From: cass8806@elan.glassboro.edu (KYLE CASSIDY)
Subject: blugh
Organization: Glassboro State College, Glassboro, NJ
Date: Thu, 30 Jul 1992 18:24:41 GMT

What Are You Looking 
For China White?






     She looks like she's dead or maybe now she's singing for the
Cure. Her hair is orange and knotted like she's been buffing it
with a carpet remnant, or quite possibly using it to stick balloons
to the ceiling. Her eyes are long and flat and black, curved
downwards at the ends, disguising cloaking her beauty with an
absurd mask of drunkenness.
     "Oh ... my ... GOD," she says, lurching to her feet and
careening towards us, falling into me, her arms wrapping around me
awkwardly, like parts of broken candles still held together by the
wick. "I can't believe you came, oh my GOD. Let me look at you!"
She reels back and starts plucking at my hair. "You're fucking
beautiful. You're fucking beautiful." She tries to kiss me on the
lips but I turn my head because I can see her boyfriend, Visconti,
sitting despondently behind her, a worried look on his scruffy
face. He's seen it before. He stands up, holding onto the back of
the chair.
     "You guys sure took your time," he slurs, "I called you at
one. What time is it now? It's like nine or ten or something."
     "It's five thirty," I say. He turns his wrist to look at his
watch and beer spills from the bottle out onto his feet. He doesn't
notice.
     "We're all fucked up," he says. Kristin is still holding onto
me, or more precisely, I am holding her up.
     "Where were you last night? For the party?" asks Visconti, his
voice viscious, "we've been up for forty-eight hours, straight, and
we're the only one's left. Everyone else left -- they couldn't take
it, and they went home -- but there's still beer. There's still a
party. There's us. Right?"
     "Right," I say, then pointing, "Everybdoy, this is Alden.
Alden this is everybody. This is Kristin and her boyfriend
Visconti. And that's the Lobster asleep on the floor over there."
Kristin takes a step back from me and inspects my roommate
drunkenly, with a squinting, uncertain, sneer on her face.
     "They call me China White," she says.
     "Thats right," I assure him, "they do."
     "Because I look like an oriental princess." She hiccoughs,
snorts and laughs.
     "That's beautiful," Alden is assuring her. Kristin does look
remotely Asian, although she is far too tall. She takes several
stuttering half steps towards him, her eyes riveted on his left
shoulder and he looks uncertain of what to do, as though he is
being introduced to some slavering monster of a relative, drooling
senile and a million years old, smelling of piss, that he is
expected to hug. She holds her arms raised limply in the air, like
a murderous puppeteer and finally she embraces him indelicately,
crashing around him like a tumbling house of Lincoln Logs.
     "Oh, do I get a hug?" he asks.
     I have always wanted to introduce Alden to Kristin. She is the
girl of his dreams; six foot one, dark skin, blond (most of the
time) hair, totally centerfold body, and most importantly, she is
irresponsibly and irrepressibly insane. But now that I look at his
face, which is peering over her shoulder, his hair plastered down
by her grip and the evening humidity, his features reveal none of
the enchantment and instant, staggering devotion which I had
expected. Instead he looks befuddled and amused, some crazy simmian
grinn on his face. She releases him and steps back, then paws at
his hair. "Oh god," she moans, "you're beautiful too. You're so
fucking beautiful. You're so fucking beautiful and you don't even
know it. You don't even know how beautiful you are." She looks down
at the floor now and I come to the realization that for perhaps the
first time in my life I am completely sober in a room filled with
people so drunk that they probably don't even know that I'm there.
I look at them and feel that I might move about among them like a
ghost, so rapidly that they would not see my actions. That I could
pick their pockets and steal their secrets and that no one would be
the wiser.
     "Grab yourselves a beer," says Visconti suspiciously eyeing
Alden, "help yourselves." I take a Miller ten ounce from the open
case on the table and set my coat down on a chair. Maybe two
hundred empty bottles are growing like a forest over the table,
leaving not an inch for anything else. A slice of pizza stands
vertical there, wedged cold between empty clear glass. I pick up
the slice and start to shove it into my mouth, making loud smacking
noisestrying urgently to appear as derranged and careless as the
others.
