MOST ELEGANT [prose] by R.P. Singletary
Triggers and please do not delete; this is the pull of strengthy recollect, perhaps a most-important > > > sex, gender, stereotypes,
- >>>high school trauma of team sport?
- >>>(chosen last? A Good book sayeth: thou shalt be 1st), etc., etc.
SOME GRAVITY OF NO MATTER unMANLY, but not the words his noggin bore: To sleep on widearsewake them drained eyes poured out this old man me, years ago that chil’…chill turn a season autumn sport me!, me ageless in my Bauhaus building cccrumbling, and I saw a most elegant — you see where this is headed — visitor at the call box, fiddling with the thing, out on the lush-side entrance. Leaves of peach trees and swamp pine needles glued to the sticky black pumps as though a rus-rusty-rusted nail hanging in some boarded-up old corner store of consequence miles away, the same force fast gathering commerce, paid and unpaid, the nature like invoices dancing a fit to better count or strike out the wishful doldrums cleaving, striking. Tap, tap, tap. Nailed upon some cross. A debt, the time. She either had the name or number wrong or the digit off by one or more, or someone did not want to be disturbed or was fast realizing, this not what he, she, they done ordered online, earlier in the haze of hour of horniness well before a coffee at dawn. (I confess, my own shipments strange, not that I find this creature odd, good God man, I’d tried every model in someone else’s borrowed book, and generally sized them up as same did me, a good-time house always in my place residing before I left the city for better or worse.)
Upon closer examination, I noticed it was indeed a man at least back then we called them such. Forgive my antiquated ways, I apologize, I have little judgment outside a Church that wouldn’t expel me, never did, and that long gone with the fleet of hair products, combs, and stamina of this former self. I needed my wants met in more-lasting ways to linger long, quitting quilting when my fingers hurt! It took me longer, with or without any color of pill. That nether region.
The door buzzed untimely, the clock pulled, no thanks to me, and I walked back to the pharmacy. “The second ‘script not ready ’til 8, don’t come back, sir, not meanin’ to be rude, but you wastin’ your time, were I to say any different, not ’til ten minutes after we open up, for your own sake, thank you sir,” the sweet words from the young boy in training, nervous, thinking I so old on yesterday’s evening. I turned back. The boulevard a-bustle. Had she left, or been let in? I was always curious which of my neighbors was paying on days when I’d run out. My ex-, the most recent one, a French woman of sturdy stock, elegant in her way, satin nylons, I had called them that, but met with riotous chuckles; I sat up in the bed that day. “Either one or the other,” she chortled in between sips of more wine, the most expensive in the shop from three blocks over. “Satin. Or. Nylons.” I rolled over. She fingered my torso; it jumped in delight. “Panty’ouse, you call them.” Now the laugh from out of my face, into the pillows, feathers in the air, I grabbed her wrists so I would not fall out the bed. “Panty-hose,” I said. She freed, slapping me in the nose, which hurt. “We have trouble with our h’s, us Frenchies,” she said. “But not with fashion, take your pick.” “I prefer you without,” and the rest of the morning fell into the rest of the day and week, orders-in but of food alone ’til Sunday and weeks later, we’d almost married, but she needed to return to Europe, something about funds or fun, I could never fully understand her English accent in or out of the sheets with me or others along for the ride. We had great fun, two or more. In table, at bed, out and about the city, I thought we’d stay together at least another six weeks.
I passed the aisle with panty’ouse, manmade, handmade? For women. Panty-hose in a sidekick display. Next to green garden hoses too lengthy for a city waterin’. In a pharmacy? Next to condoms appropriately by the endcap unit, four levels, three carousels, spin spin ’round ’round she goes where she stops….
The man. The woman. The person. Drag, trans, transaction assumed. Shame on me. Who my diddy now? The way, well, I’m a man of a certain age myself. “We see ourselves in other people,” a wise woman long ago knocked into my noggin. “Don’t you understand? What bothers us the most? Intrigues us the most? It’s a click. Why do you think cliques exist? The sheep baah-baah-blacksheeping all the way back to pasture?” I told her I never thought of it that way. You should, she said, you should be ashamed.
As I eased home from the pharmacy, my hands overflowing with blessings of largesse and gimme greed as though amid a pandemic or yet another cold-come-to-stay, the South sore man out and region prone to store-runs galore, on TP bread and milk, when temps tip tiny below 50F. Elbows and neck full of paper bag from druggist, prophylactics legal. Of plastic bag, “double-double, please double, I bought too much, I’m sorry for trouble, I usually bring my own canvas carrier, ecce ecce: eco! eco!” (of my own echo, but a lie to a new sales clerk, who based on the store’s routine, I knew what they paid by the hour, soon to be gone with the wind of winter), before I added, “next time, next time, tallyho.” The double needed trebling, sad sacks sagging. I bent over and almost felt ground. The rush of post-holiday traffic, everyone mad Santa up and gone and the cold come back to stay. “That’s what y’all get for fake celebratin’ Christmas ‘fore Hallowe’en, summer’s gone! I’d be depressed too,” but I didn’t shout it or even mumble. No foolin’, no word to the culturally illiterate.
