3
In the most ruthlessly devastating of her gait styles, waitress Sally neared their stall. So it was announced in the badge on her magnificent breast, the left one, pinned over the dazzling white blouse (for the folks who tend to read in fits and starts, like, for instance, me at times, when not sufficiently concentrated—that was said about the badge, the damn thing was pinned and nothing else whatsoever, so as to remove any groundless expectations and keep staying on the safe side)…
As always in his intercourse with the fair sex, V gave free rein to his habitual instinct or, which also possible, to his instinctive habit, notably aggravating at the instances of communication with the distaff segment in personnel of both budget organizations and private business (the time of day, it might be mentioned, had no effect on his deep-rooted habit or, maybe, ingrained instinct).
At times he gave it a shot at reckoning location of tattoos in private nooks of their anatomy, for intimate exposure besides those on the show at their working hours.
However, the imaginative detours were merely spells of an aside activity and for the most part V stayed unobtrusively keen on intercepting the flickers of the random signals emitted by female subconsciousness. Those will-less weather balloons to scout out and plumb you. The unexpected winks or, say, playing the tongue along their parted lips then leaving its tip to stick forgetfully from the corner of her mouth. Subconscious, unpremeditated impulses are numerous and unforeseeable.
Why?! Pray I earnestly, tell me why learning all those grammar rules and phonetics? Why enrolling courses of differently foreign languages online or strain yourself with a paid tutor? They are intended only to obscure the simple and ultimate truth conveyable which is so easily imparted by means of body language. And bodies, moreover so lavishly opulent and graceful as by this here representative of millennials, Sally the waitress, do have the right for self-expressing. Unrestricted. The opener, the better.
Even for the reps of earlier generation branded with offhand “X”—fretted with wear and worries, wasted by their useless anxieties and utterly worn out by the unsparing exploitation of their poor selves and those by their side they only could put their hands on—there always remained a warm nook in the big heart of true knight and gentleman, that of V.
To boil it down, enough is to remark that even for a lady fairly advanced in her years, whose puberty coincided with the times when beatniks (another since long lost and safely forgotten generation) revolutionized jigger-bug into the rock-n-roll acrobatics, even for her—faith!—could V politely wind some sixty years back and there inadvertently admire the high tempo of her strong legs’ step enfolded tightly in sleek nylon. The stockings of black nylon—the ritzy vogue, the seam shot plumb up from her heels—squeak tinily and rub each other in between her heated thighs… gee! girl! No need to haste. You’ll be in time and everything OK, and he will surely be waiting for you chain-smoking his Lucky Strike, and that’ll become the best date in your whole life, yes! In swaying swoon till midnight and beyond it to the predawn twilight sipping into the interior of his chicest of all Ford models, Crestline Victoria, over lie-down seats… A!. Babe!. O!. O!. Moreee!. mmm… Tommy… dear…
With a sad smile of understanding would V watch after that silly brimless hat of hers, and the single feather stuck up from the teensy roll of mash veil tripping in her bouncing hops which are impossible to abate, keep down… she runs on… she doesn’t hear him… the distance is too great…
By his nature, which he doesn’t flash too freely, he is a ladies man in love with all the women in the world both in stock and separately, and ready is he to go on down that road, free of charge and not overly exacting (do it!) but with gentlemanly chivalrous laziness: his yes to welcome yes, and if no then so be it, he does not press too far too hard. In short, to use just a couple of couples of words – ‘womanizer and benevolent sociopath’ would be a fit description of this here cat, V.
As for the rest (more and more diverse) spectrum of advocates for the emancipation of non-traditional appetites, he never speak up against them, so is his principle. At most (and without further comments), he may shrug his shoulder (the left one as a rule), like, so what? Jedem das Seine and let everyone be the master of what they got while he (which is not superfluous to repeat) upholds the principle of non-interference and respecting the right for self-determination and inviolability of preferences in private life and in the international arena.
