me not. I sense that he’s not telling it straight, that he’s twisting the facts to make this big nothing seem like a little something.”  

“Well, you should really read ‘The Dharma Bums.’” 

“I think ‘Desolation Angels’ is by far a superior example of what the man is capable of.”  

“That’s the problem; I don’t care for the man or his friends. I think the cat’s a typing tourist who took a writing exercise and mistook it for a literary form.” 

‘Yeah, well, he’s better than that fey old windbag Pound!”  

“Better than Ezra Pound, well, that ain’t saying much.” 

“I couldn’t get through his Cantos without falling into a coma.”  

“Pounds is a textbook bombastic stiff, and his protégé, Elliot, is a verbose bore.”

“Pound is like Rimbaud one of those writers who is more fun to read about that to actually read.”  

“Yeah, I gotta’ admit that I prefer Ginsberg to any of those cats. I mean, he seems to be genuinely trying to go to an undiscovered country. You gotta’ respect the courage of the man, he doesn’t back down.”  

“Burroughs is just plain insane.” 

“Burroughs is the wildest of that rowdy bunch, and his stuff is obscenely morbid. But I can understand how a mind such as yours could become enthralled by that fantastically perverse smut peddler now writhing about in the pit with the rest of the literati’s maggot feed.”  

“While I will admit, he can be challenging to read, he is still a better, by that I mean, more honest writer in his hedonistic depravity than that latent heterosexual Kerouac with his Jimmy Olsen, oh gosh, ah shucks, I’m just a poor old suffering poof with no conviction. “

“True, he is the consummate dabbler, but I still think he is influential and worth reading. He takes a lot of risk working the way he does, and I like the way Kerouac pretends to have no style and is just making it all up on the fly, but even his no style at all is a style.”  

“Don’t misunderstand me, I believe he’s one of the 20th century’s most important writers, but I don’t care for the man himself, and since he is the hero of these ‘Vanity of Duluoz’ stories, if I do not like him, then I’m not going to like what he writes. Since he is writing about himself.” 

“Rilke is a much better poet than Blake.” 

“I have always loved his prints and felt that his true genius was as a printmaker.” 

“Rilke or Blake?” 

“Blake was the printmaker.” 

“I thought that Rilke or Rumi was also a visual artist.” 

“No, I think you are confusing the Sufi poet Rumi with another Sufi author, Kahlil Gibran, who was also an artist as well as a poet. His book ‘The Prophet’ was popular amongst the poetasters and middle-aged hippie chicks turned suburban housewives in the nineteen seventies.” 

“Blake on the other hand was an innovative and maddening artiste who never brought a job in on time or within budget and was constantly testing the boundaries of the medium as a printmaker.” 

“Yes, he was obviously a much better visual artist; his images were often disturbing and haunting, but like his verse, obviously the work of a brilliant primitive.” 

“I do not care for those infantile rhymed couplets of his, even in his best work.” 

Dean Moriarty is an Asshole 

“I think old Dean Moriarty, I even think of old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.” 

-Jack Kerouac 

“Dean Moriarty is a first-class asshole,” said Tavah to no one in particular after reading the last words of ‘On the Road’. She closed the book and laid it on the poolside table next to her 151 Texas tea. The pool party at Nathanial’s parents’ house was much better than the one Tavah and Aaron had gone to with Desiree a few weeks ago at one of her boyfriends’ apartments out in the burbs; it was a drag. Most of the guys at that party worked with Desiree. 

They all had a thing for her, and she was eating it up, too. But Tavah and Aaron were both disappointed when they got there because there were only two girls at the party: Tavah and Desiree. This didn’t seem to bother Desiree at all; in fact, Tavah began to suspect that she had planned it this way, as if she were trying to prove something to somebody by having all these dorks show up just for the chance to ogle her in a bikini. Pathetic. She didn’t know what Desiree was trying to prove, but she now regretted not listening to Aaron and heeding his warning that they skip this dork fest. 

She had thought that it would be a good idea to meet some people who were regular folks and not lawyers or poets, musicians or artists, but just plain folk. Ordinary people, with ordinary jobs, living their ordinary lives. But this, this was just plain sad. It wasn’t anything like the party at Desiree’s house; there were no couples here, which should have come as no surprise considering Desiree’s behavior at the party she threw earlier this summer. Before the evening was over, she had drunkenly groped and slobbered all over every guy there. The few girlfriends she had from work would never show up any place where you had to wear a bathing suit. 

After her last party, not a one of her ever-dwindling number of female associates would bring their men anywhere where there would be girls in bikinis. So, here she was, a forty-minute drive from her downtown loft, surrounded by over a dozen single white males. The local pickings were pretty slim if this was all that she had to choose from. Tavah peeked over the tops of her shades as she eyed the doughy suburban boys standing around Desiree as if she were holding court, then sighed as she lay back on the lounger. 