     "Who else is here?" I say, loudly again so that they can hear
me. I imagine them deaf as well as blind and I walk into the living
room where I see Nora Laura -- a beaming, flirtatious, and
vexatiously annoying woman of 27, who at one rash and obscure time
or another Alden and I had both briefly dated but whom neither one
of us ever expected to see again in our lives. She was a petulant
and disarming artist with a round face and almond eyes. At one time
she posessed in her shabby and dark apartment, draped with scarves
and smelling of quabbalistic Egyptian love oils, a cat named
Calamity Bitch as well as a crucified maniquin in her living room
which refferred to only as "The Guy." But I haven't been to her
apartment lately. In my head I catalogue the list of words that
come careening through when I see her: Charming, winsome,
provocative, perilous, obnoxious, ostentatious and blaring. I also
tick off her various crimes against culture, mostly fashion
related, though many of them have to do with singing. She is
sitting on the sofa, naked from the waist up, watching an x-rated
video tape on Visconti's huge color television.
     "Hey," she says, looking up and pointing the remote control at
me and pressing a button, as though to increase my volume or
perhaps contrast. "What's up?"
     I shrug. "We just got here. I came with Alden. You seem to be
all set."
     "I'm just trying to cool off," she says, briefly fanning
herself. Then coquettishly lifting one of her large, round breasts
in one hand she proceeds to lick it while looking salaciously at me
out of the corner of her large, dark eyes.
     "My nipples are hard," she points out needlessly.
     "I can see," I reply, then turning into the kitchen I say
loudly, "Hey Alden, you'll never guess who's naked in the living
room."
     Alden extracts himself from the kitchen delicately, as though
he is in a maze of razor blades constructed by the glances of
Visconti and his obfuscated girlfriend.
     "It's Nora Laura," I say, pointing as he steps carefully in
his worn boat shoes down the two stairs into the darkened room. On
the screen Samantha Strong is giving a decidedly uninspired blow
job to some short hairy guy wearing only tall, white, sweat socks.
Alden's eyes flit first to the television and then down to Nora. He
seems startled at first and I watch his eyes change size.
     "Nora," he says in a deep voice, "hey, hey."
     "Show him that trick you just showed me," I say.
     "What? This?" She takes her breast into her hand again and
sucks hungrily on the small, brown nipple.
     "What does she need us for?" I say.
     "I need a cock," she croaks, and her mouth gapes in a
screaming laugh, her huge white teeth are like prophetic
tombstones, "I'm hungry for it." She laughs again with her mouth
open wide enough that I could have lobbed a grapefruit down it if
I had one. I realize suddenly that everybody is speaking in
boldface.
     "Hey Kristin," shouts Nora without turning her head, "hey
Kristin, come in here darling, come in here."
     Drunkenly Kristin responds from the kitchen like a heard of
clumsy rhinocerous, leaving a piqued Visconti leaning back up
against the fridge, sipping from a beer and flapping a sandal
against his otherwise bare heel. Kristin staggers down the steps
and Nora says: "Isn't Kristin beautiful? Aren't you Kristin?"
     "Sure," says Kristin and her eyes are like heavy slits. Her
mascara is running as though she's either been crying or sweating.
     "Show them your tits," commands Nora. She reaches out and puts
her hand on Kristin's leg, "Kristin has beautiful tits." Kristin
grins and her eyes disappear while she pulls maladroitly at her top
with both hands until her breasts fall out like fruit from a
grocery bag. They bounce and come to a stop.
     "Oh Christ," says Alden, covering his eyes.
     Kristin smashes her breasts together and rubs them.
     "Kristin is so beautiful," says Nora.
     "We're sisters," adds Kristin, pulling her top back down and
smiling a perfect orange-wedge of a smile, "we're going to be
sisters because we're the same."
     "We have the same breasts," Nora points out, and it is true
that there breasts are very similar.
     "What are you doing?" I shout, directing my comment at
Visconti, who looks forlorn and abandoned, "is this a party? What
the hell kind of party is this? I thought you said there was a
party? Naked women and pornos?" Visconti shrugs.
