What We Needed - A Scheherazade Project Entry

Disclaimer - I wrote this in the window seat on a red-eye flight to Florida after a long day and a few drinks. I take no responsibility for it's shittiness.

What We Needed

The three of us originally planned to go island-hopping in the Caribbean for 10-12 days to celebrate college graduation. Not that our commencement was in any way praise-worthy. In fact, we’d all cruised through our four years with minimal effort and fanfare. So I suppose the vacation was really just an excuse to drink Red Stripe by the caseload in our best attempts to convince comely exotic beauties to recreate the Lancaster-Kerr beach scene in From Here To Eternity.
But after reviewing my finances, I knew that we would have to scale back our trip if I was going to be able to afford to go. I was a scholarship kid and the money would be coming out of my own savings. The cost wasn’t a factor at all for Travis or Derrin. They were both trust fundies and seemed to have unrestricted access to their fathers’ bank accounts.
So we decided to limit our trip to one island – Puerto Rico. There would be plenty to do and see to keep us busy between the beaches, rain forests, bars, etc. Besides, Derrin had said he had a Puerto Rican housekeeper as a kid and had a thing for that type ever since – soft eyes, raven hair, winsome bodies. I could tell that the opportunity to fulfill some prepubescent wanderlust was very appealing to him.
Our original plan was to spend the first four or five days touring the island and taking in all the tourist sites. But after we missed the tour bus on the first day, inertia kept us at the bars of San Juan pretty much the whole time. The nights were blurs of dance clubs, giggly island girls and empty Cuervo bottles. Mornings were spent stumbling back to our rooms, sometimes alone and sometimes not. The afternoons consisted of each of us filling our ice buckets with a three dollar bottle of Captain Morgans & a two liter of coke and slowly emptying them as we recuperated in lounge chairs by the pool.
It didn’t take us long to figure out that the discos weren’t the safest places to loiter after about 1-2 in the morning. Cash-soaked, liquor-drenched Americanos were prime targets for muggers, pick-pockets and bad characters in general. Fortunately for us, we were able to find a few places we could drink, relax and fraternize in relative safety after hours.
The bordellos.
Now it’s not necessarily what you think. They’re actually very nice establishments with bars downstairs and bedrooms upstairs. The working women chat you up as you drink and, if you’re interested in that sort of thing, lead you upstairs for a little stress relief. But if you just want to sit and drink, there weren’t a lot better places to do it. The Lucky 7, the Hawaiian Hut and the Black Angus were our favorites, the latter in particular.
We had three or four days to go and morose melancholia was beginning to set in. You can only drink so much before you drown in introspection or regretful contrition. Travis & Derrin dealt with it in their way and I dealt with it in mine. They had requisitioned a handful of girls at the Black Angus for a few hours of depraved gluttony. I had requisitioned a bartender to keep my glass filled downstairs.
I watched her descend the stairs through rum-filled eyes. It wasn’t just her natural blond-hair that made her stand out from the rest of the native women working there. It was just a clumsy gracefulness that seemed more than a little out of place. And I couldn’t figure out if she was smiling at me or just in spite of me. It wasn’t even a smile really. More of an upturned lip acknowledging me acknowledging her.
By now, I’m sure that everyone who worked there realized that I was only there to drink, but she sat down next to me anyhow.
“Is it ok if I hang out here while they clean my room?” she asked without regard to what my answer would be. She said it would be about a half hour and ordered a drink on my tab.
“You probably want to hear my story. How I got here, right?”
I’m sure she had a story, well-rehearsed and completely false, that she repeated to different men every night, explaining how she went from rural South Carolina to Puerto Rican whorehouse. Probably filled with larger-than-life characters and tales of rebellious (mis)adventure. I imagined the real story had more to do with a sexually abusive father and parasitic “boyfriends”, but neither of us really cared at that point.
“It depends. Do you want to tell it?”
“Not really” she conceded.
So we talked about personal nothings. She drew on a cigarette, leaned back in her chair to exhale, then leaned back in to draw me nearer. As if affirming some secret only the two of us shared, unspoken. Every few minutes she would take my left arm, pull it towards her and look at my watch, mindful of how much time we had left until she had to go back to work. And every time she did, I was filled with more and more panic that I was about to lose something I’d never had. It never occurred to me how little sense it made.
A khakied Brit walked across the room and placed his hand on her shoulder.
“How bout we go upstairs for a bit, sweetheart?”
I followed her eyes as they went from mine, to his hand, to his face, then back to mine again.
“A little later. I need to finish this conversation first”. Docile yet subtly assertive, he got her point and sulked over to the girl at the next table.
Effortlessly she took me by the hand and walked me over to the bartender.
“How long you gonna be?” he asked.
“The rest of the night” she answered for me as she took my wallet from my pocket, extracted four crisp one-hundred dollar bills and handed them to him.
Placid serenity washed over me as she led me to her room and laid me on her bed. Using the chair in the corner to support herself, Lillian leaned down and slid off her surprisingly casual heels and began to remove her stockings.
“No, that’s not what I want” I protested.
“I know, but I just don’t want to wrinkle my dress” she replied, seemingly amused by my chaste resistance. She turned around and knelt in front of me so that I could unzip her dress. It was only when she pulled it over her head and laid it gently on the chair that I noticed her become nervous, self-conscious. But it passed in a moment and she was herself again.
Now clad only in her bra and panties, she straddled my body and placed her lips next to my ear.
“Trust me” she breathed.
Using her left hand, she deftly unfastened the buttons of my shirt, unbuckled my belt and undressed me. She carefully folded my shirt and pants and placed them next to her clothes before lying down next to me. Her lips pressed against my ear as we wrapped our arms around each other and drifted off to sleep.