These were the kind of guys for whom the pity fuck was invented. Most of them were computer geeks; their conversations tended to revolve around the latest video games, action-adventure movies, and skateboarding. While they bragged about the size of their monitors, the amount of RAM on their hard drives, and what software they had downloaded. She sipped her drink, thinking Why am I here? 

“Aaron, would you do me a favor and shoot me now?”

Aaron played video games too, but at least he had the good sense to not talk about it. Now that she thought about it, it was one of his more enduring qualities, the way he asked you about things that you liked and didn’t just go on and on about the things that he was passionate about as soon as you paused to take a breath. He never talked much about any of the things that he did without her.

Outside of a poetry reading, he didn’t discuss his poetry with her, other than in passing; she knew that he still painted, but he never talked to her about his paintings. He had warned her before about how lame most of these yahoos were, but she had dismissively poo pooed his warning, attributing his lack of enthusiasm to his being a bit of an intellectual snob. 

The booze was top shelf, the bud even better, and she could always peel away from any excessively boring conversation by sidling up next to Aaron. Tavah was hoping to find someone to bone at this thing, but it seemed as if Desiree had already raised her leg and left her scent on the balls of every guy here except Aaron. Without the distraction of her girlfriends, she realized Desiree was an empty-headed twat. The longer they were there and the more she watched her, the more she realized that she didn’t like Desiree, she did not like her at all. This wouldn’t matter under normal circumstances, but she had already paid for a pair of tickets to the Poe, Dépêche Mode concert at Starplex Amphitheatre next week. She was going to that concert with Aaron, but she was going to have to figure out how to break the news to Desiree that they would not be riding to the concert with her and “Old Balls”. It wouldn’t be hard. 

What I Think Of Dean Mariorty 

“I’ve never met a black man or black woman, for that matter, that was a member of the cult of Kerouac.”  

“True, his appeal is mainly to white boys, with emphasis on the boy.”  

“Yeah, and I always thought he was padding his resume with all of his talk about what he ate.” 

“No shit, man, half of the fucking book is a white trash cookbook.” 

“Yeah, I never felt him, you know the guy seems to be shadow without substance. “

“Yeah, I always thought he was a fugazi.” 

“Eh, I don’t know that word.” 

“A poser, an imitation of a writer, master of the art of writing without writing a wraith shadow boxing.” 

“Yeah, now, Bukowski is the real thing.” 

“True, he’s everything that Kearo-whack-off and his loser sycophant legions aspired to be.” 

“Yeah, and Buk never pretended to be a bohemian. No pseudo spiritual insights, he just was so much more honest than those guys.” 

“Yeah, he was without pretenses, and I like that he never pretended to have any great love or insight for the black people or Mexicans. He just loved his drink, loved to write, and he loved to fuck, and he didn’t give a damned about anything else; in that sense, I think he was purer than the rest of the Beats.” 

“Bukowski was not a Beat.” 

“Sure, he was. I first read about him in my books of Beat writers.” 

“Yeah, but he was just a writer who happened to be poor and drunk and writing at the same time as some of those guys, but he most definitely was not a Beat writer. Even though he embodied their bohemian ideals, he hated the Beats and the hippies.” 

“Really, I would have thought that they must have known each other since they were in California, and didn’t Buk have a big reading for City Lights and Ferlinghetti discovered Ginsberg right?” 

“Yeah, but that doesn’t change the fact that Bukowski was not a Beat writer they were merely contemporaries.” 

“Since when do you know more about Beat writers than the people like Anne Charters who have made a career writing books about the Beats and their place in literary history?” 

“Just because some stupid motherfucker writes it in a book doesn’t make it the goddamned gospel. See, here’s the deal: what you don’t seem to understand is that because the Beat movement was so thin that a lot of people have a vested interest in claiming that someone was a member of the movement that wasn’t in order to grab more attention for them as a legitimate literary movement.”  

“Bukowski was beat. But he was not a Beat poet or Beat writer. Jack Spicer was in California writing and even met some of the Beats, but he was a surrealist and an absurdist, and because he was a fat, balding, drunken old queer, none of the Beats were particularly interested in him, but he was the superior writer, certainly a more skilled wordsmith than all of the Beats except Ginsberg.” 

“So, when you’re talking about Beat writers, you’re really only talking about a few very talented people. The first wave of Beat writers would be the holy trinity of Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Burroughs. The second wave Beat writers gobbled up a bunch of West Coast anarchist writers and San Francisco Zen Buddhist poets, along with the kids on the East Coast who were reading their stuff and emulating them stylistically. But, really, then we’re talking about Corso, Di Prima, and Jones. Kaufman is virtually unknown because of his decade-long vow of silence in protest of the Vietnam War, and Walden is rarely read by anyone outside of the third-wave feminist in their women’s studies courses, even amongst the Beat hardcore; she’s underappreciated.” 

