Josh Stallings - Beautiful, Naked and Dead

I walked down to a corner liquor store. On the street cars cruised happily by, the sun was shining and all was right in their world. My world on the other hand was crumbling. Kelly had played me for a chump, here I thought she was the one pure thing in my life and I was just another squid to be played. Had any of it been true? Were we even friends? I bought a fifth of Seagram’s and a bottle of ginger ale. I sat in the Crown Vic and poured myself a stiff one. I picked up Marilyn hoping to find some answers in the ashes. So what if Kelly had been less than honest, maybe she wasn’t the angel I had made her out to be. I had loved her, that was true. Maybe loving someone meant you accepted who they were. She had accepted me with all my dark crap, or was she using me as a shield, a dark knight to protect her? If so, she’d chosen the wrong man. Maybe I should have put the key in and driven away, left Cass behind me and never looked back. But I had given my word. With Marilyn and whiskey in hand I went back to the motel.

Confronted with the ashes of her dead sister, Cass lost it. Tears rolled freely down her cheeks. Now it was concrete, Kelly wasn’t going to pop out of the bathroom and say it was all a big joke. I wanted to comfort her, give her a shoulder to cry on. Instead I sat in the chair and poured a fresh drink. I placed the bottle on the nightstand. If she wanted a drink she could get one. She curled up, holding Marilyn to her chest murmuring quietly to it. Grief was a solo act, we all did it in our own private way. I was sullenly working on my third drink when she got up and took a shower. She left the door open a crack so I could catch glimpses of her through the pebbled glass. I turned my back on her. Someone had done a real job on these girls, someone convinced them that sex was the most they had to offer men. It was hard-wired into their systems, a default setting that had to have been placed there at a young age. It played on like a ghost in the machine, overriding grief, fear and even love. Maybe the bastard I should be hunting was farther back in their past. The dead end street Kelly was traveling on started way before I met her. But the punk who pulled the trigger was going down, he ended any chance for her to ever recover.

“They have to die,” Cass said, drying her hair. It was as if she’d been reading my mind. Her tears were gone now, replaced by a set jaw and cold hard eyes.

“Yes they do, but we have to find them first, what’s his name?”

“Whose?”

“The rich cat Kelly was fucking.” I said with more edge than I intended.

“Gino T, Ter-something. He was old school Italian, diamond pinky ring, gold chains, hairy chest and the manners of a pig. He looked at us girls like he was judging a piece of beef. Torelli! Yeah, that was his name, Gino Torelli.”

“Then he’s where we start.” Images of a fat Guinea sweating on top of Kelly flooded my brain. The whiskey and lack of sleep washed over me like a warm rain. It all suddenly felt too big to handle. I wanted to climb into bed and pull the covers over my head. I wanted to be back at the dog park watching Angel play. I wanted to be anywhere but here. Crunching down six whites I gulped the rest of my drink. Locking the bathroom door I took a long cold shower. It felt like needles on my skin but I could feel my blood rushing to warm me. The speed and cold water evaporated my sluggishness. Putting on a clean pair of jeans and fresh tee-shirt I was ready for action.

“Let’s roll,” I told Cass.

“To where?” she asked.

“San Francisco, I want to get clear of Nevada in case they find those graves.”

Driving out of Reno I winked goodbye to the glittering gambling dens, free from their draw for the moment. I could hear them laughing, they knew I’d be back sooner or later. Cass told me she thought the blood on Kelly was sugar daddy Gino’s, and that he was probably dead. It wasn’t much to go on, a name and a city, but it was all we had.

In Walmart she bought some hair bleach and a pair of scissors. At a truck stop she went into the ladies room, twenty minutes later she came out as a different girl. Her curls were now cut to shoulder length and honey blonde. I was stunned by the transformation, she looked like Marilyn’s twin sister.

“What, you don’t like?” she said pouting her lips.

“No, you did fine, nobody will recognize you,” I said turning for the car. She caught my shoulder turning me to look at her.

“Do you like it?” she said, a twinkle in her eye.

“I said you did fine, now let’s roll.” After that we drove for a while in silence. She was still putting on the pout. We purred down Highway 80, through the Sierras. We crossed the state line without any problems, no we didn’t have any fruit or vegetables, did I forget to mention we left some corpses in Nevada? Well they didn’t ask, so I didn’t tell.

“Were you one of her lovers?” Cass asked, breaking the silence as we pasted Truckee.

“No, I thought I was her friend.” I kept my eyes on the road. But she saw through me anyway.

“You were in love with her. You still are, I’ve seen the way you look at me. But trust me, I’m not her. She always had the way with men, it was like she could sense who they wanted her to be and that’s who she’d become. In high school she could have had any boy she wanted, but she wound up screwing the gym teacher. He was a burly bear. Yeah, you were her type,” she said with a wry smile. “Big, strong, a bit too old and a lot too dangerous. I’m just surprised you weren’t lovers. Maybe she saw you needed a friend more than sex.” I flinched, forcing my face into neutral. “That’s it, isn’t it?” I didn’t answer. I couldn’t believe Kelly had played me like that. Was I that transparent? As I thought about it I realized I was kin to these sisters. We were all children of the battle zone. Growing up in violence you learned to duck and weave, you learned how to read the signs and become whoever you needed to be to keep from getting whacked. At Donner Pass I pulled into a rest area to make a fresh drink; Cass arched an eyebrow, but I didn’t care. I needed the whiskey to take the edge off the speed I was popping like Altoids, and I needed the speed because it had been too many days without sleep. Crunching a few whites I sipped the drink.

“Boy you have more bad habits than a convent.” She said with a grin.

Pulling out onto the highway I noticed a stone pillar commemorating the Donner Party. They were a true testament to the American spirit, push forward at all costs and eat the dead when necessary. Wasn’t that the American dream in a nutshell.

At midnight we crossed the Golden Gate Bridge, Cass was asleep and I was in a drug driven haze. Somewhere around the Sacramento delta the lines between real and surreal had blurred. Fog swirled dancing in the beams of the headlights. Orange cables and girders dripped and bent at impossible angles, like a giant braided steel spider web it waited to catch low flying dreams. The bridge under our tires beat out a steady tip tapping rhythm counter punching to Iggy’s Afro Idiot CD. Where would I be without music? It had been my one true friend. From my first Stones LP, music always filled the empty void I swam in.

Through the fog and steel, jewels sparkled calling our names. The city lights drawing us in like so many sailors before us. Calling us to crash on their rocks, this city of sirens. San Francisco, with its historic promise of magic and wonder. Built to fleece the gold miners coming and going to the fields up north, back then it had more brothels than churches and more saloons than schools. Destroyed by earthquake and fire it rose from the ashes, bigger and grander than before. In the sixties it called the youth of America to crash on its rocks, what started in peace, love, and LSD ended with heroin and STD’s. In the sixties the kids took to the streets and said fuck you to the government. In the seventies the government took the belt to them, and we’ve been paying the price ever since. War on drugs, war on music content, war on all that was strange and different. The tragic truth is, start a war with your kids and you wind up with drive-bys and Columbine. Just like two plus two equals four, it’s simple old school math.