Annie Lu looked in the visor mirror applying her ‘top coat,’ as her Gramps called it, while Joey Johns, the douche bag doorman of all time, weaved in and out of this retarded Monday morning traffic on the way to the club. As her third layer of Rose Garden Kiss lipstick coated her pouty lips she recalled how lucky she was to have them, and a nice figure, because her complexion was for shit and her eyes were just too damned small. At least she got to work the morning shift on slow days before the customers got all drunk and grabby. The skanks like Mercedes, BMW and LaLa worked evening shift on slow days and got stuck with day shift on good days.
Feeling blessed to have an hour glass figure supporting her unfortunate face she smoothed her clingy sweater skirt absently and all hell broke loose.
Joey Johns was not the best driver, indeed was not the best at anything, except for perhaps busting heads in front of the Ray of Beauty Lounge where he bounced and Annie Lu had danced for lo these past six months. She really could not dance at all and did not like being up on stage. But all it took for her to bring home $500 a night was to walk back and forth, adjust the lighting to obscure her bad complexion and eroding ‘top coat,’ and, most importantly, pick out the songs that reminded the old losers at the bar that they once had a hope-filled youth. One iced off that dream cake by smiling stupidly into their lonely faces. Every once in a while one of these guys—never a regular—would get out of line and promptly disappear under Joey Johns’ massive arm.
The money paid Gramps’ rent and all the bills so that his SSI just had to cover what the Medicare didn’t. Gramps was the only family she had left, unless one wanted to count Mom, who was still shunting from one halfway house or rehab clinic to another. As messed up as this life was it had hummed along with a sense of normalcy until now, until Joey Johns, looking sideways at her absently pressing her tight sweater skirt down over her hips ran over an old lady who had walked out into traffic holding an unopened umbrella upside down and chanted something that never completely escaped her lips into the sky.
And Joey Johns did not care, did not stop; did not even look around!
“Oh My God Joey, stop, stop! We have to see if she’s okay—we can’t have a hit and run.”
Joey did none of these things, nor did he turn onto Orchard Lane, but kept driving west on Joppa. As her ears began to ring from the stress she noticed that there were a few accidents up ahead, two men fighting off to their right, a big redneck hugging and kissing a little Pakistani guy over at the gas station in front of the pump—and the poor little guy was screaming and trying to get away.
“Oh God!”
She looked in the rearview mirror and saw a UPS truck run over the old lady’s body and then turn up onto the lawn. The driver then got out and tried to climb onto the roof of the truck, shouting something at the uncaring sky above. And Joey Johns continued to stare at her with a weird light in his eyes, driving aimlessly—“Jesus Joey you’re driving on the sidewalk; stop, stop the car, stop driving!”
The car then slammed—ever so slowly, because the idiot was thankfully easing off the gas in his trance—into a telephone pole, and her lipstick, purse and smart phone just went flying everywhere. But she did not care. Annie Lu Privolta just wanted to get the hell out of this nut’s car. As she opened the door and slid out his large sausage-fingered hand clamped down on her soft upper arm, and said in a most mushy goo-strand way, through gobs of bubbling saliva, “I ought to fuck you on the hood.”
“No Joey—are you nuts? Get off, get off me!”
Joey then grabbed the top back portion of her purple sweater dress that had seemed such a good idea on this early winter day and began pulling her toward him across the front seat of his big stupid made-in-the-eighties car.
“I ought to fuck you on the hood,” he said, with a vacant leer in his eyes.
Joey might have been a douche bag, but he had never touched Annie Lu or any of the other girls. He was like their retarded big brother and could be counted on to say the stupidest things. In fact, he had never spoken this clearly before, usually not bothering to enunciate half of the consonants.
The back door was open behind her and she was in fear for her life, having seen the crazy look in his eyes and having seen many a time, how easily he tossed men around. Annie Lu ducked her head down and slid out of that sweater dress as she backed out of the passenger side door and got to her feet. Annie had one thing going for her, her Red Wing sneakers. After wearing stupid porno girl high heels on stage she could never bring herself to wear anything off stage that was not comfortable and practical.
Unfortunately Annie now found herself nearly naked in a crazed world. All around men and women were out of their cars chanting crazy mantras at each other like, “I ought to beat your face in,” “I should kill you,” or, in Joey John’s case as he raised up out of the car and walked around toward her, “I ought to fuck you on the hood.”
Annie Lu looked at Joey, looked around at the nuts—one of which was a cop that was punching a man in a suit over and over again—and then looked down at herself, dressed in brushed leather Red Wing sneakers, a pink G-string, and possibly the most impractical pink bikini top in her vast collection of undersized breast confinement devices purchased specifically for her dubiously rewarding work environment.
