Pages

Friday, March 04, 2011

Holding Back A Big-Assed, Angry Tigress


by James Jarvis
from Offline Journal Of The Damned
(nonfiction prose about life at a weekly rate crack motel)
02/12/02

I heard screaming outside my crack motel room door
and poked my head out
and saw that seven or eight other motel inmates
had poked their heads out their doors,
not that screaming is so unusual here,
but being 4 in the afternoon,
it's a little early for the crack motel screaming.

Down the hallway
past the locked swimming pool
that is used as nothing more than a giant, wet ashtray
past the courtyard
that is used quite often
as a staging area for sheriff's deputies
(and then later on as a gathering place
for crackheads to share a glass pipe),
almost out in the parking lot
were two women screaming at each other,
their men holding them back from mutual combat.

The young, thin one was hopping around like a mongoose
as she screamed her insults
at the older, fatter one with day-glo orange hair
trying, it looked to me,
to find an open space between the barricading men
to land an overhead blow on the orange-haired lady.

The older lady's big bubble-butt ass jiggled like jello
every time she stomped her foot down
and from forty feet away
I could see the mad dog saliva
spraying from the older woman's mouth
as she called the younger woman a ho.

You a ho.
No you a ho.
No you a ho, bitch.

The discourse was not particularly illuminating
as to why the women were fighting.

Then the younger woman's man got into the argument
as the younger woman jumped back
and displayed several sweeping,
mongoose, gung foo moves
she had apparently seen on TV,
one of them I recognized
as 'The Crane' from "The Karate Kid."

She don't have to be no ho, Mongoose's man yelled,
I takes good care of my woman
she don't have to work a lick if I don't want her to,
we doing good, real good!

Then why you live in this dump you doing so good?
the older woman asked
and I thought the logic was impeccable,
unassailable,
but Mongoose's man,
a sturdy-looking rag-topped brother
surprised me
when he shot right back
We jus' passing through ch'ere,
but you'll be ho'ing outta this motel
come the next millennium.

Lord, gawd a'mighty!
I heard the older woman's man exclaim
because I knew that he didn't want to have to tangle
with the rag-topped kid,
probably a gangbanger,
and I knew that he knew that if he didn't
after THAT insult
that his orange haired woman
would make life hell for him for weeks to come.

The older man was puffy
and pot-bellied from too many years on the couch.
He was in no shape
to tangle with any hotheaded gangbangers today
or tomorrow,
or the next day,
but his salvation came
at the whim of the mongoose woman
who twirled away
on some half-remembered appointment
drawing her rag-topped man away with her,
leaving the old man metaphorically holding
the still-smoldering tail
of his day-glo orange-haired tigress.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Enhanced by Zemanta

No comments:

Post a Comment

Share |