Vegas, Baby

I love Las Vegas.

I love its hooker culture and poseur mentality.  You can literally go to Vegas and disappear...lose your identity, assume somebody else.  It is a city of sin, a city of debauchery.  No judging.  Just commonality.

It is a belly button ring...a tramp stamp.  Adult fun, topless pools and money just given away to slots, craps and poker.  It is uniquely shallow and superficial.

But Vegas is something else altogether...it is our id...our super ego.

It pulls from us our fragility, our delicate concerns.  We over emote, trying hard to be in the crowd.  We can see NYC, Paris, the pyramids...we can consider ourselves travelers...well-traveled.

But there are parts...poolside, dance floors, well-lit bars...steakhouses with James Beard-awarded chefs...silken sheets, first row seats...there are a myriad of places where I could be just one degree happier if you were there.  If you accompanied.

Yes, despite all the tawdry and unfit descriptions, there is still a vibe.  A pulse.  An energy.

It is not for everybody, but everybody seeks it.  Ride the lightning, catch it in a bottle.

Vegas is a whore...plain and simple, and it takes your money and leaves you in the morning.

But the best revenge for somebody trying to get your attention and try to make you feel like she's the prettiest...is to bring somebody classier and way prettier than she will ever be...lights out or not.

So I'd enjoy the playground with you...I'd enjoy the dazzling sunlight and dark brown mountains...the neon and the flow, I'd love the loss of time and the sound of casinos...I'd crave the sheets and the large upgraded rooms with obnoxious showers where we could luxuriate and wear robes and never leave the room.

I'd do Vegas with you, but only because as much as the city believes it is beautiful your reluctance to find yourself outstandingly gorgeous only makes you that much more so.

Don't do nothing...Kiss the girl

A friend of mine died the other day...not a real friend, but not quite fake either.  A blog writer five years younger...who wrote excruciatingly biting articles about his life, his loves...just was suddenly gone.

It didn't cause some sort of existential crisis in me...rather, I am quite thankful for all I have done.  But man...is there so much left undone.

I remember driving Interstate 5 in California, south from LA to San Diego, with Camp Pendleton and its brown green hills hiding all those training marines...while to the West was the largest, bluest view you will ever see from land.  An immense Pacific, so wide it cannot be seen from north to south but rather in passing you realize how tremendously small you are.  I remember the windows were down, the typical southern California wind scented slightly with ocean tumbling in, and the music was from a long time ago.

Doesn't mean I need to go back though...but it is something I wouldn't mind sharing the ride with a companion.   Somebody who hasn't been there, seeing it for the first time...with child-like eyes.

Don't do nothing...kiss the girl.  Kiss her on the lips at Dana Point, the outcrop of land that points out to the ocean...do it at sunrise, the opposite of the lighting, with the sun poking up out East while the Pacific churns black behind you, still dark there.

I want to spend a wanton evening in Vegas, dressed to the nines...a braless dress for her, daring and flaunting at the same time...car service and room service...music and lights.  Don't do nothing...kiss the girl, feel her like the first bite into a peach.  Be strangers in a city filled with them.  Explore...explore her.  Explore her mind and ask her hard questions in a hot tub.  Wake up with the sun piercing through the windows with a succulent hangover, feel her beside you, dress on the floor, make up smudged...more beautiful than ever seen.

A restaurant in France, where my best friend tells me is the most romantic place in the world...a darkened street in Italy where music and pasta combine in a sensuous bond.  I want to travel with her...

I want to simply fly with her...dual upgrades...drinks and slight conversations hurtling at 35,000 feet.  Slight hand touches, and of course more champagne...a soft clink to a whispered toast.  A very chaste kiss in a cabin of strangers.  Reading quietly...magazines we never had time for...topics we never discussed.   Destinations really less important than the getting there...don't do nothing, kiss the girl.

A cold cabin in the woods, a huge fireplace and seasoned wood...layers of bedding and down comforters...long pajamas of wool that tangle when together.  Snow in the morning, cold feet hustling to make coffee and stoke the fire before returning to her laughter in bed.  Bed head...restoration.

Don't do nothing...kiss the girl.  Kiss her beneath the sheets, pillows strewn about, coffee-breath and who cares in a clutch.  Shower together and scrub the day fresh with newly appointed skin.  Read by the fire, a long book aloud...poetry, light and refreshing like a plump afternoon in late spring, while a tempest plays outdoor with fresh snow and ice.

A sunset in Savannah, GA, from atop the Bohemian hotel.  Drinks at the W New York Times Square. A stay on the 49th floor at the Westin on 8th Ave.

Daily...daily the routine is just that...plundering forward, staying in the same lane.  Walking through it all with a fixed grin...staying focused, becoming professionally successful.  Buying things...breaking things.  Steak starts to taste the same...the palette is becoming quite predictable.

