Missed Connection, page 2
I remove the lens cap, raise the camera, and peer through the viewfinder.
The image comes into view, flawless.
My finger finds the button and…
Someone bumps into me.
Click.
No need to continue peering through the lens to know I’ve missed the shot. As if punished by God for my selfish thoughts, I watch the dazzling display of watery light behind the band disappear as the sun dips behind a gray cloud.
The moment is lost forever.
Chapter 3
“Are you okay? I’m so sorry.”
A woman’s voice.
A hand grabs my bicep as I regain my balance. The camera joggles in my grip. For a second I think it’s going to drop to the trampled grass, but thankfully I manage to secure hold of it. Anger blooms in me and I have to bite my tongue. Confession: I’ve got a bit of a temper, inherited from my Sicilian father Nick Delmonico, whose old-world rage might’ve sent my mother to an early grave. But that’s a story for another chapter.
As I check the camera for damage, the voice says, “I really am sorry…” The hand on my arm squeezes gently.
I look up and lock eyes with a woman who blows me away. Okay, a lot of women blow me away. But this one is touching my arm. And the pouty look on her face—eyebrows arched over crystal blues ringed with black, clear-glossed lips gently downcast—tells me she feels bad about having messed up what I considered to be an idyllic moment to capture on film.
She says apologetically, telepathically, “I messed up your shot, didn’t I?” Her voice is Downy soft, delivered on a breath of fresh air, gentle south-of-New-York accent adding an extra layer of femininity to it.
Her hand is still on my arm.
“No…well…it’s okay.” My words struggle to surface because, simply put and rightly so, I’m captured by this woman. Late twenties, faded denims, pink baby-tee, four inches of tan-cut abs exposed for the world to admire, silver navel ring a cherry on top. She’s yum on a stick.
(…a distraction from six-seven-eight…)
“You sure?” she asks coyly.
“Yeah, no, it’s okay.” Still the only words I can find, idiot out-of-practice me. Her eyes, they’re so blue and they’re looking into mine…not just into my eyes, they’re a double-shot of cliché bulleting into my soul. I can feel it: that unmistakable shudder of pleasure that runs up and down your body before settling in the heart like an electrostatic charge.
She’s still holding my arm and I start counting in my head, one one-hundred, two one-hundred, three one-hundred, a spectrummy self-stimulatory rumination I perform to keep focus.
(…it keeps you calm, one one-hundred it’s dark and dusty and stinks of mothballs, two one-hundred the door opens harsh light his silhouette, three one-hundred the BELT, the business end, you count and count until it stops…)
“Well…okay then.” She smiles, exposing twin rows of pearly whites behind a pair of moist, lustrous lips. A gentle breeze tosses a drift of sandy brown hair across her blue eyes, bringing to light the makeup on her face, nothing out of the ordinary for New York, but enough of it to make me wonder if she’s hiding a bad complexion.
“It’s all right,” I say, fidgeting with my new lens. “Camera’s fine.”
Her stare lingers, one one-hundred, two one-hundred, and then her hand finally releases.
In my world, the unexpected happens and I never expect it. With a slight narrowing of the eyes that might allege an attraction for me, she leans forward and kisses me on the lips. My shudder oozes pure delight as the kiss lingers one one-hundred, two one-hundred, three one-hundred until she pulls back, wiggles her fingers at me, and paces away, revealing a tramp-stamp tattoo highlighting a cursive LD amid a bouquet of symmetrically positioned roses.
Devil on my left shoulder, pitchfork raised high.
Angel on my right shoulder, halo fading.
I should discuss them, my good and evil counterparts. They’re bound to me every step of the way, have been since (…six-seven-eight…) I was nine years old, light and dark companions riding shotgun, offering opposing viewpoints given any scenario, any situation. Cliché but omnipresent companions, reliable even if their advice occasionally sucks.
