Joey Cloudy online

chapter 31  

Tramp  

I used to love her, but I had to kill her.  

I think my next book of poetry will be a crown of feminist anti-sonnets and I’m going to title it ‘On Women’.  

Oh. Aren’t we the clever little bastard? Retorted Tavah snidely, never looking up from her jigsaw puzzle. The image was clearly visible now, the puzzle already three-quarters assembled; it was a field of purple irises by Van Gogh.  

What is the name of that old song about Van Gogh?  

Tavah had picked up the puzzle at the DMA / Dallas Museum of Art during their visit to the museum last week with Ahmad and Aaron. Aaron had wandered off alone into the west wing’s primitive exhibit. And as he returned to the main corridor, he saw them each in front of a humongous canvas whose only composition was a wash of a single enigma of color. And for some unnamable reason, this image overwhelmed him for an instant with the solemnest burst of joy. As he realized the undeniable power of their legacy of creation was to give ourselves unconditionally to the soul purposeful act, that alone he knew was the un-abandoned obsession that would redeem his life.  

This was the only way for him as he walked the path and followed it out of the darkness of this shared nightmare we must suffer through our human history into the light of the loneliness of the solitary mind. I have heard of people who lived their entire lives and never experienced a single miracle, or seen a divine image, or had a holy moment. When this sadness lifted, he was no longer of their number, and for these pitiful beings, what a bestial existence they must endure. What will it take to bless them one and all with a single superhuman holy vision?  

Geeks, Dorks, and Nerds  

“Don’t worry, I’ve got him under control.”  

-Mona Elisabeth Whittaker  

Mona lay on her tummy, stretched out on her black futon, wearing only Aaron’s black Nine Inch Nails T-shirt and a pair of her fiancées red and black plaid boxers. She knew by the ‘Brick House’ rhythm that it was Aaron knocking at the door. Although she was excited that he had finally arrived, she did not move from the futon. Nor did her excitement show on her face as she lay unmoved. Nathan was getting clingy and territorial again. She was in no mood to argue with him.  

Right now, the only thing she was eager to do was to smoke out with Aaron and chill in the sweet silence of his aura. She pretended to be uninterested in who was at the door as she lay there looking at the pages of ‘Memoir of a Beatnik’, not reading anything. Out of the corner of her eyes, she nonchalantly watched Nathan as he pulled on a cerulean-striped pair of tattered skid-marked boxers and shambled towards the door in a bit of a huff. Mona slowly slid her hand down her belly between the black linen-covered futon mattress under the elastic waistband of her shorts until she felt the wet warmth of her bush before she eased her fingers into herself. Her other hand innocently brushed the hair back that had dropped across her pale face.  

Aaron walked in as if he owned the place. She liked watching him walk. He had a purposefulness to his relaxed stride as he walked by the kitchen into the living room. He walked everywhere as if he owned the world, and in a rather Kerouacian way, he did. Aaron had no home, but he had a job framing art at an uptown gallery. Today was his payday, and he came in carrying an extra-large vegetarian pizza with extra cheese. Aaron wasn’t a vegetarian, but she was, and since they were best friends, that meant he was pretty much a vegetarian too.  

He could have gotten half of the pizza with meat, but he had gotten the thing because he had been thinking about her. It was the middle of the month, and he knew that they were broke until the end of the month when Nathan collected his allowance or stipend, as he preferred to call it, from his parents. It was the money they gave him for expenses after they paid his rent. The money they were willing to spend to keep him out of their house.  

Aaron stood in the middle of the room, looking around for a moment before he created a clearing on the filthy carpet of the living room by sliding some of the rubbish out of the way with the side of his scuffed black steel-toed work boots. He sat the twelve-pack of Shiner Bock and the pizza on the spot he had cleared out the living room floor before he unshouldered his ALICE pack and dropped it in the corner cubby between the end of the futon and the stereo cabinet.  

