For Kels
Escort/Tacked On Like an Apostrophe
She died of heartbreak. In the morning, sweetheart, in the morning… It was all I said when the telephone rang and Anna couldn’t make syllables she was sobbing so hard. The cops found her clutching the receiver of the hotel phone, curled up, pale as secretly stained sheets. No cuts or blood. No handgun or hanging. It was just simply a broken heart. Like her tits she had survived past her own body. Every news station in the country broadcasted her afterlife special. They called her daring. They called her beautiful. They called her a whore with a smack smeared son who was five months ahead of her. She’d suffered. Suffered in the inheritance of an oil tycoon who signed his fortune to the last busty platinum blonde to facilitate fellatio on his ripened fixture (aged 98 years).
She loved him though.
That’s what she’d always say.
She loved him, though…
I remember she never walked into a room without flashes of lightning in a storm just for her.
I remember the cocktails. I remember she’d end up spilled all over her dress and I’d end up as a crutch.
I remember the first night she hired me. I stood as a wall while she crouched on the corner of the Westin St. Francis hotel to relieve herself.
I remember her smile.
I remember when her Daniel died she didn’t open the blinds of the house for a month.
I remember the debut of the TrimSpa commercial, and how stunning she looked. And maybe we all thought it was going to get better from there. How? I don’t know. Just better.
And she could never sit still. We were in L.A. Saturday then Texas by Tuesday. Ten years on the road with someone you see a lot about them other people don’t, not even family. And maybe this is why she called me because I knew she couldn’t feel at home anywhere, especially not in a double suite at the Hard Rock of Hollywood in Florida. Where she wanted to be was the Bahamas. With her son, her Daniel, even if he couldn’t talk back he’d be soaked into the earth and soil of the island by now.
When a heart breaks it does not shatter or implode or burst. A heart is not made of glass. No, when a heart breaks a tiny fracture the width of a hair cracks the muscle into halves, makes a sound so quiet, so minuscule only the wearer and dogs can hear. Sometimes the worst pain felt is a paper cut.
(As an apostrophe dangles onto possession Vickie took hold of what she could when she needed or wanted it. She was born into it. If she couldn’t use her hands she’d bend her back, lock her ankles, and straddle on by the hip. The Texan accent had even been substituted for sultry sophistication. And she gave the kind of love that confused with heart burn; made her think she could die alone and be okay with it. Vickie’s love had made her seem unattainable. At least, not by Man, or especially the kind of man that simply wanted to have her. When the stage spot lights flooded flesh and curve in the dark cavern Vickie knew those of hands would reach and she’d learned what brought home the milk and bacon, Daniel’s diapers and blended purees of baby food, the rent and methadone and Zoloft. With her soft sand beach blanket hair and eyes fueled by tumult waves like something of an ocean she had to simply take what she wanted. Before Daniel was walking for himself she’d changed her name and won Playmate of the Year and the cover. “I’ll drop it,” she had said, “for the sake of sultry sophistication.” They called her the next Marilyn Monroe. But people liked to throw out names. Now in the diamond sea a hand immerges from the sweeping current. The hand is Daniel’s and he waves in the same motion of the sea as if his hand conquered the currents and controlled the vast weightlessness by will. The hand waves come, come here, come because I am waiting, come out here. At the edge of the diamond water where the land and the ocean are separate but together her feet bury until they’re ankle deep. She waits for the cold water to rush over and around them so she can wiggle her toes in the shifting sand. The sun is brilliant on this beach and her eyes can’t focus: all there is must just be the diamond water and the capsules for clouds floating in the air above her. After she wakes but before her eyes open she knows it had been a dream. For a long time she keeps her eyes shut trying to remember the soft focus details. It takes her more time to realize she’s laid out on the hotel room floor, cocooned in a linen sheet. Her eyes just keep closed and she just keeps trying to remember. Remember because her heart hurts for the only man she ever gave a fuck about. Because she can’t open the shades for the sun outside; it is harsh and not like her son or the sun of her dreams.)
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“The Photographer”
Verbatim to the trembling colors of life are the bled violets on polyvinyl-instantaneous in eternity but no more than. A moment in the lives of others is all which he lives for. The painter of light must be a voyeur; the brush strokes which come in clicks and shutters must be his fetish. Behind the studio apartment wall is a strong fifteen of moans. So thick the fog drips off the leaves of the trees, taps like soft rain onto the pavement. By the bay he learns to quit staring into the fog because it turns his hair gray. The dilated iris of the lens softens the focus and trades a pair of eyes for one lightning strike. Sometimes relief is of simply being. Another dandelion on the wallpaper like living like a cloud. Of course, the camera obscura reminds you always that cigarettes crack into fault lines at the side of your eyes. But if you’ve made it eighteen years, well, you’ve made it. “Made it” like a ticker tape marathon finish line: caution yellow or impervious red. Run the sepia celluloid backwards and you can even cheat death. Falling upwards. Timelines are just reflections of light and the painter of which must be nostalgic. On the ceiling is the reflection of the window stretched from an inflected lamp post posted a top the parking garage. When a car pulls away the light is muscle enough to bend the blinds. He misses the frozen lakes in the winters of La Crosse. When there was no international airport but when he was still astonished to see how his lungs worked in the air. This is why the deaf will never forget the sun. And the violas haunt their dreams.
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Christmas was the shit.