Correspondance

Correspondance


I walked up to the entrance. This seemed like the place. An old man was dying besides me, curled over some hard drug or another. The apartment block looked dilapidated, a relic from the eighties and the result of belated attempts from the middle/upper class and guilty to help with their taxes what still remained ultimately broken. A token piece of history, meaning lost in political arguments and half-hearted activism. For now, the man didn't much care about the attempts to alleviate his people and himself, as he stared at me with the eyes of someone far away from home, or from anywhere, for that matter. I walked up the steps and pressed the intercom.
    “Catherine McCormick, please.”
    I waited, hands in pockets. It was somewhere in the hundreds of degrees on the inside of my coat but negative ten degrees Fahrenheit on the outside. My breath formed little crystalline vapors in the air, illuminated by semi broken streetlights. It took her five minutes.
    “Oh, so you’re the one who made an appointment. Come on in, you know where I am.”
    Open the door, up the stairs, a quick look left and right to see the mold growing on the walls and the few people out in the hall, loitering, waiting for something to happen. I keep my head down, subconsciously, chased by the ghosts of a possible coworker or my boss to recognize me, and to ask what was I doing in this part of town. I knew what I was doing in this part of town. The money I have in my hands stops becoming paper and mixes with my sweat--a cocktail of cotton, paper, and the bodily fluid of someone becoming increasingly self-conscious with the second. What am I doing here? Too late; I’m at her door now. Quickly, three knocks from a hand attached to me ring out among the various coughing and conversations in foreign languages.
    “Come on in!”
    I open the door to find her getting ready. “I’m sorry, honey, but even the young need a little prep work to look good.” Her room looks grotesque- clothes thrown around haphazardly, the various colors and designs producing dingy Technicolor vomits across the rather barren floor. Blots of color in a dingy grey interior. Half-drunk alcohol bottles are littered around the room. The air feels choked with cheap perfume.
    “You’re the customer, right? Hand me the money and let’s start.”
    I start shaking. Everything starts shaking. She is pretty, and barely legal, at least, if I believe the ad. Who am I paying? Her pimp? I don’t know. Her body is somewhat voluptuous but not too developed with the curves of a woman who has had half enough to eat. Her eyes do not look frenzied however there is some sort of calculating look about them, different than the animal look of poor men, poor men with knives. Deep breath. I hand her the money, shaking. Shaking. I look to the some of the cleaner, apparently unopened bottles of alcohol. A friend in a time of need.
    “Here you are. You don’t mind if I take both?” My eyes flicker over to two bottles of 1998 ValueCo red wine. “I’ll pay you, if you want.”
    She rolls her eyes. “Why not. Clients always come in with bad drinks and leave them half-finished.” She says this last bit of the sentence with a confident tone, a bit of professional pride.
    “T-thanks.” I hate stuttering. I get out of the winter coat, revealing a slightly sweaty undershirt. I hate this. I take the bottle and head into the restroom. I open the wine, take a look around at the various contraceptives littered on the counter, the makeup products, and my head starts to hurt. I need a drink. I haven’t eaten in awhile. It takes me around ten to fifteen minutes to finish and I can feel it warm I can feel the inebriation coursing throughout the bellicose veins in my body I am ready. “Let’s get out here.”
    The next moments are somewhat of a blur. I look at her she looks at me with those eyes of her those pretty young eyes I wonder how many men have stared into that to feel a predator feeling do you know that evolution makes women the selectors of men that’s just a line of hippie thought women have no more power than men have done I look at her body her dress complimenting every single line running down in an S shape women are made out of those letters. if women weren’t selectors they must sit back there and take it why haven’t you ever had sex i replied no and she laughed at me i turned away hurriedly into a technicolor pile i can’t get up
    are you taking my money
why would i you’re sorta cute in that old man sorta sense
i’m 23
i’m 20
you said you were eighteen you who-
she cuts me off she is laughing at me i don’t like being laughed at much at all what caused this if i go back to an hour i was trying to unhook her brassiere and i couldn’t and she laughed at me i am a virgin i am a virgin god almighty i have walked up to women and felt the hands shake i hate being called cute am i a puppy
i grab another bottle and she looks at me with a half-concern because she doesn’t want to see an alcoholic’s body on the carpet i tell her to screw off because she’s a harlot and she says she hasn’t heard that and there is bitterness on the throat


Sun hits my eyes on what I assume to be the next morning. I’m struggling to recollect. I am stuck in a technicolor yawn, a grey blot amongst a dingy world of color. She is there, sleeping, in that dress of hers, untouched. Goddamn it. My head hurts. Where’s my wallet? Where’s my everything?
I look at my belongings, somehow miraculously the same as the night I decided to enter this place. She is still sleeping. I look through my wallet. The eighty dollars are in there. I shake her.
“What is this?” I point to my wallet, opened.
She opens her eyes slowly, looks at me, and smiles. “Honey, I’ve lived this life long enough to see someone who doesn’t belong. It’s a little pitiful to see you stooped to this level. I can’t really take your money, you didn’t do anything to me.” She suddenly gets up from the bed, wraps her arms around me, and kisses me on the lips. “I hope to God that wasn’t your first, haha. I think that eighty dollars is better spent buying a pretty girl some dinner, or a therapist. Now go.”
I want to say something. But I can’t. My throat is all stopped up. I gather up my things and hit the asphalt, streets littered with the poor and dying. My stomach and head ache in equal measure, but I don’t go to my car just yet. I instead sit down, in front of that little relic of history, and cry. My coat feels colder than ever now. The tears roll off my face, the five o’clock shadow, and hit the concrete curb, a drop of transparency in a grey world.