Joey Cloudy online

TRAMP: Solipsism

Mona found herself matching up her features with Aaron’s, wondering what their kids might look like. He wasn’t attractive according to the Greco-Roman standard of beauty, but she had observed that both women and men checked him out. He looked half his age, his eyes were large, almost doll like so much so that you imagined that if you lay him on his back, they would slowly close. He had a baby face, especially when he shaved his mustache and goatee. His voice was low. She loved watching the expression on people’s faces when he spoke. It was not the sound you expected to come out of his mouth.

When you first saw him, he always looked so serious. She was surprised by the ease of his laughter and his sarcastic sense of humor. Men loved him; he was a man’s man without effort or being a parody of machismo. Women were drawn to him because he looked into your eyes and listened when they talked; you wanted to be in his presence. She loved being in the audience, hearing him read at the bookstores, coffee shops, and bars.

Even though she wasn’t his real girlfriend, she enjoyed being the woman everyone saw him with at the readings. He had a kind of cerebral grace, and you sometimes sensed that he could barely contain his emotions as he read. She had never met anyone so enigmatic yet so full of genuine humility. His newest poems were full of compassion for humanity and rage at injustice. He wrote with the kind of ferocious courage of a man who wasn’t afraid to say what he actually thought and whose insight and powers of observation were both keen and insightful. Mona was not the only person in awe of Aaron; she suspected that most of the women and many of the men who knew him fantasized about making love with him, even though most would never admit to it.  

Aaron Rainer Moore looked the way one imagined a punk rock Zulu warrior would look. But, it was not his color or physique that attracted people to him, although he was lean and well defined. Only his confident, quirky demeanor and his passion for all things artistic made him attractive. His confidence was apparent in the self-assuredness of his gait. His passion was virulent and contagious, his love of books inspiring, the way that only someone who loves the written word beyond reason can be inspiring.

It wasn’t that arrogance founded on nothing of a teenage boy when he tried to imitate a confident man only an affectation. Nor was this the ignorance-fueled conceit of a man-child to be mistaken for this moment, when a human being came into their own, supercharging the atmosphere around him. Mona sat on the back porch drinking black coffee and smoking a joint. She looked at the still pool and thought of swimming after she finished her coffee. She had thought at one time that Aaron was a queer who would also fuck women when she first met him.

But now she was beginning to suspect that he was, in actuality, straight but would occasionally screw guys. But, she wasn’t sure what he thought about during sex or what he fantasized about, which ultimately was the true marker of sexual orientation. She suspected that none of it was carved in stone and that most people were either cowards or liars or both, most likely. She wished more than anything that she was as confident in herself as he was in himself. There was something about confident people that drew you to them. It was as if they had their own private gravitational field that pulls you into orbit around their life. Who else did she know who could bend another’s light in such a manner? He walked into a room as if the world was his.

Mona hated being noticed; she shunned the spotlight, even though most counted her amongst the beautiful people, which was not what she wanted, it was not how she wanted to be remembered. She did not want to be another Anaïs Nin. That was the tragedy of Norma Jean Baker that she was, in the end, merely lusted after but never respected for her talent and ability. The truth is, Mona never understood the appeal of Monroe’s personae; she seemed to be a bit of a ditz and sort of infantile. There were many things that people loved that she just did not get, such as the appeal of the vacuous bimbo. 

Mona sat on the steps by the sliding glass door leading out to the back yard, wearing only Aaron’s bibbed overalls, puffing on a joint, staring absentmindedly at the light reflecting off the tiny waves in the clear chlorinated water. Nathan was loud and flamboyant, but he was not as sure of himself as Aaron. But he was genuinely kind, and that was an attractive quality in anyone. She began to suspect that she was so attracted to that particular quality in people because it was something she lacked: compassion.  

Nathan walked out onto the patio of his parents’ house, finishing off a Bloody Mary in a tall square cut crystal glass. He had pulled on a pair of faded Levi button-fly jeans.

Morning, Babe, give us a drag, eh? Mona passed him the roach, and he took a couple of hits before handing it back to her.

I thought maybe he had abandoned us. He said his voice was now faint in the distance as he kept talking from the kitchen, as he topped off the dregs of his drink with what was left in the blender. Well, that was until I peeked out the front and saw the motorcycle was still here.

Thinking about having a swim?

Yeah, I was going to after this.

Me too.  

She watched as Nathan stripped and then dived gracefully into the water. He swam the length of the pool, kicked, turned off the far side, and returned in a single breath. Not coming up for air until his head surfaced behind the drink he left sitting on the edge of the pool before he jumped into the water.

He splashed water on his face and ran wet fingers through his deep red curls of his balding head. The remaining hair lay in dark, wet waves on the sides and back of his head. She originally thought that his freckles gave his skin the look of a diseased pig. But, now that she had gotten used to his body, she thought his freckles made him look kind of cute, like a five-foot-six-inch, 214-pound Raggedy Andy with male pattern baldness. Mona took a long pull on her margarita, then coughed a little.

Whoa. How much tequila is in here?

None, Aaron grinned from his spot at the opposite end of the pool. I used vodka.

How much vodka is in this thing?

The normal amount. But it is Everclear.

I knew I wasn’t completely insane. 

-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.