Notes, from the Upper West Side. A novel by Dan Wrench. Chapter 72, Siren Moozing. Fuck day two was ten days away, and those ten days were stuffed with minor triumphs.
Triumphs is so seductive and nefarious they might have been whispered to witches by Satan himself. If I believed in that shit. Remember T-Shirt Girl, the chick at the gym who made sure I signed the ledger next to the time stamp every day? In my mind, I changed her name to Nipsey McNips.
Yeah. And all because, well, she had this immense rack with pointy nipples. Okay. But also because she started flirting with me one day when I was bellying up to the front desk at the gym.
She bent over the ledger while I was signing in and said, oh, you have long fingers. And then, can I say? And she took my hand and just started stroking. The kind of efflerage for my knuckles.
Thanks to the Cagles and St. Billy's Bounts, my cock was big and bullshit and ready to punch munchkin. But right when I was about to flirt back, my new pal Terry walked out of the little office behind the desk and said, hey, Boba Jack. Ready to strap on your gear?
Nipsey dropped my hand. I stared at the back of Terry's head as he walked away. Cocklocker. As I went into the locker room, I looked back over my shoulder at Nipsey.
She was talking to some fat bastard who looked like he was in for his monthly six minute stroll on the treadmill and I'm thinking, did shit just happen or is she just super friendly? And I immediately answered myself, dude. Shit just happened. Nipsey was young.
And that made me think of what Parp said once. For people who ditched the square caution and take their diet and work out to the extreme, that place where the squares get faint give up, the old rules about age don't apply. There are new rules, different rules. I maybe should have asked Parp what those new rules were, but I just didn't think of it.
Or maybe I wanted him to stop talking for a few seconds. Or maybe I was afraid to find out. But looking back on it, I'm pretty sure I should have asked. It had been just over weeks since I'd started working out and dieting so you couldn't see the changes in my physique yet, but I had bought into the disciplines.
I was committed. I think people can see it in your face when you make a commitment like that, when you're no longer typical, when you've become a variety of rockstar. Which in my case is a variety that doesn't sing or play an instrument, but is still pretty fucking cool. And it wasn't just sex brush ups happening out of the blue.
I also got called for a modeling job by one of the agents downtown who has me on his list. Rick Cutter. And what made that call even more surprising was I don't think I'd spoken to Rick since Christmas before last when I went by his office and left off a fruit basket and shook hands and passed out cards. Now this modeling job he had for me ended up being kind of a catastrophe.
I'm not going to say exactly how it ended up that way yet, and maybe I would have seen the catastrophe coming when he first called if I hadn't been blinded by my recent flurry of other minor triumphs, if Nipsey hadn't flirted with me, if I hadn't successfully held it back in the home stretch with Fern. If all the aches in my body weren't telling me I was transforming myself into some sort of gorgeous monster. And something else that blinded me to the impending disaster was knowing if I got a modeling gig it meant more money. And with the new arrangement between me and the wife it also meant I didn't have to tell her how I was spending said money or listen to her whine about it.
I didn't ask about her money and she didn't ask about mine, she didn't go to newbie school, I went to a gym. We had a monthly meeting for the boys. We were evolved. But I probably would have seen the catastrophe coming anyway if it hadn't been for parp brainwashing me with his siren musings.
You know siren musings. These are the pseudo theories that lure sailors to rocky shoals where their boats crash to splinters in their brains get pecked apart by seagulls. Those musings. This is parp in the coffee shop.
You know, Starbucks. I remember because he took his stupid purple shades off and was squinting at me. Dude, I read this great book when I was in college. Not a sign.
I just went into a bookstore one day and said to myself I'm going to close my eyes and walk over to the bookshelf and reach out. And whichever book I touch I'm going to buy that book and read it. So I ended up with this uber thick paperback called The Creative Action by Arturo Frolics. Arturo Frolics.
Where do I know that name from? Back in the 1940s he wrote this novel that was kind of popular called Sunset at Dawn. So he picked up this book by Arturo Frolics and it was about how the subconscious mind isn't at all the way Freud described. For Frolics there was only the conscious mind.
Which is like a staircase. And the closer you get to the bottom of the staircase, the closer you get to what rubes and squares and Freud call the subconscious mind. Parp said, So it's like the most focused part of your brain is standing on the top step of this staircase. And the step just below it is the song they were playing at the coffee shop an hour ago.
And the step below that is this problem you were trying to solve yesterday. The problem you stopped thinking about or so you thought but there's a part of your brain. A step on the staircase still working on it for you. Then a little later on or the next day you just had an answer to the problem and it seems like it just jumped into your skull.
That's why some people think it's God answering their prayers or some muse giving them the fix for their act 3 problem. We put the purple shades back on and ring like a clown. Notes from the Upper West Side is a work of fiction. The people depicted in this work do not exist.
Notes from the Upper West Side copyright 20-20 by Dan Ragg.