“I so do not want to run like this!”
Then Joey lurched around the front end of his stupid car with her sweater dress in his big hand with an unmistakable light in his eyes, chanting—it now occurred to her, at regular intervals—“I ought to fuck you on the hood.”
The last word struck Annie like a cold spike in the night, and she turned and ran, past an old lady who was beating some baby in a stroller with a supermarket circular in a world suddenly gone mad. Annie ran with but two thoughts in her mind: to get as far away from Joey Johns as possible and to avoid the hoods of all cars at all costs.
Her ears were ringing as they had a tendency to do whenever she got really upset, which leant a disorienting tone to a scene that might have otherwise driven her mad. She could hear one thing, right in front of her, at a time. The doctor had said this was an ‘excitable’ state, hinting that she was flaky and just had trouble dealing with stress. Annie could hear her sneakers squeak and slap. All of those other noises merged into an oceanic babble, like the sound in a sea shell when you picked it up and listened while Gramps cursed at seagulls.
As she ran through the Glory Days Bar and Grille parking lot, seeking the sanity that she hoped reigned off the main road, a man was emerging from a sleek black Saab with a refreshingly sane look on his face, the first sane look she had seen since Joey had ran over the old lady.
The man regarded her with surprise as he absently fixed the knot on his tie, and, when she noticed the bible in his other hand, she felt suddenly safe. Not wanting to get this nice church man—a tall dignified looking fellow with high and tight black hair and a thin mustache—hurt by Joey, she turned around to see how closely he pursued, and noticed with a pang of regret—and perhaps some guilt-laced relief—that Joey had the old lady who had been beating the baby in the stroller between his big hands; had her on the hood of his big stupid car doing what he had been saying he wanted to do to Annie.
Her eyes turned to the baby crying in the stroller and all thoughts of her own predicament left her. “Sir, I have to get the baby!”
As she said this she turned to see if he was going to be any help—men having always been more than willing to help her at the drop of a hint. The man was approaching her with the second of the three long strides necessary to bring them in contact, with his tie wrapped around both hands and stretched out between like a strangler’s cord. There was a dark pin-point look in his eyes and he all of a sudden seemed sinister rather than dignified, causing her to recoil with one backward step as he stalked forward in a languid serpentine way, speaking in a low incisive voice, “How dare you tempt me you savage Delilah.”
The knotted tie about his fists and their outreaching attitude told of his intent and Annie reacted by bolting for the baby, sprinting across the lot as fast as she could up onto the soggy lawn as the C-list ‘tip-me’ bikini top failed disastrously. But the sneakers held, gripped the green grass covered earth almost as well as her Spalding cleats had back when she played short stop for the Parkville Panthers. She snatched the baby out of the stroller even as the old lady moaned under big Joey Johns on the hood of his big stupid car.
“I’ve got you baby!" she exclaimed as she brought the flush-faced baby to her breast and turned to see the sinister church man marching after her nearly as fast as she had run. Thankfully she could not hear the insanity around her, though splashes of violent lurching bodies and slowly crashing cars assaulted her peripheral vision.
One thing Annie Lu knew from her athletic experience, was that this tall creep could maybe walk her down as short as she was, and that if he ran she was toast. She tucked the baby like a football as it squirmed and ran right at the tall creepy bastard, ducked under his garroted tie, and dodged out into the slowing and ever more chaotic traffic in hopes of throwing him off or getting him run over. A red minivan ran over a postal worker who was stepping from his mail truck throwing letters in the air, then ploughed over the grass in front of the Bob Evan restaurant, and then through the front window!
Annie hit the sidewalk with the baby tucked up high, and then panicked as it did not seem to be squirming any more. She looked down to check if it was okay and noticed that it was a little baby boy, about four months old, and that it was smiling up into her face. She wanted to take some time to get to know the baby but the insane world kept pressing in on her in the form of the lurching church-going madman whose eyes seemed ever more pointed and his chant ever more hateful as he picked up his pace and now nearly ran in pursuit of her, “How dare you tempt me you savage Delilah!”
“Let’s boogie baby,” Annie Lu shouted as she re-tucked the baby against her right breast and broke into a run down the south side of Joppa, west into Towson, with the preacher from hell at her back, and the noise of the world merged into an oceanic hum, the only sound coming clearly to her ears being the slap and squeak of her premium sneakers.
The fiction writing project for May 2015 is this collaboration with Erique Watson. For the preceding episodes from late 2014 checkout the RetroGenesis tag at the top of the page. We have 3 installments to go to complete the novella, which is projected to be the first of a series of seven.