I was awoken by Travis the next morning. We were being “asked” to leave by management and the faster the better. I looked around groggily to see she was gone. Not a trace of her remained except for a faint scent of perfume. Travis tossed me my clothes, I got dressed and we left.
Before falling back to sleep in my own hotel room, I found a pink envelope in my jacket pocket that hadn’t been there before. In it were 4 fifty dollar bills and a note scribbled in eyeliner;

“Here’s my half. We both got what we needed – L.”

Things I Keep In The Box - Part One

Growing up, I was kind of a bookish & sickly little dork. I didn't have much in the way of a social life outside school and the only friends I had worth mentioning were the handful of guys I roomed with.
When I was around 15, I was in my dorm and the weather was getting a little chilly. The building was very old and the windows usually stuck open or shut at the most inconvenient of times. This was on of those times - I pulled, pounded and pushed until it finally closed...... right onto my right thumb, breaking it in two places.
The plaster cast went from the first knuckle of my fingers to halfway up my elbow.
I was two weeks into the month I was supposed to wear it when another classmate (let's call him Archie Costello) had his own accident - he broke his wrist at football practice when he was tackled by the biggest guy on the team.
Now Archie was the kind of guy who just pissed you off by being so fucking perfect - effortless valedictorian, president of every cheesy extracurricular club, captain of the football team - your basic posterboy for pubescent heterosexual sublimity.
So he walks into our trig class the next morning, right arm clad in a cast identical to mine in every way, save one - in the 13 hours he'd had his cast on, he had managed to get it covered in signatures, well-wishes and lame platitudes in an assortment of fonts and colors. One glance and I could tell that a majority of these had come from female hands - all the more of an accomplishment since it was an all male school.
After I looked at his cast, I looked down at my own older cast - the only writing on it was from myself, a scribbled reminder to finish my term paper by the previous Monday. Talk about a perfect microcosmic description of my own existence up to that point in my life.
I couldn't stop thinking about the stark contrast even after class had started. So damn unfair! Like I needed another reminder of how unpopular and anonymous I was. Completely ignoring whatever lesson the teacher was trying to cover, I withdrew into my own private cavern of self-pity and abasement.
So I barely noticed when the bell rang and the class began to empty... except for Archie. I only realized he was there when he lifted my casted arm and started to write in bold red permanent marker -

"Get well soon

Your Brother In Arm,

Arch"

"People are going to think that we're trying to start a new fashion trend" he said with a smile as he called a few of his buddies over. I sat there mute and brainless as they doodled, drew and autographed on my own cast until soon it was a veritable replica of Archie's - minus the girly script.

