Rant & Roll 1

This is getting out of hand.

I was on bathing strike and it was all her fault. Erin taught me it wasn’t so bad being a dirty girl. We were bare and tangled up against each other between the bed sheets. She held my thigh between her legs, and pressed herself damp into me.

"I’m sorry if your legs stinks in the morning," she said. But she wasn’t sorry. And I wasn’t worried. She promised me breakfast.

We slept against each other, mixing skin. I lost the spot where I ended and she began. We were two perfect puzzle pieces of humanity, locked tight. She slept with her head between my shoulder blades, and her breath tickled my spine. She traced the upraised flesh of a tattoo, and when I stuck out my bottom lip the night before she slathered the piece in lotion.

I woke hours before her. I could smell her shoes. Chuck Taylors incessantly worn without socks while she pulled doubles waiting tables in her seafood restaurant. I could smell her hair which was static, and multi-colored, and teasing the freckles on my shoulders. I reached down to the floor and picked up a book. She shifted, mumbled something arcane in her sleep, she was forever swearing at me, and settled into the curve of my arm, her head against my breast.

As I flipped the pages and devoured chapter after chapter her erratic breath kissed my skin, and a scrimmage of saliva came from pointy lips and pooled between my breasts.

It was easy.

It was so fucking easy to forget three years of insanity, and lose myself in the tender spot between her thighs. That place that forever tasted of tears. I stopped crying.

There is a fine line between an orgasm and a sob. And from my lips, they sound dangerously the same.

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I thank him for giving me something to write about.

The one who always beat me down. His hardest hit was the one that brought me back up. Stop the presses, she’s not going out like that.

I get in my car, and it’s sweltering. Your car sits in the Florida sun, black seats, wide windows sucking the sun in like a lover, rolling it around on its humid, heavenly tongue. Hot box. YOU get to roll down the windows. YOU get to work the ac. But, I spend my money on the concrete hull of an apartment, on the shiny green eyes of ice cubes floating in Tanqueray.

Did you know gin glows under a black light?

I spend my money on material love, and each day I die a little inside my vehicle.

I call her Dachau. I call her Auschwitz.

I went to Dachau when I was 18. I sat on the edge of a concrete bench and stared hard into the wet walls. I scraped my feet on the concrete floor, and inhaled dead German summer heat. My friends stayed outside.

Gabby vomited in a pile of bushes.

Carrie smoked a cigarette.

I sat in the center of the shower room. There was a photograph on the wall from the outside looking in. Piles of people, limbs entangled, puzzle pieces, dead and yellowed and embracing. Each and everyone of them wore the same expression. Relief. They were finally fucking dead. No more hunger, No more pain.

This is what they found when they opened the door. This is what they found when they were liberated, and liberating.

The girls left on the first train out. They went into Munich and raised stein glasses of thick, dank, dark Deutschland beer and I kicked around the tiny white pebbles lining the foundation of barrack after barrack.

I kept one as a souvenir. A black stone, in the shape of the Blessed Mother. I held that stone from country to country, and I rubbed the tender spot where her face had been. I massaged and molested Mary until she ran smooth, and her definition was gone.

When I came home, I threw her in the glove compartment, and forgot about her.

I forget about everything in that fucking car. I slip inside my own sweat, and struggle to stay alive. Fast shot down the interstate, daily ride, and each time I find myself nodding off. Eyelids fall, head falls, footfalls and I’m going 97...98...99...

That car will be the death of me. That car will be my Dachau and I will have done it to myself.

Now I keep a handheld tape recorder on the dashboard. At night, when I’m wide awake, and the heat subsides I take turns with the stereo, and we scream. I hold staring contests with the stars. I open my mouth and the sound erupts. Mon Petit Vulcan. I blame it on cigarettes, this scratchy voice. Smoke too much, have another. I’m the kind of smoker who never has a light.

I smoke because I’m supposed to. I’m a broken girl, that’s what we do. When I get home I pour myself shots. My new boyfriend is named Jack Daniels. He’s from Tennessee and he’s much older than me. He tastes like candy on my tongue. He fits so well inside my system, and I love the smell of whiskey skin.

It’s a different kind of burn than gin.

I read. I read and I romanticize liquor. Twenty one years old and broken. I’ll be the lady at the back of the bar, -bad dye job, smoking Winstons back to back, nicotine fingers and red lipstick on the rim of her glass. Tom Collins, then Gin and Tonic, then Gin on the rocks. It feels clean.

I will rinse my mouth out with liquid love.