Yes, pathetic they are and, on the whole, coyly overacting, however, a crowd like any other one, passable for communication if abstaining from in-raids into your personal space. Yes, they wince at free-style speaking and, unaware of enlivening paganish power of incantation, grow too melodramatic, at once. But then who is without a blemish?
Pardon my axiom, tastes in any direction are preconditioned by Nature, you can’t skirt around the ineluctable, right? Though at times it’s hard not to feel sorry for a Nature’s critter who locked their vintage vehicle up and keep the artifact of brightest ingenuity incarcerated, devoid of rides because the fucking mother Nature directed them to drive some complete shit of a car. Yet, nothing doing, no way to resist Eff Mother and, for the tolerance’s sake we close the discussion of tastes as well as other surplus idle talk. Lada Kalina is their choice? Be happy, enjoy your ride, gourmets. Fuck!
Still no accouterments from a sex-shop can be better than a live partner of the right size that suits you, thanks to the fitting and careful tuning of the standard set of pleasures presented by loving Mother-Nature who didn’t get enough sleep at night and sweated over her blissful tweaks to the process, eons upon eons since the articulated origin of species, go consult Mr. Charles Darwin, the expert in this field.
On the other hand, wizzing against the wind is not a too healthy undertaking, akin to disapproving the thriving industry outfitted with the production lines of growing capacity, and the managerial pundits experienced in the particulars, turning out a wide range of accessories for any taste imaginable, accompanied by the glossy booklets where to to insert and how to ram (intuitiveness is a good thing yet better be safe than sorry), for steady growth of consumer demand, jobs in the industry, and a not negligible share in the total gross income of the nation.
To tell the God’s truth, V isn’t quite sure as to which particular trade union the workers of this industry had poured into, yet you may bet your bottom dollar plus your dear ass that the national economy is a vehement supporter of the emancipation—chain of retail stores, franchises, exports are not the things to wave off when in sober state of mind.
Dictators might pull tight “iron curtains” (tastes differ), play the card of fundamentalism, introduce bans, decree return to the traditional moral values, to burqas, kokoshniks, and kirza high boots – vain are their labors and belated because tolerance arrived in earnest so as to stay.
Or what reason for would the knife-wielding contingent in medical profession cut up the golden-eggs-laying hen, huh? The mere cost of fumbling about insert-remove the Adam’s apple? Do you know how much it is? Huh?. No? Lucky guy! Me neither. God save us from ever knowing…
So, welcome aboard the super-duper liner Reality, Ladies and Gents! The process has passed the tropic of Fail-Safe and become irreversible. Congrats! The real gourmets every other season change their genitals. Take a shot at! Feel the difference! You might like the wear! Transgender change inside-out-and-back is easier than to master the switch from Linux to Microsoft or backwards.
‘How d’you dig this, babe? When I was a male—before last year February—the posture was my fave. Come on! Giddy up, my macho!’
Turning to Lex, you wouldn’t need a shrink to see with your naked eye that no awesome breasts under the half-sheer blouse rocked him as should naturally be expected. The dark matte swarthiness in the heavenly cleavage within her low V didn’t work either. In vain delineated the gossamer cloth—so closely and exquisitely—the bumps of her admirable nipples (the left one playfully nudging the badge thru the airy light fabric separating them).
Nope. He was too far for temptations to catch him were they even performed by a topless top model role-playing a waitress taking his order.
Nah! Not a chance for all badges in the world, pinned up at whichever spot, would pull, and tempt, and swerve him in the direction of lascivious frivolity. What? Giving however flitting thought to anything carnal? Gosh, no! Not for him.
At this very moment he was coming without all that stuff because Lex was a devoted and staunch lover of grub-devouring and before a dinner pending so nigh he turned bulletproof altogether to any kind of reflectively unconscious flirting or other non-gastronomic dreams even if, by some black or white magic, in Sally’s stead had there popped up Cleopatra in the buff, wearing neither badge nor blouse (moreover, the Egypt’s government once again appealed to the global community with their announcement that Cleopatra was not black to which end they once again have found irrefutable archaeological evidence).
