Outside Glance

Flash the readies

            Wots, uh, the deal?

            Got to make it to the next meal

            Try to keep up with the turning of the wheel

            Friday. David Gilmour crooning into my ear.  Swirling images of Lilly, Jill, Tania, Rebecca, Madelyn, arms, legs, lips, cock, hair, feet, nails, red marks, rumpled sheets, pussy, you’re so dominating, cigarette butts.  The cow of a stewardess reaches over and prods me hard with her bloated fingers, jab jab jab, my eyelids part, and through tiny slits I look at her.

            “Is that thing turned off, sir? You have to turn all electronic devices off during landing,” she wheezes, her jowls rippling like gills struggling to suck in as much air as possible so her massive body can stay upright.  The pretty stewardess a few rows ahead smiles at her passengers and lets a man in an aisle seat dream for just a few more minutes.  The difference?  Pretty Stewardess is obviously getting laid, and Fat Stewardess is not.  Is that what you want, Fat Stewardess?  Would you like me to take you out on the town, buy you 4 apple martinis?  Whisper drunkenly in your ear, let’s go back to my room?  Do you want me to fuck you? Do you want me to ream out your cunt, smooth out its folds, leave a tiny dent in your womb, a flag to declare my conquest?  We’ll waddle down the street together, extra mayonnaise, frightening children, making women feel prettier and men luckier.  My beloved monster and me, we’ll be a caveat to the rest of the world: “Do not wake up sleeping men! They’ll sweep you away, and what happens then is not something you want happening!”

She walks to the end of the plane before I can say anything, but I turn my CD player off just in case.  Two sets of fingers curl around the chair in front of me as its occupant takes his hat off, ruffles his hair, and turns around to face me, only his eyes peering over the top, hair falling lazily past his eyebrows.  My eyes do the dance that all uncomfortable glances invite, darting up and down, left and right, as I steal looks at my mysterious voyeur, my lips pursed awkwardly.

Finally: “She sure told you, mate.”

I meet his eyes at last, “It’s such bullshit. This little CD player flips out when a goddamn microwave is on.”

His eyes glimmer, obviously smiling behind his mask, “Though valiant, the compact disc player will not be the demise of our hero, the airplane.”

“Something like that.”

“A shame, though.  I heard your Pink Floyd.  Comme un serenade, il m’appelle.”

“Yeah? Thanks, I guess…”

”Obscured by Clouds?”

I nod.

He taps his temple with his forefinger proudly, “C’est tout dans mes oreilles.  I don’t need a CD player, myself. I spend enough time in my own head. If I’m going to listen to music, it will be outward listening.”

I cock my eyes at him, but he’s already showing me.  He’s turning to those on either side of him (we’re in middle seats), clasping his hand to his heart and singing to them.  It’s two pretty decent-looking women, actually, now that I’m paying attention to them, a blonde and a redhead.  Redheads aren’t my thing, though.  They’re hard not to look at in bed, their hair a blazing inferno that only intensifies as you screw.  Blondes? Don’t get me started on blondes.  The rumors are true.

* * *

Madelyn was blonde.  Madelyn was my first.  While her head glistened that brilliant blonde that Vogue forces women to aspire to, her cunt was surrounded by a somber brown that darkened in the summertime (she would sunbathe naked on her patio), as though her body were ashamed of the tuft of hair between her legs.  Ah, Madelyn’s body, now there was a package to be seen. And she knew it. She would always want to fuck me on top, telling me every single time, without fail, to “relax and enjoy it.”  She would grind against me slowly, working herself forward and back, choosing not to impale herself on my cock with each movement.  She would take my hands and drag them over her body, smiling coyly as she moaned and grasped my hips with her thighs. Dearest Madelyn, if the body is a temple, then yours has fallen into squalor, brown pubic hair like litter left from vagabonds seeking solace, small red marks of irritation on your thighs where you tried to shave, your elbows scuffed up and browned, a birthmark on your knee that looks like an unattractive splotch, a soy sauce stain.  Aphrodite is no more! Her worship has left her, and yet the goddess has maintained her vanity, for all blondes must be pretty, right? 

See, I don’t like to fuck with my eyes open. Sex has become tainted.  Yet I found myself fucking Madelyn, a woman who virtually demanded I watch her the entire time. She would on occasion snap at me when catching me with my eyes closed.

