Short Story by Rafael Andres Jennings
The L.A. sun sizzled through my apartment, cremating the meat in my freezer until they smelled like packets of death. The rancid stench filled my apartment and slept on every item within it. Yet, on that hot July day my focus was far outside the putrid smell inhabiting my apartment, I had to be at work. Sitting in Celia’s car on my way to work at The Pyramids, the mirage of rotten meat interceded my extended gaze into the purple Los Angeles skyline. I couldn't really picture it, its size, the type of meat, was it packaged, had I opened it, none of that I could remember, but the smell, and the image of my roommate's, Celia’s, pinched nose as she tried to fall asleep were what my mind could illustrate. The busy sound of L.A. traffic deafened my internal replay of her text that read, “Apollo, this is disgusting. I don’t know how you live like this.” I had no idea what she was talking about, until I scrolled up into some of her other unread messages regarding the meat. I knew exactly how I would respond to her. Whenever there was a complaint to be had about something I did wrong, my responses almost always came in the form of complaints. Something about how my job leaves me out so late at night with a sore body, smelling like alcohol, and if it wasn’t for all those student loans, I had to pay I would quit this tactless job that abuses me and leaves me doing stupid things like, forgetting to throw away old meat. Celia would understand, she would sigh, and by the next time I got home it would be as though the meat was never bought in the first place. My daydreaming about excuses had quickened my drive, and I was approaching The Pyramids. The route there had become so routine to me that the Neon Orange sign sitting upon the storefront was basically a screaming stop. Looking out of my right-side window and onto the store front, I could remember that enigma of neon signs whose orange hues caressed my eighteen-year-old face with its projection. The orange sign said, ‘The Pyramids’, it was lit up by an orange glow and to the right of it were neon lights configured into a tiny Egyptian pyramid that flared in a similar vein. Two years had gone by, and even though I wasn’t that same UCLA film student, drunk with what that sign promised me, it still intrigued me, nonetheless. In my short two years of being a stripper, I still haven't tasted all the hopes of that sign. But now I was subsiding to chasing the high it gave me. I knew that each sweaty shift I spent flickering in that strip club held within it an elation I couldn’t feel from anything else. I lifted myself out of Celia's tiny car that I had borrowed, my spidery legs emerging from her Toyota Camry and onto the Los Angeles sidewalks. It was 9:36 pm and the street that The Pyramids lit was riddled with neon lights and that pseudo promise of a Hollywood fantasy, which was quickly contrasted by the homeless bodies that always accessorized the sidewalk. Sometimes I wondered if I was a part of their Hollywood dream, and what that dream was. Maybe with just a vacant stare, their experiences on these streets let them know exactly who I was, where I was going, and how long it would be before I trembled into dust. I walked into the club and was baked in neon lights and loud music. The bass in the stereos boiled the blood in my veins creating a war cry in my mind. The club had Strippers in gold thongs dancing on stages, and men of a variety too wide, submitting themselves and their wallets to the godlike bodies of neon saturated men and women. I was wearing black hoodie and black sweatpants as I walked through the main floor and into the dressing room. It was empty when I walked in, a cement back room with rows of lockers and a wall of vanities. Each vanity was decorated with makeup smudges and stray makeup tools. In the time between 9:36 pm and 10:55pm, I did what I did every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday night. I pulled my hoodie and sweatpants off and did some slight makeup in the mirror. A few lapis colored gems filled the canvas of my face and made my angular bone structure radiant under the sterile dressing room light. Then, I made my way to the stage. Every time I stepped on stage and stood in the middle of the club; I felt a violent ignorance for the world around me. I grabbed the metal pole in front of me and intricately grinded my hips under the purple spotlight. One hand on the pole I danced. Long ago, I submitted myself to stripping, it became my religion. I felt the tears of a God I once knew as nothing but silver sequins on my thong. Stripping made me realize that I don’t enjoy power, that possibly I loved being objectified. It