“All of the really shitty writers that have been classified as Beats or who slaughtered the hipster cash cow later in life, who wrote memoirs with titles such as ‘Off the Road,’ can’t get their books off the shelf because, other than the fact that they fucked somebody famous, they have no talent. You can file them away with the list of bimbos whose talents are suspect to this day, such as Norma Jean Baker and Anais Nin.” 

“Jeezs, don’t you think you’re pretty harsh on old Madeline Cassidy?” 

“Not as harsh as she was on me. Have you read ‘Grace Beats Karma’?” 

“No.” 

“Well, consider yourself lucky; it’s painfully bad. Even more delusional than her fuck buddy Kerouac, but without a lick of literary talent. As far as I’m concerned, those vacuous Jell-O brained twats owe me for the cost of the books, plus my time for having wasted it reading such painfully bad writing.” 

“I always thought that you learned something from reading, even bad writers, even if it’s what not to do when you write.” 

“Man, fuck that noise. Those imbeciles should stick to suburban housewifery while turning the occasional trick and leave the real work of writing to those who are at least capable of putting together an interesting sentence. If this thing was ghostwritten, then I recommend that she immediately hire an exorcist. My god, If you got nothing to say, shut the fuck up.” 

“So, tell me how you really feel about the Beat writers?” 

Mona fell over, howling with laughter. And Aaron had to admit that he had probably gone a little too far with his critique of the Beats, but then he thought nah, you can never go too far. 

Nathanial loved these rants of his; he found Aaron’s insights on literature genuinely interesting, and whether he agreed with his opinions or not, they were at least his own. Gathered from what he had gleaned while reading and studying the authors’ words. Rather than slavishly regurgitating the opinions spoon-fed to him by professors of literature, he himself held these kinds of beliefs because, well, that’s what they do in school, at least for the first twelve years, which is teach you what to think, rather than teach you how to think. 

Nathanial knew everything that he ever had to say about art or literature was merely him regurgitating what he had recalled of what his professors had said about the meaning of this novelist or that poet they had forced him to read. However, Aaron drew on his real-life experiences with people and his experiences in the world. Whereas Nathanial only knew what was in books and movies. His real-life experiences were extremely limited and totally confusing. 

You Can’t See Me 

At first, you couldn’t see why anyone would want to be around a guy like Nat. But after a while, once you get to know Mona, it becomes obvious why someone like her would choose to be with a guy like Nat. It was because of his complete lack of testosterone in his personality. Living with such an effeminate boy was like living with a chick with an enlarged clit. It had all of the psychological advantages of being a lesbian without any of the social stigma. Mona tended to be attracted to metro-sexual men. 

The macho types did nothing for her other than make her feel uncomfortable and bring back a lot of bad memories, so she tended to avoid them whenever possible. Mona wasn’t mannish per se, but rather boyish in her demeanor, and it became apparent that she was the man most of the time as far as their sex life was concerned. This added a level of irony to one of Nat’s favorite pastimes with Mona, which was ‘What are we going to name our baby?’ Every time an odd name was used in a movie or mentioned in the news, Nat would always say to Mona, 

“I think that would be a good name for our baby.” 

Which at first seemed cute when you thought that they were just another young couple planning on getting married in the not-too-distant future. His constantly teasing her by suggesting these horrible names. 

“If we have twins, I’m going to name one Jessie and the other James in honor of my maternal ancestors who fought and died defending the noble cause of the Confederacy.”  

Every time he watched ‘The Little Mermaid’, he suggested they name their child Ariel. Aeon Flux, after we watched the animated series, Morgana, anytime he watched anything about the legend of King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table. The only thing Aaron liked about King Arthur was Monty Python’s Holy Grail. But it became hysterical to Aaron after he discovered that their sex life actually consisted of her pegging his ass violently with a foot-and-a-half-long latex strap-on dildo. 

Now, every time Nat mentioned one of his ludicrous ideas for a child’s name, Aaron laughed the hardest. The image of Nat bent over with Mona behind him, wearing nothing but that massive strap-on dildo, tearing into his pasty rectum like a kid ripping the paper off of Christmas present, never ceased to amuse him. 

Occasionally, when Nat would suggest a particularly atrocious name, such as Drusilla or some such thing, Mona would have second thoughts about the wisdom of having introduced them. On these occasions when they both began to get on her nerves, she would shout in her shrill little voice. 

“Stop laughing, it only encourages him! It’s not funny!” 

Which only caused the two of them to laugh even harder, for completely different reasons. Aaron could be a real bastard sometimes. 

-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.