Joey Cloudy online

TRAMP: Laurel and Morgan

“I don’t know about you, but I just wanna get my kicks, 

Before the whole shithouse goes up in flames.” 

-The Lizard King 

Laurel, Morgan, Kelley and Crazy Chrissie were the reigning queens of the roll party scene. If they had a motto it would have been something to the effect of we’re party girls and we’ have the carpet burned knees and the cum soaked crotches to prove it. Laurel and Kelley were roommates and they were all Mormons. They all planned to transfer to the University of Salt Lake City before their senior year.

Aaron didn’t understand them but in his own way he loved them all. And what was there not to love about a clique of completely hedonistic bisexual nineteen year old suburban punk exhibitionist. Morgan was laughing so hard she was crying, but even through the tears she kept snapping away, taking pictures with a small silver colored disposable 35-millimeter camera made of plastic documenting this party. This way even if she got blackout drunk tonight she would be able to look at these pictures and see that it was real she had been here and it was glorious.

Arron sat cross legged on the floor on the other side of the room half drunk with a beer in one hand and a joint burning in the other, nonchalantly observing the scene blowing smoke rings at the ceiling growing a little bored. Laurel had her face in the metal bucket that he kept in the middle of the room to catch the water that came in through the leaky skylight. She was on her hands and knees retching in loud wet spattering salvos the sound reverberating off of the walls of the metal popcorn can as if it were a kicker box with a blown out woofer. With her head halfway into the can, all that you could see of her head was the back of her spiky red hair and the words ‘living for kicks’ embroidered on back of her tee-shirt in large red letters. After she finished puking she rose to her feet, smiling weakly a thin strand of translucent yellow bile dribbling from the corner of her mouth. She looked around the room a second squinting her large blue eyes after every flash of the camera unsure if the storm had passed when she seemed certain that there was nothing left in her stomach she staggered off towards the bathroom.

Morgan, Jimmy and Arron continued with the festivities, with everyone drinking longneck bottles of Texas brewed Shiner Bock, frozen margaritas, smoking bud from a little wooden dugout that Aaron had been smoking weed out of since before any of these people were born, They could hear the muffled sounds of water running into the bathroom sink, gargling and teeth brushed her as Laurel cleaned up before she returned to the party undaunted. They greeted her with applause as she returned from the toilet and Laurel, always on stage curtsied elegantly before making her way over to where Aaron was sitting and grabbed the beer from his hand. She turned the bottle up and chugged the half of the beer that remained in the bottle effortlessly then she burped loudly soliciting another round of applause shouts of bravo foot stomping and cheering before she plopped down on the floor cross legged beside him smiling triumphantly.

Aaron reached out and gently lifted her chin looking into the blue field of her eyes, leaned forward slowly until his lips just touched her lips before he began to exhale the pot smoke. Laurel sucked the smoke into her lungs greedily and when he had finished blowing her a charge he gave her a soft kiss on her lips. Her breath still reeked slightly of vomit under the minty smell of toothpaste, beer and sweet sticky weed. Laurel lit a camel Turkish blend and leaned against Aaron as he leaned against the sheetrock wall.

They had seen the writing on the wall or more accurately the pictures in their grandparent’s family photo albums of their mothers when they were their age and realized to their horror that they looked exactly like their moms when they were their age. They looked at the pictures then at their moms and they saw the future and it ain’t pretty. They were destined to become fat assed suburban breeders.

The childhood dreams of growing up to be slender and beautiful and live a life of fabulous wealth and fame disintegrated as they realized this was it for them they had lost the genetic lottery this being the case Laurel decided at eighteen as a college freshman to hell with saving her virginity for her wedding night she was going to get her kicks now before time and genetics conspired to make her look just like all of those fat ugly women that she had grown up mocking swearing that she would never let herself go like that and become two hundred and twenty five pound joke of a woman to look at, but it was hopeless the baby fat of her childhood hung around her big boned frame as she grew up until now, even though she was a Rubenesque vegetarian, she was undeniably on the way to passing pleasingly plump in the fast lane driving a rocket car to just becoming just another fat bitch in the burbs, it wasn’t fair.

