Joey Cloudy online

TRAMP: No Woman, No Cry   

“my fear is my only courage”      

-The Mandela Effect  

“my feet is my only carriage”      

-Bob Marley     

Aaron casually strolled into the foyer and headed towards the sign-in sheet, letting the ALICE pack slide off his left shoulder onto the concrete floor as he greeted the doorman Xavier by name. He checked the time; he was five minutes late, but Tavah wouldn’t be pissed. Hell, he thought as he pushed the ever-lengthening dreads out of his face, she’d waited a lot longer than that before.      

Tavah met Aaron on a blind date of sorts last summer when she first flew down in June 2000 from New York to look for a place to live in Dallas. She, being Israeli, was excited about moving here to clerk for Karl Rothberg, a well-respected federal judge. Originally, the plan was for Vanessa, her distractingly attractive lesbian real-estate agent, to take her out clubbing. But earlier that afternoon, she was suddenly incapacitated by a vicious migraine and forced to back out of escorting her client through Deep Ellum.

So, she sent a guy she thought Tavah might like in her place, her cousin, Aaron, who she referred to a bit sarcastically as the Artiest, to escort her through the trendy clubs and bars of Lower Greenville and Deep Ellum that were his regular haunts. Vanessa was confident the two would get along. She had noticed over the years that Aaron had a type. Tall, pale-skinned white girls with black, black, black, black number one hair. Tavah was tall, white, and had black hair. But Tavah wasn’t so sure, having never dated a Texan or a black guy before.       

    Aaron arrived at her hotel in his coworker, red Ford Taurus with his little brother Ernest riding shotgun, acting as security. Levi, acting as chauffeur, was a friend from work. The 5-foot-5-inch, stocky, red-headed skater kid Aaron introduced as Psycho Levi would be their driver for the evening. Aaron had been leery of Vanessa’s phone call and questioned the wisdom of escorting his cousin’s client to the strip. As the day wore on after her panicky call just before lunch with the weak-ass excuse of a migraine, the more he thought about who he was dealing with, the more nervous he became.

If this girl turned out to be a real Cerberus, he didn’t want to be stuck with her alone for the evening. Hell, he didn’t even like his little lipstick lesbian cousin. But, she was family, whether he liked the goofy cunt or not, you look out for your kinfolk. The problem wasn’t just that Aaron knew he couldn’t trust Vanessa. But they’d had more than a few arguments over the last couple of years, and no matter how hard they both tried, if they were around each other for very long, they would begin to rub each other the wrong way.       

    Aaron was the kind of guy who held a grudge with a death grip, and he was still pissed with Vanessa after she sent their former roommate Ashlee a four-page love letter via email. This, after they had all agreed, when he let them move in with him and the subject of inner household dating first came up, that in order to maintain the peace, we wouldn’t try to hook up with each other while we were roommates. Even after she asked him about the wisdom of professing her love for her to Ashlee, Aaron warned her that it was a bad idea because not only was Ashlee a bit of a bigot, but she was also deathly homophobic. Vanessa argued that that couldn’t be possible because she was a dancer and most of them were at least bisexual.  Aaron assured her that even though she slept in the same bed as Vanessa, if she showed any sign of being sexually attracted to her, Ashlee would flip out.      

Victoria reluctantly agreed not to pursue the issue, of course, as soon as Aaron walked out the door, she sent the email to Ashlee. Before he got out of class that day, all hell had broken loose at home. Aaron called Vanessa to find out why she had been blowing up his pager all morning. She confessed that she’d sent the email. She was in a panic because Ashlee should have been home by now, and she didn’t know what to do. She asked Aaron did he thought that if she called her and asked her to delete the email without reading it did he think that she would do it. Loud laughter was his reply.        

Listen, Cuz there is nothing that you can do now. Everything that you could have done. Everything that you should have done, we discussed this morning. But your little hot ass couldn’t keep your shit together, could you? Ashlee’s moving out.”        

“You don’t know that. How can…”        

“Vanessa, shut the fuck up. Who has more experience with straight women, you or me?”        

“You, I guess?”        

“Do you even have to guess? Trust me on this one, your little love letter is all the reason that our mutual friend girl needs as an excuse to get the fuck outta dodge. Ashlee didn’t come home that night, nor did she call.”

When Vanessa got home after class, Ashlee’s stuff was gone. She moved out, leaving only Boomer, her cat, and her dog, a red chow named Starbuck. Vanessa had a grudging respect for her cousin’s brainpower. Both he and his brother had helped her with more of her homework than she cared to think about.       

It’s not that she wasn’t grateful; she appreciates everything that Aaron had done for her in her own fashion. She just thought he was a sorry son of a bitch for abandoning his first wife and their four daughters.        

