I wanted to go home with Joanna and wreck some things…I don’t know why her friend didn’t like me, but it was clear she wanted me gone. To that end, she drug Johanna outside to a cluster of golf carts around a late-nite pork and beans stand, dishing out staples to drunk and dazed Odyssean home-bounders…a few young black bucks sat idly in their carts, very familiar with Johanna and her friend…I stumbled over and got her just enough on the side to ask her if she wanted to come over…she had downed a couple of aquardientes and like lightning in a snowstorm she laughed…and I knew then that I had a chance…but not tonight she said…I asked when and she gave me the location of her employment, the Tropicana Beach Club, and said she’d be there any afternoon at the outside bar…and I saw that smile slide into something dirty, standing in the moon of lights…I wavered off with a kiss to her cheek and began what was becoming a routine walk home, bopping along under a palm tree prosidy…I thought of Johanna and I thought of Ramona and I thought of guilt. I may have felt some, but I didn’t let it ruin the inky stroll homeward…I went to bed spinning on the heat and tar of Los Angeles and dreamt of myself blowing poetry, and Johanna blowing me…
Next day was Sunday, and I thought long and hard about going to see Johanna. It tainted my day blue and crimson, so I paid homage to the King of Literature by shacking up with Whalen’s “On Bear’s Head” and writing poems. I kept thinking of Ramona’s teeth, her perfect strong dentals white as light….how often she flashed them, and how it made those around her stumble…I do be turned on…yes. But it was by the blackness and pink privates of Johanna, counter to the mouth of Ramona that got me breathing hard…It left me in somewhat of a quandary and so I sat and soaked in it, waiting for tomorrow…
Monday I put on the swim trunks and running shoes, tuned the cd player to Dylan Albert Hall Concert, and leapt from the beach back door into 242 choruses of sunshine, breezy palms, and lone mangroves…I reeked of tender reveries and ghastly acts of love. It was a good half mile past where I usually turned around, so I was sweating profusely when I reached the Tropicana…
-Michael Price
