Into The Fire

[MalReynolds]

Multi-parted, like Tin Cowboy.

-

This is my suicide note. This is my swan song. Those of you reading it are about to be entreated to one of greatest deceptions ever pulled on me, ever, and if you were expecting something else – perhaps an allegory, perhaps a morality play, then please leave now. Close this volume, walk away, and forget you ever picked it up again. This is no land of morality, this is no land of justice. This is the land of my death.

After talking to Marlene, I finally figured out where it all started. What sparked the entire mess, and that was Julie Cunningham. Julie Cunningham is a cute girl with burned out eyes and a friendly smile. She had soft hands – very soft hands – and came from rich parents. Julie Cunningham was my first girlfriend, in the fifth grade, but that didn’t last. Not many things last in the fifth grade.

Julie Cunningham, the girl with soft hands and dead eyes, loved cocaine beyond all reason. She loved it more than she loved me, she loved it more than she loved her friends, and she loved it more than she loved loyalty. Julie’s nose was best friends with cocaine. Her nerves were roommates with the powerful feeling that only the white powder can deliver. Her soft, subtle frame that could easily trick you onto your knees had only one weakness.

She could get you off without even touching you, she was that good, and that was all thanks to the coke. You had to be creative if you wanted to keep up with the inflationary prices. You had to be WITH IT, even if you came from money, to keep up such an expensive habit, boyfriend, mistress, blow-job.

Julie was nothing short of amazing. She had soft brown hair, long tapered fingers, a laugh that you would kill for and a smile that you would die for, but she didn’t keep anyone. She didn’t keep anyone other than white powder. She was a loner, and if you didn’t know that, you were as good as kidnapped.

I was not engaged to Julie Cunningham. I did not have sex with her, she never got me off without using her hands. I knew about her – people got to talking – and I stayed away. I stared at her with contemptuous eyes.

I didn’t come from money. I didn’t come from poverty, either, but I did come from the lower middle class. And in a city like this, if you came from lower middle class, you knew to hate the rich kids. They could and would make your life a living hell with the drop of a top-hat and cane.

So, I was not engaged to Julie Cunningham, moreover, I loathed her. I wished her to un-exist, and I wanted nothing more to do with her life than what transgressed in fifth grade (which by all standards of dating today ‘wasn’t much to speak of.’) and the eventual breakup.

And I did not know the role Julie Cunningham would come to play into this until much later, until it was already too late.

I’m staring at the pill bottle pretty hard. Maybe if I concentrate, the number will double and it can be a sure thing. I hope so. Marlene doesn’t even know what I’m about to do, and I trust her with everything… Despite the fact that – Well, despite her stature. She doesn’t come from money, but she comes for money.

Now you know about Julie.

Let me tell you about another girl. One who was infinitely more important to me than Julie, one who meant the world and a half, if that was possible. I would have lassoed the moon (Thanks, James Stewart) and given it to her in a heartbeat.

Wendy Millan. Such an average name for such an above average – I won’t say woman, no, because I want you to be as enamored with her as I used to be – angel. Long, red hair, milky white skin, green eyes, and quite frankly, a body that wouldn’t quit. A good girl. A girl that went to Church every Sunday and made sure to pray.

I met Wendy – well, the devil is in the details, suffice to say I met her and she met me and within a week we were holding hands, I was carrying her books, we were kissing before class and stealing away to the theatre to cuddle. She was perfect – and when she won Prom Queen of Westing High, I was proud, despite not even getting a kingly nomination.

She invited me up on stage. The Prom King was furious, sure, but she always had a way with words.

Prom night, we had sex for the first time.

When we finished, she rolled over and spilled a couplet into my ear before passing out.

“You were a wet dream for the prom queen.”

Any case of the shakes or inadequacy I had before that moment were long gone with the simple utterance of that phrase, such a simple phrase that melted me. I was hers and she was mine and we were together.

We had even planned on going to the same colleges, see? There’s a nice local one, cheap, but if you survive there, you can survive anywhere. The brochure makes it look much nicer than it actually is, but getting accepted to Westing is much more difficult than you would think.

But we both got it.

We did it, her and I, we got accepted to the same college. The day we got the letters, she cried and I held her. It was Norman Rockwell, minus the parents.

Mine had died in an avalanche.

Her’s had passed on a cruise.

We had each other and not a lot of money. We emancipated ourselves from our Godparents the second we got our acceptance letters. I took a job flipping burgers and boiling fries, and she – Well, I thought she worked in a Saks.

I know there wasn’t enough time for you to fall as completely in love with her as I had, but time is running short, I fear. Someone will notice their pills are gone, someone will notice the bathroom door is shut, and that’d be the end of it.

