I think it took me a total of five minutes to get from SpectraCom to my apartment. I’m in the shower maybe three, four minutes, and am cleaned, perfumed, shampooed, fluffed, shaved, dressed to impress in designer black pants, a black long-sleeve shirt and my biker jacket—a real American Literary bad-ass. The kind your mother warned you about reading.
When I’m convinced I’ve been properly cooled, I grab a beer from the fridge and call Alicia. Her phone rings once. Twice.
My apartment door flies open and Chloe blows in like a backdraft, throwing sheets of her dramatic sense before her, clinging to the door-jamb like a ‘50's starlet, sighing a cinematic, body-draining sigh.
It rings a third time.
“Rubin!” she cries. “I’ve had a horrible day! I need you to massage my feet!”
Fourth ring.
“Chloe, I’m not going to massage your damn feet. Now get lost!”
“Hello?” says a winded Alicia on the other end of the line.
“Hey,” I say, sitting on the couch.
“Hey, Rubin,” Alicia says in her tender little voice. Just listening to her talk envelopes me in a blanket of glee. I think I could just sit and listen to her talk all day and not even think twice about it. “What’s up?”
“I just got home, I was wondering when you wanted to go out?”
Chloe takes off one of her ruby-red glitter slip-on sneakers and hurls it, hitting me in the elbow as I turn. “I will be in my bedroom waiting for my foot massage, thank you very much.” She stomps down the hall and her bedroom light floods the kitchen with a ‘click.’
“Well, what do you have in store for us tonight?”
I shrug. “I don’t know... It’s so hard to find... You know... this town is so... you know...”
“Don’t say it!”
“Dead!”
“Oh! Why did you go and do that?” she giggles. “Come on, admit it. You couldn’t think of anything because you were afraid I wouldn’t have fun.”
“Yeah, something like that.”
“Well, pick anything. I’ll say yes, I promise.”
“Anything?” I ask coyly.
“Well, within reason. Don’t forget, we just met. This girl is still a little bit old fashioned.”
“I don’t know. We could see a movie or something.”
“Rubin Valentine, please tell me you are more exciting than that! What is this, 1959? You want to see a movie? Give me a break! You want to see a horror movie? What, are you going to take me to see that movie about those inbred killers in the woods?”
“You’re right,” I admit. “You’re right.” I smile and squeeze my fist tight in front of me. “All right, I’ve got it, I’ve got it. We’ll just go get coffee and get to know each other.”
“Boooring! Come on, Rubin, I’m an American girl. I want to be entertained! Entertain me!”
“And if you’d have let me finish, I would have said that we could go up on the roof when the coffee-shop closes and look out over the whole city.”
“Now we’re talking.”
“All right, meet me at my house. We can walk from there.” I hang up and go back to Chloe’s room, flinging myself at her door which shudders under my weight. “Chloe! This is great! I’ve not gone on an actual date in... Jeez, I don’t remember the last time I went on an authentic, Olde-Timey date.”
“You’re retarded!” she snorts, looking up over the rim of the art magazine she is skimming. “My feet aren’t going to massage themselves, you know.”
I sit down on the bed and put her tiny, scarlet-tipped right foot in my lap and start to rub her arches with my thumbs. “Why would anyone want to touch your gross feet, Chloe?”
“Shut up and rub,” she grunts, covering her face with the magazine. “My feet are far from gross. I had an exhausting day, Rubin.”
“You sat on your ass all day and yelled at customers.”
“And that cute boy from Error Management was sitting across from me, and he kept looking at me, and I think he thinks I’m cute. Oh, Rubin, what am I going to do?”
“Probably fuck him.”
“No! I mean after that! I can’t sleep with a boy from work; everything will be awkward. And do you know how those people gossip? Everyone will be talking about it. What if I ever want to sleep with another guy from work?” Beneath the magazine draped over her face like a shroud, she shakes her head emphatically, having to hold the edges of the pages to keep it from sliding off. “If he doesn’t already know, someone will tell him for sure. It will ruin everything! What will I do?”
