The Short Stories Of Mila Strictzer (8) "Its alright, he was only chewing my boot." "Fuck, my head is spinning, " John said and then, "Don't say it, Joel." After a few moments, the exhausted team fell asleep again. Somewhere in the dark desert night, the dog that they thought was dead for sure crawled a few more feet before the life finally left it for good. ***For more on this story, read the complete book, Scarecrow Solider, by the same author, Tex Strozier There was a cut out newspaper advertisement on the kitchen table that she had put there to remind herself. It said, "vaginal laser treatment can change your whole essence. Act now and receive a half-price discount." Her apartment was on the west side of town, not too far from the strip, in Las Vegas. It was just a short drive down the highway from her apartment to the strip club where she danced almost every night, except when she got tired or too sick and she had to take a couple of days off. If she was high, that didn’t matter, she could still make it to work and perform. Her apartment was set up in a leopard skin motif, which was over everything; the couch, her bed, even the toilet. At night she would drive to work in her new sports car, pay the retainer fee to the shift manager and work the minimum number of hours required. She would take her outfit in her bag over her shoulder like the professional dancer she knew herself to be and get changed in the back room with the other girls. Some of girls were a little older, around thirty or so but most of them were in their early twenties and very pretty. Nearly every one of them had had plastic surgery on their breasts, but the few who did not were still able to get plenty of action in other ways. The club was packed every Friday and Saturday night. She always made money and on some nights she would make a lot of money. She had all of her lines down to a science; what to say to egg the men on a little, what to say to build up their confidence and what to say to get into their wallet. Occasionally, there would be a smart ass but he would get the treatment real fast. Once in a great while, a man would play her along so well that she would be fooled into wasting her time with him without taking any of his money. But men like that were few and far between. They all wanted just one thing and she fucking knew it, too. But what she really wanted was her sugar daddy to come riding in on his white horse. And she knew he was out there, too, somewhere. When she found him, she would get him, too. It was only a matter of time. There had been a couple that had come close and she could have had them, easy, but she was quick to see that they were not what she was looking for. So she had decided to just let them go. "Hi, Lisa. How are you, tonight?" "I’m tired. And I didn’t get to eat. How are you?" "Things are okay, you know." "Sure." "What happened with your date?" "Oh, with Mr. Muscles?" "Tell me what happened with him." "No show." "I’m so sorry." "That’s alright. Time to get to work." "I’ll be there in a little while." "Okay, see you," Lisa said to her friend, and left the dressing room. She walked down the hall to the smoke-filled main room that was full of people. The music was loud, the song "I wanna be a cowboy" by Kid Rock. Girls everywhere were all over men that paid their money to come see and feel as much as they possibly could. Looking around, she quickly saw a man sitting alone and went up to him, slowly easing into his lap like some kind of cat, purposely personifying that beast. She rubbed her hands on his chest and said, "What’s your name, baby?" "John." "Well, hello, John, my name is Rage." "Like Rage Against the Machine or just road rage?" "Your good. The band, sexy. Where are you from?" "L.A." And now she adjusted her conversation a little to fit where John was from. "Oh, wow, what do you do out there? Do you work in the movies?" "No, I’m a professional kick boxer." He was actually a stockbroker. "Wow! I like to kick. When I’m in bed..." John looked at her face for a moment, wondering. Then he looked down at her breasts. They were very large but obviously fake for several different reasons. But they still looked good. She noticed him looking at her and said, "So do you want a dance?" He looked up, into her eyes, and replied, "Sure." She stood up and slowly removed her bikini top as she swayed her hips back and forth to the beat of the music. Then she rubbed her breasts against his chest and then she turned around and rubbed her g-stringed ass against his lap and back and forth like that for the duration of the three minute song. It was the exact same dance every time. The monotony almost made it bearable. It was like taking candy from a baby. She would have to dance once or twice during the night on stage; she was good at that, working the pole, as the girls called it. Everything went just as it should all night long. Usually, about halfway through the night, if it was a good night and she was making a grand or two, she would go in the back with some of the other girls and do a few lines of coke through rolled up hundred dollar bills. She only did the drugs because she was so depressed from having to dance on top of men that she did not know all night, she told herself. Sometimes, she thought about stopping dancing and trying to find a nice man and getting a job as a secretary or something or maybe she would start going part-time to college soon, like a lot of the other girls always said they were doing, but college cost so much and the time…So for now, tonight, she lifted up her head as she finished up her last line of coke, rubbed her nose a little bit with the palm of her hand and then she felt the rush flood her body. It felt warm and she felt good, like she could do just about anything she wanted to. So she looked over at her girlfriend that had just finished up her last line and kissed her on the lips a long kiss, trying to suck her tongue into her own mouth. Then, she drew out and said, "Fuck, you turn me on, Trish!" Trish, a very voluptuous-looking, young black woman answered, "How you feel?" "I feel fine!" "So do I!" "Let’s go get into some trouble!" "Let’s do it!" So the girls left the dressing room and went back into the club and right away stumbled into two men in dress suits and ties. Both girls quickly found their way into the men’s jackets and started rubbing their chests, even putting their hands down the men’s pants, which was against the rules. "Let’s have a party in the VIP room," Lisa said to the man she was with. The two men looked at each other and one said, "Why not?" So the four of them went into the back room and they sat down, way in the back. The girls started dancing but pretty soon it was obvious they were looking for a little bit more. And then, after not too much time, Lisa put her head under the man’s shirt that she was with, reached into his pants, and started giving him head. Then, one of the security guards saw what she was doing and yelled at her from the other side of the dark room and she quickly pulled her head up and looked behind her shoulder. The guard motioned for her to come over to him, but instead, she just sat back down in the seat right next to