At this prelusive moment Lex turned a slightly balmy clot of lewdness that dims the sight with wabbly haze of lust and—lo!—all of him was in the foreplay already. His trembling fingers reached out to scratch, stroke, caress the sensual, awaiting folds – the corners of his mouth, all in small uncontrollable tremor (both the corners and the fingers).
In the attitude of owner the palm splayed over the pubis… (err… what?. not now! not now! we’ll proofread it later!)… the embossed pudenda of menu grabbed tenderly and spread wide to flip the beans of pages before to delve impetuously into and with short repetitive leaps move it (the inflamed gaze) from line to line still deeper to the very bottom… O! The moment of bliss insatiable! O! I’ll have the choicest and yummiest morsel from this jewel box…
The true food-lover way is a lifelong honey moon.
Sally walked off with the order to the folks slaving in the kitchen (one naturalized Czech and two fresh Venezuelan immigrants under the endemic chef, the waitress’ grandmother). Lex sat back a bit laxer yet still retaining his anticipation.
‘Watch me and learn from a wise man,’ instructively told he V, ‘the moment before you get the ultimate pleasure, think of some nasty stuff. Serves as that skeleton at orgies of ancient Roman hedonists. The gratification feel becomes acuter.’
‘My wedding gift for you will be The Anatomical Atlas of Skeleton Bones, richly illustrated. And thanks for sharing the trick.’
‘Any time,’ was Lex’ condescending response. ‘That’s what a guy needs pals for – to collect crumbles of wisdom. For a starter, you may choose thinking about the Malthusian Catastrophe we’re going to give a headlong dive into any other day.’
‘It’s about that screwball geezer who foretold inevitable global hunger because of the population growth? Bosh, threats of the end of the world give me no hard-on. The mankind’s history most optimistically proves that balancing on the razor’s edge since long became man’s main preoccupation and pastime, we glibly jump over every catastrophe scheduled for tomorrow just to land in more deep shit. So save the Malthus’ horror screenplay for amusing your grand kids at bedtime.’
‘He proved it mathematically!’
V gave out a tired sigh:
‘At the dawn of the 20th century mathematicians rolled out their calculations that in fifty years life in all major cities would come to a crunching halt because of the insoluble dilemma. No way to clear the city thoroughfares of droppings by the horses needed for the in-city transportation. The trained shitheads used logarithm rulers for the calculus which made it undefeated.
Your pessimistic Member of the Royal Society lived in the world populated by less than one billion guys. He missed to take into account the innate ability of people to regulate their optimal numbers by means of mass shootings at schools and kindergartens, ethnic cleansing, world war slaughterhouses, extermination camps and other methods of saving mankind by killing them. A pretty elegant solution, if you think of it. To whet your appetite, you know.’
Lex gave out a disgruntled squirm:
‘Know the difference between a cowboy camp cook and a renown chef? The latter will never dump a sack of peppercorns into one meal.’
With melancholically slow movement Lex reached for his dinner jacket on the seat-back and angled a pinkish pack of chewing gum out. One bar was extracted, unwrapped and put into his mouth. Ruminating thoughtfully, he dropped the pack into the breast pocket of his shirt which action seemingly woke him. Lex perked up and winked at V.
‘Sorry chum. I’ve got no manners!’
Two digits of his dived into the mentioned pocket to fetch out one more bar which he stretched out for V saying:
‘But I am working at it’
‘Alex Tailor Jr.?’ sounded close by.
Lex dropped the offering next to the salt shaker on the table and stared up at a couple of body builders wearing black office suites and tanned maps from solarium.
‘It’s me.’ Said he curtly.
The beefy claw of the strong man flashed a three-block-lettered badge.
‘Follow us, sir.’
‘What the f…’ started V, yet the second of the artificially tanned jocks interrupted his statement.
