I regret not mentioning this sooner, but an odd thing happened when I went to see Bad Santa a couple of weeks ago.
For several weeks prior, I had adopted the affectation of smoking Davidoff cigarillos, which are cigars roughly the size of a cigarette, my usually preferred nicotine delivery device. Kennedy smoked Davidoff's. I normally don't, but was so taken with the romance of Clint Eastwood's nameless gunslinger in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, that I had to dabble in that character's vice. Clint Eastwood, incidentally, never smoked and found the things awful and nausea-inducing. His character, taciturn and highly skilled, displays a queerly muted morality that borders on ambivalence. Such a figure tantalizes one like myself, who feels so uncertain about life as to induce apathy and aphasia. And so I began to smoke Davidoff's.
While the flavor of the cigarillos delights, the experience tends to feel hollow to one accustomed to the inhalation of cigarette smoke. The generally accepted manner of smoking cigars and their primary derivatives suffers not the smoke to enter the lungs, only to linger inside the mouth, where one savors the soft sweetness. An enjoyable diversion which when finished leaves a taste that is less enjoyable.
I had reached the midpoint of a Davidoff when I decided to leave for the film. Knowing that I did not want to sit all through the movie with that awful taste in my mouth, I grabbed a popsicle from the freezer with the intention of cleansing my palate after finishing the smoke. The popsicle, root beer flavored, was one of the last of a late springtime purchase and had been stored so long that it had undergone sublimation.
Sublimation is the process by which a solid becomes a gas and then returns to solid form, yet never enters the liquid phase. A common process employed for purification, the effects on a popsicle are delightful. A popsicle is composed of water, flavored syrup, and a wooden stick. When long kept in a freezer, the water evaporates and then crystallizes again around the popsicle, forming small tumors of pure ice around the base, while the syrup collects at the lower end of the popsicle's wrapper. It is always best to store popsicles so that the exposed wooden stick points away from the ground, so that the syrup pools around the tip of the treat and doesn't touch the part you must touch to enjoy the popsicle. One can then tear open the popsicle's paper pouch, remove the item by the clean handle, then lick the sticky liquid from out the bottom of the wrapper, bite off some clean ice to grind, and finally eat what remains, an unusually slender but otherwise normal popsicle.
I did not want to miss the beginning of the movie and I had timed myself poorly. I clenched my half-smoke between my teeth, pistolero style, and threw my bagged popsicle on the passenger seat of the car. I would take Fee Fee to Olive to the theater.
I sat in line on Fee Fee, waiting to turn left onto Olive. It was the middle of the day, but the traffic, as usual, had backed up a bit and I was certain of a fair wait. The lights at this intersection are timed to favor the traffic on Olive, leaving those wishing to turn at a disadvantage. The intersection, which leads from the heavily traveled Olive to Fee Fee, a road which feeds several subdivisions, has two gas stations so that the hummers and such have a place to pay exorbitant prices for gasoline. It was at the station to my left that the odd thing happened.
A small blue sedan faced me from the left of the pump. A young woman I believed to be around 26 years old was filling her tank. She wore imposing rectangular glasses of thick black plastic which are, I believe, quite the style. Her dark brown hair was cut all around at the length of her chin, creating a fetching parted curtain look which well framed her carefully painted features. She wore a dark navy jacket which parted to expose a cream colored blouse of exaggerated lapels. She wore pants with a bit of a flare and a sharp crease which, along with her mostly hidden but detectably long, pointed black shoes, created the impression that her lower half had been rendered with a handful of polygons.
To the right of the pump, a high school girl refuelled an oppositely aligned SUV jeep type car. Or truck, or car truck, or jeep. She, no more than 16, sported a white blouse and blue plaid skirt which signalled her student status at a local Catholic high school. She wore a light fleece jacket, had her long dirty blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail. Her pale complexion displayed the underlying network of blood vessels. In the cold weather, her cheeks shone purple like a drunk's.
I would like to take a moment to describe her footwear. She wore tan shoes with no socks. The shoes were of the style that resembles a stereotypical Dutch clog with the heel side of the shoe removed except, of course, for the sole. This removal allows the shoe to be slipped on and off, and it exposes the foot's heel and a significant portion of the instep. The instep, with its light blue web and wrinkled texture, resembles in these properties an erect cock. I may be influenced in this supposition by a piece of internet porn I saw some months ago which featured Mia Sweet being penetrated by another young woman's foot.