So, let’s delve, shall we?

Take a look at this standard hotel on the corner of Wilmouth Avenue. Kind of a shady area to be sure, but not bad. Twenty stories high, and in every window you can see the same unenthusiastic ****ing, girls with dead eyes like Julie hopping up and down like they were on a super bounce, the only variable in each window is bra on, or off.

The only reason it’s really appealing would have to be the spacious front door and friendly desk clerk.

If you stood on the corner across from the hotel, you could see many, many things. Nice Christian girls going in with rosaries on, coming out with their rosaries off. Priests, preaches, upstanding members of society, the rich, the poor – they would all congregate at the Wilmouth Suites for the simple pleasure in life of soliciting a prostitute.

I myself have never been to the Wilmouth Suites, but Marlene has told me about them.

Lawyers, virgins, teen lovers – it was a place to get off and get away.

And if you were standing on the corner on the night of May Fifth, you would have seen Wendy Milan tentatively enter the hotel. You would wonder, “Well, what exactly is an angel like that doing in a seedy place like the Wilmouth Suites?”

There are a thousand answers, but only one of them is right.

She could be going there, trying to drum up business for Saks, but Wendy didn’t really work at Saks. She could have been going there, trying to get directions on how to get away from there, but that’s not the case either.

No, the real answer to “What exactly is angel like that doing in a seedy place like the Wilmouth Suites,” is, “Paying off a debt.”

But the answer, as simple as I would like it to be, isn’t really that simple at all.

Enter Julie Cunningham, ex-angel, coke fiend extrordinaire.

Now were going to flash back a few weeks before the Wilmouth Suites.

And we’re going to watch a scene unfold between two very smart people.

Wendy and Julie.

-

[ShastaTwist]

Encore, whore.

[FoJaR]

can i get an encore

[MalReynolds]

Wendy and Julie had been friends long before I started dating Julie and stopped being friends shortly after. I didn’t find this out from Marlene, I found this out from Wendy during casual conversation. In the third grade, they were the best of friends, and Julie was someone with substance, a girl that you could really trust.

Oh, how times change.

I’m not exactly sure the details of everything that followed, but I’ll tell it to you with the best of my recollection. I’m going to be filling in some of the gaps as we come along with what I can only assume happened, based on what Marlene has told me.

Before you ask, I do trust Marlene implicitly. Her and I share many of the same ideals and have shared some of the same ordeals. I’m fractured, too, maybe in my mind, so maybe I trust her when I shouldn’t, but I can’t tell the difference anymore. I don’t think I shouldn’t trust her.

Wendy and I had gotten our acceptance letters.

Here’s an excerpt from my journal.

“March 10th.

“The letters came in the mail today. I was nervous, but not for myself. I was fairly confident that I got into Westing – my scores on the SATs were in the upper echelon for someone with my class load. I was more worried for Wendy. But if she didn’t get in, I wouldn’t tell her I got in. We would suffer the winds together.

“But she did get in, thank God. As much as I love her, I don’t think I could have lived as happily without attaining my full potential. But I would have done it for her. I would have gone to some second rate school.

“Because regardless of the date, I plan on asking Wendy to marry me.”

That’s one of them. I didn’t write again for the next few days – I was occupied with Wendy. She had said yes.

“March 14th.

“I was walking home from dropping of job applications up and down the road and I came across a small dog. He looked at me with disdain, even though his fur was matted and covered with dirt. Perhaps it’s just my mind playing tricks on me – how silly it seems that a dog would look upon me with disdain!

“The doctor said I should start taking anxiety pills to stop the shakes I get when I’m under duress and I couldn’t help but agree with him. When he was writing the prescription, he mumbled a few things about it being a controlled narcotic, that I had to see him every time I needed the prescription to be refilled and he would turn me over the police if he suspected I was abusing them.

“It’s no problem. I don’t even have anxiety attacks very often, although the sight of the dog staring at me with its brown head ****ed sideways was enough to make my face flush. It was standing in front of a butcher’s shop, and I could only assume it was either a scrappy young vagrant or it belonged to the man who ran the shop.”

It continues like this for some time. I’m going to skip to the important part.

“She said yes! We’re looking at wedding halls, and although the ring I bought her is nothing more than sterling silver, she knows full well the intention behind it. She said it didn’t matter if it was plastic, or platinum. She loved it either way.”

That’s the important part. She loved it either way. It was a ring that cost me around forty dollars and it was the wrong size, and she still loved it. Instead of keeping it around her finger, she laced a chain around it and put it around her neck.

So there’s another piece of it. We were to be wed, although if you’re reading this, I can only assume you already knew that. I don’t think the wedding party should ever doubt my intentions – they knew I was to marry her.