“Oh, excuse me ma’am, excuse me, ma’am,” I said, back erect prompting bags to tumble in the street. A car fled, gone with one of the cheapest concerns of my life. I shrugged. The lady too. Big-shouldered a heave, waving off the robbers with a whiff of Chanel, “better luck next time, the kids these days, are you OK, sir?” Her long arms led to longer fingers, red red red to match my blood all-American. “I’m fine, I’m ‘fraid of bein’ punctured after a cat-fight squabble in the New Orleans of my youth. Everybody downthere want some of this.” She saw me, the distance I kept from her pointy shards of red paint. “Too much whiskey on Bourbon Street,” we said together.
“Nice to know, Russ, a gentleman left in the big, bad city,” the rough-hawed voice reminiscent of high-school football*, the one-syllable go-to endearment an always. I swear I could’ve heard it carrying a flea-kicker foul. A fair catch kick? Tall and lean, a curve or two up or down, the long stride of straddle, wobbling in heels too high and needing athletic boy cleats to catch and grind the grime upon the street awash in latest filth of smeary newsprint, doughnut wrapped chocolaty, condoms. I knew those big feet.
“At least we know they usin’ ’em!” she said, wide mouthed and glossy lipped. “Me? I take my own precautions.” She rattled a pill box from her handbag. I jerked up my pharmacy plastic.
She pulled my arm, torso, legs, then feet around the baby-saver in the streetly roux.
“Thank you, ma’am.” I saw close up the shadow. It still morning, so I mean on her face.
“I’m not a natural,” she began, “blonde.” Impressing me with her enunciation. Hard d on the end.
She proud of being a female, knowin’ her feminine fixes, blonds are men, and now not she
The protective cup removed, its compression short and supportive, her pillowed haunches tamed bumping into my own narrowing hips. Coach could call her name as his
“I remember you,”
“Oh, Rusty!
She clutched her pearls, nape vacant, vapid illusion of silly dumb play. She gripped my forearm, sweet somethin’s across my pinna, deep tongue throbbing the temporal bone…of my left ear, left. I winked instinctive. “I always wanted you.” Right eye, right. Long the make short. Mate too. Life.
…your secret or mine, kind sir?” met with my own “your place or mine.”
I patted her arm, comforting her fingers, avoiding them fierce nails. She towered over my 5’10”, the height of shoes rendering our duo’s duenna an oddity among the rest of us freaks drawn to the South’s gloryholeland in a newer (old) world (colonized) wanting to ban, book, tame, talk, and debar downtrodden. All illicit illegals. Alien to some constitution.
Furtively, she passed me her purse, the size of a ripe pigskin pumpkin. It slid right in. And felt so good, the memory muscle. “Run for the win.” Jocular said. The goal afield, cast not out– I did not know where I was, in church or youth, Heaven!
“I knew the first I saw you at the box,” her brows furrowed, “temptin’ the door with your goodies,” her lips smiled wet, “but that gait, that gait, the wide hips luscious
“I had forgotten that.” She, as a he, back then couldn’t fit in our regulars of padding athletic, too broad the pounding received many of a Carolina chick from that gamecock groin straight.
“Wide hips luscious, how you been
All business but between old friends (minus the red Raider jerseys, paired jocks socks soiled put-aways sweaty), she took back her pocketbook, opened counted closed, and while we drove on-on-foot dove through dog sh*t the next block on, we occasionally halted
“Rusty! Rusty!” calling me like times before “coach? my Daddy late…
“These bunions, Rus? Rus? you wouldn’t believe how these pricey shoes the men love
as she exchanged black leather for soft canvas, left
“The corns on the right– near busted
right, careening, me stabilizing; as many years back to seal a verdant deal come august?
“not out of any field and into boiling pot the cobs of May, but ready to be shucked, guffaw…
the season. Who?
Us all in time
IN THE NAME
in the name of,
why
a most-elegant
sport
uniting.
Finally
(“All things of utmost [the word or two here slurred***]
fall into place,” she said. “Ultimately, regardless of our team.” “Or quarter,” a second-stringer shoved in.
A ragged–)
THE END
***from nerves or pharmaceutical, streetwise?
*
[Note: football here refers to the U.S. American pastime.]
