Joey Cloudy online

Chapter 29  

TRAMP: Burning Down The House On Belmont Street  

“And you may ask yourself, “How do I work this?”  

And you may ask yourself, “Where is that large automobile?”  

And you may tell yourself, “This is not my beautiful house”  

And you may tell yourself, “This is not my beautiful wife”  

-Talking Heads  

Aaron looked at the cheap prints in readymade frames on the living room walls, Pollack knockoffs, offset-lithographs, random geometric shapes splattered with primary colors. It was the sort of thing in vogue with art majors who loved to paint but couldn’t draw, chosen because the colors matched the sofa or the curtains. Empty white walls were preferable to these art student abortions. The usual futon in front of the television, the coffee table probably pressboard, poplar or pine with an Oak veneer sat in between.  

In the corner to the left of the TV was a large black metal cage with a smaller metal cage on top. The one on the bottom was for the AkiTa named Mavis, and the slightly smaller cage on the top was for the litter box trained iguana named Thea. In the opposite corner was a large, narrow terrarium on a tea server that housed her constrictor and python named Bo and Monty.  

As they continued on through the house, Desiree showed him the downstairs bathroom next to her bedroom. Then they continued with the tour of her home back through the dining room, an antique table of negligible quality surrounded by reproduction Chippendale chairs. The kitchen was huge with a gas stove. An aging white fridge which served as a perch for the only venomous snake in the house, a coral snake in a small terrarium that covered half of the top of the fridge. There were three ways to exit the kitchen: if we headed back the way we came through the dining room, then the living room, which was the door next to the fridge. The door opposite that one led out to the cedar deck with the usual patio furniture, a few ecru plastic chairs around a table from K-mart overlooking the large backyard.  

The door on the wall between those two led to a medium-sized room that Desiree used for her office, other than an ebony colored RTA computer desk that held a year-old Pentium computer with a huge monitor and a fire engine red Olfa lamp, one of the dining room chairs was in front of it, and a nearly empty two-drawer file cabinet. The only other thing of note in the room was a few of her paintings in ready-made black metal frames hanging on the wall next to the door they had just come through that led to the kitchen. She pointed out with some pride that she had won a painting contest as a child in North Dakota, and she even had her clippings from the local paper framed on the desk. The paintings that she stood beside, with the royal blue first-place ribbon on them, in the decade-old photograph, pictured landscapes of adequate quality. But these newer paintings that she was working on were female figures, and neither showed any of the promise of her earlier work.  

What do you think of my paintings?  

She chirped after telling him about all of her awards and accomplishments as a child prodigy. He chose the lie direct rather than the lie of omission.  

I think they show some potential. I’d be interested in seeing them when you’re finished.  

Aaron felt uncomfortable talking to her about her art; she was obviously fishing for compliments, and he wasn’t biting. She was the kind of girl who was accustomed to having boys complement her. Like a lot of attractive women, she believed the lies that men told her about her nonexistent talent as a painter. If she were fat or ugly, then she wouldn’t have these illusions, but beauty acted as a sort of filter through which all reality is filtered. Men lie to beautiful women in the hopes of somehow getting into their good graces. Women lie to beautiful women, hoping to raise their status by proximity.  

Once they were out of the office, she led him toward a wide staircase just past the only room with the door closed in the house.  

That’s Jeff’s room. We both work for the same company.  

Desiree opened the door, and they peeked inside from the hallway. Aaron feeling a bit like an interloper. Inside Jeff’s room was just as nondescript as its occupant. On a small desk, there was a computer. A three-year-old Jazz Fest poster hung over an unmade full-sized bed. A lone white Adidas sneaker with pale blue piping rested on one of the pillows. Piles of crumpled clothes tumbled off the bed onto the floor. She closed the door and then headed upstairs to what was to be Aaron’s room. It was a single room nearly as large as the entire house downstairs. The only door led to a huge bathroom with a European-style shower. The skylight was glorious; he was going to love living here.  

Only one thing disturbed him about moving in with Desiree, and that was the fact that there were no books in the house. No bookshelves and no books other than a few manuals sitting next to the computer, the only other reading material in the house seemed to be the usual women’s fashion and home decorating magazines. Damned that waspy twat Martha Stewart to hell for deifying the cult of domesticity.  

Desiree was a computer geek, just like Ahmaad’s mother. Hell, they both worked for the same company. These were a species of intellectual on whom literature was lost. It was a bad sign, nevertheless. Having dinner or a few drinks after work was one thing, but living with a woman who had no respect for literature, he suspected, was not a very good idea. Sure, she seemed open-minded enough, but there was something false in the front that Desiree put on; he just couldn’t figure out what her game was.  

Was she really a conservative Christian type who was feigning hipness in order to save his godless soul? Well, if she were a closet Christian, then she was in for a hell of a surprise when he moved in here. No, that couldn’t be it, they had talked about god and religion, and she wasn’t the one that got offended, it was that dumb assed little Vietnamese fucker Marshall who came by that afternoon, the two of them already three sheets to the wind. He arrived uninvited and then left just as suddenly in a huff.  