In a move more instinctual than purposeful, I raise the camera and bring her into focus. I shout, “Hey!” and watch through the viewfinder as she twists around and smiles at me, this beautiful girl in Bryant Park who just kissed me more passionately than my supposed life partner has in over three years; she smiles, this beautiful outsider who has promptly incorporated herself into all my near-future wet-dreams; she smiles, as if happily posing for the picture I’m about to take.
She smiles.
My sweaty finger presses the button.
Click.
Chapter 4
The ensuing seconds flicker by like frames of stop-action film. What just happened? To the casual observer—if anyone had been paying attention—what just occurred between me and Ms. Pink Baby-Tee stands to look like any other casual event taking place in Bryant Park. But to me? It’s much more than that. It’s fate taking a front seat in my life, making sure I’m distracted.
(…from six-seven-eight…)
The devil on my left shoulder, shouting: Go! It’s what you need!
I shake off my what-just-happened-to-me reverie and follow my hard-on in the direction LD just walked away. I shoulder across the lawn through the crowd of jazz-band enthusiasts. No sight of her. Over the gravel walkway. Nothing. Where did she go? I skim the entire scene in a semi-circle, striving to glimpse a fragment of her tight pink top.
The angel on my right shoulder: Let her go. Go home and be with your wife and daughter.
It’s not every day a young Barbara Eden materializes in a veil of pink and kisses you in the park. This could be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I can’t just trudge away with my head hung low, back to my groundhog’s-day-in-hell life. I need to talk to her. I want to know why she kissed me. I want to kiss her again.
(…she’s steering you away from six-seven-eight…)
I step up the pace, moving back and forth across the graveled path, weaving between and bumping into aimless nose-in-phone meanderers. I turn to look at each one, hopelessly optimistic, but all I get are dirty looks.
Near the kiddie carousel I catch a flash of pink. I dart in that direction but realize, despondently, that it’s just a child atop a fiberglass horse wearing a pink shirt. I turn, look back over the lawn toward the 41st Street exit. A continuous stream of bodies moves in and out of the park, but none are wearing pink.
Fuck! She’s gone, lost in the crowd, this strange woman who kissed me at random, who gave me a minute taste of everything I’ve been missing out on the last four years of my life.
My hopelessly loveless life.
Chapter 5
Before I have a chance to collect my thoughts, or even think about looking at my phone to see how late I am, my cell phone vibrates. I pray it isn’t Jolie. I pray it’s a solicitor promising me a surefire way to consolidate my debt, or an affordable timeshare in St Lucia. Promising me anything or anyone other than her.
I put my camera back in its case, harness it over my shoulder, then dig out my phone and check the display.
Jolie’s cell. Joy to the fucking world.
I take a deep breath, counting one one-hundred in my head because the tempest is real, then press the green phone icon and there’s no chance to say “Hey," or “I’m on my way,” because when I put the phone to my ear, I’m greeted with my daughter Rachel’s unbridled, tear-bursting, snot-blubbering cries.
At least it’s not Jolie.
I possess the innate talent of setting calm into my daughter. Could be that I just understand her needs, could be that she’s just plain scared of her father (…you get that…). “Baby…baby, what’s wrong? Why are you crying?”
More crying, tapering, tapering, tapering, see I told you so…into a bewildering wail like something heard on Friday the 13th Part VIII. I stand corrected.
“Honey, Daddy can’t hear you if you cry really loud like that in my ear.” Sometimes I think Jolie has a sixth sense that informs her when I’m up to no good. I wonder if she’s sitting idly by right now, a Dr. Evil pinkie lodged in the corner of her mouth as she employs her toddler to inject anguish into my magic moment. “You need to stop crying so Daddy can hear what’s wrong, okay?”
Her stream of cries stagger into intermittent, hiccupping sobs. Amid the gloom and doom, a sad child’s voice emerges like a bright star on a cloudy night. “Wh-when are you…hiccup…coming home, da-da?”
My ears are listening, but my eyes are searching. I feel like a snake because it’s no easy feat going from a beauty’s kiss in the park to a counseling session with my almost-four-year-old daughter.
“Soon, baby-doll. Real soon, okay?” I’m craning, glimpsing, standing on my tippy-toes. Still no pink.