“You’ll wait until you go to the Spot that night, and pick someone up there.”
She sighs and drops her arms to her sides. The magazine slides away from her face, down the slope of her arm and onto the floor when she sighs. “Yeah, you’re right, I guess. Did you see that one boy there last night? I think his name is Evan. He is the drummer for that band. I think he likes me. He was asking people about me.”
I cast her right foot away and pick up the left one, kneading deep into her sole. “You think every boy likes you.”
“They usually do.”
“Because you sleep with them.”
“Anyway, Rubin... What are you doing tonight?” She throws herself into a sitting position and lolls her head to me. “Please, illuminate me to your oh-so-exciting plans for the evening. You aren’t taking Alicia to the Spot, are you?”
“No,” I hiss. “No, I’m not, so you can’t get a ride there. Alicia and I are going to do some breaking and entering, climb on some roofs, maybe get arrested.”
“Take me with you.”
“No.”
“Take me with you.”
“No! I’m hoping to hump.”
“You’re not going to hump,” she sighs, throwing her legs over the side of the bed and lurching to a rough semblance of a stand. “I don’t care, I didn’t want to go with you anyway. I might just call the police. Enjoy your housebreaking.”
“Good night, Chloe, tell everyone at the bar I said hello.”
“Hell no,” she says and pushes past me as she stomps out of her bedroom. I get up and follow as she storms through the kitchen and slams the bathroom door across from Kurt’s room.
I walk past it to my room at the front of our sizable ghetto apartment overlooking a junkyard at the edge of the river that washes down to the Confluence at downtown and beyond into the Atlantic. ‘A little bit of Doom City goes a long way,’ they used to say in the bars. I yank open the blinds in my front window. I can see the highway on the other side of the valley. It runs west, out to the Pacific if you just keep going. I could get onto the highway and see water in just a few days. Forever longing to make mine a breath of fresh air. My body feels heavy, like I’m breathing liquid.
Outside, Alicia’s Saturn pulls up and parks at the side of my street. The interior light ignites and the door opens. She swings her long, denim-wrapped legs out to the road and slides out of the car like Venus emerging from the sea. She sees me in the window, flashes those acres of ghostly white teeth.
I grin and wave back, walking out of my bedroom to let her in. I have the door open before she gets to the landing, and when she ascends to the door, I bow slightly to admit her.
“I wore my building-climbing jeans,” she says, patting her thigh. “I’m all set for adventure.”
We head off to the Java Hole, where some kid is reading bad poetry about the Old Priest and the Fish. It seems as if it’s some kind of long, drawn-out story, and each poem seems to be about the same thing. All the kids listening though seem to be really into the whole thing, and he’s getting standing ovations after each one. Some kids are even shouting along to his poems, like this is some kind of rock concert, and I actually expect a few of these black-clad, overly hip, coolerthanthou’s to break into a mosh pit as this guy recites from the page.
I don’t think he’s really all that great, and don’t understand how he has all those book deals, but it’s still fun to watch it all going down. Alicia and I don’t really talk all that much, we just watch this mad poet doing his thing, ripping unrepentantly into the depths of his soul and feeding it line by line, sentence by sentence into the starving gullets of the hipster kids on the floor in front of him, fists raised and arms around each others shoulders.
When he’s done, he’s replaced by a limp noodle of a reader who can’t even manage to be heard clearly with the aid of a microphone and cranked PA. We’re both almost done with our coffee, so we finish up and slide out the back door when no one is paying attention.
Staying in shadow, we sneak down the adjoining alley, down behind the dumpsters where there is a grate-floored stairway lying in the darkness. I quietly lead her up an iron-rung landing, to a second, steeper flight of stairs and up over the thigh-high edge of the vinyl rooftop of the Serling Building. In a crouched run, I lead her on a stealthy dash to the other side of the roof, where we look down over Main Street. I kneel against the wall and rest my arms on the edge. Alicia comes to my side, hanging down over the wall so far that I almost lurch to catch her before she falls, but she slides back to safety behind the wall before I can move.