‘Keep to order in the public place, sir.’ His left armpit looked bumpier than the opposite. A disproportionate result of inattentive muscle pumping.
‘V, don’t, please,’ said Lex getting up. He hung his dinner jacket over his forearm levered from the elbow and went off between the guys in black.
Stunned, watched V after their short convoy making for the exit from the establishment. Then he frowned and lowered his gaze at the chewing gum bar in a blue wrapper apparently wrinkled by a clumsy tamperer.
* * *
4
‘Been any fucking reason for to get buddies, you and me?’
More than once criticized and whipped (metaphorically) for his pompously ornate figures of speech, Lex time and again, so as to keep on the safe side, ventured into the language that he believed was the street parlance and then he sounded like a damn putz. A kinda Sir Francis Bacon’s try at Ebonics or something before to take a shot at his own version of The West-Side Story.
The question just brought up could be asked much nicer and more modestly, in an acceptable tone of neutral communication, like, “why did we make friends with each other?” or else “what did become the foundation for our friendship?” but no! He preferred to act a yo-bro!-yo-bro! mobster.
‘Supposedly, the two lazy-bones were attracted and kept together by sloth of equally immeasurable dimensions, if you ever heard the word “gravitation”.’
‘What-what?’
‘Each and every of you and me are too lazy to counteract the habit of four years. Or is it five already?’
‘Numbers mean nothing!’
‘Tell it to your taxman, Pedagogue. Though, in part, yes, just one year is more than enough for real friends to call each other all the names under the sun and direct the partner to every petal in the Wind Rose so the quantity of later additions do not tell on the firmness of their valuable relationship.’
‘I see you’re cooking on gas today, chum, how about defining friendship? Taken as a notion, nothing personal. Yet in plain words, please, without the coefficients from the Material Resistance Table?’
Here is another of Lex’ quirks for you. He’s fond of starting a philosophical discursive speculations on this or that hooey which normal guy would feel ashamed to even think about because that hooey is too obvious for any lame ass: life is life, flower is flower, especially if from Morocco, and so forth without loosing his face and last crumbs of self-respect.
‘Well, leaving the Material Resistance Table aside, friendship is what suffice to make you happy after a single look at your buddy and realizing there is a more fucked up shithead than you yourself. Stupidity is the inherent vice even in the most ideal friend who you have to tolerate because you need a sidekick for your routines on stage which is the world.’
‘Your stage is pretty grave, man.’ With a sweeping chaperon gesture Lex embraced the bare walls in the room resembling the inside of sooner a cube than a parallepiped. Their severely white paint coat imparted to the closed space the air of ascetic rigor even though a humble glance around couldn’t target on any crucifix or symbols of any other faith or cult.
He occupied a low half armchair, whose sheer varnished wooden arms bore burns and scars of random marks from the times immemorial (“he” here is Lex and “it” is under him). The trajectory of his all-embracing gesture ended with the soft landing (without ever looking to coordinate the movements) onto the circle top of a beer can standing on the brown floor by the right hind leg of the half-blood (being funny) within the range reachable by the occupier.
The chaperon's head sank back onto the upholstery fabric in the gently oblique back of the half armchair, pretty worn by leaning of other heads before this here one, which turned it’s front to face the only window in the room—neither a flower-pot on the white sill nor even a view outside but simply a rectangle of blue from the standpoint of the eyes in his head dropped back restfully.
Atop the computer desk in the corner to the left from the window, there towered thin black tin in the PC box of the corresponding architecture (a collected by the cheap Indonesian workforce and stamped “Made in China” critter) in a close company with the monitor Philips. The couple of streamlined speakers in thick mesh of fencing masks protecting their mugs, though not armed with rapiers, secured the Hollander's flanks. The avant-garde position held the mouse and keyboard, both wired and black as the rest of the desktop’s equipment.
