CHASING THE TAIL OF GOD

 

"Kimmier tells me you're a writer."  Wes's rusky voice plays wryly with the words.  "What do you write?  Not that it matters. I haven't any time for reading.  The physical is my plane.  I prefer the Kiss of flesh to the uneasy shadow play of words."

She's shocking.  In this puddle-earthy bar with its drab, faceless boys in their drab, faded greens, Wes is bold strokes, brilliant colors, long aristocratic lines.  She taps a cigarette from its leather case while she explains to Adolph that she's an exotic dancer at a convention hotel called Goys in Louistown. Haughty.  Cocksure.  Opinionated.  Wes is the tail's-lash, come to pass.  The alarm clock in the dreamless sleep.  It's Wes's custom to get a little sloshed before going to work in town.  "The looser the better," she is saying as she lifts up her skirt, flexing one long, unclad leg before the wolfish faces of Adolph and Christian. "See!" she says.  "I'm getting looser already."  Wes lets out a laugh like a little fart. 

The humor in her eyes casts around to see if anyone shares the double meaning, but Adolph and Christian are still ogling the burning afterimage of Wes's magnificent appendage. "What do you write?  You never answered.  Fiction?  Poetry? Scholarly?  What?  Adolph barely gets out his answer before Wes interrupts.  "There are poems about me.  One that's like a dream. I - - - she reflects - - - am a kind of muse, slipping from bed to bed, the soft wet breath for the visions of sleep.  Little beads clinging to my lips.  Dew on the Rose of Sharon. 

What is it you write?  Ah!  Poetry.  Yes.  Poems have been read aloud to me.  A spoken music."  Wes's eyes drift upward with that lyrical look of exaltation found only in persons capable of total self-sacrifice. Incinerated monks.  Sword wielding saints.  Crusaders of vainglorious causes.  Shakti-bums.  Prick kissers all.  "Make me a poem," she wispers.  The most affected little girl bow lips Adolph has ever seen.  "I'm good to look at.  My hair's a ruddy mane.  My forehead is not too broad.  I am good to look at.  My eyes are not set too deeply.  There are green centers in them flecked with bits of blue. I am good to look at when my hair shines.  I am good to look at. Make me a poem.  If you can!"  She verily shouts this last bit of cocksass.

Adolph promises to write an epic work devoted entirely to Wes. He thinks that a project of this magnitude will take a lot of getting to know her.  She agrees.  Adolph wiggles unashamedly with anticipation. Old juices flow. "I like to be with artists.  They need me so badly, living in their heads like they do," Wes mews clawingly, using her long, tapered fingers to accent the point.  So saying, she touches Adolph's thigh and gazes wantonly into his eyes.  Adolph notices (in the middle of an erection) that Wes is wearing a small plastic module behind her right ear so he brushes aside the shiny curls, spilling shoulder drifts of red, for a closer look at the tiny component.  "A hearing aide," Wes explains.  "I can only hear with this clumsy box.  But it serves me.  I take it off and dance like a doll fluttering in the wind.  I hear no evil so that I can better serve the flame burning in my body.  I spread the oneness of the natural animal onto the open slices of the talking heads.  I want to become naked poetry," she says, turning to Adolph to test the impact of her words.  "Do you think I could be a poem?  Who would have written me?  A passionate Arab prince.  A sickly urbane intellectual?  Maybe you with your sweet, piercing weeps of blue?"  She moves closer to Adolph.  He can feel her warm breath against his ear.  "Come see me tonight," she whispers, draining the remainder of her drink in one gulp.  "I'll be very good. You'll see."  She knows he'll come.  Cocksure!  Yeah.

Adolph and Christian conspire to go into Louistown together for a night of savage fun.  They decide, since their funds are low, to invite Christian's bunkmate Nico.  Nico's good for a square.  Likes to powder your nose.  Takes your pleasure as seriously as his own. "You'll like my little bespectacled Dodillito," Christian promises, his chuckles like Morse code.

Goys is a skin-joint.  Smartly dressed up to look like a nightclub.  Each customer arrives, looking for action, checks his tar-brush or ten gallon hat, wraps his grubs amount a neat-whiskey and pants a live birth in his boxer shorts.  At the end of the night, when every wrinkle and scar of the dancing ladies has been microscopically perused, the raw meat and bones stumble painfully back to their rooms with swollen glands and empty pockets.  Three drink minimum per show. Two shows, at nine o'clock and at eleven.  Cheapest drink is twelve dollars.  And that's faucet swill to boot.  Add it up.  Lucky to have Nico with a great green roll.

