Dolly (Unfinished)

Dolly

By
Varo Borja

Red Charles of the Ritz looks lovely with a black eye. And a busted lip. My name is Dolly. Dolly Divine.
My cigarette tastes like blood and candy and I’m coming down off that cheap cocaine that the jackass in the next room fed me to get in my pants. Haha. He doesn’t know that I have his wallet stashed in my pretty pink panties and no time to waste with 35 year old, small dicked used car salesmen who can’t get it up unless they’re beating on a woman and cheating on their wives with everything in a skirt. So I grab my pink purse with the silver sequins and I hit the door. I’m down the stairs of this dive in a wink of the eye and out on the street again. The night air is cool and damp, but reassuring. It hides me and my bruises and my bad teeth and my bad dye job that I shoplifted from Walgreens. My heels are too high and they hurt my feet so I take them off and go barefoot. Barefoot and pregnant. That’s what Daddy said. Ever since that nigger raped me back in Memphis last year though, the doc at the emergency room said I could forget about babies. So I came to L.A. All 85 lbs of me with a duffel bag and a dream. I wanted to be a movie star. Just like Marilyn Monroe. Little did I know that there wasn’t much need for movie stars anymore. At least ones from Mississippi. That’s what that man in the white limousine said. He said that I could make it in the porn business. I’d never even seen a porno (besides Daddy’s magazines under the mattress) until I came out here and was in a couple of them. Well, I wasn’t really in them. The man in the limousine said that since I was sixteen that I’d have to be a fluff girl. You know them ones who stand out in the hallway while they’re shooting and keeps the stars erect. The ones that they send out for coffee and cigarettes and that they beat up on when they’re bored. I’ve been beat up a lot. Daddy said that I deserved it. When a man hits me I feel like I’m getting the best of him, and then when I spit blood on the floor and pretty myself up again he loves me just like Daddy did.

The neon lights on sunset remind me of those country western songs that I used to hear on the radio on warm summer’s nights back in Mississippi. I’ve been here in L.A. for a while now, but I still can’t get over them neon signs. One day my name will be written on one of them. I can see it now. Dolly Divine, mistress of the night. I like that. Mistress of the night was one of them dimestore novels that I read when I was a kid. Well, I guess I am still a kid. But L.A. has a way of making you not feel like a kid. A way of making you tough on the outside and all cold on the inside. A way of growing you into a stone statue like them Confederate ones back in Vicksburg.

I’m hungry. I stop walking down Sunset for a minute and pull that hard dick’s wallet out from underneath my leather skirt. 50 bucks, a couple of credit cards and a photo of one of his kids. She looks all pretty with her high school cheerleader’s uniform on and her braces and her face free from blue-black love taps. I stand for a moment and gaze at the photo. I look into her soul. Yeah. She’s got scars. They’re just not on the outside.

I walk into a 7/11 and grab a bag of chips, a Snicker’s bar and a big gulp filled to the rim with 44 oz of Mountain Dew. I walk to the counter and the Arab clerk eyes me suspiciously as I pull out my newly won plastic money and slap it down on the counter next to my dinner like I own the place. I give him a wink and a half caste kind of smile that doesn’t show the bad part of my teeth and say “Its my Daddy’s” and he swipes the card. He hands me the little slip for me to sign and I scribble the name of the jackass that it belongs to in a really feathery way like I think a man of his upbringing might, and then I grab my loot and I’m back on the street.

I sit down outside of the 7/11 on the curb that smells of gasoline and stale piss and I open my chips and nibble a little bit. My stomach hurts nearly all the time, and even though I know with my head that I’m hungry, I can’t seem to stomach all the food. So, I toss the Snicker’s bar and the half empty bag of chips to a bum lying on his back in a liquor soaked fantasy land by the blue and white payphone (I keep the Mountain Dew; I hate water and coffee and Mountain Dew reminds me of Mississippi) and then I start to walk down Sunset again to look for someone to take me home so I don’t have to sleep in some alley that smells of the bums and the dregs of some B movie horrorshow.