My cast lasted longer than Archie's. He cut his off on his own after a week and a half in order to play in the Homecoming game. Mine came off a week later.

I still have it in a box in my attic.

Emptiness - Scheherazade Project Entry

She had to stand tiptoed on a dining room chair to even be able to reach the heating vent. Her foggy recollection of a stashed bottle drove her frenetic search. The butter knife bent just a little as she unfastened the two retaining screws holding the cover in place, reaching inside and pulling out a blackdust-covered fifth - mere ounces left. The amber liquid served as a prism as the light from the chandelier filtered through the rum and danced on her face.
She drank until it was empty.

Ungracefully climbing down from her perch, she continued to the kitchen. Callously knocking over cereal boxes and Tuna Helper, she knew it was there somewhere there amongst the bottles of vinegar and salad dressings. Cooking sherry. Never opened. Bought under the suspicious eye of her husband (there was a new recipe she wanted to try, she told him). Her trembling hands slipped on the foil cover, unable to gain enough grip to twist off the cap. Undeterred, she grabbed the bottle by it's body and broke the neck over the edge of the marble countertop. The shards bloodied her lips as she up-ended the bottle.
She drank until it was empty.

Redness dripped down her chin and neck as she tried to organize her thoughts. The garage. Her gait a little more awkward now, she rambled down the hall and through the door. Unzipping each pocket of her husband's golf bag and probing until she found what she was looking for - his flask, given to him for serving as a best man at his little brother's wedding (the night she hit four mailboxes on the drive home). Past the point of being able to taste the scotch inside, she let every drop fall from the silver vessel.
She drank until it was empty.

With a new-found clarity of purpose, she returned to the kitchen. The refrigerator. The thirty-two ounce bottle of real vanilla bought for fifteen dollars during their vacation to Jamaica (his idea - he wanted to celebrate her six months of sobriety - she ended up unconscious at the bottom of Dunn's River Falls). 35% alcohol. Her apathy morphed into a reluctantant smile as the cool sweetness burned her bloody lips and coated her screamed-raw throat.
She drank until it was empty.

Now that she had drunk enough courage, she walked the mile down the hall and into her bedroom. Leaning up against the headboard, she pulled three things out of the nightstand drawer. The first, a pack of Newports - she slid one out, snapped off the filtered end, lit it and drew the delicious smoke into her lungs. The second, the note her husband had left on the dining room table - she read it one last time, folded it back up and laid it on her lap. The third, the S&W revolver her father had given to her when she turned 22 and moved out on her own - she placed it in her mouth.
She drank until it was empty.
She drank until she was empty.

Predator

I watched you dance through the rain-streaked window
swaying to a song only you could hear
oblivious to the danger just beyond your door

I crept up on your porch, thunder muting my steps
still watching you glide over the tile floor
I wondered if you were in there alone

My hand is against the glass now, shadowing your neck
the chill down my spine not from the cold
my claws scratching against the window pane

The latch barely creaked as I slipped inside
your back still turned facing the wireless
nothing between us but a thin cotton sun dress

Our eyes met in the stainless steel reflection
but you weren't alarmed or frightened
but casually reached for your sharpened blade

Just In Case

I noticed it only because of the deathly quiet
it's wings moved the air & the air moved the leaves
I looked to see it land in the crimson maple
the night heron's crest stark against the twilight sky

Curious as to how it wandered so far
I froze, not wanting to frighten it away
the bird's head swiveled across my gaze
Not certain if it was in danger or in sanctuary

I silently wondered about my winged guest
why my tree? why my plot of earth?
was it flying towards a safe secluded hideaway
or flying away from winter's wicked wrath?