Don't do nothing...kiss the girl.

It is that thought that reminds me...and like a fine sliver of light, like hallway light beneath the door of a darkened room, I find myself deliciously lured.

A Salt Shaker at Giuseppe's

Near the intersection of Interstate 66 and Highway 15, where the roads start to begin their gradual slope into the nearby Blue Ridge mountains, and the evenings pale across a wide spread plain that gets broken into angles with the nearby hilltops, there is a bar inside a restaurant.  Known for its wide porch suitable for the litany of smokers, the local Haymarket residents mingle with teams of soccer players and softball enthusiasts from the nearby fields.  They make noise and buy pizza in the large restaurant rooms...but the bar stays quiet and distant from the visitors.  Instead, the bar is where a few come to drink and watch hockey games on small screens.  You can order the full menu, but mostly people come to drink.

The police chief of the small town sits at the near end of the bar, closest to the kitchen.  He's likely in his late 50s, maybe later.  But he has a gun so he usually is left alone, chatting with Joe the owner and chef.

Sometime in summer, maybe late, maybe early...he couldn't remember.  He was alone, didn't want to be out in the unusually chill evening of a Virginia summer night and figured that the noisy comfort of this bar would serve him well...ice to the back of the neck so to speak.  A beer in a cold glass...maybe some wings.  Quiet solitude in a place with white noise of strangers.

The bar ran horizontal to the street, a long single stretch of wood with comfortable chairs that swiveled...wide wood top that had a slight inlay where the salt and pepper shakers could reside beside bottles of ketchup and red pepper flakes.  There was a virtual juke-box, that tended to play 90's favorites...(he remembered a flare memory in his mind that she preferred that genre of music...) and he shook it aside as he sat down.

He told his name to the girl behind the bar, an older attractive lady who flirted with everybody, including the boss...including the police chief.  He had finished his first beer in an amazingly fast fashion...so when she came by again he just pointed at the empty.

Another hon? she asked.

He nodded.

She put the bottle in front of him, and in his peripheral vision he saw a shape he remembered.  A male face, a friend from golf.  Joe.

Joe didn't recognize him as he sat down to his right, but when he announced himself Joe reacted like a high school reunion...hand shakes, pats on the back.  He remembered thinking it was such coincidence.

Joe took up the only seat to his right...to his left were a few open ones...Joe's wife was expected at some point and they could move around and figure things out.  He, looking back, was glad he didn't move then.

The second beer went just slightly slower, and Joe was now buying.  The place was filling up, the music slightly louder...the sun now low and turning long orange lights into the windows...people had to speak up, heads moved towards each other to hear.  The single bartender was joined by another, and they moved in a dance between the ice machine and the bottles at the back of the bar.

Soon Joe's wife arrived, and awkwardly she took the seat to his left, his separation a point of initial concern but they waved him off as his drink and all its sweat was on the bar in front of him.  She had a clean spot and he sat between them, alternating back and forth in his dialogue.  He ordered some food and could feel the evening mellowing.

He didn't know exactly what caused him to glance...perhaps it was just a recognition.  Perhaps it was muscle tissue, or some carnivorous craving that remembers a taste that instinctively allures and draws attention.  Whatever the fuck it is called he remembered looking slightly right, over the shoulder of the police chief.

She was coming in, she had arrived.  She was not alone.

The impact was fairly immediate...he suddenly looked forward, the taste of any food immediately lost, the taste like a tablespoon of salt in his mouth.  He heard Joe talking and his wife asking him to talk louder so he was caught in this crossfire of words...he sensed more than felt her presence moving towards him...he couldn't look, like the arrival of something that would cause him to react violently...not physically, but emotionally.  Like he would be stripped raw and bare in that center section of the bar, exposed.

She passed by him, and he could feel his flush...the heat arise inside of him, likely visible.  She took the chair next to Joe's wife...she was one chair away.

He returned to a normalcy that is like talking quietly to one person on one side and screaming to the person on the other...he wasn't nervous.  He wasn't even upset.  Rather, he was confused...his reaction unveiling new ground, new stances.  He wasn't even sure she saw him, but he turned more towards Joe's wife so he could regard her.




Regard her.  It had been quite a long time since that had happened.

Maybe it had been a year or two...a decade when the sun is snatched from your sky.  Not in a fit of pique or in some amazingly tantalizing train-wreck of a disaster, they had just simply stopped.  Stopped being.
Stopped being them.

Sure there had been some fast interactions...a wave here, a smile there.  But like a glance it was just that...a hit and run.  The way you brush a baseball against somebody to protect the plate when you're pitching.  It's not deliberate...it's not hurtful.  It's just like a warning to keep away.