     "You should have been here earlier," says Nora, "Kristin and
I were dancing on the hood of the car and we were naked and all the
little neighborhood boys were standing in the street watching us
and we kept going like this," here she illustratively grabs her
breasts and aims them at me like a pair of crazy bazookas, "and
their little peckers were getting hard and they were saying 'ooh,
what's this in my pants?' and I said, 'Do you like it?' They won't
be getting any sleep tonight!" She cackles again and shakes her
head so that her long brown hair covers her nakedness entirely.
Kristin is still grinning like an idiot and leaning up against the
stereo now.
     "Why don't you put some music on?" says Visconti from the
kitchen and I push Kristin gently aside and kneel down in front of
the CD player and shove something in. And when it starts Nora jumps
up and starts thrashing her head around. I notice for the first
time that she's wearing pair of jean shorts and that her hair is so
long that it hangs down below the ragged cut of the denim,
swinging.
     "What's this?" asks Kristin.
     "It's Pearl Jam," I say, "Pearl Jam. Where do you live? Under
a rock?" 
     "Huh?" she groans quizzically and I rap on her forehead with
my knuckles a few times, like I want to get in and she laughs and
goes to push me away but she's so drunk that when she pushes me,
she looses her balance and falls down onto the sofa.
     "Hehehehe," she giggles, "I'm laying down now."
     I follow Nora out into the kitchen and the last thing I see in
the living room is Alden and Kristin sitting down together on the
sofa, watching the porno movie and Kristin is leaning across
Alden's lap, touching his hair.
     "We should wake this guy up," says Visconti, poking at the
Lobster with the toe of his sandal. The Lobster, beet red and two
hundred and twenty pounds, is laying in front of the speaker, arms
folded across his chest and a smile on his face. "He's been asleep
since noon," invokes Visconti disdainfully, poking him again. The
Lobster however remains inert and oblivious. I finish my beer and
fish another one from the box on the table. For a moment, as I am
opening the bottle I think that there is a Marine Corps emblem on
it and I wonder if it is some Desert Storm commemorative beer or
something, but then I read the label and it only says "America's
Quality Beer" and I guess that it's only a coincidence.
     "Doesn't that look like the Marine Corps logo?" I say, holding
the bottle out to Nora, like she's really going to be able to tell.
She takes the bottle from my hand, and instead of looking at it,
she shoves it slowly into her mouth, bobbing her head up and down
suggestively a few times, taking almost the entire length of the
bottle down her neck before tilting her head back and drinking from
it, maybe an inch of glass rising vertically out of her mouth. She
hands the bottle back to me and squats over the Lobster, allowing
beer to dribble from her lips onto his face. He grunts and rolls
over -- looks up disgustedly.
     "What the fuck are you doing?" he demands, wiping beer from
his face.
     "Waking you up," says Nora.
     "When the hell did you get naked?" he remarks, observing her
dangling breasts.
     "When you fell asleep and I knew that I'd have to satisfy
myself, sailor."
     "I'm going outside," I say, setting the half filled beer down
on the window sill and getting a fresh one from the box. "Things
are getting entirely too weird in here for me."
     And somehow I'm sitting outside on a lawn chair and Visconti
is sitting on the grass next to me, and there is a six pack between
us and I've a broken, unlit cigarette shoved between my teeth,
drunk, and trying to look like Franklin Roosevelt.
     Visconti is saying: "The only way I can deal with it is to
pretend that it isn't happening. I mean, I know that she's
beautiful and I know that guys look at her all the time."
     "But she's drunk," I say, "she doesn't know what she's doing
and she won't remember it in the morning."
     "But tell me I'm not feeling it now," he says, "I know that
she's in there, making out with your roommate -- I mean, it's
hardly fair to say that since she's going to get drunk and fuck
other guys I might as well get used to it. I mean, this sort of
shit happens four or five times a week, every time she goes out,
she gets fucked up and she gets fucked. You know? and the next
morning she doesn't remember any of it, but it hurts me man, you
know? It hurts me right here." He thumps his chest.