My heart leaped as it looked to take air again
then leaped higher when it settled in to stay
I slowly crept back into the comfort of my home
but left the window open, just in case

C17H19NO3

I awoke from a dream in human form
crawled out of my black bed
through my black room
filled with yellow poppies

I walked in the light and examined myself
wearing someone else's clothes
speaking someone else's words
living someone else's life

I covered the eyes of a passing woman
showing her things she'd never seen
thoughts she never pondered
sins she had long forgotten

I laid her down in a bed of Ivory
promised her treasure and love
adorned her in silver and lace
as my brother prowled in the distance

I kissed her softly with milky lips
as she drifted off to narcotic slumber
her pulse lightened under my touch
her breath slowing to a whisper

I wrapped her completely in my arms
a stranger she's known all her life
just one of a thousand sons
who leaves before she wakes

Numb

I'm going to drink this absinthe
til I can't feel your hand in my hair
your lips on my neck
your breathe in my ear

I'm gonna take these pills
til I can't hear you calling my name
your accidental sigh
your heart against my chest

I'm gonna turn off the lights
til I can't see you walk in the room
take off your clothes
lay on my bed

I'm gonna get lost in myself
til I can't remember your laugh
the way you made me ache
the way I made you cry

I'm gonna take this poison
til I can't feel no pain
I can't taste your sweat
til I'm totally numb

Hypotheticals

What if I had business in your town
just for a day?

What if my hotel was just 10 minutes
from your house?

What if I happened to mention to you
my room number?

What if you could take that day off work
and maybe that night?

What if you happened to stop by
just for a minute
just to say "hi"?

What if no one else in the world
knew where we were
or what we were doing?

What if we forgot about everything
outside that room
just for a while?

What if we tried to pretend
to be somebody else
just for a day?

What if we gave into temptation
and crossed that line?

What if we satisfied our hunger
like never before?

What if we lost our inhibitions
as if nothing else mattered?

What if your sweat became mine
and mine became yours?

What if you walked out the door
as if nothing had happened?

What if we tried to get back
to living our lives?

What if no one else knew
about our precious secret?

Hypothetically speaking, of course.

The Empty Space

It followed me to the Cabo Rojo lighthouse
as I stood on the limestone cliffs
Two hundred feet above the sea
the Empty Space watched over my shoulder

It walked with me in Westminster Abbey
past the Unknown Warrior & Poets Corner
breathing in Chaucer's dust
The Empty Space's footsteps echoed

It bathed with me in the mist of Rifle Falls
then hiked to the catwalk above
leaned over the edge until we were sure to fall
The Empty Space grasping my arms

It sat behind me as I signed the mortgage
planning in our heads even then
to make the house all our own
The Empty Space lives in every room

It stood in the back at my best friend's wedding
where I was far from the Best Man
watching the last of my friends get married
The Empty Space danced alone

I've never been anywhere
I've never done anything
I'll never be anyone
without the Empty Space where you should have been

It's Not Enough

It's not enough to hear you say my name
I need to feel your breathe on my face as you say it

It's not enough to feel you
I need to hold you until every inch of your body touches every inch of mine

It's not enough to spend a moment with you
I need to be with you until the stars fall around us

It's not enough for me to make you happy
I need for you to never want again

It's not enough to know what perfume you wear
I need to swim in your scent, your sweat

It's not enough to love you
I need to to feel it in every synapse of your body

It's not enough to tell you
I need to show it for the rest of my life

The Bridge To NoWhere

We'd been running from the cops
for what seemed like an hour
both of us half-dressed and barefoot
the rest of our clothes under our arms
except for the sock & panty dropped behind us
laughing at our misfortune with every step

It's not like we planned it that way
we'd parked behind the old high school
with the most moral of intentions
just going to catch up on old times
maybe take a walk through the park a bit
and sit atop the Bridge To NoWhere

I didn't notice you steal the bottle from the head table
I don't even want to know where you stashed it
no place to hide it under your bridesmaid dress
and that look of pure mischief in your eyes
made me walk a bit faster, a tad quicker
thats when you decided to run onto the playground

I made you push me on the swingset
your dress nearly flew up over your head
as you almost made the back handspring on the balance beam
then walked over as I hung upside down on the monkey bars
and cocked my head to one side, yours to the other
and you kissed me, five years before Spiderman

That's when I knew I was in trouble

After indulging our inner seven year olds on the playground
we raced to indulge our inner seventeen year olds
your tafeta dress (or chiffon, I don't know) tore a little
as we crawled under the chain link fence
and travelled back in time ten years
right back to that night on the Bridge To NoWhere