The best laid plans of mice and men, and all that.

I’m having trouble deciding the order of events to write down, and how to properly explain how they transgressed. Since I fear my time may be short, I think I shall go in reverse order, starting with the most important event and working my way backwards to the engagement. Hopefully, this will help shed more light, in case I find I have to terminate this letter at a bad time.

-

June 23rd.

Our wedding day.

It was going to be nice. A local church, brick and mortar, our Godparents, friends, and friends of the family coming to see us walk down the aisle.

I had taken the last of my anxiety pills because despite how much I was ready for the rest of my life, there is always the inopportune feeling of nerves that will course through your body, the slightest whiff of adrenaline setting off your most primal urges when you’re staring down a road that will encompass the rest of your existence.

We even had the local constable come to make sure everything was in order. I insisted upon this detail. Wendy had fought it for some time, she was under the impression that everything was going to go all right between us and that there would be no need for anything such as law enforcement.

Her motives, how obscure.

The dressing room was much smaller than I had hoped, but I had very little trouble getting into my tuxedo. There were a few men gathered around me – friends of my Godfather, I could only assume, and they kept cracking jokes about the bachelor party the night before. It hadn’t been all that interesting for me – I kept my hands to myself and my eyes near my shoes.

And then the organ started playing, and I hurried down the aisle to stand stalwart in front of the preacher and his organist. There was a small choir of teenagers that were giving it their all the make this small time wedding seem much more grand than it really was.

My heart was in the sky when I saw Wendy walking down the aisle. She looked beautiful in her second hand white dress. I couldn’t take my eyes off of her.

She stood less than a foot away from me, staring me in the eyes. I could smell her breath, sweet and hot drift across the expanse. I could tell what kind of perfume she was wearing, and that she had only enough time to put one contact lens in.

The preacher began talking, but it was nothing but a low drone to my ears. All I could hear was my breath coming out in short rasps and her sighs. Everything was muffled as if a plastic bag had been placed firmly over my head – my breath could not exceed a distance of three feet before being sucked back into my lungs.

And I saw the world through this bag, the formless shapes sitting in the aisle, the familiar red hair of the constable, but it was all a blur. The only thing visible to me was Julie. No, Wendy. How odd that I should write Julie.

Like a bag being ripped from my face, a rush of cold air hit and my vision cleared when the preacher delivered the penultimate line, “Until death do us part?”

“I do.”

That was me. I said I do.

“I do.”

That was her. She said it was well.

And then we kissed.

-

It was a short drive to the reception. I was down to my white shirt and cummerbund, the jacket having left my back long ago, almost immediately after I was out the door, and Wendy had managed to knock her dress down half of a size. In the ten minutes it took to get down to the reception area, which was a local skating rink that had given up their floor just for us, but five of those were spent removing various articles of clothing to make the dancing easier.

The other five were spent, our foreheads touching, holding hands, staring at each other, like birds.

The sound system in the rink was nothing less than absurd. It cracked and static burst every time there was a hint of bass in the classical arrangement Wendy and I had agreed upon.

It was so much so that I could not stand to be on the floor after the first dance. My Godfather took Wendy for the second, and I went for a walk outside. I told everyone that I would be right back, but my voice was lost over the noise emitting from the speakers.

I went for a stroll, jacket slung over my back, being held with one finger like some kind of noir detective. It was too cold outside, that was to be sure. And as I walked past the alley between the skating rink and another nameless building, I managed to hear a brief snippet of conversation coming from two workers who had been at the wedding.

“Quite a nice ceremony.”

“That’s true.”

They were dragging a trashcan down the alley, so I could only make out the conversation when they stopped pulling the metal down the brick.

“The bride looked spectacular.”

“That’s also true.”

“But should she really be wearing white like that?”

I had to smile, because I had no idea that at the moment they weren’t referring to her and I and our healthy sexual relationship.

“And the groom doesn’t even know!”

Drag, scrape, drag, scrape.

“What an oblivious idiot.”

Scrape, scrape, drag.

Oh, and by the way, at this point, I had stopped smiling.

[FoJaR]

oh man poor fella!

[MetalMethodMan]

Ouch... Man, I can only imagine what could have happened to him. I have to read more, this is great.

[MalReynolds]

I have some good news and bad news then:

The good news: This story isn't dead.

The bad news: The way I want to be the story to be told and the way its currentley written do not congeal and are counter productive. So I'm abandoning the thread and will start a new one when I finish "The Tin Cowboy."

With a new spiffy title.

[mead1]

Awwww. I was really enjoying it. Oh well, Tin Cowboy is an excellent read, so I can't really complain.