“Don’t be so inwardly focused all the time,” she said to me one night, “You’re not jerking off with a pussy instead of your hand, Will. You’re having sex, making love. If we weren’t meant to notice our partners then it wouldn’t involve two people so intimately.”

“Intimately…” I repeated, the smoke from my cigarette leaving my mouth like the word, floating up and fading away.

* * *

This guy must have already worked them over, because they just smile and sway their heads politely to the lyrics.

Well the monkey puzzle tree
Has some questions
For the watchdogs of the profane
And I ask is it sad
That I'm driving myself mad
As this fire in my heart turns blue?

He turns around again and looks at me with a proud glaze in his eyes.  I smile slightly, “Interesting choice of lyrics.”

“Aye, they’re called Super Furry Animals.  Welsh psychedelic rock,” he says, apparently expecting me to be surprised at the band’s name.  I go “huh” and glance out the window. My “single-serving friend” waggles his eyebrows at me.

“The name’s Ropeswick. H.J. Ropeswick.  Professional Narrator. You can’t hear my authoritative capitalization, so here’s my business card.”

He holds a tiny rectangle in between his pointer and middle finger, reaches over the seat and takes hold of my hand slapping it in.  I open my palm warily and peek at his business card:

H.J. Ropeswick, Professional Narrator

Narrational Musings, 3rd Division, A

120 W 78 George Washington Ave.

NY, NY. 03832

“Do you mean to tell me, Mr...Ropeswick, that you, um, narrate for a living?”

“That’s right, mon ami.  My clients are usually 40-something yuppies who have lost their joie de vivre, these chumps, they’re so buried in their mid-life crises that all they want is to hear their lives through someone else’s eyes.  I’m going to New York City to work on my ‘noir’ package, a special order for one of our older clients.  Ever seen Double Indemnity?”

“I can’t say I have.”

“Oh, it’s fuckin’ gold, let me tell you.  I’m on viewing number, oh…12 now.  The heyday of noir films, that’s the time I’ve been focusing my research on.  Cry of the City?”

I shake my head slowly.

Ropeswick holds his palms out apologetically, “C’est pas grave, they aren’t terribly popular.  Hell, I would have never seen them if this guy hadn’t asked for such a specific narration.  Want a free sample?”

“No thanks.

* * *

I’ll be setting foot in Noir York City in the next 15 minutes.  Why?  Why not?  Why Paris? Why London? Why LA, Venice, Vienna, Florence, Amsterdam, Detroit, Boston?  The starving artist travels across the globe until he can find the city that best suits his suffering, whose population’s schadenfreude will be great enough that his woe-is-me poems will sell well enough.  The sun reflects the water below, setting it on fire in a holy white cascade.  We’ll begin our descent into judgment day momentarily.

Opening on an airplane.  How cliché.  The plane banks hard to the left and everything rattles. I grab my armrest.  She grabs my armrest, too.

“Oh, sorry,” she mumbles, withdrawing her hand, her hair falling lazily over her face like cold tree branches, cheeks changing color like autumn leaves.  I flash my famous reassuring smile and take her hand in mine, placing it back on the armrest underneath mine.

“We can’t have such a pretty lady thrashing all around like that, now can we?  What will people think?”  She swallows audibly and brushes some hair behind her ear.

I take her out for drinks that night.  She laughs at my jokes, vodka lingering in the air between us.  After a few drinks she’s got her hand on my thigh, running her nails up and down my crotch lazily.

“So, what do you think?” she asks, gazing at me through hazel eyes.

She wants to see through me.

“About?”

“I dunno…” she twirls her hair, licks her lips, “So, what do you do for a living?”

“I live.”

“You live for a living.”

I nod, going into intellectual mode, “My dear, I’m not one to immediately identify myself with my career. There’s so much more to gauge a person on, and yet we sit here and base people entirely on what they do ‘for a living,’ as though my life can’t be that great if I don’t have a fabulous career!  Fine, I’m a doctor.”

Her eyes go wide.

“I’m a lawyer,” I say.

“I’m an investment banker,” I say.

“I’m a teacher,” I say.

I lean in close to her, putting my hand on her waist my lips barely touching hers, “Maybe I’m a predator,” I say with a sly grin.  She furrows her brow at this, but quickly smiles and laughs.  She’s rubbing her legs together, turned on by my little tirade.

“You’re too nice to be a predator.”

After another hour she’s practically begging me to have her. 

