Crooners of July

Content Type: Fiction, Shorts Subject Matter: music, onomatopoeia, sex

Baby, they’re crooning. They’re crooning to me over the AM radio with its static coming in like waves in this hot, humid air. I’m leaning in my window, just taking it in as the heat takes the life outta me. I’m sweating but I’m cool, cuz I got crooners, singing it like sugar.

The megalithic air conditioner next to me’s busted. Trent took a swing at it last time he was here and knocked it hellways to Sunday, so now I don’t got no AC. It’s chill, though. Cuz I got me crooners and I gots me a moon, and that means I own the night, with its twinklings and its wooshings and its leanings. Leaning like the buildings seem to lean over the streets, looming at us as we waltz on by, half drunk and the other half skunked, as we stumble on in too-high shoes and laugh raucously. Leaning like those skunk-drunk girlies who leer like prostitutes at any piece of flesh they pass, tipsy-like. The night leans like I lean out my window, bra-less in my sleepshirt and breathe it in. It feels cooler out here somehow, with Frankie on my radio and streetlamps bathing me in their glow. So cool it makes me wanna dance and sway, right here in my window, in the oversized t-shirt that still doesn’t quite cover my butt so my panties show to all the world. Or all the world that cares to see what goes on in Apartment 9B at 1am on a hot July night.

Bet you thought I’d say August, didn’t you? Everybody says August. If it’s hot, it must be August, they think, but not ‘round here. Here the city bakes no matter what time of summer it is. Summer’s just one big oven you’ve gotta stumble your way through, same way you scuttle through winter slush til it thaws out inta spring. Spring and fall are enigmas. They come and before you know it they’re gone. A few days of perfect weather and then we’re caught in the extreme again, pushed and pulled and tugged and shoved, but we’ve gotta keep passing over that center point. July’s the center of the year, so right here it’s July. Not August. Tough shits if you don’t like it.

I’ve lived here a long time. Not all of it in this tiny apartment, just a long, long time in this ugly, baking city. I did my time. I went to preschool and dayschool and middle school and high school and then I even did some college. ‘Nuff to get me a job working reception for a 24-hour doctor’s office down the street and a couple’a blocks over. They don’t talk to me ‘bout doctoring and I don’t make then listen to my crooners. It’s a deal and it works like clockwork.

There used to be a clock over what used to be a bank that sat across the street from what is now my apartment, but this part’a town’s long since been too run down for that kinda shit. Now it’s a dance club and a bar and a delicatessen, and the clock was took down for a big sign that says Marty’s. I can tell you one thing- I ain’t never seen this Marty fella, but if I do, I’m gonna kick his ass for putting his bigass name right in front of my window. A lady can’t sleep with all that bright pink light streaming in. I ask you- what kinda man named Marty wants his name in lights in _pink_?

At any rate, I can’t tell what time it is anymore just by looking out the window. I used to be able to, right when I first moved in. The bank was closed but the clock still worked. Then Marty moved in and now all I get’s fluorescent whatnot. But Marty’s major business hours are winding down and the sign’s not so bright right now, so instead of pink, I’m bathed in golden streetlamp, and I feel like a goddess of the night, in a shiny gold skin and my clean white t-shirt.

I can’t help it. There’s a groove coming from Marty’s and my crooners are really on it tonight, they’re singin’ it like it is, baby, and I just can’t stop my butt from raisin’ itself and wiggling round and around. “I am here!” it says, shaking itself in the window as the rest of me follows, exhilarated. “I am here and I dance, and you can shove it if you don’t like it! Take that, Marty’s! I don’t need no cover charge to be free!” So I dance and I shimmy and I turn up the radio, laughing as I do so because it is Saturday night and I am wild.

There are always people passing on the streets beneath me. Going by to clubs or going home or calling cabs or finding whores. They never look up; they are always too busy to see me. One time I sat out here with my middle finger up for a whole long hour and nobody noticed, they was all so wrapped up in their stupid ol’ lives. I have a life, too, ya know. And right now I’m dancing it. And right now, some guy’s stopped in the flow of the river of people and he is looking up at me.

He isn’t Trent. I can see that even in the briefest of moments when I first catch sight of him, in the time it takes for me to realize that I have been spotted, and that it’s a man, and that he is handsome, and that he isn’t someone I know. In the next moment I falter, my rhythm broken. I’ve been seen and I’m caught. Caught in the act of enjoying my life and my body, like my mama meant me to. Halfheartedly, my muscles continue though my mind has stopped and my eyes are on something else. They are trained on the guy down on the street below, as he looks back at me, and he doesn’t care when people bump into him. He isn’t Trent.

Trent is my “manager”. He thinks that I can sing, or dance, or act, or one or all of those, and he wants to try to make money off me. Off _my_ apparent talent, mind you. I don’t really like him, but he’s good for a screw, cuz he thinks that I look up to him, that I want him to represent me, but really I just want him to stop being so full of himself and go make himself useful. Like by fixing my air conditioner instead’a breaking it. He hangs around only cuz I let him, and someday I’m gonna throw all his stuff out my window. Maybe some guy at Marty’s will pick it up and use it to wipe their toilets.