It was an important lesson best learned young. Life is never fair, your parents are liars; there is no tooth fairy, no Easter bunny, no god. You could do what a lot of her mother’s friends did and waste mountains of money on liposuction and plastic surgery but what would be the point they both knew that a thickset woman who had liposuction and plastic surgery was still a hag. She still looked like a glad bag a hefty hag who had had plastic surgery it was truly pathetic. They were coming to the realization that life was not like in the fairy tales.

They were not going to grow up to be the long necked, slender, beautiful, white swans. And if they thought of the animals that they looked like it made them shudder with revulsion. Morgan was a pig and poor Laurel she was already a cow. Is it any wonder that they hated their parents, wouldn’t you when you realized that you were the result of the union of two short, fat, ugly losers who bred badly. There was nothing you could to do to make yourself beautiful if you weren’t. The women who had all of that surgery were wasting their time and money, there was no hope of them ever being mistaken for one of the beautiful people. Without the basic body type, bone structure and facial features, trying to look like the women that they grew up imagining that they would someday become, all models in the fashion magazines, the pop stars on MTV and actresses in the movies…was an exercise in futility. They would have been better off and saved themselves a lot of unnecessary pain and money if they had simply accepted the fact that they never had been and were never going to be eye candy and invested in a large reliable vibrating dildo or paid to have themselves serviced professionally by an american gigolo.

There were of course certain men who didn’t mind fat women. Amongst their friends, cow tipping is what the guys called it when you picked up some desperate for dick stout suburban slut, bent her over the hood of your car in the parking lot of the dance club or bar and blasted her straight up the ass. They both had big tits and nice round asses but they both also had plump bellies, cottage cheese thighs and lengthening stretch marks beginning to make their appearance around their hips, thighs and breast. Who let the dogs out? Apparently, it was their parents.

More delusional girls would have tried to rationalize their situation, taken up the man hater mantle and become radical lesbian feminist. Others hooked up with one of the perverted sickos that were aroused by the rolls of fat and over lapping slabs of flesh on the sagging tits of a Jell-O fuck but even a fat chick found that sort of thing repellent Just because they were fat and ugly didn’t mean that they weren’t also repelled by the fat fetish of chubby chasers. If there was anything worse than being fat or ugly, it was the men who were aroused by these morbidly obese hags. It wasn’t fair. Big fucking deal, life ain’t fair. they had been dealt a losing hand and there was nothing they could do. Except to sweeten the pot with some enduring memories of the stellar fuckings they got at their roll parties before they folded and walked away from the table busted.

Laurel and Morgan had jettisoned any of their childhood illusions about the future. Being practical girls they did the math numbers never lie they knew the score, it was a blowout. Morgan slid in close beside us with Jimmy in tow where Laurel and I sat on the floor. We wrapped our arms around each other’s, shoulder to shoulder we leaned in close to each other, our heads all pressed together. This one’s for posterity. Laughed Morgan as stretched her arm out in front of her body as far as she could before she pressed the shutter button. The glare of the flash stabbed our eyes with a dagger of light as the shutter opened and closed with a tinny metallic click as a foursome of happy drunkards all grinned into the cycloptic eye of the camera. The exposed negative capturing our image within the darkened confines of the cameras interior as a shard of our severed souls chemically preserved on the film.

Twenty years from now; when they had college aged children of their own, after time, gravity, childbirth, processed foods and genetics had their way with their bodies. In the great leveler time they will in middle age grow depressed haggard with the pedestrian responsibilities of suburbia and family life isolated within the sheetrock covered walls of fixed rate mortgage fortress, now aged and misshapen rejected by their mates impotence, mocked by the young, even your own children, in that moment of absolute solitude when you look into the mirror to see a face carved into a mask of the ultimate loneliness, after the second dirty martini or the third glass of pinot grigio when you reach into a forgotten corner of the closet for the last time your trembling hand will brush across the surface of a box filled with long forgotten dreams.

You will pick it up remove its dusty cover and through your tears you will see old friends and yourself, not as you are now but as you were and the way you will always be trapped within the amber matrixes of those who loved you. Their memories in the same way that they are trapped within your mind you will remember yourself in their eyes reflected transformed and beautiful. Then you will put away your husband’s pistol with your box full of old photographs, go into the kitchen and cook something unremarkable for dinner. With the memories of something sacred safe again within the sanctuary of your mind. 

-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.