Joey Cloudy online

chapter 26

TRAMP:

Sometimes A Man Simply Prefers The Honesty Of A Good Whore

“I told you from the start just how this would end /

When I get what I want, then I never want it again.”

-Hole

Mona lay with her head on Aaron’s chest, his neatly trimmed goatee tickling her forehead, as they lay stretched out legs casually entwined on the black futon, buzzing on good pot, sipping freshly groundA coffee, snuggling while The Cocteau Twins’ ambient music pumped hypnotic tracks across the room. Mobius strips of fading blue grey smoke drifted across the air, flashing bright, crossing blades of light entering the darkened living room from the edge of the Venetian blinds.

Queequeg’s black and white feline form sat regally atop the maple desk next to the monitor, being petted by her fiancé Nathan as he sipped his coffee and surfed the net on the now, nearly 10-year-old MAC, oblivious to the conversation on the futon in the opposite corner of the debris-strewn living room.

Aaron speaks; his voice rumbles gently in his chest over the sound of his heartbeat. The voice is never much more than a husky whisper that only reaches her ears. Harmonious frequencies of his speech. His epicurean meanderings continue to resonate pleasantly in her ear. She feels his words as he speaks, hears the breath come in and go out like the tide, a of winds the words set sail with, she was not listening to his words; she was feeling his breath, the way his chest vibrated as he spoke over the drumming rhythms of his heartbeat.

The poems rise prayers from this cathedral of meat, blood, and bone. Mona listens to his heartbeat as he speaks and plays with the 108 sandalwood prayer beads that hang around his neck. She lay her palm, fingers splayed, on his chest over his heart. They make poems here.

Mona first saw Aaron’s paintings while studying with him at his place after class. The first thing she noticed was how clean and full of light it was in opposition to the dank debris-strewn chaos of hers and Nathan’s apartment. When she entered his apartment, the books were all on shelves, sorted not just alphabetically but by genre as well.

There were books everywhere. There were bookshelves on every wall, not occupied by other pictures or other furniture. Books lined the top as well as the interior and bottom of every shelf of the interior of the massive walnut chrome-trimmed credenza when you first entered the front door. Across the length of the bar. The bedroom was the same. Next, you noticed the art, a gigantic, framed poster of a gas-masked Sandman hung on the wall to greet you as soon as you opened the door.

On the drafting table in the dining room, a new piece, only half finished, a lone figure face half submerged, screaming in a swamp. It haunted her, and she was flattered when he asked her to model and offered her pointing lessons as payment, since, true to his bohemian ideals, he was a penniless romanticist.

The sex was always tantric after their cessions. She had become, over the years, his favorite model, the goddess in the Dionysian pantheon he manifested in the reimagining of the Major arcana as a suite of tantric tarot paintings. He has just begun the new suite of paintings reimagining the tarot’s major arcana. He was a highly trained, skilled watercolorist, as well as a patient and innovative teacher. Her paintings were nothing like Aaron’s, but she was showing improvement in her own style.

I’m a radical lesbian feminist trapped in a black man’s body. Aaron lamented, “

You are so full of shit, your eyes are brown. Mona giggled as he continued with an exaggerated earnestness he adopting a ridiculous southern drawl. I was literally raised by feminists during the height of the women’s rights movement of the 1960s & 1970s. Aaron stated emphatically. Now, boastful with a note of indignation.

I voted for the ERA, pro-women from the draft to the death penalty. I am a feminist like the women who raised me. I am a product of the first generation of male feminists. I witnessed the battle of the sexes as a child. I sat at the feet of a second-wave American feminist; Second-wave feminism was a period of feminist activity that began in the early 1960s and lasted roughly two decades. It took place throughout the Western world and aimed to increase equality for women by building on previous feminist gains. Bettye Friedan, Gloria Steinem. I was reading Fear of Flying in grade school, along with The Feminine Mystique, and I adore Camillia Paglia’s Sexual Personae. My Secret Garden is on my nightstand for Christ’s sake.

