city like the breath of a sweaty desperate boy who'd climbed the twenty
half-flights of stairs to the penthouse level of the Imperial Hotel in
downtown San Francisco, given to believe he would find the woman of his
dreams, a woman his friends said was "like no woman you've ever
experienced before," a woman whose reputation preceded her in accurate but
imprecise fashion, much to his dismay, in that she was in fact beyond his
dreams but in the wrong way, her four feet and five inches of stature (if
you can call it that) terminating in a mop of orange curls that fell
around the smile formed of six randomly misplaced teeth just wrong for
oral gratitude, not that he minded that, never having received oral or any
other sort of gratitude, and later as he wandered off to hope the free
clinic would take his insurance he would quietly ponder why he had to run
for shelter when the promise of a brave new world unfurled beneath a clear
blue sky.
I'll wait for you to do the doot-doot-doot-doot-doo. You know the song.
The wind curled gently around Xavier Holland's temples, in much the same
way as the professional's creaky thighs had not, the scrapes of antique
stilettos on his shoulders proving he'd not been in the right place at the
right time, and the squawk of the Night Owl Line bus startling him back
into reality showing that once again he was like a fish on a bicycle in
the scales of justice, weighed and found wanting, or at least waddling a
bit.
He remembered catching the billowing redolence of her, um,
professionalism. He had read fifteen years of Penthouse Letters and
watched every porno video his brother had stolen from the Sticky Wicket
Video and Intimate Grocery, and had expected a floral experience when he
first dived between the creamy fjords of a lover's thighs. He was bitterly
disappointed, though, and swore never to expect to get what he paid for,
except in the luck of having waxed his mustache earlier for part of a
costume for a fancy ball at which his "gift" had been given him in an
envelope in the form of a short stack of grotesque dead presidents
(appropriate to have a short stack for this particular gift) and an
address on the back of a maxi-pad wrapper.
Xavier stepped into the crosswind of Market Street as the F Castro
streetcar passed, splashing a gray mist on his city pigeon gray Bugle Boy
slacks that nearly failed to absorb a day's oil and grime. He felt clean,
oddly enough, drenched but refreshed.
(C)2003