She said that the conversation about religion had pissed him off because he had been raised by a very religious southern Baptist family. Desiree bragged that she had been a punk in her high school days when he warned her about his raunchy assed friends and the partying that often went on until sunup. Although that was something of an exaggeration what they usually did all-night was read poetry to each other and argue about the merits of this poet over the short comings of that poet but he didn’t want to mislead her and have her believe that because he was a writer that she was going to have some quiet little house mouse up here pecking away at the keys in solitude all the time.  

Granted, that’s what it would be like most of the time, but on those occasions when he did have company, he just wanted to be sure that it was not going to be a problem. She assured him that it was not going to be a problem, but of course, immediately, it became a problem. She was eager to have him move in, and he needed to get out of that hotel. He wasn’t ever going to make enough money to pay the back rent on the apartment he had been evicted from in ‘99, and so it was always going to be up to him to rent from individuals. It was a risk, but what the hell.  

Well, it’s cheaper than living in that crack head hotel. Besides, living a block in a half away from all of the dance clubs and soulless bars full of drunk college kiddies putting their tab on their parents’ credit cards on Lower Greenville would be fun. Plus, it was nearer downtown and Deep Ellum, and Insomnia, the used bookstore, was less than a half a mile walk from here.  

Well, what do ya think? Do you want to move in here? The computer in the office would be at your disposal because I do all of my work on my laptop.  

Aaron tilted his head back, looked up at the pitched ceiling of the room as he spun around 360 degrees, looking over the massive room, then his eyes returned to the sky light with the plastic paint bucket beneath it to catch the water that came in when it rained.  

Well, Desiree said tentatively, wondering if he would finally move in?  

OK, then it’s a deal. I’ll catch the next bus out to my room, get my stuff, and be moved in here tonight.  

You’re kidding, right?  

What?  

I’ll give you a ride to pick up your stuff, dude.  

I don’t wanna be a bother. I ride the bus or take a cab all the time.  

If it was a bother, I wouldn’t have offered, jeez, don’t act so macho, it’s retarded.  

OK if it’s cool with you.  

Cool Cool.  

Desiree said Cool, Cool all the time, It was cute at first, but by the time he moved out, he wanted to strangle her every time she said it.  

Desiree had heard of ecstasy, but she had never tried it. These days, she was like most of her friends, a full-throttle alcoholic who started drinking every night after work and smoked two packs of Marlboro Light 100s a day. While many young professional women worried about their careers stalling when they bumped their heads on the company’s glass ceiling. Desiree had only bumped her head on the bottom of her supervisor’s desktop or the headboards of beds during mid-afternoon trips to the LaQuinta motel less than a mile up Central Expressway.  

She had fucked and sucked her way to the top levels of middle management at EDS, where she was employed as a computer programmer. Now, she was, for all intents and purposes, trapped in a dead-end position teaching a course about software she didn’t know how to use. Desiree was clueless about men, women, and the real world in general. Having been raised in such a provincial household with her very austere, overbearing Lutheran mother and her moralizing grandmother, who only spoke Swedish.  

She had been a spoiled, precocious youngest child with a talent for painting, but the divorce of her parents when she was only seven had completely warped her mother, who then completely twisted her youngest daughter’s sense of self. She thought she was smart enough, she had never worried about her face, and she was pretty enough. Desiree was ashamed of her body. She thought she was fat. When she was in fact, thanks to a membership at the gym, her vegetarian diet, as thin as a rail.  

Still, she behaved around men like a tragic Candid and seemed to need to seduce the men around her in order to sense she had control over them, rather than befriending them before earning their respect. She kept a rotating group of horny scrubs on standby, each one thinking that he might someday be the one she chose when she finally settled down. There is a type, a very specific type of man who wastes his time waiting for a woman as fucked up as Desiree to call him so that he can get his monthly blowjob, or if she were feeling particularly desperate he might be given the privilege of getting to flail his penis around in that wretched canyon between her legs that passed for a vagina on her. For the more promising well hung amongst her geek cadre, vaginal intercourse in the missionary position was about as wild as Desiree got in bed.  

If she were not so attractive, in a sort of elfish alien sort of a way, no man would bother with her, because Desiree was a dead fuck. She was a lazy, selfish lover who just lay there like a cooling corpse during sex while you essentially masturbated in her. Desiree had wide breeder hips and a huge pussy echoes, and everything Evil Kenevil had a better chance of making it across Snake River Canyon. Combine that with the fact that she knew next to nothing about yoga, Pilates, Kegels, or vaginal muscle control.  