So he had kept away, a world shrinking from a great vast expanse to a small silo...a world that was a bit more gray than ever before.  Colors...yeah, they stayed mostly the same, but like older.  A patina was painted across.  And now, like some reveal she was incredibly close.  Full regalia of make up and outfit...she sipped her beer and smiled, never meeting his furtive and rare looks her way.  Joe's wife was a dumb obstacle, an impediment.  If he could burn her to the ground he would...just to get a better view.

He remembered centering his view on the salt and pepper shaker in front of him.  This isn't happening, he thought.  There isn't a way in the world that this is going on.

This.

This is cruel.

Cruelty.

He had forgotten how she had applied make up to her eyes...had chosen certain colors to combine when she was going out.  Staring at the salt shaker, pure white and boring, he suddenly remembered he had forgotten how achingly beautiful she was, how transformed she was and in the suddenly loud and much smaller bar in Haymarket he felt ugly and alone.  He felt also ran.  Joe yammering in his ear and asking if he wanted more beers and he signaled no...he had no appetite for anything human at this point...his one thing worth desiring just inches from him with zero chance of happening.  It was a prison, this part of the bar...it's wood warm and glowing, the bit of headlights coming through and the music suddenly in the background.

He knew how the ghosts felt...they were there, looking, watching...but the the alive ones couldn't see them...couldn't detect them.  He could scream and lunge...she would remain in repose.  She smiled at somebody else, talking in hushed tones he couldn't hear.  He knew how prisoners felt, the outside air just far enough away...a sky, a star, a butterfly fluttering by and reminding...

He switched to water...it was a safer bet.

At one point, at some point she got up to leave.  For a minute he contemplated a coincidental need to get up as well, a sudden confrontation.  He knew that would be horrific for her, a saddening.  He needed to leave her alone, let her go and not disrupt the one thing they had agreed upon.

He couldn't help but turn slightly in her departure...she had a slight smile.

He wondered what it harbored.

He regarded the salt shaker, the boring white and the colorless tint and he felt an ache like something was just suddenly removed...and the whole lot of the shaker was tumbled over and poured into the raw wound...a stinging, piercing singe of pain that he knew he would feel.

Now, many years later, he can still remember her walking away.

Bits of Voices

I would never let on the dramatic and unexpected impact that was felt in the invisible infiltration of the simple sound of her voice.

Arriving in my ears like a new color, a new taste.

There is a trace, a linear linkage like a long black wire that traces itself back to the parts of Virginia from where she came...places near Scotland and Surry...Carsley.  Small and in-between places where shoals and shallows were covered by the salted sea, and then baked under summer heat.  Her voice was the color of bourbon, smoother still, and her laugh was the release of endorphins in my mind.  Spiking, chaotic, warming...relieving.

It was so occasional.  So fairly rare.  The reason I kept voicemails to remind me, the way you keep the cork of some fair wine to attempt to glance and whiff the scent again...and again.

But the recorded voice was nowhere near the live one...the slight changes in attenuation.  Sometimes tired, sometimes annoyed.  Sometimes just curious.

But the clawing back of her voice inside my mind was enduring...I need only hear it once to feel like it is sparkling new...but remembered.

It arrives at my doorstep.

I have heard it in daylight, heard it in rain.  Heard it whispered to me, heard it through tears.

I have heard it all.

But mostly...now...just hearing it at all is enough...even if merely to tell me the time, or tell me the weather.

The last light you see when you close your eyes

It is when I realize that you are the sun, and that I,  the most distant star in your galaxy, can still see you with your fervent burning glow...clearly.  Warming, brilliant, exclusive and constant.

while you, even while squinting to discern me from the great distance, can barely detect my faint light.  I fall cold upon you...and perhaps I don't even fall at all from what you can tell.

The stir of a stray stand of hair...perhaps I am just a breeze that barely pulses against you.

Every night a moon will rise, whether crescent or full, waning or waxing.  But it is when we notice...it is when it catches our eye.  It is almost always the same exact distance, causing tides to rise and fall.  But it looks differently in its cycles...sometimes it is almost beautiful, low on the horizon, orange and looming.  I am the moon, the constant but changing...forever far but occasionally close.  I rise and fall in a black evening, and many times I am not the brightest.  Rather, I take my place in the constellations that surround you, oftentimes they are way brighter...relegating me to a slight light that you can detect...maybe see.  I don't know, for in the vast emptiness where no light is brighter than another, I cannot be sure of the last light you will see when you close your eyes.

But you.

God you.

You are the Sun.  The impermeable.

You light up the hallways and the mornings.  The closed doors with space behind...creeping in behind cracks and crevices.  You cannot be shut out.  You begin and you end but the absence of you remains as a presence...a want.  A craving.

