"Be polite. Love does not give license for rudeness."
Leo Buscaglia, "Loving Each Other"
Another small, dirty town on the long road to Shitsville. This is where I belong, I muttered, peering through the smeary, bespattered windshield. My glasses weren't too clean either, but that was all right: it was a smeary, bespattered world, and I could still see well enough to see that.
The first dingy motel featured one of those cheap signs with the moveable plastic letters: it boldly promised "Reasonable Farts Daily." At first, I assumed this must be something the local kids had done, perhaps been doing for years - considered a hardworking, immigrant owner, a Pakistani or a Korean perhaps, driven almost insane by a battle lost nightly. It didn't make any difference how late he stayed up. He bought floodlights, he chained a junkyard dog to the sign post. Didn't matter: come morning, he was boldly advertising reasonable farts.
Then it crossed my mind that maybe there were no kids - this could be a marketing campaign orchestrated and executed after innumerable focus groups ("Ok, now how would you feel if you saw a motel marquee that said ..."). I idly wondered what might constitute a reasonable fart hereabouts. Maybe I should comparison shop before I gave my custom. On the other hand, the farts here had to be more reasonable than in, say, San Francisco or New Orleans. Fuck it, I was bone tired. I turned in the driveway onto the hard dirt and cinder parking lot. It was about 114 degrees, starting to cool off with the coming of dusk. That dangerous and magical hour when anything's possible.
The fat lady in spandex behind the counter looked up disdainfully from her Blue Boy magazine - apparently, I had failed some test just by turning in. Water off a duck's back, babe - I'd been failing tests since the day I was born; it only made me more comfortable.
"Sorry mister, we all full up tonight," she leered. Then she let her eyes crawl over my body like a lazy blowfly doing a happy rumba on a fresh dung pile. A greasy droplet of sweat furrowed the pancake on her pendulous jowl, hung for a lingering moment on her double chin, and then landed with a Splat! upon the desk. She smirked a little, licked her lips, then wiped them off with the back of a swollen hand.
I glanced out at the 13 abandoned, tobacco road cabins propping each other up outside. A beagle-sized rodent jumped out of a broken window with something still alive in its mouth.
"I can understand that. You've got a really pretty place here; there's a Cape Coddy bed & breakfasty ambiance. As soon as I saw it, I had to turn in. Couldn't help myself." I made no move to the door and stared back unblinkingly. Our gazes locked, and my mind spun suddenly into gaudy, opium-like daydreams. Everything went black except for the unearthly effulgence of her humongous face. Fire tongued the shabby walls. Suddenly we were both deadly serious, trying to decide whether to throw the last dirty dollar on the roulette table, double zero.
Then, after what seemed like an eternity, she barely shook her porcine head - like a water buffalo flickering its ear at a tse tse fly, her tiny corkscrew curls barely stirred. Did I glimpse a flash of wistful regret, or was I only fooling myself for the millionth time? She looked down at a double-page fold-out, sighed, licked her forefinger and slowly turned the page. I turned to go, then stopped at the door. Without looking back, my voice hoarse with strain "What's your name, sugar dumpling?"
"Rosalita," she whispered, and there was a millennium of raw, wet pain in her voice.
So.
"Rosalita" I repeated, staring sightlessly through the screen (Mr. dog-rat was hopping back into cabin 9 for seconds). I should have known, even if she had put on an extra hundred pounds. After all these crap-filled years.
I pushed out into the hot baked dirt and black flies and loneliness, and smudged a greasy rag across my windshield. God, I was tired ... and, fuck me, but I had forgotten to inquire about the farts.
To be continued.
By Henry E. Panky
No Legitimate Content
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