The Rooms (Unfinished)

The Rooms (Unfinished)

by

Varo Borja

Anna sipped her vermouth silently pretending all the while that it was the blood of the man who had left her in this dive holding the check and none of the cards. She wore a black dress, silky and soft and high, high stiletto heels that made her wince just a little when she stepped to the left and out of the narrow confines of the perspective into which she had been placed. Slow jazz reverberated in the smoke filled air as some half caste gypsy savant blew timorous notes from his tenor saxophone, serenading the last call lowlifes and fat businessmen in cheapish business casual attire slovenly slurping the mid grade whiskey that they couldn’t even taste anymore because they had drunk for abandon and the release that a night out of town and away from three kids and a sagging bottom wife could afford them. The signs were good that Anna would be able to scrape one of these fatted calves from his barstool, get him to pay the check, and sneak out of his hotel room while he was puking his guts out in the bidet or the sink or the bathtub. At one time Anna had been a looker. Hell, she still was but she was past the point of her ripest maturity and her 34 DD breasts had turned to 36 E’s over the last five years and her ankles were a bit larger than when she had won that swimsuit competition in Austin years ago. Her dark hair was still as lustrous as ever though, and her almond eyes still could be playful, or conciliatory, or knife like, depending on the situation and whatever was expedient. She’d had her tubes tied years ago after she’d had her third miscarriage and swore that she’d never get pregnant again, regardless of how much her biological clock demanded the retribution of her sex. Anna’s skin was still very good also, and she took care to keep out of the sun and always found time to cleanse, exfoliate, and moisturize her way into keeping the dogs of middle age at bay.

“Hey honey. Wanna buy me drink?” Anna said as she sauntered over to a 300 lb. man tanned hulk in a Brooks Brothers sport coat.

“Suuurrreee. Take’ll ya what? Vurmooth?”

“Sure, sweetie. You look right handsome tonight. You in the for the conference?” Anna could lay it on thick when the need arose, there was always a conference, and the bartender, Fat Mike was giving her the sign that it was now or never.

“Yayah. Its aw-full-ee hot in here, ain’t it?”

Anna noticed the absence of orangish goo around the barbarian’s left ring finger, indicating the fact that his man tan was recently acquired and hadn’t yet penetrated the bonds of matrimony.

“Why yes it is, darlin’. Don’t ya think that we should go somewhere cooler? Say, your room at the Clarion?” Anna prayed silently to the virgin that his room was at least at the Comfort. She threw in an extra Hail Mary for a suite at the Quality.

“Ummm. I’m stayin’ at the Sleep o-vur on Bristol. You wanna cum?”

Anna cringed. These days it was tough to find a man with taste, let alone decency, but she was in dire straits and in need of a lift to her apartment on Manchester. Bristol was a block away and if she took her stiletto’s off, she could easily sneak out with the buffoon’s wallet and make a B-line to her own bed where Max, her black manx patiently awaited her arrival.

“Honey, you’re sweet as apple pie. Anybody ever told you that your jawline resembles Matt Damon’s? You could pass for him any day under the sun.” Anna silently snickered to herself and ran her hand across the prodigious back of the lamb being led to the slaughter.

“Nah. You ain’t a hooowar are ya?” said Mr. Sleep.

“Honey, I’m anything you want me to be, and a hell of a lot that you can’t handle. We ready to blow this pop stand or not, sugarbritches?” Anna loathed being called a whore and her saccharine seduction was wearing thin at the seams, much like Mr. Sleep’s overstuffed, badly cut blazer.

“Okay. But you gotta drive. I’ve had too drink toooo much.” Mr. Sleep stood up slowly, bracing himself on Anna’s left breast and tottering ever so slightly, much like a weeble wobble that’s had a few too many Jim Beams.

Anna and Mr. Sleep (Anna never bothered with names. Her only concern was the size of a man’s wallet and the time it took him to pass out. She did have the last vestiges of a conscience, and the less she actually knew about her prey the better.) made their way to the door after Sleep fumbled about with the tab, spilling the contents of his overstuffed wallet out onto the bar and only being able to reconcile his debt with the help of Fat Mike and…