The wide swivel armchair—a jarring note contrasting by its throne aspect—aloof and alien in respect to the robust monk-cell design—showed its black back to the computer gone deeply into the hibernation mode because V, for a considerable stretch of time already, had been seated in it facing Lex.
With his right foot planted in the mock Cocobolo laminate flooring, he used the leverage of the skeletal structure in his leg (yes, also the right one) to impart driving impulses to the languid swings of the throne, hither-thither, describing a slight arc in reciprocating horizontal turns, both slow and not protracted, within a radiant or so, no wider.
The left of V’s ankles ascended as high as to be put across his right knee to serve a pad for the bottom of the beer can in an unfocused, careless grip by his hand’s digits. Quite naturally, the support as well as the beer (both consumed and still awaiting to be poured in) were also involved in the general movement, hither and thither, together with the rest of the contraption composed of organic (engine’s body) and inorganic (all the rest) stuff except for his foot firmly pressed to the same point, which served the anchor and source of the lazy half-radiant rotations. Wiggle-wobble…
At the meeting place of two perpendicular walls, in the catty-corner from the computer, there stood another, regular desk consorted with a hard wooden chair.
The neat cylinder smack-bang in the desktop center (once again black and of the same fencing-mask-like mesh) resembled a mini-pot for indoor floriculture hobbyists letting out—a little bit above its black rim—the exotic thin twig of a single ball pen. In a nurse-like solicitous attitude, the desk lamp craned its shade over the outgrowth. The strict business-like style of the desk was softened in part by the tight green roll of a synthetic yoga mat in its off-duty resting posture by the desktop right edge.
Two wall outlets, one ceiling light fixture, and, naturally, the door exhaustively completed the interior of the hermit’s lair.
‘As we know,’ pronounced Lex in the Oxbridge nauseous manner of meticulously nuanced articulation of each sound, ‘friendship presupposes presence of salubrious prerequisites and compliance to a certain number of necessary requirements, do we not? Consequentially, a fair stock of sloth plus shared disgust to puristic castration of the language alive for morality’s ends created us for each other. Anything omitted in my listing, dear colleague? Not a squat of a chance, I hope. If we approach this issue from the standpoint of applied logic.’
‘A widely accepted recipe does not exclude inspirational add-ons while cooking the meal. There’s no guarantee from the creative fancies of the chef.’
‘And which ingredient will add a charming spicy flavor to the subject of the discourse in hand?’
‘How about hate?’
The beer can (having started its ascend up in the air a second before) came back to rest on the Cocobola brown. Lex crossed his arms on his chest with each hand fingers splayed, wide and rigidly, over the biceps areas in the opposite arm.
‘Fuck! Given the percentage of jest in composition of your average jest, hence proceed with more deliberation, please.’
‘Nothing equals hate in being the most reliable pledge for a lasting relationship of any sort. Let’s turn to basics. Fiancee hates her Groom for all his feints and dodging before she milked the proposition out him, after all. Groom hates Fiancee for the misery he lived thru listening to the tons of her empty non-stop twits before she gave, at last. Then starts the agony of matrimonial life describable by only French “o-la-la!” Anyway, they have to stick together to repay and revenge for their initial sufferings, getting waylaid by further ones down the road. And what exactly pushes us to cover our buddy’s girlfriend? To make of him a damn dumb cuckold from now on? Can you guess? The word starts with “h”.’
‘It’s madness!’
‘Nope. Wrong letter. And we are simply dusting down our ken of inductive logic here. Combining the pleasant with the useful down the road in our friendly relations.
‘Some fucking hooey. Completely. All of it!’
‘Yep. That’s my motto: All or Nothing. OK, forget it. I know as well as you do, it was not you who fucked her, it was she who used you, my dear friend.’
One hand was clutching the beer can while the other, at the same very moment, as ill luck would have it, was scratching the back of his head so Lex had, practically, nothing to grope for right retort with. Instead, he sipped from the can silently. Because some of V’s jests do stun you hundred per cent flat.