More Than A Woman

(Untitled, The Return to the Abandoned Island, 2009)

There are some stories you try desperately to keep to yourself, and away from love ones, but somehow they reach fame through the internet one way or another. In this case I had trusted a friend and coworker named Philip with the saucy and forbidden tale, and I guess the moral of this story is trust no one, Mulder was right.
Philip and I worked the night shift at Wallmart, restocking the shelves, running around with big lifts, sometimes even the motorized ones, and we had our fun to spite having to sleep off the daylight hours for minimal wage. In those days, it didn't matter what job you had, and how bad the work was, as long as you had a friend, it was fun. Philip provided me with that, and I believe it was mutual as we both seemed to find the same deviant pleasures in running controlled chaos in America's largest discount department store. At the end of the day, even if our managers caught us racing at 25 mph down the junk food aisle, we got the job done, and we never hurt anyone doing what we did. And we were their primary supplier for questionable goods, pot.
It wasn't all the late night fun that made us best buds, it was in our off-time when we got together and went to the strip club, and drank out in the boons, hunting for anything that moved. No matter what, as long as Philip and I were together, it was good times, and with that comfort came many stories shared. Philip told me about his time in the Gulf, and even had a stab wound, a casualty of friendly fire (or rather friendly stabbing). I had seen the side of his stomach where he had the scar before, but never noticed it within the sea of tattoos. Philip as a joker had gotten a tattoo of a woman, naked, and spreading her legs, and guess where the tattoo was. Anyhoot, we shared many of our favorite memories between our friendship, and had seen the Lewis Range of Montana, the holy rocks of Utah, the starbucks-drinking hookers of Seattle, the breasts of Ireland, and the orgies of Berlin, sometimes all in one night after a good day of hunting. In those days we didn't catch much, and it was more just about the feeling of being a man with a large gun (courtesy of Courtney in the firearms dept.) surrounded by undeveloped and untarnished land; it felt damn good. My only regret is we only did peyote once out there, but it was hard to score it at the time, even from our Indian friends.
That peyote was sure something when we had, I remember being taken away, the sound of my shirt being ripped off, my shoes falling back to the Earth as my body floated on a mystic journey filled with blood rain, civil war battles, Scooby Doo, and Charlie Chaplin fighting Hitler for moustache rights before the court of George Washington. I woke up to Philip slapping my face, saying it's been two days, and we were supposed to be at work four hours ago. I had pissed myself, and Philip did worst; waking before me, and disposing of his briefs several hours before eventually sobering up enough to wake me.
The ride back was uneventful, and the only thing you could see was 40ft of gray road, lined with two bars of yellow and the faces of trees all being lit by headlight. I didn't know why I said what I said at the time, but it just felt right, and I had nothing better to say over the silence of a broken tape player.

Phil, man, did I ever tell you the story of Julia?
Julia, who; that young one that comes in in the morning to work cash?
No, no, Julia was this person I met a few years ago, before I moved here, in my old stomping ground of Tennessee.
Nah! nah, man, come on and spit out, brother.

Julia always wanted to move to New York, she'd blab on and on about being a dancer there, and she made me promise we'd go there. I was totally confused when she told me because I had been paying her for sex for the past week, and had no intentions of anything more; it was business, I wanted it that way.
Anyhoot, so I said, sure, why not, and we carried on like we always did, the bj before the ds, ds before the bs. For a hooker she was a really passionate wet one in the sack, and she got me hard the instant she dropped her pants, and walked with her hips gyrating as if there were two pistons pivoting from her vagina; it was the sexiest thing I had ever seen. And it was the reason why I was half-serious about going to New York with her. I imagined the road head for a thousand and something miles. I even imagined her dancing before an audience; all dressed in three-piece suits and evening gowns, watching her in the Opera House, dancing, and slowly remove her clothing in a sexy manner and whipping her thong at the rich old dude who resembles/or is George Burns in the third row.
She would stay with me after the sex, and she would just talk and talk about all of her dreams until I slipped into sleep, holding her. At some point of the night she'd peel my arm from her chest, gently exit the bed, and take what was hers from the wallet in my pants, and kiss my forehead as she left me unconsciously; being careful with the door. It had only been a week but I had really started liking her, she really cared for me, and I took care of her, providing her with an income, and I was a good listener too.
It was either before or after I got the tattoo that I realized I must've loved her. It had been two weeks now. There was something about her. I looked for the something in our paid time together and I often looked out the window at the slow blinking red lights of radio towers in the distance, waiting for an airplane to crash down on the hotel parking lot, and end our lives together in that explosive moment. I was absent from her, in an off-world colony mining space dust and fighting wars with laser guns and star destroyers. What was it about this woman that made me call her each night, and use up every other paycheck to keep her here. The feeling was mutual when she told me during sex she loved me, I didn't really know what to say, no one had ever told me that, at least said it and meant it. I saw her cry, the tears dropped to my hairs of my chest and became one with my sweat, and I just kept my mouth closed, looking straight in her eyes until I was done. That was the first night she left early, and it was the only night it cost me nothing for her time.
It would be the last time I see her, and after a series of attempted to reach her I gave up on calling her, showing up at her usual places, the corner of Bellevue or Kerr, and I had no idea where she actually lived; we were always at my hotel room. Eventually I got the balls to talk to her pimp, and asked him where she was in more tone then he wanted to hear that night. I ended up with three broken ribs, and the answer I wanted. I remember being on the ground, tonguing the blood from a loose tooth, and coughing when the 6' 8" leprechaun in a brown glazer and pin-stripe pants told me she was a real special one, and spat on me. I could still hear him saying, "She sure fooled you!" as it echos in the corridors of my memory. And after those words I tried to forget their following, a straight pain in my ribs and heart, "She is more than a woman, she's a..."
Damnit Philip, you got 6,800 hits. I clicked around on his blog, and noticed nothing as personal about his own life, and perhaps that is the moral to the story:
THERE ARE THINGS THAT SHOULD BE KEPT BETWEEN YOU, A HOOKER, AND HER/HIS PIMP.
Since Julia, or Julius, Julian, or now Julietta, and maybe Juliana, I haven't paid for sex, at least directly and since that blog post of January 27th, of the year 2002 on philipmorganstalestotell.com, I have yet to reveal more than my name, the places I have lived in, and a carefully orchestrated ensemble of stories that lead the listener to no conclusions about me, my history, or the many shameful things I have done, or the people I have loved, love, or loving. Some things should be buried, such as a part of us, or those we have known, and let those ground remain sound, unaltered, and blessed in silence. May we forget who were once were, as fools, and as cowards, and listen to who we are today.