If you give a mouse a cookie…

I fuck her in her hotel room, my eyes shut, trying to drown out her squeals, the slapping of our thighs, the squeak of the bed.  She told me she’s on the pill. I won’t have sex with a girl with a condom; I can’t feel anything, and I haven’t gotten anyone pregnant yet.  The mirror fogs up.  She comes and I pretend.  Playing house on a whole new level.  I get out of bed, put my pants on and slide into my shirt.  She tilts her head at me curiously, but without surprise.  This isn’t the first time she’s been left in a hotel room.

“Do you have my number?”

I flip out a business card with her number scribbled on it, “Yeah, yeah. I’ll call you.”

I close the door behind me.

Rip.

* * *

Tania hated that I would fuck her with my eyes closed.

“Making love is a spiritual experience, and when you close your eyes, I can’t see into your soul!” she cried in the dark as I tried to piss.  Tania was always into the transcendental idea of sex.  She used to say that, in the split second before a man’s orgasm, he loses all coherence and thought, and can see God.  She told me that divine figures are innately sexual, and that pleasure is only a step away from paradise.  Tania explained all about how Gabriel, heralding the birth of Christ, gave Mary a single kiss, and she experienced an intense, even violent orgasm.

“We’re limited because our pleasure can only come from our genitals, but God? The angels? They have no such limitations,” Tania explained to me one night in bed, dragging her toe against my shin.  I told her it sounded like bullshit.  She looked up at me and spoke frankly.

“Well, listen, sex is about as close as we get to heaven on earth, right?”

“Right…”

“So imagine what heaven itself must be like!  I bet even sensing the approach of an angel was a huge turn-on.  Divine pleasure courses through their veins!”  She ran her hands up and down my chest, obviously excited by the conversation.  That night, I took her hand and pressed it between my lips.

I didn’t love Tania, but I miss her every day she’s gone and will be gone.  It’s my fault.

* * *

Saturday.  I’m in a phone booth and “leave a message at the beep!”

“Ben, it’s me.  I just got into town, and I was hoping I could bum a ride off of you.  I’m in a phone booth just outside the drug store on 1st Avenue right now, but I’ll probably be gone by the time you get this.”  I leave my hotel information so Ben can call me later.

Then a muffled voice: “The sun broke through the clouds with fiery bravado, unaware of the bleeding of my heart.  I turned to the phone booth, planted like some horrible glass cage.”

I peer over my shoulder. Lo and behold, I find myself in front of Ropeswick, dressed in a wrinkled and run-down suit, a rumpled black fedora perched on his head, his tie a hideous red and green, hair matted down and haphazardly strewn about his head like a mop had been sewed into his skull. I open the booth with a polite smile.

“Hey…Roppwick…how’s it going?”

“My eyes flashed on the fella who spoke to me.  I regarded him top to bottom. I’m unimpressed. ‘It’s Ropeswick,’ I say, my hand disappearing into my coat in case this brute needs a little more correction.”

I look down at myself, suck in my gut, and step out of the booth.

“Are you, uh, describing your day to me?”

He shakes his head as though clearing something out.

“Not to you, mate. Really, it’s more to me, but I guess any verbal description of what’s being done is nothing compared to what goes on in my head.”

You got that right.

“So, this is the ‘noir’ package at work, huh?”

He beams brightly and nods, “Come on, I’m going to go watch Thieve’s Highway.  My place is only a few blocks from here. Just came to get some groceries.”

I politely decline, pointing at my watch, and tell Ropeswick I have to get back to my room before Ben calls.  He smiles and offers me a ride, telling me how nasty the New York subways can be, “like a vast, infernal hell-hole,” he says in his best Obi-Wan, “You’ll never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.”

* * *

That takes me back.  Lilly was completely obsessed with Star Wars, even going so far as to do her hair like Leah’s from time to time.  I would never fuck her with her hair in pastry shapes; she looked too much younger, too movie-like, too fictional.  I was never into the whole role-playing thing.  I want my girls to have to face their realities.  You are underneath me, and my weight is pressing down on you, and my cock is inside your cunt. Not the pizza boy’s, not the electrician. You’re not the head cheerleader, you’re not a nurse.