As Christian picks a table very near to the stage, a blank-eyed ebony beauty, with skin like polished marble, buffets an imaginary balloon. The dithyrambic thrusts of her powerful hips kick up sparks and there's enough torque revolving in the ever widening circles of her marvelous expanse of ass to turn the crankshaft of a tractor.     

Adolph is having a hard time figuring the appropriate facial expression for the situation.  Should he leer, loll his tongue; wrinkle his brow with speculative wonder?  What?  Keep the beat on the table with his knuckle ring?  Look straight into the gloomy black hole.  Up into those frigid nodes of darkness glassy from the Mexican Brown she skin-pops before every show?  What if she looks down at him while he's looking up at her and their eyes meet in one of those lingering acknowledgements of mutual existence?  Wouldn't it be embarrassing with that mossy crack staring him in the face?  He scoots off to the men's room and digs around for the courage to face the dragon in the mouth.

When Adolph returns, there's music striking the stage in deep, bassy grooves that you can feel swelling in your chest like summer thunder.  Wes's Kaftans is billowing in concentric, heart-shaped hoops on either side of her languorous body.  A flutter of azure.  Shafts of light in the morning snow.  The warm green of Neptune, piercing the dusty veil, rapturously greeting each pair of eyes, holding 'them with her steady gaze as if, at any moment, she will fling herself into their laps and grant them their wishes in one fervid dreamsuck. It is just for you, she is saying, as her foot arches stiffly, forcing the toes to point, not these others, but you.  Her leg snaps out again and again.  Saber strokes cutting the light strings. Each man feels he is alone with Wes.  That this, despite the cost, is his lucky night.

Nico tugs at Adolph's sleeve.  He's holding a gold watchcase and car key.  He wispers, "Coke, old buddy?"  Adolph nods approval. He doesn't want to appear abashed by the presence of the Lady.  This snob-thing with Coke is getting out of hand.  Very bourgeois.  So it's the frozen mask.  One eye on the tangle of scarfs and the other on Nico's efforts to calmly open the container.  "It's right from the rock," Nico adds dipping the Key into the watchcase of glittering dust.

Wes draws a hand across the top of where the Kaftans drapes her shoulder.  The wing turns whip-like and floats to the surface of the stage, disappearing in the velvety darkness outside the ovoid shapes that are created by the spots trained on Wes's blue-white skin. "Sweetjeezus," Nico gasps. "She's incredible."

Some hot taunts with her shoulder tucked seductively beneath her chin and the remaining wing is cast into the air.  She teasingly crosses and uncrosses her arms hiding her breasts in a seductive parody of a child's peek-a-boo game.  Completely bare, but for the twist of scarf between her legs, she looks outlandishly savage. She's slender and muscular with skin whitened by talc or chalk. Nipples pointed red with rouge.  A dirty blue-bruise of Pythagorean shapes--- sharp, angular, leggy.  "Now that's a stripper," Nico says admiringly.  Christian looks miffed.

"An exotic dancer," he corrects without taking his eyes off Wes's hand playing with the knot of her loin cover.  Pull it, they think, all of one mind, focused on the tiny knot.  Pull it, she does.  The scarf hangs like a window shade.  She lets them peek and then turns straddling the tightened cloth like a towel you snap, drawing it up hard between her legs. 

Adolph watches closely to see if the expression on her face changes.  Does she cum, he wonders?  Whether Wes achieves orgasm or not, Adolph can't tell, but the audience hoots and shrieks like cats in heat.  Wes rocks rhythmically on her imaginary lover and the caterwaul becomes a chant.  Pink!  Pink!  They wail in unison.

The performance ends with Wes waggling her ample rear in their flushed faces.  She climbs down the bar to a stool and jumps to the floor like a snow leopard.  Holding the Kaftans semi-modestly over her breasts and crotch, she swaggers into the excited crowd.  All around men hoot and yowl.  She pays no attention.  Squinting to focus her eyes, the heartbeat of the master colorist looks for Adolph and Christian.  When she finds their table, Wes pulls up a chair, folds the Caftan around her like a towel after a shower and beams broadly. "Well!  What do you think?" she asks.  "Don't tell me.  I can't hear a thing.  Isn't it a wonderful night?" 

