Joey Cloudy online

TRAMP: Anarchy in the Used Book Store

“We’re so pretty, oh so pretty.” 

-Sex Pistols 

So, what do you think?

He looked up distractedly what do I think about what?

Those two showing up here today with her fiancé, who we’ve never seen in the year since I’ve been working here. I thought he was her father at first there’s nothing going on romantically between them. He must have a lot of money. Big mouth, big bucks and no balls.

Yeah, and a very small penis.

You think so?

Fuck, my neutered cat has a higher testosterone level than that guy.

Why do you say that?

Because he’s obviously a coward. The only way to not see what’s going on between them is to pretend that it’s not there. His kind is real good at pretending not to see anything what makes them feel uncomfortable.

Well that doesn’t mean that he’s a coward just because he’s in denial?

You can call me a dick, but I know a pussy when I see one. Every conversation with that guy is just more of the vagina monologues.

Vagina monologues?

Pussy farts. You can tell when people are into each other or if you look carefully when one person is into another person and who is just there. The little goth girl and that Rasta looking black guy you’re so hung up on are definitely into each other. If you weren’t so busy checking out his ass you’d have noticed how his usually stoic composure disintegrates and he lights up whenever she meets him here.

She on the other hand wouldn’t be riding the bus over here in this heat if she wasn’t into him. She’s young, oddly attractive and could easily find a more affluent lover if she so desired. Old guys love that young stuff and she looks young for her age.

Your buddy the poet has no wealth amassed, at the moment doesn’t even own a car and he has at least one kid from a previous marriage. I mean come on for the longest time you thought he was homeless. Until you saw him with his kid you were afraid to talk to him. So she has no reason to be with him except that she’s into him, otherwise she wouldn’t waste her time or endanger her relationship with daddy Morebucks.

It’s beautiful to see them together but sort of tragic when you think about it. They’re never going to be able to make it together.

Why do you say that?

Sooner than later she’ll be forced to choose between the man that makes her truly happy or a life of wealth and leisure with a person whom she can merely tolerate. It’s just like something Jane Austen would write if she were alive today.

Although I am loathed to admit it in this case your referencing the great melodramatist that you hold in such high esteem is quite accurate. While I on the other hand was thinking that it would be the stuff of a great Shakespearean tragedy, a romantic comedy or a farce even.

Why do you hate her so?

I don’t hate her I don’t even know her but I guess all of this speculation about the state of their affair has me feeling a bit maudlin I suppose.

No, not the goth girl, I meant Jane Austen. Why do you love Shakespeare and hate her?

I suppose that this particular line of is inquiry best answered with a question. Why do you love Rap but hate Punk?  

There were lots of cool looking girls that worked at the book store but Aaron never hit on any of them. Having grown up in the company of attractive females he knew that good looking women get sick of every horny bastard and his mother trying to pick them up on the street, at work, in stores on the train or bus stops.

He figured it was better to strike up a conversation with one of the customers after all if you both like the same sort of books you at least had that in common. Besides he had only ever seen one black person working at this book store and she had junkie nails; thick, sickly, jaundiced colored with ridges streaking the length of them it was often a sign of a vitamin deficiency.

He had dealt long enough to recognize when someone was fiending. She was cute in a feral sort of a way that only a junkie can be attractive but he was married at the time and it would be silly to hit on a woman that would see you and you’re old lady together. He liked her dreads they were only about six inches long and had a funky blondish tint to them. Back then he was still wearing his flat top faded with lots of stylized parts that V’ed in the back.  

Nowadays he practically lived at the Half Priced Book Store on Northwest Highway. He hung out in the metaphysics section hoping to hook up with some of the new age pagans, wanna be wiccans, neo hippies and Goth chicks. Of course it never worked. He never saw any good looking young women in the bookstore, except the ones that worked there. And he knew better than to hit on them.

The only woman he ever met in the bookstore was a short blonde middle aged woman who easily weighed over 250 pounds. She saw him cruising the isles reading a wiccan spell book and started talking to him because they were wearing the same Tibetan prayer beads. So much for that plan. The best way to get laid seems to be the tried and true method of get em drunk, get em naked, get the pussy. Everything else smacks of effort. 

When he was still married to his second wife her best friend Cassandra Wyld tried to fuck me one day after her best friend went to work and then got mad because Aaron turned her down, after that she made it her business to put him down whenever her and Satan were together hanging out, whores don’t take rejection well.

Your friends and your family will say the words that they want what’s best for you and they want you to succeed and they want you to find love and happiness in your life but that shit ain’t the truth most times especially if they don’t have those things in their life then they don’t want anybody else to have them either, Satan used to go skiing water skiing at the lake on the weekends with Cassandra when they were together but Aaron couldn’t go she said it was just the girls but Cass was fast and easy a regular slut and all of Satan friends were just like Cassandra like his daddy used to say birds of a feather actually what he said was pigeons and ducks don’t nest together if you want to know what someone is really like then meet their friends and see what their like and you’ll have a pretty good idea of the values that the person you’re interested in really holds.

Riding the bus you don’t even have see whose on the bus to be able to tell where you are people on the average are petty and stupid and they despise those who remind them of their own limitations and failures whose presence is a constant reminder of their own inadequacies, Aaron was on his way to see his grandmother after work the old man needed help with a car so he told him he’d come by after work. He on the bus in north Dallas it was not too crowded but the people who weren’t reading a book or the news paper talked quietly amongst themselves, the 44 Malcolm X was the exact opposite crowed and no one was reading except the occasional born again Christian with the king Jimmy version of the bible really just a closeted queer who just wanted to not get the shit kicked out of him anymore praying that nobody will notice him or catch him checking out another man’s ass.

the usual loud shit talking sister it was always the same shit different sister but the same sister 250 pounds of ignorance incarnate with 20 pounds of horse hair weaved and glued to her empty skull

“Look at that nigga with all that hair. Who he thank he is, a black Jesus, sitting back there reading the white man’s books like he was better than the rest of us. I got news for you baby, you can read till the second coming and you still gone be just another nigga to them white mutha fuckaz.”