My eyes are locked with the stranger’s. Even from this far away, I can see that they are dark, darker than his hair and his eyebrows and even his eyelashes. Yes, I can see his eyelashes from here, and I think they are a paler brown, but it’s hard to tell in this golden light. He has his hands in his pockets; a sweatshirt or something, Lord knows why. It’s ninety something degree even though the sun’s been down forever. Stored heat in the concrete, you know. But he’s looking at me, and he doesn’t seem to care, so I look back at him, and I don’t really care that I’m not wearing a bra, even if I was just dancing to the crooners. Somewhat impulsively, I want to invite him up.

You’ve got to understand, though, that I don’t normally do those things. Sure, I’ll fuck around with Trent when he’s here cuz, ya know, he’s Trent. Not like he wouldn’t be trying to get into my pants anyway, so why not take advantage of him before he does it to me? I should be getting something more out of this deal than some motormouth hanging around my apartment and drinking all my beer.

Yeah-huh, so I put my hands on the windowsill, leaning out just a little bit, letting my panties show down to the street. I wonder what he’s like, if his lips are real smooth, or his hair is real soft. It looks soft from up here, all shiny and gleaming and clean. I don’t know many guys with clean hair, not like that. For that matter, he looks like he knows how to shave, and that’s important too.

A new song comes on, and I can feel myself swaying already. I close my eyes and let my hips pick it up, find the beat, bring it home. I straighten up and let my body go, moving and swaying to the rhythm of my lounge lizards. I’m lazy like them and alive like them. I am trapped in this moment; only my window and the street below exist. I am a princess- I am Rapunzel cheering on her suitor. I am Juliet calling to her Romeo- but I am teasing him, too, and I know it. I think he knows it, too, because he is still standing below me, the only boulder in a preoccupied river.

I twist. I bend. I rock, and I feel every inch of my body. Words like “sinuous” keep me going. I don’t know where I heard that word. Nobody gets me cuz I use words like that. They don’t get how I can be a street kid and a scholar at the same time. “They’re different sides of the same coin,” I tell them, and they just shake their heads at me. Well, that’s their deal and this is mine. Cuz no scholar knows how to swing her hips quite like I do and no street girl’s got the finesse to do it right. Sensual-like.

I can feel his eyes all over me. He held back at first but now he’s tempted and I’m reeling him in. He’s feeling it too. He’s here inside the room with me, not on the street anymore; he’s here and he’s touching me, dancing with me. We don’t care who sees us down on the street below because we are in a different world from them. His hands are smooth but rough; hard but not, ya know? Guy’s hands. Short nails. A little hairy. Delicious hands. The hands I always knew I _really_ wanted holding me, not some pansy-ass manicured, inhuman ones. He wraps one around my waist and lets the other play in the air with mine as I leave one on his shoulder. He’s just that perfect bit taller than me, and his eyes are brown. Toffee. I stare into them as we swing together, my lounge lizard serenading us not two feet away.

It’s heady in here, with the heat and the pink and the gold and the dark. He spins me, and I come back to him, my hips lining up perfectly with his. I am wearing a smooth summer dress, the kind that just flows down your torso, and he is in dress pants and a button-up shirt… but he’s left the top buttons undone just for me. The party is over and we are the last ones on the floor, the last couple dancing at the wedding, long after everybody else has left. His nose is just a little tiny bit crooked, like someone beat it that way when he was little. His eyes are smiling at me as his free hand finds its way to my neck and I start to smile back before he kisses me. It doesn’t matter how hot it is outside, because all I can feel right now is the heat that we two create.

Languorous. That’s me. Swimming through the air and tasting imaginary lips with only the crooners for company. Baby. My eyes are still closed from that kiss I can taste in my mind, but when I open my lips for air, the illusion is broken, and I am back in apartment 9B, in front of my grubby old window, looking down onto my street, lit by Marty’s and the streetlamps and the occasional car driving by the delicatessen. Wistfully, I open my eyes, and drop them down to the pavement below. But it is empty. Taken aback, I lean out the window, the better to search. Where’d that motherfucker go?!

He is walking away. His hands still in his pockets, just another body in the sea of bodies. I can’t believe it. My skin has a fresh sheen of sweat on it, and he’s walking away, like he doesn’t care, like we have shared nothing at 1am on a Saturday night in my street. He doesn’t even stop at the crossroad, just keeps on going with a li’l look left and right, to make sure he doesn’t get run over. I lose him beyond the next streetlamp, in the twilight between gold circles.

My hair is plastered to the back of my neck. Drunken party girls laugh as they stumble home, and it’s an ugly noise. My crooners try to comfort me, singing their songs of broken loves and far-off homes. The radio DJ comes on, with his too-smooth, too-calm voice, reminding me what time it is and that I can donate to the station, if I have the money next week with my next paycheck. But I don’t hear him; I’m still staring into the darkness. Resolutely, I shake myself off.

‘I hope he’s got the mother of all boners,’ I think maliciously, and I slam the window closed.