She thought all there was to giving head was letting a guy put his cock in her mouth and wave it around a bit at her tonsils. This usually worked for her because she tended to date dorky young nerds or older men whose careers had peaked as mid-level managers or low-level department heads or adulterous vice presidents, all of whom reeked of desperation. These are the sort of men who would jump through fiery hoops for pussy. They tended to spontaneously ejaculate at the mere sight of a good-looking woman, no matter how dreadful a lay.  

Aaron woke up with a drum kit falling down a flight of stairs in his head. His eyes gradually focused after he rubbed the sleep from his eyes. Aaron then sat up on the pallet of blankets and large overstuffed throw pillows that he slept on, not quite directly beneath the skylight. There was a small leak whenever it rained hard, so he kept an old metal popcorn can beneath the spot where the skylight leaked.  

The last two years living like a gypsy, sleeping in the car, crashing on folks’ futons, hotels, and staying up all night drinking coffee, reading and writing, waiting on the buses to start their routes, days hanging out in the bookstores, all of those late-night conversations, meeting people, making new friends. This morning, the sound of falling water pounding against the bottom of the metal bucket was sweet as a drum solo; there being nothing lovelier than the storm that you are safe from beneath your own slightly leaky roof.  

The builders had placed a high steeply pitched roof onto this former one story nearly one hundred year old wood framed house. A wide staircase led upstairs to what could have been used as a game room. There was only a single room other than the gigantic bathroom with a black and white art deco tiled European shower, complete with a bench along the wall across from the showerhead. The Greek key molding gave the humongous single room, which was as large as the entire two-bedroom house beneath it, an austere yet elegant ambiance.  

Desiree Baker owned the house, and she was also a client of Aaron’s realtor cousin Vanessa. They had met at a dinner party at Vanessa’s and gotten along well enough. Desiree needed to rent out the empty upstairs in order to be able to afford a new SUV, so when she found out that Aaron was living in a hotel, she asked him if he wanted to rent the upstairs loft. There was only one kitchen, and Desiree had over half a dozen pets, snakes mostly, pythons, and a constrictor boa. She also kept a pair of coral snakes in an aquarium in the kitchen on top of the refrigerator. That was to keep Dakota, the Akita puppy, and Thea, a litter box-trained iguana, who liked to take for walks on a leash around the neighborhood as if she were a bald green dog.  

Both Dakota and Thea had the run of the house. Thea and Dakota both slept in the living room. Thea’s large cage completely covers the top of Dakota’s crate. Dakota stayed in her crate while everyone was at work during the day, while Thea followed the sun from window to window from downstairs to upstairs, then back downstairs to her cage in the living room by the westward-facing window. By the time anyone came home, it looked like she had never left her cage. Aaron was used to reptiles; several of his friends kept everything from snakes to birds to ferrets when he lived in the burbs with his mom.  

Aaron celebrated moving into the loft by inviting his girlfriend at the moment, a beautician who was attending college at Texas Women’s University, and her girlfriend over to party with him that weekend. Desiree had been a punk when she was in high school, and so she has always thought of herself as pretty hardcore. But that didn’t change the fact that she was from a small town in North Dakota, and there was a massive difference in what Aaron meant when he said party and what she had in mind.  

Back home, she thought she was a real Punk because she wore a black leather motorcycle jacket, had fuchsia highlights in her hair, and listened to a bunch of American hardcore bands that no one there had ever heard of. A big night out consisted of driving around in the boondocks, drinking cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon, and smoking the occasional joint. But Aarons’ girlfriends were into stuff a lot heavier than pot and a lot more hardcore than strategically ripped jeans and neon colored highlights.  

Aaron’s presence was beginning to frighten her. He wasn’t doing anything that he hadn’t always done; in fact, he was acting perfectly normal for a writer. Drinking, smoking, and fucking are all of the traditional literary pastimes. Never had he spoken to her in a belligerent tone; it was something more subtle than that, it was because of the other night when he had refused her drunken advances. She didn’t feel that she could control him the way she kept the other men in her life under control.  

She had initially believed that because he was a poet that he would be the easiest of them all to handle. She had never had a black lover but it wasn’t that black men never asked her out, occasionally one did but it was always some sad hip hop, pseudo gangster rapper wanna be pathetic fashionable ghetto fabulous cultural stereotype or one of the double stuff Oreos at her job asking her if she wanted to go the theatre with them Jeezus, like does she looks like she gives a fuck about Stephen Sondheim, the day she started listening to that lame shit somebody better find her pod.  

Aaron carried himself as if he were a regal bum, and he spoke a peculiar fusion of Black and standard English as if he were bilingual. Which he in fact was. Desiree had noticed it on several occasions when she had given him a ride to the Southside to cash his paycheck at the parts house. She had seen on those occasions how effortlessly he shifted gears, speaking to his father, he slipped into a black English that was so colloquial and alien to her North Dakota ears that she could not follow the conversation but only pick out occasional words and phrases. When he was around the white boys, as he referred to everyone north of the Trinity River, he spoke their language; he had no trace of the lazy tongue that was the signature of American black English.  

-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.