Aaron took off his black leather motorcycle jacket and draped it casually over the pack. The black long-sleeved tee-shirt clung to his slender five-foot-nine-inch form. Mona lay there letting her eyes eat up every facet of him, the way the long nappy tendrils of hair hung down just past his shoulders, the large almond shaped eyes over high cheek bones, the graceful line of his jaw, the wide flare of his nose, the plump lips, surrounding the line of his mouth, the almost pointed chin, his long slender neck, the chiseled swell of his chest, the slender defined muscle tone in his arms, the broadness of his shoulders, exaggerated by the slimness of his waist and the flattened plane of his belly. Her gaze slowed now as it drifted over his waist, lingering here, she checked his package and felt herself longing for him. The thought of their previous lovemaking aroused her.  

It’s not that she had not been having regular, although completely unsatisfying sex with Nathan, along with another baker’s dozen or so other area musicians, writers, and artists she irregularly hooked up with that hung out in Deep Ellum. They were delusional losers, mostly open mic fringers who drifted from one poetry workshop to another, the usual slacker pack of no-talent hacks that inhabited the margins of every scene.  

Aaron sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the familiar horizon that was the full perverse curves of Mona’s prone body. She caught a whiff of the musky aroma of his scent, the odor of burnt wood, sweat, and pot that clung to his unperfumed body smelled sacred to her. She exhaled softly, anticipating future orgasms as she stretched her body feline-like over the length of the futon. After a moment, she sat up cross-legged in front of Aaron, smiling. Her moist crotch was practically in his face. Nathan returned from the kitchen with three reasonably clean plates and passed one to each of them. Mona saw Aaron lean almost imperceptibly forward as he closed his eyes and inhaled deeply through his nose before he opened his eyes and said, looking hungrily into her eyes.  

I could eat the whole thing myself. Mona erupted with laughter. Aaron smiled mischievously.  

What is so funny? Asked Nat unconcerned.  

Nothing. Mona giggled.  

Aaron fished around in the pockets of his jacket, pulled out two bottles of IBC root beer, he handed them both to Mona. Nat tore open the cardboard on the twelve-pack, snagged a couple of beers, and handed one to Aaron before he grabbed two huge slices of pie out of the box. The slices were bigger than his plate, which caused the tips to flop over the edge a little. With a stubby index finger, Nat flipped the daggling tip of the pizza back over onto his plate. The sauce-covered digit went immediately into his mouth as he noisily slobbered on his finger with so much gusto that one might have thought he was auditioning for the position of a fluffer on a gay porn set. He continued sucking on his finger in this manner until satisfied that he’d removed every molecule of cheese and pizza sauce from his fingers before he went back to his desk to resume the computer game he was playing before being interrupted by Aaron’s intrusion.  

Thanks, brother. Nat muttered, raising his pizza to his mouth.  

You’re welcome, brother. Aaron twisted the top off his beer and lifted it in the direction of his friend before he took a long pull, half-draining the bottle before he set it down. Mona stared blankly at the cap on her bottle of root beer for a few seconds before Aaron dug out an old Swiss army knife from the front pocket of his baggy black Dickies jeans and used its bottle opener to pop the cap.  

Mona was intrigued by how alike yet different the two men were. A pair of Bizzarro fun house mirror twin opposites. Each was highly intelligent, but Nathan could only regurgitate facts in an endless stream of non-sequiturs and useless trivia. Aaron possessed a profoundly rational type of knowledge and an amazing associative ability. Nathan was the product of elite private schools and public schools in neighborhoods so rich that they may as well have been private schools and a graduate of one of the best liberal arts colleges in the nation.  

Aaron was autodidactic, a product of his own indomitable hunger for knowledge. After his mother’s suicide, he moved in with his father and attended inner city public schools, and took a few community college courses. He was an insatiable reader, the product of a life immersed in study in public libraries, used bookstores, listening to public radio, and watching public television, and he had graduated from the school of hard knocks DIY Valedictorian.  

You could see the difference in how they lived. Aaron’s place looked lived in, but it never smelled or got completely out of hand. Nathanial’s place looked like downtown Baghdad; books, mostly comics, DMing/Dungeon Mastering stuff, and D&D-based novels covered the floor. Other than Mona’s school books, there was no order to how the books that were on the shelves were placed. There were just as many strewn all over the floor as there were on the bookshelves.  

