I was jogging alongside the athletically - if not aesthetically - inspiring full-scale replica Parthenon in Nashville's Centennial Park on a warm sunny Friday afternoon, after getting a $5 beauty-school haircut by a skilled gay Southerner named Cody, when I saw her: a cool beauty a la Scarlett Johansson reading a book on the steps facing West End Avenue. She paused to look down & then smiled at me as I passed in my black shorts & tanktop.
I smiled back & kept on running, absorbing that young beauty's implied encouragement, thinking "It's high time to end this sexual drought." To be surrounded by so much feminine beauty without a lover is a torture akin to spending a series of nights in the spiked embrace of a medieval "iron maiden" device. I feel like a romantic heretic in the bloody hands of some Kafkaesque Inquistion, baffled by the senseless cruelty of involuntary celibacy.
The night before, a drop-dead gorgeous olive-skinned 24-year-old singer named Marcy, a woman of Hungarian/Roma & Polish ancestry who hails from Traverse City (Michigan), sat next to me on the sofa at Music City Hostel. We talked while drinking wine & half-watching men in silly costumes figure-skate in Vancouver. She gave me her CD & suggested that I might become her manager when she returns to Chicago. I'd rather be her lover, but neither scenario is likely, so I'll just enjoy the fantasy. I gave her a Hot Club of Rambler City gypsy-jazz CD & an article about Django Reinhardt. Oh, and my contact info, of course.
"A good novel is like a punch in the face," wrote Franz Kafka. And seeing a beautiful woman - who you know won't sleep with you - is like a punch in the solar plexus: it takes your breath away, but leaves a lingering bruise on your heart.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment