Friday, January 22, 2016

the huntress diana



When he turns on that sunbeam smile, toothsome, dazzling white, we both sigh just a little as we settle into our corner of the bar.
“What can I get you?” he asks.
“Something cool and yummy,” she says, “something delicious.”
“We’ve got that.”
“I’m sure you do.”
“What did you have in mind?”
“Something potent,” she says, “but subtle enough that it won’t clash with the buzz we already have.”
He smiles.
“Can you suggest something special?” she asks. “We’re celebrating.”
“what’s the occasion?”
“It’s Wednesday” I say.
“So it is,” he says, seeming to notice me for the first time.
She says, musing, “I’m thinking something in the vodka spectrum.”
“Martini?”
She wrinkles her nose.
“I make them super dirty,” he says.
“I have no doubt,” she says, “but not tonight.”
“Cosmo?”
“I hardly think so.”
“Cape codder? Madras?”
“Mmm”
“How about a Stinger?”
“Oooh, I do like the sound of that.”
“I thought you might.”
“Sounds kind of dangerous.”
“if done correctly,” he says.
“Are they good?”
“Oh yea”
“Are they strong?”
“Trust me,” he says.
“I think I just might, handsome. Let’s see how you do.”
He laughs, it’s like the sound of a fortuitous comet blazing across the sky. 
When he goes, she turns to me.
“Isn’t he like a perfect apple?”
“Mmm” I agree. He is something to see.
“A ripe, firm, delicious, golden apple,” she looks over at him as he shakes up our cocktails. “Look at those forearms,” she sighs. With her eyes closed she listens to the rhythmic lull of the tumbler, “That’s the most beautiful sound in the world.” She is giddy, she is luminous tonight, moonlit and white, aroused by the whisper of booze that shimmers silver in the air when he pours it into our trembling glasses. With that first tentative sip, the drinks chill and burn our eager lips.
“How are they?” he asks.
“Nectar,” she says, “ambrosia. The drink of he gods. Simply delicious.”
“I’m glad I measured up.”
“Indeed,” she smiles.
“Will you two have anything to eat?”
“Do you have anything to nibble on?” she asks.
His doe brown eyes glance briefly at her magnificent cleavage, which seems to wink back at him, encouraging him. “Definitely,” he says.
We pretend to read the menu. The game is on.
“He needs a shave,” I say.
“I like them swarthy,” she asserts.
“He is good looking,” I acknowledge.
“Do you think I should flirt with him?”
“You’re off to a good start.”
“Let’s hope so.” She says.
“What happened to you and the guy?"
“Doug the Dick?” she laughs, “I gave that chump the heave ho.”

She gives all her men nicknames: Baby Face, King Dong, The Tickler, Minute Rice, Pee Wee, Guido No Thumbs, Mister Clean, to name a few from the more recent past.

“Can I get you another round?” The barteneder, attentive and quick, is before us again like a vision.
“Absolutely” she says. “Those were perfection.” She does that old trick with her hair so that it just grazes her naked shoulder. A whiff of pricey perfume riffs the air.
Again the musical cocktail shaker plays a rhapsody. We sway on our barstools just a bit to its siren song. With precision he pours out two more before us.
“You didn’t spill a drop,” she says.
“I never do,” he says.
“Quite a skill,” she says.
“Comes with lots of practice.”
“It takes a certain amount of dexterity and poise, I should think,” she says.
“I try my best,” he says.
To this she just shrugs, and takes a lingering sip of her drink.
He goes to take care of a group of khaki clad office drones at the other end of the bar, her eyes never leave his enticing backside. 
“He has a lot of potential,” I say.
“Oh doesn’t he though?”
“What do you think?”
“I need a new man, “ she says, “and no doubt he is a fine specimen."
“Beautiful.”
“Gorgeous.” She concurs, placing her glass squarely on its pink napkin for emphasis.
“So what’ll you call him?”
“I have no idea, he is strong, and slick, he makes me a little woozy just looking at him.”
I sip my cocktail. “How about we call him Stinger?” I suggest.
“I like that, that has promise," she says,  "hopefully he lives up to it,” she says.
“Here’s hoping”
We clink glasses.

She laughs, and waves him over for the kill.




Thursday, January 21, 2016

Kitty and the yum yum song

“God damn it!”
“What’s the matter?” she stirs in bed, her voice still thick with sleep.
“That god damned cat of yours!”
Her eyes blink open. It’s still dark outside. Not time to get up. “Pipe down. You’ll wake the baby.”
“I don’t care if I do!” He tosses a pillow at her. “Wake up!”
“Hey!” she’s sitting up now. “What’s all the racket for?”
“Look!” he says. “Look what she did!” he’s standing, naked except for that ratty pair of boxers. He stands there pointing at something.
She blindly feels for her glasses on the table by her side of the bed, next to the half read paperback and the jar of handcream and the ashtray. Once she can see, her eyes follow his finger to a spot on the floral sheet.
“That evil little flea bag took a shit on my side of the bed!”
“Oh that’s nonsense!” she says, but there’s no denying the perfectly formed turd, presumably feline in origin, where he was just sleeping.
“She’s had it in for me from the beginning,” he says.
“Kitty?” she laughs. “Don’t be silly. She’s just an innocent animal.”
“Innocent my ass. I tell you she did it on purpose!”
“Oh you’re crazy! Just listen to you! A grown man, for pity’s sake.”
“You always take her side,” he pouts.

“Mommy, is it morning time?” the boy is at the door, rubbing his eyes.
“No sweetie. Daddy just had a bad dream. Go back to bed.”
“I don’t want to,” he holds his doctor Doolittle doll tight to his body. “Daddy scared me awake.”
 “He scares me sometimes too, honey. Let’s go downstairs and make jiffy pop while Daddy fixes the bed.”
“Really?” His eyes are wide open now. “Can I have yoohoo?”
“Sure.” She grabs her pink robe from the back of the chair. “Let’s go downstairs”

At the stove she fiddles with the knob to adjust the flame under the popcorn.
“Is daddy mad?”
“No honey, he’s just being silly.” She hands him a paper napkin, “wipe your mouth, you have a chocolate milk mustache.”
“Remember the song you and Daddy sing when we go to Dairy Queen?”
“Why don’t you sing it for me?”
“Yummy yummy yummy I got love in my tummy,” he sings.
She doesn’t sing along like before. She stands at the stove and watches the foil begin to rise as the popcorn pops, she listens to the hard kernels bouncing against each other before they explode.
“Yummy yummy yummy,” the boy sings

From upstairs, a sudden loud crash, a thud, a series of “God dammits!”
“Uh oh”.
Daddy comes barreling into the room, a scratch on his forehead, blood streaming down his face, red droplets on his chest hair.
“What happened now?” she says.
“That damned cat!” he says. “She attacked me!” he collapses into a chair. “From out of nowhere she pounced on me!”
“You’re nuts” she said.” What happened?”
“Look!” he shows her his wound. “She must’ve been lying in wait, like a sniper.”
A sound like escaping steam comes out of her as she wets a clean dish towel under the tap. She dabs at his forehead not too gently which makes him wince. “Don’t be such a baby. Sit still! ”
“I’m telling you for the last time that cat’s got to go”
“Shush” she says “this needs some mercurochrome . Do you think you can stay out of trouble for five minutes while I go get it from the medicine cabinet?”
“I’m serious” he says “ that animal is out of here tonight.”
While she’s gone he says to his son, “I could have rabies, if I start to foam at the mouth you’re my witness!”
“Yes, daddy.”
When she returns with the familiar glass bottle of antiseptic and the box of bandaids, he’s there sipping a Naragansett. The popcorn is burnt.

Eventually he’s cleaned up and on his feet. “Now let’s go back to bed and get some sleep,” she suggests.
The whole way up the stairs he’s fuming. “I’m not going to be attacked in my own house by some feral animal!” He mutters something about “guerilla war tactics.”
“Are there monkeys going to hurt us, mommy?
“No, honey no monkeys, you’re daddy’s just being stupid.”
“I’ll show you who’s stupid!” he says, his eyes are lit up. He runs toward their bedroom.
“What now?”
“Time to even the score” he says over his shoulder.  She watches her husband, this man she married, the father of her child, from the doorway.
He’s wild, crazed, dancing furiously around the room, kicking a brown mass of fur, yelling, stomping on it. “Die stupid kitty die!”  Finally, he stops, breathless from his exertion.

'You idiot” she says. “What the hell are you doing to my good wig?”

He stands there in the middle of the room, blinking at her. His dingey underwear sags, looking forlorn. Under his bare foot the inert hairpiece is limp.

Kitty comes from wherever she was hiding, rubs up against her mistress’s legs. She’s purring. Her green eyes view the scene with a studied calm.

The cat had a smile on her face, the grin of the victor. In years to come the little boy would insist he saw it, whenever he told of the night, when his mommy stopped singing the yum yum song.








Wednesday, January 20, 2016

september moon

[ a version of this story is accepted to appear in Silver Birch Press Beach&Pool series July, 2016]
https://silverbirchpress.wordpress.com/2016/07/12/a-purple-sky-prose-poem-by-norman-belanger-beach-and-pool-memories-poetry-and-prose-series/




“Look at that moon!” he says.
It is pink and beautiful, the full moon. The whole bay seems to glow, rose tinted and brimming. We are both quiet a while, watching it, as it rises and rides the evening sky that is just now shimmering with wistful, distant stars. 
“It’s a super moon,” he says. His brown eyes are bright, penny copper, lit up. He smiles at me. 
“A thing to wish on,” I say.
We’re both tipsy. The little cottage is like a houseboat adrift on the tide; we float, still high on the place, rafting, bobbing, the two of us, just us. We exchange stories: of the blue heron wading in the moors; of the color of the water and the feeling of it, cold and exhilarating on naked skin; we talk about the things we did today together, as though they happened long ago, in some silvery past.
“The dunes?” he says, touching my arm, “remember?”
“Yes.”
“Is there any more wine?” he asks.
I pour us both a last glass. The empty bottle sits between us on the wood planking of the deck.


“What would you wish for?” I hear him say, his voice sounds far away, dreamy, drowsy from our day at the beach.

I reach for him, and from my pocket I pull out my heart, the jade green rock I found today at Race Point, while he dozed under his hat. The smooth soft stone sits in the palm of his hand
.
Next door, in Maisie’s overgrown wildflower garden, crickets sing in tall green grass as though summer will never end, despite the chill that comes in on a breeze and makes us shiver into our sweatshirts. 


The sky suddenly explodes with starlings and stark white gulls. On the shore plovers and pipers and little peeping birds hop in the sand. We look across the way to Wellfleet, where the last winking daylight glints off the house windows. Out on Long Point, the old beacon stands mute and pale on a sandbar finger. Her light flashes green. By now the moon is high, practically overhead; the sky is purple.
“What would you wish for?” I ask.
“Just this,” is all he says, still holding the stone, still feeling its pulsing warmth, and its weight.



Sunday, January 17, 2016

Dance me to the end of night

this piece was published in Blunderbuss magazine, august 2015



Some Thursday nights, Sean and I would go to the 1270, because it was two for one beer night, and the door guy let us in without ever checking our fake IDs. Downstairs where the punks hung out strung out in the dark, we’d buy drugs.  In the back room mirror, we put on eyeliner and practice jaded expressions. Fueled on bumps of coke and piss warm Rolling Rock, we shuffled in a zombie dance to Morrissey singing about the end of the world.

Up a curious flight of stairs, where furtive glances from strangers and groping occurred, the main bar was a sudden explosion of amphetamine brightness, blasted by the last dying beats of disco. The whiff of poppers made us dizzy as we twirled under a spinning mirror ball, a pack of jackal children, wild when they played that new song. “You must be my lucky star”, we’d scream, with our hands waving in the air. Sweat streamed down our faces until we cried black tears.

Eventually we’d come up sputtering for air, climb to the roof, gasping in the moonlit night sky. Lolly was in her corner, mixing drinks like an alchemist, she served up gasoline gold nectar we’d suck down until the lights flickered last call.

The club emptied out at two, and the sidewalk would be crowded with whooping drunken kids. Like lemmings we followed the flow down Boylston toward the Victory gardens.
In the Fens, the unafraid took the darker, unlit paths. Eyes called out from the muddy reeds, where pagan boys played hide and seek and other, more dangerous games. From tall grasses, insects still sang as though summer would never end, despite a chill that crept in with the damp of the sighing swamp, and leaves that fell down like rain.

 We’d sit on the picnic table under a rose trellis, Sean and I, sharing cigarettes and talking, laughing about nothing, huddled together shoulder to shoulder. Once, maybe twice, we kissed, while just outside the park, sirens and city life pulsed.

 Night would wear on, until  the cold gray light of another  dawn.  We dragged ourselves home in dirty soaked sneakers, silent, smoking, listening to birds rouse in the trees. We were stoned and happy, yearning for the little death of sleep, neither of us knowing then

we would never again be so young,

or so free.





02657     as if       

this piece was published in Aids&Understanding Magazine july 2015  
it will be reissued in provincetown's fine arts work center blog                                           

“What time is it?”
He sighs, drowsy from a day at the beach.
I move over so he can put down his bag.
“ The clock at town hall just rang 4, ” I say.

The stairs of the post office are filling up, in that hour just before naptime, when we usually meet. Groups of us park our bikes and lounge on the concrete steps in the center of Provincetown’s busy Commercial Street. It is the custom then, in those pre- cell phone days of the Gay Nineties, to congregate at that place. In the sleepy afternoons of a late August, there we are on the steps, catching up and gossiping and occasionally meeting boys. The post office is the place to check in with your friends, cruise men, or make plans for the evening.  Many relationships begin, and some end, there. This year we all are wearing madras, flannel, and baseball caps, cut off shorts and banged up combat boots, skin tight T- shirts, and Calvin Klein underwear.

A gusting wind puffs off the bay and the sun hangs low, it’s in our eyes and burnishes our skin, we are golden and young that summer, we are louche and lithe.

“I walked the dunes,” he says collapsing next to me. His hair is tawny and smells like the sea. There is sand still on his sandaled feet.
“I read all day,” I say.
“You got a smoke?” he asks. “ I am dying.”
I hand him the half pack of Camels and a damp book of matches.
It takes him four of five tries before he finally gets it lit. “holy shit” he says and laughs, exhaling smoke.

We are silent a while, just looking and listening as the ocean of humanity goes by, up and down the rag tag street. It’s mesmerizing.  There are the sounds of kids screaming, people laughing, music blaring off a boom box.  Miss Ellie sings Dusty Springfield songs on the corner. Waiters across the way are already hawking tonight’s fish dinner. Out in the harbor, the Boston boat, just now pulling away from the pier, blasts its horn. We watch the parade of tourists, and drag queens, and boys, the endless tide of the summer people.

“Breeders and bears on bicycles and twinks and damned New Yorkers,” says someone. He is of the gang of beautiful jaded townies that commands the center of the coveted stairs.
“Fashion victims,” another says.
“Check out that one,” a redhead nods,  “he’s wearing overalls.”
“ I don’t think they were intended to cover all of that,” says an old Queen from his perch on the top stair. He has the look, the gaunt cheeks and yellow skin, though his sunken eyes still glint with gleeful malice.
“Why do handsome guys always end up with troll boyfriends?” the red head says.
“Don’t despair,” says the Queen, “that just means there’s hope for you, dearie, maybe some day.”
There’s more bitching and chat, and more comments on the passers by, it’s all mindless and silly and fun. We are like the gulls flocked and squawking out on the breakwater, making noise. 

My friend laughs. “You going out tonight?” he asks me.
I shrug. “Maybe I’ll make the usual rounds.”
“ See you at the Vault?”
“Or A’house. It’s the disco dance a thon boxer brief party tonight upstairs at Macho Bar”
“Fuckin’ A !” he says. He chucks the butt of his cigarette deftly into the sewer grate.
“I’ll buy you a Rolling Rock” he says, “if you’re good.” He makes a low growling sound, as he lugs up his beach bag. “OK Tiger, time for me to get my beauty sleep.”
“See you later, maybe,” I say.
“Maybe,” he says. His eyes are brown, with flecks of penny copper.
We both smile.
We both stand there a while and smile, as if.

As if I won’t be there in the old boat yard tonight, sometime after midnight. As if he won’t be there, looking for me. As if we both might not find each other there again, seemingly by accident. As if the moon won’t be full by some happy coincidence. As if we might not walk the damp shore of the bay. As if he won’t kiss me under the pier. We smile, as if.

I still think of him, sometimes, now, years later, long after that summer, long after he is gone. I think of him, some of these breezy late season evenings, when I sit on a bench at town hall. They don’t let you hang out on the steps at the post office anymore. There are railings and signs now. So I sit here, under a battered straw hat, with reading glasses and two new hips. I am two decades older, a survivor of sorts, sole and alone, on the shore of a sandbar called Land’s End. I sit with the folks, and the ice cream eaters, and this year’s crop of kids. I listen to them talk mindlessly and carelessly like we used to.




When I think of that past summer, sometimes I remember a sun setting over the dunes, and long shadows in the moors where blue herons rustled in tall grasses. I remember a handful of nights with a sky full of stars. I remember whole hours spent, just sitting around, looking at people, shooting the shit.  I remember the smell of wet hair and sea salt, the rain and the fog. I remember his laugh.

Just now the old bell tower chimes 4 at Town Hall. I wake from my dreamy dozing and my memories. I put my hat over my eyes, and listen to the street performers singing love songs. I listen to the ebb and flow of chatter as the parade goes by,
the endless tide of the summer people. I listen, still half asleep, still smiling,

as if.