Most of what Aaron read was pretty deep stuff: philosophy, theology, serious literature. Nathanial read fluff exclusively; fantasy, science fiction, and comics, rarely did he read any real literature. Aaron’s weakness was for video games; he wasted countless hours playing Final Fantasy VII, Tomb Raider, and Resident Evil on Ahmad’s PlayStation. But when Aaron was in school, taking classes at the community college, the PlayStation was put in the closet until he finished the semester. Yes, he was a geek, but even then, he exercised self-discipline and restraint. He had his priorities straight, at least compared to most of the bohemian types that she knew.  

Mona had been looking forward to Aaron’s arrival all day as she napped lazily. They lived with Nathan’s aging cat, Queequeg, whose litter was rarely changed, their filthy one-bedroom apartment with garbage strewn across every horizontal surface, it was the accumulating bags of garbage that confused Aaron the most. He didn’t understand why, with a dumpster not twenty yards from their front door, they didn’t take out the trash.  

There was a four-foot-high pile of white plastic bags filled with garbage piling up in the kitchen in front of the side door. It seemed both were content to live in squalor rather than put forth the effort it took to clean up after themselves. Forget what you think you know about the health and hygiene habits of Americans. The filthiest people are the ones who have been raised with servants cleaning up after them their entire life. Take away their housekeepers and you end up with a scene very much like this one, a trashed, filled apartment that was rarely cleaned and stank at all times.  

Mona hoped that Aaron would want to go out tonight. She had long grown weary of Nathan’s inane anglophile babble about King Author and his incessant chatter explaining his character’s latest misadventures in his long-running Dungeons and Dragons campaign. Nathan was even more talkative, if that was possible, than usual because Eric, Jacqueline, both Bills and his girlfriend Brandie, the geek camp follower with the jug handled ears, along with the rest of his adorable loser crew from his college days, although these days they seemed more like losers and a lot less adorable, along with her sister and her Jerry Garcia look alike sweet geek of a husband were all coming by to spend the weekend play dungeons and dragons.  

The thought of being surrounded by so many gaming nerds made her shudder with revulsion. Then she relaxed, she had a way out, that’s why she had invited Aaron over tonight, because she knew that he would not want to hang around after they started playing either. She planned on leaving with him. Jacqueline had been desperate to fuck Aaron from the moment they first met, and Aaron had always been attracted to Jacqueline’s petite five-foot-four-inch tight physique.  

Mona had done everything in her power to help them hook up, but it just hadn’t happened yet, and there was an odd tension now between Aaron and all of the gamers because he had stopped playing with them last year when he first began writing poetry seriously. Not that one cannot do both. But Aaron had just gotten fed up with their sloth; they were rich, they had everything, but did nothing. Their lack of any apparent ambition alienated him from them. He didn’t understand why they did nothing else with their lives.  

I just don’t understand ya’ll, you’re all some of the most talented artists and gifted minds that I’ve ever met, and you’re the smartest bunch of mother fuckers I’ve ever known. Why don’t you write and paint and have your work published, put your stuff out there for other people to see, instead of holding up in your rooms every waking moment playing Dungeons and Dragons?  

Role-playing is as important as writing poetry. Aaron was incensed, hearing such an insipid lie coming out of the mouth of someone as brilliant as Nina. He didn’t say anything for the longest while he just stood there looking at her as if she had just squatted and taken a shit right there in the living room.  

No, it is not. Aaron continued incredulously, and I don’t, for one minute, think you’re so delusional that you actually believe what you just said either.  

Nina didn’t genuinely believe it either, but she, along with the rest of the group of hardcore gamers, were still annoyed with Aaron because not only had he stopped gaming with them, and he was a damned good player, but so had Mona. Everyone knew why; she also no longer wanted to be associated with a gang of nerdy losers. She never had, but now with Aaron’s influence, she was beginning to see that she had other options.  

-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.