“I found this place one time when I was taking pictures of the city. I don’t think anyone else knows about it. I’ve never seen any evidence of anyone else up here.”
She gazes out over the lights of Parlor City. “You were taking pictures of the city?”
“Yeah,” I say, lost in the sights. “You know, of the old buildings and stuff. It’s a great city. I love the way it looks. It’s... I don’t know... twisted and dark, with all those ancient buildings covered in weird symbols that no one really knows about. I mean, like that one right over there.” I point off to the north to a gold-bricked building to the north. “The building looks like it’s right out of Biblical Jerusalem, but it’s got the faces of Pharaohs on the sides. Then, right on Main Street, right up there,” I say, pointing up Main to the west, “there is that massive Masonic Temple. This city has some weird secret history that no one really talks about.”
“The Old Priest and the Fish?” she asks tentatively, head turning slowly as she takes in everything below us.
“The Old Priest and the Fish,” I affirm.
“You know, you’re right though,” she says, eyes stopping on the towering Ayers Foods building standing over everything, top four levels lit up with eerie green lights. “I never really looked around. Usually, when I think of this city, all I think about are the wired rednecks.” She glances over at me and raises her eyebrows. “I never really looked at the buildings. I never noticed how intricate the architecture really is. Just look at all these peaked facades carved with vines and flowers, and is that... right there, is that a lion’s head? It’s beautiful, Rubin, it really is. I’m glad you showed it to me.” She looks back and forth from the cityscape to me, taking a deep breath.
Kiss her. Kiss her. Kiss her. She wants you to kiss her.
Oh! I’m such a fucking loser!
She leans in close.
I lean.
She pulls away.
I almost fall on my face.
“So...” She trails off and licks her lips apprehensively. “How long have you been coming up here?” She turns away and leans on her elbows over the wall again.
“Oh... I... Uh, well, I guess I found it about... about a year ago, yeah, a year ago. I was trying to put together a photo collage of the city.”
“What happened with that?”
“Well, I don’t know anything about photography and I was trying to do it with disposable cameras. The photos didn’t come out very well.”
“No, I can’t imagine they did...” She trails off and looks over the craggy, broken-toothed smile of downtown Parlor City. “I’m glad you showed it to me,” she repeats. “I’ll keep your secret, I promise.” She pushes herself back and drops on her rump, pulling her knees up to her chest. “Oh, Rubin...,” she says, smiling and shaking her head.
“What?” I ask, trying to keep the smile pinned to my face, but I can smell already that my reasons to smile have just jumped off the roof.
“Oh...” She shakes her head and smiles. “Oh, nothing. Nothing at all.” Almost like it’s forced, her face brightens. “What are you doing tomorrow night?”
“I don’t know, probably going to the Spot. It’s wing night. Everyone goes there for wing night.” I rub my stomach in anticipation. “Why, it’s the main event of our social circle. You can’t miss it. Want to come with me?”
She purses her lips apprehensively. “I don’t know, hipsters with faces smeared in hot sauce and bleu cheese while Pearl Jam plays too loud on the juke? I’ll think about it, but I’ll probably pass this one up.”
“Suit yourself.” I lean in close, arm positioned to easily slip around her shoulders should she move just a little closer.
She shifts her weight into my reach, and we awkwardly fall together. She melts into my side, pushing into all the nooks and crannies, finding every available space for maximum surface contact. She buries her head in my neck and exhales hard. “Oh, Rubin, I knew it was going to be like this.”
“Like what?”
“Oh, nothing,” she whispers. “I’ll tell you about it later. I don’t want to think about it right now.” We sit there in silence for a good half hour before she gets to her feet with no warning and says, “I need to go home and go to bed. I had fun tonight.”
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