But this was not the scene at the gas station. In Neutral Milk Hotel's "Song vs Sex," 90's psychedelic songwriter and possible schizophrenic Jeff Mangum wrote about pornography's "looks of love" being "staged...a lie." Quite opposite, the looks which the two refuellers exchanged marked a tense and nervy line, they became visibly shaken as their gazes crossed. The younger woman's jacket slowly pulsed as her face darkened. The professional lost her grip on the pump as she drew her arm up as if to touch her sternum, halting midway in a tentative reach for the high schooler. Suddenly, the older woman jumped onto the concrete island and drew the copine into her embrace. The two began to kiss with no small degree of passion.
I wondered for a moment about the language used to describe the intensity of homosexual feeling. For gay men, the pejorative "flaming" is often used to describe the degree of one's homosexuality, as if such a property existed and had degrees of existence. Well, it does have a nice ring to it, I suppose, regarding ardour. Such a word, however, is never applied to lesbians, it seems, much less those in heterosexual couplings. At least, it is not used as singularly. Passion's flame may burn, but to mention a flamer is another matter entirely. In that same Neutral Milk Hotel song, a reference is made, again in a sexual context, to "pretty girls and burning men," a lyric which clearly centers sexual desire on the masculine object and uses a word which conjures up a homosexual connotation, which fits well with the rest of the song.
As for these two lovers, they kissed passionately as each wove her arm through the intricacies of the other's outfit, one slipping deftly between wide lapels, the older grasping underneath plaid decorated plaits. As the latter brushed up the thigh of the former and came close to its felonius destination, the younger woman lifted her head from her companion's shoulder and visibly gasped, then giggled. She apparently realized that she was still fuelling her car with her carnally unoccupied hand. In her coquettish manner, she found this quite amusing. She removed the fuel pump from her large vehicle and held it up in display for her companion.
The nozzle of the modern pump is a metal tube sheathed in a thick ribbed plastic which prevents gasoline fumes from seeping into the air as one fuels a car. I remember the time when these sheaths were first mandated. Previously, fuel pumps bore a sticker which warned of the dangerous nature of the fumes and the cancers they could cause. The modern nozzle saves us from this threat by loosely sealing the connection between the car's tank and the fuelling device. In fact, the pump will not dispense gasoline as long as this device is rigid and uncompressed, meaning that there is no such seal around the container. It is possible to circumvent this device for unique fueling needs by simply pushing the sheath back from the metal nozzle. Those familiar with the uncircumcised cock may draw their own filthy analogies to this process.
The high schooler, despite her age, must have been aware of the functioning of the nozzle. For the young woman began to behave in the least responsible manner possible. So taken with the novelty of her situation, she grabbed the plastic sheath of the nozzle in the manner described above. I can only speculate that she found the madness of her situation demanded that she act similarly outside reason, that she compound the unreality of the situation with an immature and unwise sexual joke regarding the fuelling device's mechanics.
Appalled at this lack of concern, I immediately threw my car's transmission into park, undid my seatbelt, exited and began to jog toward the pair. It was not until I screamed "carcinogen" that I remembered the cigarillo in my mouth, for as I reached the final syllable, my tongue dislodged the Davidoff from my teeth, causing it to flip with no small force towards the two. Quite apart from my paunch, distinctly unstylish and thorougly ungreen clothes, and none too hasty pace, I must have appeared like the cover of some World War II era comic book, screaming with such fierce determination that my butch cigar flew from my mouth. The Davidoff hit the ground parallel to my shoulders and then tragically rolled into the small pool of gasoline which wet the ground. By the time I understood the implications of this action, I could only stop my forward momentum and dash backwards lest I be engulfed.
When a human body burns, the flame's heat first cracks the skin. Newly liquified fat then catches fire as it begins to soak into clothing. There, the fat burns instead of the clothes, which act as a candle's wick, drawing fuel from inside the body. The resultant tremendous, constant heat turns the victim's body into ash.
Shaken and guilty, I thought ruefully of the popular psychedelic band the Beatles' penultimate statement on the album Abbey Road, that "the love you take is equal to the love you make." I found then as I do now that this statement is as true as it is gracefully worded, a poor rhyme for a shallow thought. I much preferred the sentiment of late 60's-early 70's psychedelic songwriter and almost certainly schizophrenic Syd Barrett, who noted "that's love, yeah yeah yeah yeah" in his song "Rats."
"Rats!" I thought as I reached for the popsicle by my side. I focused my thoughts on the opening of the wrapper and the enjoyment of the contents, rather than the grisly scene of incineration which passed beside my car. For all the drama of the conjugation and subsequent conflagration, it had not lasted long enough for the light to change, and I had thoroughly sucked the root beer slime from the paper wrapping by the time I made it onto Olive.
As for Bad Santa, I did not miss the beginning of the film, the entirety of which was quite enjoyable.
Posted by mattb at December 23, 2003 03:08 AM