Dollar For Your Thoughts, Part 8/14

           Things fell into a blur for me as we dove into the contrary life. We feasted on subs and sipped spiked fruit cocktails. We borrowed board games from the common room, and cards, and set them up to lose to one another. We had to switch strategies fast, though, since losing soon became simply winning. Sometimes we just went on to another game when we reached that point. And, I’m here to tell ya, you ain’t lived until everyone is trying to lose at Queens. We played on a carpet too plush to have been on that floor very long. We played amidst drapes, wallpaper and bedspreads which were varying shades of puke. The hum of the AC unit, which joined us in our mission, never blowing perfect. At all times, we were drunk, syncoptic, coital or a combination of the three. About two in the morning, Connie was in a pout because she was winning at Monopoly. And, lucky me, I landed on Boardwalk with a hotel and slurred:

            “That’s a thousand to you, Candy.”

            “What did you call me?”

            “Connie!”

            She had my right nipple this time, like she had a few times that night.

            “You did not you called me Candy.”

            “I didn’t! Candy. I mean Connie! Connie!”

            The sex was, at first, introductory, and then became second-nature. With some laughter. And we did internalize our new lifestyle for use during our trances. In one that  I had the first night, my assignment, if you’d call it that, was to sort cans of Imnolicious soup by their sell-by date. Instead, I jammed the older ones, and those dented, to the back of the cupboard shelf. I came out of my trance and proudly informed Connie of this before I realized another activity had been occurring simultaneously.

            “Works for me,” she said from above. “You just keep doin’ that.”

            We tore through the motel’s library of games, drank, ate, screwed and cheered counteraccordingly to the news on the big screen.

            ‘Tenger probe begins water-gathering process on Mars.’

            ‘Yay, boo, yay,’ (counter) accordingly.

            Night became day became night and in our trances and in our dreams we deleted police reports, tenderly transplanted creeping charlie into vegetable gardens, broke dishes rather than clean them, and routed sewage back through thousands of toilets.

            I either came to, or came out of a trance to find Connie in a fluffy burgundy robe, with Smiddy beside her, blowing on her hair. She turned to me.

            “Sit go-in.” She then complained, “Your glom doesn’t make blow dryers!”

            Smiddy nodded, blowing on her ear and shoulder, being shorter than Connie, even in waffle-stompers. I’d only known him as a face at the door when Connie accepted deliveries, but it had to be him, after all, he wore coveralls with the name “Smiddy” embroidered on the front pocket.

            I stayed beneath the scratchy blanket, feeling vulnerable, despite the words I used, more threatened and jealous.

            “Imno doesn’t make blow dryers per se,” I corrected her, “but we’ve got a great model in Beta phase in Peoria…” I caught myself, then, “Dry your own damn hair! There’s air everywhere! Go find some!

            “Quit pickin’ on Smiddy!”

            She beamed like a redneck queen at the height of self-realization.

            “Imno doesn’t have to be everything to everybody!” I told her.

            “No. Just everything to its citizens.”

            “I’m getting dizzy,” Smiddy informed both of us.

            We escorted Smiddy from the room, and I prepared hot-plate Kung-pao, (forget that it was ten in the morning), wearing nothing but black britches borrowed from the motel kitchen. It was all very adult and novelistic. I did have to hand the spatula to Connie, though, when I felt a trance coming on. She tended to the sizzling chicken, and I must have been a sight, sitting there in just pants, drooling and staring at the puke-damask wallpaper. I can confirm that she looked goofy, at times, during our purposefully misplaced weekend.

            It was Saturday night, as Connie reminded me as I came to after ‘spot-cleaning’ (so, staining) a carpet. She suggested that we go to the ballroom and see Clarissa Weisengaard front for ‘Paver Base’. 

            “I don’t go see bands,” I told her.

            “Ex-actly. It’s our mission. Smiddy adores her.”

            And it was a Saturday night, Connie emphasized; she really had a handle on what few had done before. A conscious lack of control, with her turn at a trance (‘De-liming bathroom fixtures’, thus, leaving the water on at a trickle and buffing her nails instead) as we clothed for the evening.

            We sortied into the guts of the half-abandoned motel-restaurant-convenience store-strip mall complex toward the ballroom deep within. We wandered into a room filled with warped wall board- stored willy-nilly and peppered with pigeon shit. Indeed, a hole had developed in the ceiling there. Not the ‘venue’. We hoped. We continued less through hallways than through empty conference rooms, unusually large oddly-shaped foyers, and a room that contained only a surplus double-tub industrial sink which outclassed anything else we’d seen used in the complex, by model and condition. A room Connie referred to as: ‘The Storeroom of Broken Dreams’.

