To the Artist's Page                To our home page

To Dave Dreher's previous piece     To Dave Dreher's next piece

Bumped

The girl who moved 'back here,' to El Paso, back from North Carolina. She has a nervous laugh which she forces out at every conceivable opportunity. Her first day at work. They won't let her strip today. Just do some waitressing and watch the girls, they told her. She is 23. Her thin permed brown hair falls just past her shoulders. She raises her arms over her head midriffed in a checkered blue shirt and jeans (country), and rocks her hips back and forth to third-rate R&B music. A body that would look good in a dress, she has a nice shape but also no muscle tone at all. I imagined the inside curve of her legs and ass, thinly flabby. Still, she had a pleasant way about her. She smiled a lot, for whatever reason was fluttering about upstairs. It didn't matter. I was used to girls who ignored me or wore a deliberately vapid expression on their face as a way to let me know… This girl's little country blouse is sleeveless. And goddamn if there wasn't more of the same on her arms. Spots of bruises, a rough dried red patch of skin on her elbow. 'I was having a fight with my boyfriend and I jumped out the car while it was still moving.' Back in North Carolina? 'Yeah. ex-boyfriend. I'm living with a girlfriend now. We're not dykes or anything. I knew her before I moved. She got me my job here. I start tomorrow.' She blurbs this out with a not-so-white toothed smile and nervous cackle, so you know.

She went around the place, dropping off and picking up drinks, doing her little bump-and-grind move, forcing out more nervous laughter from underneath her thin permed hair. I stuck to the pool table. I was playing well. The table was level and the cues were straight. I watched her walking around in the semi-dark, music blasting. I could see the fight: Boyfriend with a hunk of chaw in the side of his mouth, driving. Spit cup in the drink holder underneath the radio, which is playing a gangster-rap tape very loudly. 'Yew fucking bitch!' he yells. Brown flecks of spit flying out of his mouth. He grabs her arm and squeezes, looking at her, the road, her, the road. She is horrified, but 60% of that is because she is drunk. She freaks out, frantically claws for the door handle, somehow breaks free and tumbles out. The whole thing is not made easier by the fact that the pickup they are in is jacked up so high. Her hands search for the ground but her elbows hit first. The son of a bitch spends most of his time and money on that truck, now speeding off into the dust and dark with the red tail lights shooting off one last dirty look. He is driving away fast, the engine is being made to work hard. She can hear it. So what do you expect? To be pleasantly surprised at her savvy at the age of 23? Maybe a streak of sarcastic humor that betrays wisdom well-beyond her years? No. You could see that it wouldn't take much for her to jump out of her bruised and flabby skin- a beer bottle breaking on the floor, a door slam, a car skidding on the asphalt. It would not take much to bring it all down around her like the shards of her teeth being broken by a baseball bat swung by her (ex-)boyfriend. She is here now, thanks to her girlfriend. It is a job. But the smile, even a forced smile, will not last long in this place. Too many men. Different men every time, fingers and palms reaching for her g-string and tits and ass constantly. No, the wisdom, no, the bitterness will come after she drinks herself out of this job and the next one, after the next boyfriend ('the one') runs roughshod over her apartment and her soul, after her belly, face, and ass bloat into a wrinkled sag, after she is retired from life at age 30, carrying on day to day in a dusty shithole in the Lower Valley, clinging to TV's truths and the US Government nutrition advisory labels on the cans and bags of junk food, shades drawn, teeth yellowing. Tammie.

To the top of this page