Bad Girl's Night Out; Maggie and Nicole part 1
So I pick up my phone and look at it. I've got a text. It's from Maria, my publisher.
"Tick Tock Tick Tock Motherfucker! You ever heard of a deadline?"
I was going to reply back to it, then again, I'd done that once a day for the last three days. She needed a call. I'd call her this time. Right thing to do and all.
"YEAH?" she answers me.
"Hey... hey... hey," I said, "is that any way to talk to your star writer?"
"That any way to talk to the person who puts up with your inability to finish your latest draft," she snapped back, "and still lets you stay at the company's Airbnb location in Harrisburg on the company dime? C'mon Bill, you have ONE silly ass chapter to go and you're done, so what's the holdup?"
"There's no holdup," I lied, turning the television down, "I'm writing one more vignette as we speak,"
I held the phone down to my laptop and tapped away at the keys like machine gun fire
...TAP TAP TAPPITY TAP TAP TAP TAP!
before adding with,
"my juices are just beginning to flow. This is gold I am cranking out... GOLD!"
"Smells like the same old bullshit to me," she shot back.
She sounded mad. I think she was mad. She definitely sounded mad.
"You mad?"
There was that enormous fucking sigh on the other end of the phone. She wasn't mad. If she'd been dead quiet on the other end... you know, with that stone cold silence where she's thinking of finally having had enough of my antics... then it would be something entirely different. Oh but the thing was, I always did this...always. I always delivered too, just I often shaved pretty close to a deadline. My bad. I blame my parents and the new math I had in junior high, all those years ago.
I certainly didn't blame her. I'd left my home in Arizona four weeks earlier to follow up a lead on a person I was researching for my new erotic novel. After I'd met with that source, I just kind of stayed at various places in Central Pennsylvania. My wife Linda was on vacation with old friends in South America and I didn't need to get back to the Grand Canyon state very fast, so for four weeks I'd simply eaten and drunk up my advance money in various locations around the Keystone State, cranking out another chapter every few days, but I was not writing with any sense of urgency. I didn't have the heart to tell Maria I was out of ideas this time and simply couldn't finish and I'd been at the company AirBnB for the last week.
Was it writer's block? Was it my almost manic sense of needing things to be oh so perfect before hitting return and starting a new paragraph? I'm not sure. I'd tried long naps, cold baths, drinking like a sailor on shore leave, even jacking off like a monkey in the zoo; all in the hopes to have one more idea for this collection of short stories but nothing was manifesting itself. It was like my own mind was cock-blocking me from cranking out my money-making filth.
Anyhow, that sigh told me she was smiling. I swear, when you've worked with somebody that long and you get to know 'em, you can hear the smile. She was shaking her head and smiling too... I know it. You couldn't tell me differently.
"Stay off the booze," she chuckled, "and write! Start tapping the keys for real. Not any of that fake stuff you do to satiate me. Oh and there's a decent steakhouse up the road from where you are. I'll send you the address. If I know you, you're not eating right... or you're eating all the wrong things. Get a decent piece of meat and a big salad so you've got fuel in you to finish this..."
"I'm disappointed," I told her.
"You're disappointed?" she laughed back, "Where do YOU get the right to be disappointed?"
"You're laughing at this," I told her, "and you're beautiful when you're angry."
She said something about my mother and about me being impossible and then
BLOOP!
the address for the steakhouse appeared on my screen. It was one of those business locations I must have driven past a dozen times and not seen. She then added she'd be calling me in the morning and that she expected something worthy of being called FINISHED in her box by noon right before she hung up.
Oooh
when she spoke to me like that I wanted soooo badly to finish in her box. I really COULD fuck the snot out of her! Yep, I blame my parents.
So I'm finishing up dinner and adding the tip with a ball game on the tv right above my booth and I look at my watch it's only 7PM. Plenty early. I've got loads of time to crank out a chapter. I might even make it an all-nighter and then go to sleep tomorrow noonish after I hit SUBMIT to Maria's hot angry box, I was thinking. Then as I'm on my way back out to my car with one of the mints my mouth from the cashier's counter, I look down a long street to the south from the restaurant and can see the gaudy flashing neon on a white building reading the words "Savanna's," a posh swanky gentleman's club I'd seen in the back of the local free papers for Harrisburg.
"Time to do some research," I thought, "I can have a few overpriced beers, ogle a few sets of tits, and still have time to service Maria's box with my sticky prose by noon tomorrow. Well... okay NOONISH."
***
I had my first overpriced glass in front of me not fifteen minutes later. I shrugged to myself about the two drink minimum. I figured at least the house rules about no cell phones meant Maria couldn't call me and see where I was at in the story.
I was right up next to the U-shaped stage at the wrap-around seating. The stage ran two strippers at a time. Most of the patrons in the place stayed back and hugged booths and tables along the side walls but a few brave souls like myself sat up at the comfy red front row chairs and had the stage basically in our laps.
I looked around at the "frontline troops" reclining around that stage; braving the onslaught of glitter, tits, and whirling spiked high heels. There were a couple of guys that looked like long haul truckers, another old grandpa looking dude being ignored by the strippers because had that aura of "No ca$h whatsoever" as he sipped his cranberry and whatever it was, and some guy who'd not even bothered to take off his brown janitorial jumpsuit with the name "Mike" embroidered over his left tit in red. Somebody still knows how to sew cursive I see.
The pair that stuck out however were two women. They had an empty chair between me and them and at first I didn't really get a good look at them when I came in and sat myself down... hell I was still smarting from the cover charge that had stung me in the wallet and was quite frankly ogling the two impossibly hard-bodied strippers (a blonde and a raven-haired brunette), both sporting coconut titties fake as campaign promise and matching red thongs so small you'd seen more cotton in a fucking Q-tip. The best word to describe me was "distracted."
So I'm sitting there amidst this haze of darkness mixed with flashing lights, wafting cheap perfume mixed with the scent of sweat & feminine hygiene products and sound... oh so much SOUND; loud does not come close to what this was. It's why I like both my sex and my porn with soft music in the background; cool jazz or New Age hums and gongs so I can enjoy the event and blow my nut butter in what you'd call aroused tranquility. This on the other hand, was like a sound-wall of today's radio hits cranked up HIGH with the knob ripped out and thrown across the room. I feel that most strip club DJ's are in a state of arrested development; never getting beyond the age of twelve and this night didn't change my thinking. It's also why I didn't notice the two women seated one chair over until the music changed and the house lights came up long enough for the bouncers to toss a thirsty handsy drunk head-first out the front entrance.