   Vanessa was certain that Aaron had committed as many crimes as the rest of his roguish assed friends and relatives that he used to hang out with. Everybody in their family knew what a little bad ass he was, despite his good boy façade. Growing up, none of her aunts wanted their kids to have anything to do with him; he was, it was agreed, a roguish little hoodlum.        

   Now, at thirty-seven years of age, he stood before them unscathed. While the children of those who had been forbidden to associate with him as a child were all addicted, incarcerated, or dead. She counted her brother amongst the addicted and dead, a heart attack last spring. Some part of her resented him for surviving, for coming through it all safe with this new self he created; thug turned the warrior, the warrior turned painter, the painter turned poet? Negro please. He was no Cincinnatus or retired Samurai.

While she didn’t care for his style of painting and couldn’t comprehend half of his poems, what she did understand was that white people were driving halfway from Oklahoma to hear this brother read poetry on a Tuesday night in a coffee shop east of Downtown. And that was the kind of thing that would impress this gorgeous Jewish lawyer client of hers from New York. She needed him to do her this favor so that she could close this deal and collect that sweet-ass commission.

Besides, she could tell that they would like each other. They were both brainiac pot-smoking leftists. She had described Tavah to Aaron as looking like the actress Daryl Hanna, which was a lie, other than she was tall, beautiful, and allegedly had a vagina. But he saw her as somewhere between Zena warrior princess and Wonder Woman. Note to self, call your cousin tomorrow and say thank you.      

   Tavah saw the red Taurus stop in front of the sliding glass double doors of the Adolphus hotel lobby. The car’s tinted windows kept her from being able to see inside, but it fit the description of the car her realtor’s cousin said he would be in, and it was on time. She took a deep breath before she walked out of the hotel towards the car.

She dressed casually for the evening with comfort and coolness in the merciless Texas heat dictating her ensemble for the evening, a sky-blue tie-dyed sundress of light cotton and sandals. Aaron emerged from the back seat in his usual black steel-toed boots, baggy black jeans, and oversized black Nirvana t-shirt. They took a moment to look at each other with an approving eye before both broke out in big goofy grins, laughing as they embraced, each relieved to see the other was attractive, neither being the kind of person that would want to be seen out in public with an ugly date.         

“First, we hit the Angry Dog. If we’re lucky, Cassidy will be there tonight.”      

“Cassidy, you know from where?”     

“She used to date my best friend, Doogie, before he married Janie.”    

“Is it in the West End?”    

“Nothing’s in the West End anymore, Kiddo. Got gentrified in the 80s, kicked all the cool kids out, so now we all hang out in Deep Ellum. The Angry Dogs is the first bar you see if you’re on Elm Street coming in from Downtown.”    

Aaron introduced her to the driver, Psycho Levi, and the other passenger, his little brother, Ernest. Both of whom spent most of the evening trying to impress her with their lame assed cliché pickup lines and clueless attempts at what apparently passed for conversation in the projects and trailer parks. Tavah was, however, impressed by Aaron’s charm and scathing wit. He was actually a great conversationalist he talked to her in some depth about the history of Deep Ellum too everything from early 20th-century Blues music to the Elmwood cobblestoned streets that looked golden in the rain, inspiring the yellow brick road in the Wizard of Oz.

Whenever the two losers he had brought along as beast handlers shut up long enough for him to get a word in sideways, she found him to be terribly funny. He even managed to laugh at himself for bringing his brother and some guy from work with him tonight. He got the joke and laughed with his whole body; she found that attractive. He was artistic, hardworking, and ambitious, but still laid back. She looked up at some point while Ernest and Levi were trying their damnedest to get into her panties, and Aaron just shrugged his shoulders and smiled.

Living La Vida Loca electric guitar riffs followed a blast of trumpets across the bar.

“Dance with me, Aaron.”

“I can’t.”

“Yes, you can, Aaron. You see, Your Boss, my real estate agent, told you to take me out and make sure I had a good time. Now get up, and dance good.”

Aaron grinned at the tall, dark-haired stranger as she took him by the hand. He followed her onto the dance floor. She spun, and her sundress rose like petals of a flower. She spins, shimmies, and shakes serpentine and sensual. She slithered up to Aaron, tossed her arms around his shoulders, and wrapped a leg around his waist as she ground her crotch against his hips in an exaggerated pantomime of seduction. She had nice moves, but he wasn’t about to get embarrassed by a Yankee girl.  

Watching from their seats with most of the other patrons, Levi and Ernest watched the couple dance. Ernest tapped Levi on the shoulder.

“Watch the show. My nigga’ used to win break dancing competitions in Cali when he was in the Marines, had a whole crew of pop locking jarheads, and he was their leader.”

Levi looked back at the dance floor just as the music exploded after the chorus, and Aaron began to spin as he circled his partner.