gave my blazing hunger a place to be seen by what felt like a thousand shiftless spectators all yielding their hard-earned American dollars to me. Like a mother, the hues of red and blue coming from inside the club seeped into my skin and rebirthed me, gave me a name, combed my hair, and told me everything would be alright. The swivel and roll of my hips to the music was a symphony with applause that came in the form of dollar bills. My nightly shifts at The Pyramids made me all the things I've ever wanted, an exhibit, an artist, and a god. Until I worked at The Pyramids, I never thought I could acquire a crowd, or be admired. My juvenile quest to be exotic could’ve been what led me to L.A and then eventually to stripping. I think what I felt for the dingy men that came and watched me, was my own brand of love. My love was petulant and fleeting, but it was mine. I loved their eye-contact when they watched me. It was a sort of bestial gaze that I tried to match, as if I was challenging them. Excitement flushed my mind at the thought that every pair of those eyes laid on me loved me too. As I danced exposed, their minds would surge and in glints of desperation, and I think it was their infatuation that would seal their love for me. I hadn’t ever been in real love before, but the stares I got while stripping were fragments of love keeping me well-fed in terms of passion. They substituted any need for real love. I began to realize that in its purest form, love wasn’t real. That all the emotional taking and giving was just an unfair game that humans were probably not really meant for. I felt the cold stir of possession in all the love within my life. My parents said they loved me, my friends, and ex-lovers did, but they all wanted a permanent state of love that sated them and drained me. It was no match for the transient feeling that The Pyramids had promised me upon walking in. I lived in a flaming rush of desire placing me as its subject. At the strip club, there was never a lack of love. Love laid in the squandering eyes of men I’d never see again, and steamed off the dollar bills I ironed and collected. After my first night of dancing, I knew I’d exploit everyone who walked in this place for that feeling, then maybe all of L.A then maybe the whole United States, then maybe the whole world. Yet, I felt the bitter peck of exploitation too, cause my love wasn’t free anymore. At the end of my shift, I gathered my dollar bills into a bag and went back into the dressing room to count them. $1,000, not bad. So, I put my clothes back on and signed my stripper alias on the sign out sheet, Ares. At 2:00 am I walked down the shadily warm sidewalk looking at my phone. The July air always held a feeling of permanence. I was staring at the picture of the meat in my texts with Celia. Still a little confused, still trying to come up with something to say to avoid being blamed for the rotting meat. On the empty sidewalks I heard the notes of a distantly familiar song floating onto the sidewalk. I stopped. I pressed my eyebrows together and gave a sidelong stare at what seemed to be a bar. I penetrated the small wooden door into the bar, and the name of the song came to me. It was Midnight Train to Georgia, my mother’s favorite song. I watched the performer of this, a young woman whose curls flowed down her back like a waterfall. Her eyes closed and her voice steady, she sang under a dim spotlight on a platform in the back of the dark brown bar. I stared at her with a little mouth open, and involuntarily I felt a tear laminating my gaze. The tear fell down my right cheek into my mouth, and then rivulets of tears fell off my chin. Through my misty vision, I turned around and stepped back onto the sidewalk. The west coast breeze that had lost its once smothering sweetness hit my face and I remembered; I hadn’t cried in a year. My teary-eyed face had been immolated by this thought, and all I wanted was to cry one last cry, an earth-shattering cry. A cry that left a red burn on the cheeks of every human, and a gap in time forever. Then I would be happy. Then I would disappear, or dissolve, and knowing humans, life would move on and there’d be a thousand more tears to follow, but no one could ever and would ever cry like me. But every day I wake up numb searching for something stronger than tears and something softer than love.
I woke up the next morning to the smell of rotting meat. I saw a note from Celia telling me she was angry at me and needed to go away. I Ignored the smell, and the sentiment, as I looked out of my window, and into the citrus orange sunrise that lay in the east. I think all of L.A smells like rotting meat, I think that’s what the sun is for.