“I want you to come home.”
“I’ll be there soon. Where’s Mommy?”
“In her room.”
“And where are you?”
“In her room.”
“Can I talk to her?”
I hear my baby-doll (not to be confused with baby-tee) fumbling with the phone. Her slightly muffled voice says, “Da-da wants to talk.”
Jolie’s voice, also slightly muffled: “Tell da-da to get his ass home.”
More phone fumbling. “Mommy says get your ass home.”
Nice. I say, “Okay,” but am suddenly distracted by a glimpse of a pink shirt across the street, about a hundred feet away. Like a dog to its owner, I start jogging toward it, saying in a choppy voice, “Rachel, baby, tell Mommy that Daddy’s on his way home, okay?” I disconnect the line, then move down the adjacent walkway leading to 41st Street…and there it is! The very symbol of all my present aspirations: a pink tee-shirt—hardly the back of one shoulder, but as pink as the sky is blue—disappearing into a storefront.
I slow to a brisk walk as I exit the park, thinking about what to say to her, if it is her. There’s my camera and her captured image inside, and then her LD tattoo, which given the situation can be used to melt the broken ice. So, what does LD stand for?
I scurry between a pair of gridlocked taxis, step onto the curb and move through the door the glimpse of pink went into. I’d been far too distracted to notice what kind of place this is, and promptly grind to a halt before a makeshift wooden partition with a stop sign and faded capital letters that demand my exit if I’m under the age of twenty-one.
Uh-huh. On the other side of the wall are adult videos and toys.
I’m no stranger to sex, have had my fair share of it prior to getting married,
(…it distracts from you, six-seven-eight…)
a significant portion credited to my undergrad years at Fordham. And while college was a playground for experimentation, I emerged a man who loves and admires and appreciates sex in a mature, gentle, respectable manner. Ergo, count me out for anything that might cause pain (…BELT…) or get me dirty (…dust…) or smelly (…mothballs…); my kink pretty much stops at the widespread male fantasy of having a threesome; what man doesn’t want to be sandwiched between two beauties? Right? But I digress. I’ve never really understood the allure of the kinky stuff, which, as I step past the wooden panel into the store, is what most of the clientele here are looking for.
Tall rows of shelves like those in a library present my choice of path to take, each offering a plethora of colorful DVDs, none of them labeled with anything I’d have with my morning coffee. There’s an old/young section, a hairy section, and an amputee section. As I move deeper into the store, more lively brands emerge: water-sports, granny, midget, and a few other deviant fetishes I have no familiarity with. Apparently, the farther in you go, the more extreme the videos get. Please don’t ask me what they keep against the back wall.
Denying my curiosity to know what a furry film is, I tear myself away from the DVDs and head to the register. Here there’s a glass tabletop display running fifteen feet long which under normal circumstances, like in department store, might be filled with women’s jewelry or men’s cologne. But here? You’ve got vibrators and dildos and fleshlights, plus a whole other host of “toys" that come in more shapes, sizes, and colors than Bryant Park does people. The variety is staggering.
“Help you, honey?”
The rugged, cigarette-abused voice belongs to the awful-looking elderly woman behind the register. She’s a horror show, overly tanned, overly wrinkled, sleeved in tattoos with one on her neck that identifies her in flowing script as Marge. “Marge” loops a matted gray curl behind one ear and smiles, her beady black eyes sizing me up and down over a graveyard of yellow stumps for teeth.
The angel on my right screams: Get out of here! Marge the Garage is going to get you! but my lips speak for the devil and its simmering libido. “I’m looking for a…friend. She just came in here, wearing a pink tee-shirt.”
The woman—Marge the Garage—uses her fat jaundiced fingers to snuff out her cigarette in the ashtray on the counter, ignoring at least one law, then shrugs her rounded shoulders and says, “Maybe in the back?”
“In the back?”