“She moves like a professional.”

“I noticed. She is really good.”

“Yeah, she’s obviously had some sort of training as a dancer.”

She moved, liquid, sensual, smiling as her partner matched her moves in a frantic pop, gliding around her as if he were a machine on a track. It was the spin into a split, then bounced back up, moving like a snake, that caused

“Levi to exclaim holy shit!”

As several onlookers cheered and clapped, Tavah and Aaron took turns, now showing each other their best moves. They both stopped on the beat, then shimmied towards each other and danced dirty on each other’s thighs. Before they turn their backs on each other and spin away, she stops with a flourish, and he spins into the split as the trumpets roar and snakes back up to his full height with the guitar riff.

“Jeezus, are his bones made of rubber!”

Ernest looked on indifferently as if he’d seen him do this his whole life. And he had.

“Guy was even on the gymnastics team in school, then studied Taekwondo and Kenpo for years.”

Ernest pulled on his beer, looking at the woman dancing with his brother. She was beautiful, grinning ear to ear, and she knew how to move, that’s for sure. The song ended the patrons applauded the couple as Bob Marley began to wail through the bar’s speakers. “No Woman No Cry” carried them into each other’s arms, they spun in a slow, sensual circle, staring into each other’s eyes, smiling. 

“They move like Gomez and Morticia Addams.”

“Jack Rabbit Slims, he said. They are doing the dance number from Pulp Fiction.”

He laughed, finally getting the joke. Ernest said, looking at the redhead kid sitting next to him. There was something about the way they were around each other that he couldn’t put his finger on all night, and that was it, they shared some sort of weird secret language.        

   There was chemistry between them. They were at the end of the evening, two attractive people who were not sexually attracted to each other. Still, she’d had fun and made sure she got his pager number before she left for New York, promising to call when she returned. Aaron assumed she was lying as he wrote his beeper number on the back of one of the gallery’s business cards and gave it to her before she, a little drunk, a little high, climbed out of the car and staggered towards the lobby of the Adolphus. Aaron waved, mouthed good night, figuring that he would never see her again.        

   A month later, Tavah called Aaron from her new loft apartment on the eighth floor of the old Santa Fe building in downtown Dallas. Tavah invited him to dinner. He agreed to meet her after work. Levi was pissed but didn’t let on, volunteering to give him a ride. He thought that she should have called him since he was talking to her most of the night and driving a nice new car.  Levi was a recent graduate of The Art Institute. They hung out painting, drinking, smoking weed, and listening to rock and roll and old school hip hop. One of those guys with a Texas-sized ego and a Rhode Island-sized intellect. Lacking an ounce of class. Aaron thought he was a hard worker, even though he lacked common sense of any kind.  Levi thought he was handsome, a real ladies’ man; the need for delusion ran deep.         

   After overhearing Aaron’s phone call at work, Levi volunteered to give Aaron a ride to Tavah’s that evening. After work, he told Aaron he would need to make a ‘quick stop’ to score some weed from a friend in the Grapevine or Grand Prairie somewhere in the goddamned sticks, but promised to have him back in plenty of time to meet Tavah. Aaron was supposed to be at her place by 7pm he kept calling from different places. Levi stopped looking to score weed and assured Tavah that as soon as he got back to the city that he would come right over.

After stopping at a laundry mat, a quickie mart, several apartment complexes, and one cow pasture that was supposed to be a park, they finally drove back to Dallas. Levi got Aaron back to the city after eleven pm, then refused to take him Downtown, forcing Aaron to call a cab from his place in North Park.        

   Tavah was pissed, but she was also glad that Aaron had called and let her know that Levi had flipped out and had practically kidnapped him. Tavah saw that not only was Levi colossally dense, but petty to boot. She wouldn’t have gone out with a piece of useless trash like him if the species’ survival depended on it. Not just because he was ugly, which he most certainly was, but because he was a witless fucking idiot. She had neither the time nor the patience for fools. She wondered why a guy like him was friends with a useless prick like Levi.

Aaron liked Levi because he paints after work, and better to be associated with hicks who have a real work ethic than a bunch of pseudo-intellectual uptown snobs who hadn’t finished a painting since college, who did nothing but talk about art but produced nothing. Watching the two of them together was like a color-blind casting of ‘Of Mice and Men’. Aaron was one of those screw ups who ultimately tried to do the right thing. Like herself, he flirted around at the margins of the law and morality, but in the end, he would only go so far over the line.       

     The cowboy cab dropped Aaron off at the Old Santa Fe building at 11 pm, which meant that when he finally arrived at Tavah’s with a bottle of merlot, a quarter ounce of smoke, and a bouquet of street corner roses, he was only four hours late.   

-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.