Not to say Lilly was into that.  Sex was escapist enough on its own, and Lilly needed escape.  Her mother had died in childbirth, her only gift, her only birthday present, to her precious daughter a case of fetal alcohol syndrome.  Even today, Lilly’s nose is small and upshot, her eyes tiny, hiding in her head, and slightly flat cheeks.  And some rather acute psychological issues that she needs pills for.  And a mild heart condition.  She looked good, though, and she considered me a blessing.  Lilly, the girl who life dealt a shitty hand, had finally found a man to take care of her.  Escapism through my dick.  After a few months, the night terrors got to me and I broke things off before I died of insomnia.

* * *

Ropeswick drives a shitty little Geo, but he drives it for everything it’s got.  We maneuver through the narrow New York streets, being so audacious as to cut off buses and cabs and SUVs.

“The car deftly glided over the sewage-filled wasteland that is New York City.  In the distance, a woman screamed. Twilight crept across the sky, laden with dark foreboding and the promise of yet another bleak night, when the demons make their way out of the sewers and rape and pillage and  – ”

“Hey, Ropeswick?  Could you cool it?”

“Yeah. Right. Sorry.”

We drive the rest of the way in silence.

* * *

I hadn’t been in such a small car since Jill took me by the hand, smearing purple wine in between my fingers, and led me to hers.  Jill loved to fuck in the car, loved how the windows tinted themselves with our warm breaths, loved how I would have to lift her legs up over my shoulders and pull her forward so she wouldn’t keep hitting her head on the door.  Jill loved to be taken from behind, which proved to be a problem in her small car.  She would smear herself desperately against the window, pressing her breasts against the cold glass as she turned to look at me pleadingly over her shoulder.  I would oblige her, if only to keep myself hard, but I never enjoyed it.  Jill had a thin red line running from the small of her back down in between her ass cheeks, a simplistic road map leading to her cunt.  I found myself inexplicably drawn to it whenever I fucked her from behind.  Where did it come from? It looked like someone had taken a red pen and etched it into her.  Teacher teacher, I think you forgot to mark a mistake right here.  Jill was oblivious to all of this, deriving infinite pleasure from scuffing up her knees, resting her head in her hands, having her hair pulled, or falling over her shoulder, tangling itself in her face, grabbing my hands and forcing them to pinch her nipples as her muffled moans resonated in the small car.

You didn’t care for affections and angels and souls, did you, Jill?  You just wanted to be dominated, debased, overthrown.  Veni, vidi, vici.  You wanted me to send you home with an ache in your belly, your ovaries turned inside-out. You wanted me to ready you for candles, bottles, rottweilers, horses, elephants.  You wanted Malcolm to feel remnants of me, didn’t you? You wanted to stay fucked. 

And now you are. It never occurred to me to say something.

* * *

            “Home sweet home, mon ami.  Le voyage, il est fini.”

            I get out of the car and bend down to speak through the window, “Thanks, man. Can I offer you a few bucks for your trouble?”

            Ropeswick chuckles and waves his hand dismissively, “To aid a fellow man is payment enough.”

            “I don’t get you, Ropeswick,” I say, “I was convinced New York was filled with douchebags who can’t keep Derek Jeter’s cock out of their mouth long enough to offer someone a favor.”
            “Oh, it is,” Ropeswick laughs, “But it’s the off-season.”

            “Why do you do what you do…narrating?  You seem bright enough to be able to do something a little more…substantial.”

            Ropeswick shrugs, his eyes glimmering, “La coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait point.”  He drives off, his car begrudgingly roaring to life like an old man just out of bed, blaring his horn at a taxi trying to pull out its parking spot.

            I take a shower in my room and fall asleep in my towel, my last thoughts are of the pretty little maid walking in on me like this, with a massive erection.

            That night I meet Ben for drinks.  He looks good, his hair is shorter, he’s got a nice goatee going on. “I guess you finally learned how to use that beard trimmer,” I teased as I slump next to him at the bar.  He flips me off and slides a shot and a beer to me, both of which I down in no time.  I order another round. Ben orders a third.

            We don’t have a lot to say to each other, but then again we never really did.  Ben and I have the kind of friendship that we can pick up and run with no matter what either of us have been through: we change, we grow, we triumph and fail, and we respect each other for it.  Well, I respect him, anyway.

            My target tonight is a hot little number who came waltzing in around midnight, dirty blonde hair with bangs that droop past her eyebrows, her thighs rubbing together underneath her skirt, a black top that shows off her lovely cleavage.  Her heels clack against the floor like an officer striding in to ensure beds are made.  Yes ma’am, folded over two inches. Yes ma’am, I ran a lint remover over the blanket.  Yes ma’am, I’ll give you a grand tour of the space between sheets.

