It was a dark and stormy night in a town that knows how to keep its secrets. The pavement was slick with forgotten promises and the air rank with dissolution and ambiguous morality. I had just taken care of the remnants of a ’07 Shiraz and was peering into the depths of the empty bottle, searching for my dignity when BAM. In saunters the goddess – all 6’4” of her. Her pink-sequined cocktail sheath, looking like so many salmon roe waiting to spawn, has a slit you could hide the 102nd Battalion in. Her ankles are sturdy and athletic, though they’d have to be, holding up all that woman. Her thighs are like those slabs of beef at the store that you just want to rub all over your face, marbled in all the right places and slightly hairy. She has a slight paunch, a bit of a gut that you can’t help but admire. Whether from her love of the brew or one too many brats popping out of her snatch – who knows or cares? And her breasts. Wow. Two huge misshapen melons, ready to burst at a touch. One slightly lachrymose and sagging – like a soccer ball that’s passed its prime and knows it. I name it Umbro. The other is more sprightly and urgent in its plump voluptuousness. I dub it Sandusky. Like Ohio.
Her face isn’t much to look at. A large nose and a double chin that disappears into the folds of her neck cover up most of the ill-concealed blotchiness. But her eyes. That milky blue-green you see on the shells of sick sea turtles ensnares me from within pools of hot pink eye-shadow lava. She flicks a finger in my direction and, like a puppet, I’m winding my way towards her. She lights a cigarette ever so delicately, her bratwurst-esque fingers deftly manipulating the Zippo that she gently replaces betwixt Umbro and Sandusky. Lucky lighter. She smells used – like motor oil and condoms. Maybe there was a team of mechanics in her past. I don’t care though; I drink in her aroma like the wino on the corner of 51st and 2nd swills 40s.
“Are you going to the Ball?” she growls, her voice is the subtle music of a rusty pick-up on a gravel road.
“The huh?” I’m not really listening. I’m too busy adjusting myself.
“The Ball, little man, the Ball. The Event of the Year.” I can tell she capitalizes the “e” by the way she croaks it. Like a bullfrog in heat.
“Is that where you’re going?” I’m losing it and losing it fast. Her wanton sexuality is clouding my mind. She could have violated me with a splintery broom handle and I probably wouldn’t have liked it, but I wouldn’t have protested if it meant she would be mine.
“Yeah, let’s bounce.” She grabs my arm in a grip that was both intoxicatingly pleasurable and incredibly painful. Like those sex toys that have sharp edges. We stroll out the door, every eye on us, covetous of my prize.
We reach the Ball and there’s a dame at the door who wants my money. She’s in all black, like a crow. I throw her a few Bens to stop her cawing. That shuts her up. The Ball is the Event of the Year. Everyone who is anyone is there and living it up. There’s the mayor, who’s all dolled up in something with red sequins. She looks like Dorothy’s Ruby Slippers, stolen off a dead witch and worn all the way to the Emerald City and back. There’s a bilious-looking Southern deb with an Ellen DeGeneres cut whose biceps were larger than my thighs. She pinches my ass repeatedly until my woman tells her that unless she wants to go back to Alabama with her labia in shreds, she had better step off. I’m taking a cigarette break from the excitement when a saucy wench with hair the color of a jaundiced infant shambles up.
“Do you think that if I went to the bathroom and put my mouth next to the urinal a someone would stick his cock into it?” she gasps, her hands clawing feebly at my belt.
“Look, lady, you do whatever you want with urinals and cocks and your mouth,” I start, attempting to remove her hands from my crotch.
“WOULD YOU DO IT?” she screeches in my face before slamming me against the wall, ripping at my pants in a frenzy that can only be described as atavistic. I try to wrestle her off, but she’s like one of those African hunting dogs, tireless in the chase after that sickly wildebeest. I resign myself to her clutching, but before she gets much farther, she’s pulled off me by my goddess, my 6’4” heroine.
“You touchin’ my man?” she snarls, the sea turtles are livid.
“Eh meh eh meh deh” comes the mewled response, the African dog is retreating quickly in the face of my lusty Amazon.
“You touch him again, I’ll shave your head. And then use it to crack walnuts on my marble countertops,” she barks. “Now, git,” she says with this authority that I find supremely erotic. The jaundiced infant scuttles away in fright.
“Little man,” she turns to me. “I’m gonna make you pay for letting her touch you,” I can tell she says pay in italics by the way she grabs my junk and twists. Hard. “We’re going home. Now.”
The rest of the night passes in a series of painful, but sensual blurry montages. Like in A Scanner Darkly and Requiem For A Dream. I won’t go into too much detail, but suffice to say that there was a splintery broom handle along with large amounts of macaroni and cheese. And syrup. So much syrup.
I come to the next morning as my angel is closing my bedroom door on her way out.
“Wait!” I groan and try to get up, before realizing that I’ve been handcuffed to the bed frame. She pauses.
“Who are you? Did you leave your number? Will you uncuff me?” I try to look at her, but I’m like Our Savior on the Cross and my range of movement is severely limited.
“Valise,” she whispers, winking at me. She closes the door, leaving me struggling against my bonds and wondering why I had roast beef taped onto my knees.
I never saw her again. I still go to the club every day in hopes of catching a glimpse, a fleeting moment. I questioned everyone at the Ball in hopes of getting something, an address, a phone number, anything. But, alas. No one there had seen her before or after. Now, whenever I catch motor oil and condoms on the wind, I think of her and touch myself. My gargantuan she-devil with that splintery broom handle…my Valise.