You hopped up onto the guardrail, raised your dress a tad
as interstate traffic rushed beneath us
the whoosh of semis made your hair dance under the streetlight
you pulled me close & wrapped your legs around mine
undid my rented bowtie and silken cumberbund
when the passing cars noticed and honked their horns

unbuttoning, unzipping, unsnapping, unhooking, undressing
undoing every second that had passed us by
but feeling as if not a moment had ever slipped
since we'd seen each other last (as you walked down the jetway)
And we stood motionless for what seemed like forever
after we saw the headlights of the only police car in town

Before we ran off the other side of the Bridge To NoWhere

She Comes To Me

When it all gets to be a little too much
her husband is gone a little too long
she's feeling a little too alone
she comes to me

A cigarette whisper on the end of the line
desperation veiled by seduction
like orange stripes on a black wall
she comes to me

When she's had just a little too much to drink
my house is a little too close
my bed a little too comfortable
she comes to me

fingernails tapping on my kitchen window
her soul camouflaged in apathy
like black stripes on a black wall
she comes to me

When she's been thinking a little too much
memories a little too foggy
her needs a little too intense
she comes to me

Lips brushing against the back of my neck
hiding a secret in plain sight
like butterfly wings on a black wall
she comes to me

To Charlotte - The Girl Of My Dreams

I don't know if this is going to get to you
I only caught your first name
You probably don't remember me
You seemed pretty wasted at the time
I had a pretty good buzz on myself

I was waiting to be booked
public urination and drunk in public
when 4 officers carried you in
hog-tied, flailing & spewing f-bombs
soon handcuffed on the bench next to mine

I overheard the AO read your rap sheet aloud
Battery, assaulting an officer, resisting arrest,
disorderly conduct & malicious wounding
hard to believe you did all that
what do you weigh, maybe 105?

Your blouse must have been ripped in the fight
I saw your bra strap sticking out
I don't know if you got punched in the face
or maybe it's just how you do your makeup
either way, you looked good like that

You peered over and gave a quick laugh
I swear it was someone else's puke on my tie
I tried to loosen it with my chin
I didn't want to look like a square
I'm usually not this "establishment"

I wanted to ask you about your mods
but then they ball-gagged you
(you shouldn't have tried to spit on that cop
you missed anyhow - nice distance though -
and hit the guy sleeping on the floor)

I could only see the one tat
but you probably have more
I was gonna get one once
but the guy stopped after I passed out
that explains the dot on my crotch

But that's how I knew your first name
from the tattoo on your neck
I asked the cops about you at my arraignment
but they said they don't have you on file
maybe "Good Charlotte" is just your nickname

Il Mio Sogno

He sat at the other end of the bar and I hated him from the second I saw him. Oozing arrogance and smarm, he came in with a group of kowtowing friends - laughing at every joke and hanging on every word. Wearing a black blazer over a charcoal sweater, he was perfectly assembled.
Tanqueray 10 & tonics for the whole bunch of them - not just Bombay or Beefeater, but Tanqueray 10 . The compulsory cheesy toast followed and they laughed some more. I half-heard two or three of his pathetic little anecdotes before I had him figured out. He wasn't the confident renaissance man he portrayed himself to be. It was all a mask, a charade.
He knew it was a sham. Inside he was just a scared little boy afraid of being exposed for what he really was. The smooth and suave wasn't fooling me.
And I was going to let him know it. I was going to dress him down in front of all his little toadies and show them how small he really was. Both barrels.
I strode across the bar cocksure in my righteousness. Standing before him I prepared for attack.
"Nice shoes" he said.
I didn't know what to say. "What?"
"Nice shoes" he repeated this time gesturing down to my shoes then to his.
His friends chuckled as we all realized what he first noticed - we were both wearing identical pairs of black low-top Dr Martens.
I walked away without saying another word.

he is ugly

i saw hatred
i saw beauty
i saw rage
i saw wonder
i saw insanity
i saw lust
i saw evil
i saw grace
i saw wrath
i saw charity
i saw greed

as i passed by the hall mirror