            I buy her drinks, and we dance a few times, her hips grinding sensuously against mine and she wraps her arms around my neck and runs her tongue along my neck and her lipstick leaves a mark.  I try to fuck her in the bathroom, but we’re too excited, can’t keep ourselves still enough for me to get inside her.  Her ass leaves marks of condensation on the porcelain. She leaves her panties behind.  We go back to her place and I undress her slowly, until she’s begging me to take her.  I oblige, doing her from all sorts of positions, railing into her until she starts to hurt and we come together, my teeth grit and eyes squeezed shut and I’m seeing red lines and tiny cars and heels and divine intervention and Mary’s dripping cunt and pain and sickness and death.

            I can’t watch. It hurts to watch.

            I have a dream tonight.  In my dream, I’m sitting in an Indian restaurant with Rebecca, the Indian restaurant we used to go to all the time. We’d split a chicken tikka-masala and two loaves of garlic naan.  I think we fucked in the bathroom a few times.  We’re both naked, and she’s got her hand resting in the middle of the table, wanting me to take it into mine.

            “I just don’t understand why,” she says.

            Why?

            She nods at me, withdrawing her hand.

            “You’re not a bad guy.”

            Ye shall be as gods…

            “What?” Her cunt starts to flame up. The fire begins to envelope her body.

            The world is a bad place, Rebecca, and if God is going to get away with this truancy then why not?  If He can send a massive flood to wipe out the world, then why can’t I?  Made in His image, sure.  A fucked up vision that guy’s gotta have.  I am the flood.  If a man like me can be punished, if I am to be a contemporary Job, I’m not going down without a fight.  Let the sinners and the sluts burn away, I will exact Justice as I so see fit, and if God wants me to stop, well, it’s nothing more than a wave from his grimy fantastic hand.

            Rebecca laughs, “You don’t even believe in God!”

            Nor does He believe in me.  We have a mutual understanding between the two of us: he doesn’t interfere with my business, and I don’t interfere with His.  I never said I was a prophet or anything like that – now that would be something – I am merely a vessel from which to demonstrate His follies.  I am God’s satire.  I am the Fool to His King Lear.  I am War. I am Famine. I am Pestilence. I am Death.

            Rebecca’s eyes go wide. She speaks in a voice that is an amalgamation of them all, the fire engulfing all but her face, which glows the red of embers.

            “I saw that the Lamb opened one of the seven seals, and I heard one of the four living creatures saying, as with a voice of thunder, ‘Come and see!’”

            Fade to black: And behold, a white horse, and he who sat on it had a bow.  A crown was given to him, and he came forth conquering, and to conquer.

* * *

            Sunday.  My first memory of the day is retching over the toilet, puke all over the place, in my nose, my mouth.  It’s disgusting and elating.  Last night swirls down the bowl and into the sewer, where it belongs, never to be heard from again. Like the woman at the bar, like the woman on the plane, like Lilly, Jill, Tania, Rebecca, and Madelyn.  Like me, in a few years.  I take off my shirt and scratch at a spot that’s been bothering me for a few days.  There’s a message from the doctor on my phone.

            “Will, listen, I have some bad news.”

            Beep. To erase, press 7.

            I glance in the mirror.  My hair is messed up, I should get it cut.  My nails are too long, they should be cut, too.  I don’t mind my body; my abs don’t really show, but they aren’t all that bad, either. I’m a good weight, about 160, and my eyes are brilliant and piercing in blue.  I scratch my chest again and turn my arms over to look at the underside.  I see what the doctor wanted to tell me now.  Glaring back at me, smiling its disgusting smile, is lesion number one, “the wine-dark kiss of the angel of death.”

            I take a shower and dress, and I look good.  Maybe Ben will want to hit the town again tonight.  We could both use a good lay. Look out, ladies.

            Ropeswick says in my head, “The day opened like any other, the sun going through the motions that force us all into wakefulness.  I reject the sun. The sun hides no secrets, and bares all, even those secrets that cannot be told.”

            Why New York?  Why not?

            Why life?

Eli is a junior from Boston, majoring in English and Music with a minor in Creative Writing.  He's probably going to make a lot of money one day, so keep your eyes peeled.