"Be polite. Love does not give license for rudeness."
Leo Buscaglia, "Loving Each Other"
Another small, dirty town on the long road to Shitsville. This is where I belong, I muttered, peering through the smeary, bespattered windshield. Frankly, my glasses weren't too clean either, but it was a smeary, bespattered world, and I could see well enough to see that.
The first dingy motel featured one of those cheap signs with the moveable plastic letters, and I was briefly surprised at its message -- it promised "Reasonable Farts Daily." Mulling this over, I assumed this must be something the local kids had done, perhaps been doing for years -- analogous to the nightly painting-the-stallion's-penis-red on the equestrian statue in the campus square. I considered a hardworking, immigrant owner, a Pakistani or a Korean perhaps, driven almost insane by a battle lost nightly. It didn't make any difference how late he stayed up. He bought floodlights, chained a junkyard dog to the sign post, planted increasingly nasty boobytraps. Didn't matter: come dawn's sweet light, he was advertising reasonable farts instead of reasonable rates. And one day, he just came to accept it.
Then it crossed my mind that maybe there were no kids. This could be a bold marketing campaign orchestrated and executed after innumerable focus groups ("Ok, now how would you feel if you saw a motel marquee that said ..."). Hmm, I idly wondered what might constitute a reasonable fart hereabouts. Maybe I should comparison shop before I gave my custom. On the other hand, the farts here had to be more reasonable than in, say, San Francisco or Miami. Fuck it, I was bone tired, if I had to shell out a little extra, so be it. Leave in the good Lord's hands. I turned in the driveway onto the hard dirt and cinder parking lot. It was about 114 degrees, starting to cool off with the coming of crepuscular dusk. That dangerous and magical hour when anything's possible.
The fat lady in stained, white spandex behind the counter looked up from her Blue Boy magazine. My first impression: the Michelin man with the head of Jackie Gleason in Shirley Temple curls. Kind of saucy if you liked that look. Definitely disdainful: apparently, I had failed some test just by turning in. Water off a duck's back, babe - I'd been failing tests since the day I was born.
"Sorry mister, we all full up tonight," she leered. She contemplatively stroked her mustache and let her eyes crawl over my body like a lazy blowfly doing a happy rumba on a fresh, moist pile of dung. A greasy droplet of sweat furrowed the pancake on her pendulous jowl, hung for a lingering moment on her double chin, and then landed with a Splat! on Mr. Centerfold's donkey-sized product. She smirked a little, licked her lips, then wiped them off with the back of a swollen hand.
I glanced out at the 13 abandoned, tobacco-road cabins propping each other up outside. A beagle-sized rodent jumped out of a broken window with something still alive in its mouth. I wondered if the bathrooms were en suite.
"I can understand that. You've got a really pretty place here; there's a Cape Coddy bed & breakfasty ambiance. As soon as I saw it, I had to turn in. Couldn't help myself." I made no move to the door and our gazes locked. Suddenly, a trap door of the heart dropped opened beneath me, my feet danced in the air, and my mind spun into a gaudy, opium-like dreamscape. Everything went blurry except for the unearthly effulgence of her humongous face, and I could barely draw breath, her rich, womanly musk was so strong. Fire tongued the shabby walls. Now we were both deadly serious, trying to decide whether to throw the last dirty dollar on the roulette table, double zero.
After what seemed like an eternity, she barely shook her porcine head - like a water buffalo flickering its ear at a tse tse fly. Her tiny corkscrew curls barely stirred. Did I glimpse a flash of wistfulness, of melancholy regret, or was I only fooling myself for the millionth time? She looked down at a double-page fold-out, sighed, licked her forefinger and slowly turned the page to a hirsute hombre in chaps and stetson, looked a bit like Ben Stiller. I turned to go, then stopped at the door. Without looking back, voice hoarse with strain, "What's your name, jelly donut?"
"Rosalita," she whispered, and there was a millennium of raw, wet pain in those euphonius sylables.
"Rosalita" I repeated, staring sightlessly through the bug-crusted screen. (Mr. dog-rat was hopping back into cabin 9 for seconds.) I should have known, even if she had put on an extra hundred pounds or two. And the pencil mustache: I didn't remember that.
After all these crap-filled years. I grunted with the force of the gut punch.
I pushed out into the hot-baked dirt and black flies and loneliness; smudged a black, greasy rag across my windshield; climbed in, popped in Garth Brooks and headed down the road. God, I was tired. I needed a hot shower, a big plate of fish sticks and a tall glass of Dubonnet. And a bimbo I could pay to tell me she loved me....
I was miles away, watching the film of the past flicker by one more time, howling out the words to “The Dance” before I realized – damn, I had forgotten to inquire about the reasonable farts.
To be continued.
Henry E. Panky
No Legitimate Content
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