Aaron loves black people, but he hate nigga’s’ they ain’t the same thing.  

Aaron stands at the bus stop when the only other person there a blank a white guy in white tee shirt and dirty jeans with short cut messy blonde hair ask.

“Do you smoke?”

“Not just a fashion statement but  a lifestyle.”Aaron replies pointing to his dreads They laugh as they wait for the bus. He’s a ghost there but not there with him at the bus stop downtown, on the way to Levis and Karla. ON the bus the ghostboy

Do you want to smoke? He ask as they get off the bus?

Yeah This is a life style not a fashion statement I got some but I ain’t got nothing to smoke it in, I got papers and a pipe at the crib.

hey can I smoke with you if I get you high.

Cool Say we can buy some papers at this quickie mart.

There is confusion about what they’re smoking ghost boy’s talking about crack cocaine and Aarons talking about weed. Levi and Karla both rolled with drunken laughter as Aaron tells him of his adventure on the way over on the bus. They talk about Levis nipple piercings, and the Mexican neighbor with bitch titties and his skanky little blonde speed freak girl friend who kept asking Karla about Aarons work schedule because she wanted to hook up.

They were doing nitrous hits out of a heavy duty balloon while Aaron was smoking weed and drinking beer, wondering who took a shit in the pool. Ahmad tells his mother where his father is staying.

“Mama all of daddies friends are college degreed professionals and nobody ever has to call 911 when I’m with him.”

He was ten. Aaron didn’t start drinking coffee until he was in his thirties until then the closest he ever came to drinking the stuff was hot chocolate.   

It is a myth that most people who use drugs recreationally become addicted or fail to live up to their potential in fact that opposite is true, like the skid row alcoholics the people who become addicted to illegal drugs is minimal the majority of the planets population can handle their shit. Certain hallucinogenics and psychedelics can have a positive effect on most people most of the time the danger of over dose and addiction are ridiculously exaggerated by those in government and the media.

Boots and Angel and the crack whores he hung out with during the time he lived in the hoods and barrios of little Mexico in Oak Cliff, smoking cocaine and fucking whores all night before he got up in the morning and went to work. At two jobs, Boots got him so high once he couldn’t get an erection and started to cry because he wasn’t a junkie he was a sex addict and there wasn’t any point to being high if he wasn’t fucking. The affair with Boots and Angel lasted only a few months but it was a hell of a few months the summer of ‘96 Aaron was in a transitional period, he was still in love with his ex-wife she was married again and had two kids by her new dope fiend husband. 

Mona and Aaron walked through the streets of downtown dallas on there way to Tavahs for a vegetarian dinner. Aaron was nervous about the two of them meeting like this he wanted them to like each other but he had doubts. Tavah was an Alpha and Mona was not. She didn’t mind if he hung out sometimes and was quiet and just listened to her or read a book or wrote a poems. But this was a real dinner party and conversation was the main course. He took the little blue pill just before the boarded the train at park lane station and now it was kicking him into gear.

Everybody except his Moma was glad when My cousin Fat Ricky shot his brother Billie Ray to death. Billie Ray was a bully, a pedophile and a rapist. He was nearly ten years older than Ricky and had been fucking his little brother up the ass since he was in grade school, is it any wonder that Fat Ricky turned out to be a pedophile too. He had put his cock inside of his girlfriends of five year old daughter, still he did the world a favor when he emptied a clip in his brother Billie Ray’s sorry ass somebody was bound to have to kill the ignorant son of a bitch sooner than later, at least he kept it in the family.

Aaron lit another cigarette and kept on talking the Adoral made him talk Mona was used to listening. I used to moonlight as a dealer in the old days at the height of the gang bang cocaine wars of the early nineties I smoked a little cocaine then to keep myself awake all night and sat in the room of some dot head hotel on the south side with a French twelve gauge aspa auto loader with a folding stainless steel stock and a pistol grip covered in foam rubber, I didn’t really need the money I was there to back my boy and fuck the pretty girls who ran out of money but still wanted to get high I am a predator, cruiser and bruiser, my thirtieth birthday I was painting in my large room in a duplex on the Southside on Pine street just a block west of Oakland which is now Malcolm X, I got so drunk that I was on stage dancing with no shirt dancing with the stripper flexing my pec alternately left and right in time to the music with the red head who was on stage she came over to our table and started up the usual bullshit conversation I told her to relax I knew the score and that if she wanted to party with us I gave her my pager number and told her to come by the room after she got off work.

Tavah didn’t like Mona any more now that she had spent the evening with her seeing her up close. Aaron rambled on over the salad.  So, when she got there we had picked up two blondes one blonde and then she called her friend a short girl with glasses and short cropped dishwater blonde with nice tits and a fat ass, she seemed relieved to not be the only girl there when she asked where our cousin was we told her that he had took off to go hook up with a girl on the other side of town so it would just be you three girls and us two guys Ernest was already all over the tall skinny blonde in the middle of the king-sized bed everybody introduced themselves while I got beers and then I told the little blonde one to mix everybody drinks she filled the plastic cups with ice and poured the glasses with Bacardi 151 and coke, I rolled a primo and we passed it around the red headed stripper asked if it was ok if she got a shower first and I told her it was cool and asked if she didn’t mind if I joined her Red invited the blonde to join us and she said she was going to get in the bed first I was a little disappointed but she wasn’t going anywhere and I can fuck all night when I’m drunk or high and I was both.

-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.