But that doesn’t change the fact that I come from a long line of misogynistic men. It’s one of those things, as a culture, that no one likes to talk about, but for most of us, it’s true that too many of us didn’t have fathers, and those of us who had them didn’t care who their fathers were. My father, older brothers, and cousins were all the type of men who love pussy but hate women. And because he is such a charming mother fucker, he has absolutely no problem bedding more than his fair share of women. And here’s the kicker, he doesn’t lie. None of that baby, I love you forever, you’re the only one for me bullshit. Every woman he’s ever been with since I was a kid knew before she ever got involved with my father exactly what he was like, and they still went for it anyway. My old man has dated some of the most beautiful and brilliant women that you have ever seen, and he’s a fat assed loud loud-mouthed, drunk mother fucking mechanic.

As an artist, it was Aaron’s habit to sleep with his models hell; he considered it his right and duty as an artist to seduce the girls and boys who were his models, and who was he to fuck with tradition. “What does it mean…Tradition! TRADITION!” Eugène-Henri-Paul Gauguin is his hero as a painter. Of course, he knows only the myth, nothing of the ugly truth, the pedophilia, the syphilis. He knows only the beauty of browned skinned island girls in his paintings for now, and he was the same way as a young writer, or at least being young to writing.

One of the appeals for Aaron as a writer, although he would be embarrassed to admit to it now, was that he thought that women liked poetry and that poetry readings would be these scenes filled to capacity with brilliant women. Any of you who have actually been to a poetry reading before can stop laughing now.

Aaron understood that Mona, being a survivor of child abuse and an introvert, most likely both were a high-functioning autistics. Mona and Aaron were both emotionally crippled messes. Before reaching puberty, both had been molested as children. Mona had it the worst, being repeatedly violated as a prepubescent child by her mother’s brother, Uncle Pete.

“When I was thirteen, my mom’s 37-year-old ex-boyfriend started raping me and telling me that now I was his girlfriend.” After I told my mom what happened, she told me that;

“It was about time that I found out what the world was really like, and I was old enough to handle my own men.” She stole my diary and took it to a psychiatrist in a vain attempt to have me committed. After seeing me only once, he diagnosed me as paranoid schizophrenic with paranoid delusions.

” I wasn’t crazy. Everything that she had read in my diary was true. She wanted to get rid of me so that she wouldn’t have to compete with me for men’s attentions.”

It sounds incredible, but Aaron listened, having seen it before, women can be some cold-blooded mother fuckers when they put their minds to it.

Mona continued as she lay with her head resting on Aaron’s chest.

“The day before she was going to ship me off to a mental institution, I ran away from home. I hitchhiked to Dallas from our house in Fort Worth. I lived on the streets of Deep Ellum for the next few years. I got addicted to cocaine for a little while, ended up pedaling my ass for money for food and fucking middle-aged losers for a place to crash, before I met Nathan.

Does he know you were a runaway?

He’s clueless in that way that only the rich can be. When I told him that I had run away at thirteen, he thought it must have been a wonderful adventure.

Sounds like ya boy obviously read too much Huckleberry Finn or Oliver Twist or some shit.

I decided it would be better to gloss over the drug thing and not mention the prostitution. Not that it would have mattered much since Nathan’s basically gay, the only way he can achieve orgasm with a woman is when she aggressively penetrates him with that 18-inch strap-on latex horse cock dildo.

Really?

Yeah, that’s why that girl shot at him through his bedroom window in high school. She freaked out when her boyfriend revealed he was into ass play. Since before college, his preferred method of intercourse has been violent rectal stimulation of his prostate. Other than me, the only semi-heterosexual relationship that he’d ever carried on was in high school, and that ended on a bit of a sour note when the girl showed up at his house one night with a pistol and started shooting through his bedroom window. Nathan has that sort of effect on girls.

Other than that, rather disastrous affair, the only straight sex he ever had involved a drunken ultraconservative neo-Christian girl at a party in college, who’d had way too much to drink and passed out. No one there thought very much of this girl, her being one of those holier-than-thou, bible thumping types who thought that she was better than everyone because she just said no to drugs and believed that she was blessed by God with long, straight blonde hair, blue eyes, and a large bosom. She was one of those obnoxious neoconservative types in the habit of pointing out the sins of her fellow students who never tired of reminding them all that she was going to heaven, and they weren’t, because she was saving her virginity for her wedding night. While she was unconscious, Nathanial Percyville Robertson III sodomized her. Damn. Word to the wise ladies…

“Never get drunk outside of yr own house.”