the man. The guard yelled at her again, and finally, she got up and walked over to him. "Go see Steve, now! I already called him." "You asshole!" "Go, stupid bitch." So she stormed off. The club manager fired her and now she knew it would be tough for her to find work again, even at another club because the asshole manager would probably call around. But she was allowed to empty her locker out and several of the other girls gathered around her for moral support. "Lisa, don’t worry, Steve is just an asshole," her friend Sonya said. "I know that." "Go home for a while and then call me, okay? You can try again in a couple of weeks, after things are cool again." "Oh-okay..." She said, almost crying. So she packed up her stuff but before she left she went into one of the other girls bags, the one that used heroin. She took out that girl’s gear that she used to shoot up with and went to the bathroom. She hooked up her own arm and shot herself up with heroin, because after all, her mind was ringing in her ears, H is for heroin, H is for heroin, H is for heroin. She left the bathroom, threw her garbage into the trash and left. In her car, she reached into the glove compartment and got out some of her pills, tossed them in her mouth and swallowed. Then she put the keys in the ignition and started up the car, still mad as hell. She pulled out of the parking lot, screeching her tires. She raced her new sports car down the street, lined with industrial buildings. She found her way to the highway, it was mid-morning by now, and she flew down the road, cruising at about 100mph and thinking to herself that she did not care about the police; fuck the police! She never saw the group of young kids working on the side of the highway, working off a small misdemeanor by picking up trash on an early Sunday afternoon. She did not see anything because she was so fucking blasted high with H, pills and anger, too. But she felt the impacts because her restraining belt caught her and threw her back and she felt some bumps against the front part of her car, too. When her car came to a complete stop, she saw some blood on the windshield of her car. She was wide awake now and she really did not feel any of the drugs anymore. She put her left hand on the steering wheel and turned around and looked behind and she saw a swath of motionless bodies and blood all over the road but then her cell phone rang on the seat next to her so she reached over, picked it up, and pushed the green button to answer. "Hello?" "Lisa, hi, its me, Sonya." "Oh…hi, Sonya. How are you doing?" "I’m okay. I just wanted to say, if you need to, you can stay with me for a while, too." She just kept looking over her left shoulder, her left hand on the steering wheel, her right hand holding the cell phone next to her ear, with her seat belt pulled taught because she was leaning. "I have to go now, Sonya. I think…I have a problem." "Be careful, girlfriend." "Okay, I love you." "I love you, too." And she looked down and pushed the red button of the cell phone to disconnect. Jacob Jeffery sat down at his computer to write. His girlfriend had just dumped him or, actually, she just wanted to be friends but we all know that is code word. Jacob usually wrote, in fact, he had written ever since he was a boy. He could never tell if he was any good at it, even though he won an essay contest in seventh grade but then there were only fifteen students in the English class. And 9/10th’s of those fifteen were not really interested in competing. But as he got older, he realized he did not care if he won a contest or not, he enjoyed writing and he like reading his own writing. Not a bad combination. He knew writing has to be one of the most difficult endeavors for anyone to undertake. The reason for this is because you have to be true to writing. You can’t cheat on writing or cut any corners, unlike many other professions. The tolerance for BS is simply zero. So, he put his pen to paper and wrote the following: "There are some people who are born geniuses in music, art, or even in sports. But not in writing. No one is a born genius in writing. First you have to learn to write and that takes until age seven or eight, if we’re talking actual legible writing then I say thirteen. And you have to learn to read, too, and I am not talking Little Red Riding Hood, either, but read that one too. You better have read a few of the classics; you don’t have to have read them all but enough to keep afloat. And, clearly, you better find a favorite writer that you love and then read everything they have written with a fine-toothed comb, because that person is now your sensei. "Like your sensei, you must earn a black belt. Now here is fine analogy. Some disciplines of karate are more difficult then others. The true bad asses, like the Kung-fu masters, are black belts of fiction, pure fiction to include poetry. Then, I believe, comes children’s books, but there are, sadly, only a handful of these great masters, then non-fiction and lastly other forms like technical writing, which is still writing. Hemingway is my sensei. "Unlike the martial arts, writing will not help you get out of a bar fight alive but it does have powers. There are no natural born writers, zero. Writers don’t even have "potential". Perhaps a slightly greater amount of insight but that can be developed by anyone who wants to. Writers have desire. No more desire then anyone else to take out the trash but anything relating to writing the writer must desire strongly. "The age of fruition seems to be about twenty-seven to thirty-five. That is the age where the writer overtakes the reader. Before that, what is put on the paper by the writer the reader instantly identifies (they can actually smell as far away as a mile) as either adolescent or boring. Does that mean you have to be published by then? Absolutely not! If you want some guidance on publishing, please read the Preface to The Short Stories of Mila Strictzer . But by the time frame of that window, you ought to be able put something together, start to finish, that is not half bad, which an objective third party enjoys reading. Nobody just sits down with a pen and rolls out a masterpiece. Granted, one must start young to get a black belt, but what’s wrong with a green belt if you enjoy karate? And besides, writing has special, magical gifts that is dispenses, which few but the master’s are aware of. I know this because I have read the great senseis close enough to recognize this great secret. I am afraid this is all I can reveal about that at this time. But, trust me, writing does have powerful powers. "The other reason there are no masters before about twenty-five is because I don’t care how well you can’t write, what have you seen or done before, boy? Or girl? Granted, we readers can be enthralled by some stories about your hood, if your good, but common, the number one reason we read is to learn something. Readers read, talking all of them now, especially nowadays, ½ for amusement, and ½ to learn something that they can use in their everyday lives. So writers better keep their readers supplied.
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Copyright © 2001 Mike Strozier |