            I was aghast at the lack of cohesion in what was a model Imno project, as we walked through spaces that were dimly lit by rooms nearby that we were never able to get to. I kept my Imno cool, for form’s sake now. Connie saw right through it, though, as I could hers. We had each gotten to know each other quite well over the past three days. Both of our respective departments were obviously not working well.

            We headed toward some thumping and choir-conversation in a corner of the immense, mostly roofed complex. We walked into an interim storeroom with four arched entrances. A recording began to play through the ballroom’s amplifiers. Connie chuckled and investigated the center of the room, which hosted stacks of chairs which ruined nearly every sightline to the stage. Small tables with chairs were placed around it like spokes around a hub. An aesthetic choice. Perhaps an altar.

            When I recall that lost weekend, aurally, it’s the gritty, no-nonsense swell of Power Base, and visually, the rotating clumps of dancers and listeners on the ballroom floor, in eclectic retro wear. Connie herself had scored a pair of puce crushed velvet slacks and a ruffled white linen blouse which she wore beneath that pea-green vinyl jacket of hers. I was just as retro, but without intention, in the department recommended gingham and khaki. For us both it was the required, mystical, laminated badge on plain, woven polyester lanyard.

            That’s how Connie and I had been waved past the ticket table. Other than the risers the band was on, everything else in the ballroom was in storage there, but was utilized for the show. The crowd on the floor numbered well into the tens, and there were others lounging on small suite sofas which were stacked bleacher style along the walls of the storeroom. The audience perched on those, in handfuls here and there, and they waited, like the furniture, for a purpose.

            The man who’d waved us past at the ticket table went to a microphone stand onstage, the recorded music stopped, and Connie and I stepped a little closer to the stage. The man spoke to a woman who joined him there. She lifted the microphone from its stand and looked over to us and smiled, all in her antique skinny jeans, t-top and anime black hair.

            “Clarissa!” I shouted to Connie.

            “Jet!”

            “Yeah! Jet!”

            “We have a pair of economic enforcement administrators in the audience this evening…” The PA boomed. The band began to play. I tingled. Connie bounced on her toes beside me. There were cheers, and some low notes from the crowd.

            “And with love to our northern neighbors…”

            I lost Connie at that point, but she hadn’t bolted. I saw her fifteen feet away, at 4 o’clock. High. She had done what Connie wouldn’t usually do. She’d mounted an unoccupied table, and with a two-fisted horn salute, shouted:

            “Sit go-in!”

            Lustily. Finished with a breezy, laconic intro, the band lit into a cover of Guess Who’s ‘No Time’. I couldn’t take my eyes off Connie. However, as a viable part of the brain they had made note to stray to Jet when they could. Connie tugged her PEZ container from her jacket pocket, and took a ‘must have’ lozenge. One could never have too much sugar for a weekend perdu like ours. Connie stood high above the crowd that danced as it bided time.

            Then, later, beside me, Connie caught my eye and nodded toward Jet approvingly. (I guess I’d been trancing, leaning on one of those sturdy tables which were all about, but with my glazed eyes trained toward the stage.) Then, the scent itself switched from the mostly tart ‘ballroom’ to room deodorizer. The concert was over and back we were to the carpet too plush for utility, thin plastic drapes and standard, laminate motel room furniture.

            I’d been trancing, rescuing butterflies from a hedge slated for clipping, but I’d crushed a butterfly instead. Connie was shouting, and she was right to. She was shouting at me for this caveman solution, from there at the balcony window. The butterfly was still in my hand. I looked at it and realized that it was Connie’s badge. I’d crushed that, and my hand was bleeding.

            “Merle! Merle! Lookit!”

            I trod through the dark room, tripping over and kicking off blankets and spreads and joined her at the window. All I could see at first was that some stars were missing. In front of the sliding glass door, there in the cold breeze, Connie grinned, presenting this void to me as if it were something.

            “I just hung out in the janitor’s closet and refused to fill the mop bucket this time,” she told me. Perhaps she just wanted to share the night sky with me, I thought. Or the lack of it.

            “The inside of the closet went to other places, but I couldn’t go there.” She smiled. “So I just stood there and sang ‘High Hopes’. Wha’d you do?”

            “They entrusted me with a butterfly, but I crushed it instead.”

            “Bad boy.”

            “Yeah. Your badge’ll never be the same. Woa!”

            Some of the stars had moved. Connie smiled mellow and ran her hand down my spine. We had both been phasing back into clothes when in the room. I’d stuck with the caterer britches, and she was in a flannel nightie.

            “That was the front of it you saw,” she told me. “It stretches back to that tower that’s blinking. About 3 kilometers back.”

            Then I was able to focus on what she was referring to. The stars, in a line above the horizon, were moving. Like a huge frown over the small city. I felt a tingle; almost a shock. I gaped over to Connie, and her eyes were saucers, as I’m sure mine were. She said:

            “I can’t think of anything we can do.”