-Jack Kerouac.

There is nothing worse, after getting black out drunk, than coming to with a hangover and a sore, drippy asshole. But other than his cliché college boy date rapist routine, which one could hardly consider a relationship, Nathan’s only real lover had been Eric. For the four years that Nathan and he were in school together, they carried on a passionate, openly queer love affair. Eric, besides being a brilliant student, was also a dedicated gamer. When they weren’t in class, they spent nearly every waking minute playing Dungeons and Dragons. As they, seemingly indefatigable, fucked each other silly in character.

“Oh my, your polymorphed red dragon is ravishing my defenseless 27th-level fighter, magic-user, thief who is secretly the lost wild elfin princess, oh!”

The middle English accents and the falsetto caused the ridiculous to cross the line into the utterly pathetic. They spent the next four years in gamer geek boy heaven. After graduation, they sort of let the relationship expire without comment. Both coming from relatively well-off families, neither was willing to risk their trust funds for a crack at anal sex with a bear. Nathanial moved back into his old room in his parents’ house in Dallas. Eric moved back to Boston to do his graduate work.

Aaron listened and thought to himself that Mona was sort of a dream girl for a guy like Nat. The perfect cover fish, being poor white trash, desperate for a place to live. While she didn’t really look like a boy, she didn’t wear makeup and wore oversized tee-shirts and baggy jeans, which, combined with her pageboyish haircut, made her look like the angst rocker Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails fame with nice tits and a fat ass.

Nathaniel finally had to admit to himself that Aaron was smarter than he was after all. Aaron was right about the difference between having a better formal education and real intelligence. Obviously, he had benefited from attending some of the finest private schools in the country, and he was, in the end, merely well-educated but not particularly gifted in any practical sense.

Whenever he managed to come to any conclusion about how the world worked or what people thought, he was inevitably proven to be completely wrong. What Aaron lacked in formal education, he more than made up for with an insatiable intellectual curiosity and instincts so accurate that they bordered on preternatural. Nathaniel Percyville Robertson the third hated to admit it, but Aaron was a better writer than he would ever be. Sure, he read his comics and action-adventure novels, dreaming of being a leader of men, the kind of man he always read about, the one who saved the world and got the girl. But wanting it and being it are not the same thing.

Nathanial found himself in a constant state of confusion because things never seemed to go his way. People would not follow Nathanial out of a burning building if he held the door open for them. And he never understood that all of those, dork saves the day, books that he was so in love with were written by squishy trust-fondled babies, just like himself.

Aaron, on the other hand, wanted none of these things, still they were his. He had an instinct for sizing up people in any situation. It was the fact that he did these things without any formal training that really bothered Nathaniel. Finally, he had to admit that this was the true power of the alpha, the innate ability that made those around you want to not just follow you, but want to please you, to seek to do what would put them in your good graces.

Yep, Nathanial decided this was what the power of the alpha was really all about, not physical mass or raw number crunching intellect, but some intangible thing that you either did or did not possess. It could not be taught in classrooms or learned from books, and the cinema is no more than dancing lights. We live out our lives staring into cubes of light, leaping from one dream world to another with the push of a button. The automatic emoting of everything is eaten with the ‘I’s first. Oh, I can open my mouth and say any foolish lie convincingly. But when I am lying in the loneliest hours as I wait razor blade teeth of time for this slut called sleep to join me in my bed, no matter how delusional my pose is in the light of day. Staring into the dark hours, I know what is and what is not. Life is a play, and thus far I have played the fool. So what if my life is only an imitation of death, and great men are made of fiercer stuff?

Nathaniel Percival Robertson III sat back into the plush leather of the soft chair in front of his computer monitor and contemplated the future. It was set, it would be comfortable but unremarkable. But Aaron was going to be infamous at the worst, possibly famous. Granted, being an Anglophile, he did not really care for Aaron’s poetry. But he had seen the effect that it had on people, and he knew that he would be a great fool to not be a part of it. Something was happening, right here, right now, and whether it was literary or literal history or something else he didn’t understand, he was going to do whatever he had to do to make sure that he was a part of it.

-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.