A suit and tie walks' by the table gawking at Wes's beautiful, naked back.  She seems unperturbed by these attentions and continues her one sided conversation.  "Come up to my rooms.  I have a suite in the hotel.  A nice, cozy place with a view of the river.  Oh yes all of you.  Please." No argument there.  Better to be an insider and come away with the prize than to sit in the glandular half-sleep of another unfulfilled wish.  Part of the world is out selling its ass.  Its youth.  Its sleek, good looks.  Like the flower girl who is so beautiful that men buy armloads of her gardenias and take them somewhere to weep.  The rest of the world is just taken.  Wiped clean. Their pockets out like elephants' ears.

At the elevator, Wes ties a dark blue belt around her narrow waist and snaps the wings securely in place.  "There," she says fiddling with the hearing aide under her hair.  "Earth to Captain Midnight.  Testing.  Testing.  Wasn't I wonderful?  Those clowns will be giving some bodies wife a healthy turn.  Thanks to me!"  The elevator careens up the twenty-three floors to Wes's little suite. "Major Zap owns the hotel.  Lets me live here for free.  A whole suite. Isn't he a darling.  He calls me his eternal spring."

Wes's joyous confession piques Adolph's curiosity and he wants to ask if Zap is a real uncle or an uncle-uncle, but he doesn't.  He leaves it alone.  Something unsaid, between Wes and him, makes it impossible to be critical or unpleasant.  Her life is a bubble thin membrane and it doesn't need a prick.  "Where's Zap tonight?" he asks instead.

"He's in Italy.  Sometimes he stays at his hotel in Chicago. I've a postcard from Milan.  He's taking me next time!"  The elevator grinds to a halt at the twenty-third floor.  Out she leaps.  Breasts bobbing like slinky springs.  "Shit!" she swears.  "A piece of glass. I've cut myself, Shit!"  She hops impossibly on one foot.  Her pretty face contorted with pain.

Anybody, who has ever tried to board a bus or flag a cab back in New Hope, knows why Adolph beat Christian and Nico to Wes's injured foot.  What willowy lines, those stately limbs, which Adolph brushes with blooding lips.  The luck to be smitten by the Tail of God.  Is it love, he thinks, or just another hot flash?

Wes rubs her foot tenderly after Adolph removes the glass.  "It hurts, ya know."  He craddles her up and carries her to the room.  Not missing a single, musky breath.  That's baked bread right in the heart. A sweet savor that couldn't be any sweeter.  Wes guzzles bubbly out of the jug, "for the pain," she says, as she rubs her foot tenderly. Tears dry in salty stains around her larger than life eyes.  You can swim clear down to the black fathomless bottom of those watery windows and see yourself dripping the sappy unquent of desire.

Nico slices coke into majestic snakes, making sure every crumb is properly powdered and every nose fully packed.  Even dabs it under the tongues of his fellow celebrants like some weird Eucharist.  No pain at the dawning of the crown.  Only the slow cooking bodies, laden heavily with their euphoric souls, pouring out into perfumed space like the ribbon of black water outside the window winding its way to nowhere.  Nowhere at all.

"What a nice night," sighs Wes.  Adolph snuggled into her arm. Nico's head on her lap.  The clump forms a smooth skin, except Christian.  He becomes stiff and impetuous.  He works at the knot of the scarf.  Wes scolds.  Christian works heedless.  She protests. "Christian!  Be cool, man --- take it easy," Adolph admonishes, not wanting to rupture the idyllic scene.  Christian moves frantically over her face and tries to plant his lips like a mosquito bite.  Wes shakes him off.  Half of Adolph understands.  Christian is blitzed. Wes has been more than a little provocative.  The other half --- the half overcome with growing affection for the woman who saved his hide straightens Christian up with a knee to the groin   It's a smooth hydraulic move.  Christian doubles over, groaning in his teeth, and Adolph finishes him with a bell-ringing gong to the side of the head.

After Adolph helps apologetic Nico get Christian into a cab, he works through the night preening and stroking Wes's fiery plumage. She's holding back.  Adolph is in no hurry.  He can play sixteen (pants up or down) forever.  Longer with a sylph like Wes. Bodies grinding.  One liners to keep the time fluid, not too serious.  Just good clean fun.  They take their time this way until the rosy glow and the chattering magpies of dawn push them together into blissful sleep like two carved wooden spoons.