     "But you know," he goes on, "the only thing that matters is
this, is the air, is walking outside and being able to breathe the
fucking air. I mean, some people just don't know what they've got.
I travelled the world, I travelled this country. I used to be in
the Navy. I travelled across this country from New York to
California maybe five times and I always said: New Jersey sucks, I
hate New Jersey. I Don't want to live in New Jersey. And you know
what? It's taken me a long time to realize this, but it's not New
Jersey, I mean, look at this place, it's beautiful. That tree over
there, just look at that fucking tree. People who say that they
hate New Jersey just aren't paying any fucking attention to what's
going on around them. You know? This place is beautiful, and the
Pine Barrens, they're amazing, but you've just got to go outside
and look at them, you've just got to see them for what they are.
And that's the only thing that matters, fucking living. It's not
about you, or me, or her, it's only about this. This fucking world
that's out here, and if you can live at peace with this fucking
world, then nothing else matters and it doesn't matter who the fuck
Kristin is fucking. It's the grass between your toes. I used to be
a glider pilot; for five years I was a glider pilot; and I'd sail
around and the only sound you here is shhhhhh, like just the air
and shit, and it's completely silent and all you can feel is the
plane moving up and down in the air, like it's catching you like
your mother and holding you like it loves you, and that's nothing:-
- flying is nothing -- the real feeling is when you land on the
ground and you step out and there's just grass under your feet and
you're back on the planet and you know that it loves you and that
your part of it. You know?"
     Then suddenly, with a clandestine crash, the door swings open,
banging up against the side of the house and Kristin pours out like
a wave of determined uncertainty. She is crying and there are
shimmering tears deluging down her face, making it wet.
     "There you fucking are," she says, looking violently down at
Visconti. "Here's the fucking asshole." She turns her head and
addresses these words loosely to Nora, who is standing behind her
with her top still off and the swell of her breasts only hinted at
in the dark air.
     "What's up hun?" he says.
     "You know what's up, you fucking bastard," she slurs. She
mumbles something and drops the beer that she is carrying. It
crashes to the patio beside me and there is a white spider growing
across the concrete, foam hissing.
     "Careful of your feet! Stay right there!" Visconti warns,
getting up and stepping over me. He puts his arms around her and
goes to lift her up, to carry her back into the house.
     "Get off me, you fucking bastard," she shrieks, swatting him
on the shoulders. She wriggles from his grasp like a greased
sausage and comes down hard on a shard of glass then she is
screaming. Visconti picks her up and carries her to the car and
sets her down on the front seat. With the door open I can see that
there is blood on her foot, not much, but a thin red trickle
slicing down from the ball towards the heel. Kristin is laying back
on the front seat and crying as Visconti pulls the sliver out. He
gets up and is headed to the house when Alden comes out.
     "What's going on?" he asks.
     "Kristin stepped on some glass," I say.
     "Wow."
     "I'm gonna get a towel and I'm gonna wash it off," says
Visconti, "she's done this before."
     "I have to go to work tomorrow," says Alden and I nod.
Visconti nods too.
     "Thanks for coming over guys," he says and shakes hands with
both of us. His hand is dry and cold. "Don't be strangers."
     Alden and I walk over to the car where Kristin's legs are
dangling askew from the drivers side door, looking white and false,
like Marilyn's protruding from the vault. She is passed out and
Nora is sitting in the passengers seat with Kristin's head cradled
into her lap, slowly brushing her breasts across Kristin's mouth
and face.
     "Good night," says Alden, leaning down and looking into the
car, "It was nice meeting you Kristin. Good to see you again Nora."
     Neither of them make a sound. As nothing more than formality,
I twist my hand in an insincere wave to these people who don't
really care anyway.
     "What do you want?" I say as we are walking down the driveway
towards the car.
     "What?" asks Alden. But I am not talking to him.




				# # #






k. bradley cassidy
cass8806@elan.glassboro.edu
replies and comments welcome
Newsgroups: talk.bizarre,alt.politics.bush,alt.politics.clinton