You remain unfiltered, despite distance.  Despite weather and patterns.  You remain constant and transfixed.  Awakening in the dark I know you will appear, just like if I awake to a quiet and tranquil mind I know you will soon emerge...dragging me into the daylight like a memory of you pulls me out of a sleep.  Sometimes refreshing, sometimes alarming.  You burn into my brain as I try to rub my eyes out into a morning.

Morning.  The beginning of a day.

Mourning.  A lamenting of an end.

Your sun, your light shines regardless...leaving me to interpret if you are a beginning or an end.

Me, the moon, always returning but sometimes less and sometimes more depending on the day.

You, always brilliant, always golden.  The sun.  Never waxing, never waning.

I fear that I watch you descend at the end of the day and that I am over, vanquished.

I wait...I hope...pray, for your return and that you alight in the few hours when I am not just dreaming about you and you indicate that yes, you are real.

I wonder what is the last light you see when you close your eyes.

Naked

My favorite...

My most favorite glimpse of her was when she was naked.

Not nude.  Not bare, or exposed.

Not when we were sensual even, because at that close distance she was exceptionally beautiful...remarkable...the sensory illumination of our bodies intertwined like ropes woven together...that feeling was immersive, I was buried in her.  I was interwoven.  I was like ink upon her paper.

I could not see the entirety of her when she was beside me...only just the eyes or where I laid my gaze.

Rather, my favorite glimpse was usually in the afterwards...when we were in the glow...and we were talking like two of the dearest friends ever...when we had shared quietly what could never be conveyed by words...but now, we were preparing to return.

Back to life.  Back to reality.

And she would arise naked, walking past me to gather her clothes, gather her belongings.  She was completely stark, and completely comfortable.  She knew how my body had responded to her, and how she to mine.  We were complete.

In those quiet moments of shadow and half-light, her curves exposed and vulnerable, open and preparing to become clothed again...I found her ease of being naked inviting...I found her comfort in her skin extraordinary.  Sexual but in reminiscent...reminding me of the sweetness of her that was becoming a fast memory.  She walked, she sauntered over and put on her clothes like in a dressing room, mechanical and repeated.  But before she did...before she placed on the layers there was a glimpse of her...when she was naked...and god did it remind me of why I could not wait until I could see her again.

Clothed or not.

A beautiful road

She looked amazing when her hair was wet.  A collection of curls and darkness and so unlike the daytime portrait that she displayed.  Her naturalness was enticing, the way you sought out colors in an Autumn, waiting for the peak.  But she always possessed the peak.  She just happened to only reveal it over time so it never reached an apex, but rather like a road unraveling in front of you with each minute and mile growing even more compelling...you wanted more...you needed more.

She was as quiet as a lone highway.  The times when the only noise was the wind and speed and a car cutting slews into the air...she kept herself contained.  It was sometimes maddening.  Rather the hope that the vast horizon would open her up with its distance and endless expanse...it seemed to humble her.  And keep her silent.

What are you thinking about? was a sentence she hated.  Her mind was not a museum...to be visited, studied and remarked upon.  Rather instead it was a vault.

Every once in awhile she whispered what was in it.

Like when you're driving and the lanes are open before you...just a blackness but an openness that is unyielding and allowing you to move forward with no threat of stopping...when the sun is low, like a butter colored orb over a stark stand of trees and a song comes on that is like a soundtrack of the past.   And the relaxation and calmness that happens...it just happens.

Like when you step away from the tub, still dripping warm waters, but allowing the towel to embrace you.
Engulf you...the way she stared at you, with her encyclopedia of emotions behind her eyes, and perhaps she shared a note or two.

She was this beautiful journey, through the nooks and valleys...through the running of stop signs and danger.  She alone was the way you feel when you suddenly braked or avoided a car careening near you.  She got your attention...she grabbed you by the throat...not in a hard way, but rather in a way that you allowed.  Like buckling up, she put an arm around you.  But you trusted her to care.

Mostly you wanted her to arrive.

To come home, or be there.  You wanted her to finish. You wanted her to be relieved.  To relax.  You wanted her to exhaust herself against you, to hear her breathe your name against your ear.  You wanted her to be spent, but only after the trip with you.  All I cared about was maybe being beside her.

It's hard to define beauty.

Perhaps it is best defined by the desire to spend the time with her...the hours, the minutes, the miles that we could share and be beside another...listening to the music, watching the slow arc of suns...no rain...golden afternoons on highways...sunsets at gas stations...twilight in traffic.  Let me spend those moments beside her, if only to be beside her.

For she is the journey that is unrivaled, and unequaled.  Her and her curled hair and her auburn stare.