She motions with a yellow toe-thumb toward a curtain of beads hanging in the doorway at the rear of the store. A red neon sign above it indicates, among other things, what’s going on back there:
PEEPSHOW
Marge clears her throat, then deposits the spoils in a wastepaper basket behind the counter. At least I hope there’s one back there. “Need any singles?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Singles. For the slot in the booth.” She winks and flaunts her cemetery smile.
“Of course.” I reach into my wallet and pull out a twenty, thinking that LD, who may or may not be the glimpse of pink I just saw, may also not be a customer, but an employee. I’m suddenly disillusioned, but the pieces fall into place, offering a realistic explanation to what just happened to me. LD, cutting through the park on her way to work, bumping into me while texting, using her up-close-and-personal career skills to earn my attention and extract my forgiveness—the very same skills she uses here to extract dollar bills from the slot in the booth.
Marge sticks another cigarette between her lips and hands me a pre-made stack of singles, well-worn and well-handled. I accept the bills from her before considering where they’ve been. Gag.
Feeling unsure and nervous, I slink away, clutching the singles tightly and fighting my insecurity by pretending I’m Tony Montana with a fistful of c-notes. I peer over my shoulder to see if anyone is watching me, considering where I am. That I am a married man, this apprehensive move matters, but it doesn’t stop me.
One one-hundred, two one-hundred, three one-hundred, heart galloping, blood racing, I spread the swaying curtain of beads and pass beneath the glowing PEEPSHOW sign.
Chapter 6
The beads rain and clatter behind me.
I’m in a dark, dingy vestibule, maybe ten by ten feet, nondescript with moldy gray paint peeling away from the wall. Ahead to the left is a hallway that runs into the darkness beyond. From its mysterious, shadowy depths come the diverse chants of women pretending to be horny. I swallow past the lump in my throat and wonder what in the hell I’m doing here.
Angel on my right: You’re looking for trouble…
I’ve never been to a place like this before. New York’s got its share of strip clubs and I’ve visited a few of them (…they help repress six-seven-eight…). But a peepshow? Is it simply what I imagine it to be? Or is there something more to it? Something I’ve been missing out on my entire life?
No better time to find out.
I step into the deep, shadowy, mysterious hallway and am startled by a male voice. A deep, croaky one.
“Hey brah.”
I turn and behold a mountain of a man, a bouncer from the oversized looks of him, so black—and wearing all black clothing—that he’s hard to make out in the musty gloom. If not for the whites of his eyes, he’d possess the power of invisibility over anyone deciding to misbehave back here. Maybe that’s why they hired him.
“What’s in the bag?” he asks.
At first I’m confused because I’ve got no bag with me. Then I realize he’s referring to my attaché, forgetfully looped over my shoulder. It’s not a bag, it’s a Tenba Transport Attaché for cameras. Pfft!
“A camera. Some prints.”
“Can’t take no pictures.” His eyes roll toward the case and they bulge out of his skull proptosis-style and I freak out because that’s not supposed to happen, ever. But it just did. And I have no words, other than his mugshot would reign supreme in my Freaks & Geeks portfolio.
“No…of course not. Don’t plan to.”
“Open it up.” His breath reaches my nose and it’s rancid, like death only worse because it’s warm. Which is what he’ll make of me, warm death, if I don’t comply. So, I open the case. He looks, says “Aight,” then goes back to waiting for more perverts to harass.
I say, “There was a girl I saw come back here. She was wearing a pink tee-shirt?”
He nods, slowly, guardedly, seemingly poised to kick my ass should I make a wrong move, but doesn’t say anything.
“I want to see her. Do you know where I might find her?”
“Pick a room.”
I grin uncomfortably, snap the case shut, then move down the dark hallway, passing five closed doors before locating one that’s available. Room six. Sounds good to me.
I step inside.
Chapter 7
What in the hell am I doing?
It’s an abrupt question I have no answer for other than “I’ve reached a new low.” I notice a sliding bolt on the door and wonder who in God’s name would want to lock themselves inside this dark, sticky prison. Ugh. I hope in the end, after this mission impossible of mine is completed, that LD appreciates all I’m doing to track her down.
