Not To Touch The Earth (An Excerpt)

She took the used, rolled up 20 dollar bill as it was passed on and hoisted it up her left nostril. She lowered her head down to the back of the porcelain toilet and huffed in a line of that powdery stuff up her nose. She'd been married for 5 years now but this was no time to be worrying about that. They were held up in a stall in the men's washroom... Both of them. She met him not 30 minutes earlier and here they were together in this bathroom stall at a little bar called The Flamingo. The bar was located in a small, under populated town in mid Ontario and was only ever busy on Thursday's and Saturday's. Much like The Flamingo the town was petty. It's shortage of places to go and things to do made the people who lived there very restless and at times quite stir crazy. So every Thursday and Saturday night they would pile into the bars in droves like hysterical children leaving their morals behind at home. She inhaled another line, this time up the right nostril in order to keep a balanced numbness as the man slid his hand up her silky black shirt and pried his fingertips at her breast. She leaned back and tilted her neck in order to look at the ceiling as the rush of the drug powered its way from her head down to her fingertips. He kissed and bit at her neck. The faint sound of the house DJ playing Daft Punk's "Get Lucky" leaked it's way in from the other room. She felt free in there, beside the toilet in the men's room with this man she hardly knew. She didn't have to focus on the 2 children she had at home or what it would be like to have to raise them alone. How one day she may have to explain to them both that Daddy wasn't coming home. This escaped her.  She took the man by the hand and dragged him back out to the dance floor where she closed her eyes and moved her body to the loud bass booming inside of her ears. This was her night out. Her time.

She had arrived there with her husband (who was also the father of her children) and a few friends whom of which cared only about themselves just as much as she did, so much so that she may as well had just arrived alone. After an hour of feeling ignored and watching the woman he bared two of the most influential things in his life with throw herself at the mercy of drooling men he decided to leave and go back home to safety. A place where his sanity could not be tampered with, questioned, or tested. She watched him storm out of the front door through the incoming crowds of people with a staggering sense of domestic freedom. The drugs, the booze, the dancing, the sex, all craving's she refused to let wallow and stir.

She pushed back the freshly dyed blond bangs out of her face while her eyes picked up on all of  the smiles and glares of men with scruffy facial hair and up-kept bodies. Some dressed very well and others... well, they wore muscle shirts and tight revealing v-necks as if to broadcast the idea that they clearly spent and spend countless hours in a gym, lifting weights, doing squats, and primitively grunting it out to look the way they do. It brought her a fantastical notion of pride knowing she could have any man in the room. She bounced from stud to stud. They bought her drinks. They grabbed her ass. They whispered sickly erotic exploits into her ears on the dance floor. This turned her on. It got her off.

As the lights went on at The Flamingo for last call she knew she would have to choose, but which one of these cavemen would be lucky enough to degrade her tonight?

"You're coming back to my after party, right?" One of the carbon copy men asked as he took her by the hand and walked her towards the door.

"You have any blow?" She asked trying to secure one of her vices for the remainder of the evening..

"Yeah. Yeah. Of course!" he replied

And so she went. Hopped into a yellow, vacant cab and in the back seat got fondled all the way to the mystery man's house in between inconspicuous key bumps of cocaine and laughter.

He lived in an impressively large villa by the river and by the time they arrived there were already a bunch of his friends drinking in the living room. After introducing herself, grabbing a beer, and doing a couple lines with these guys the savagery started to begin. Not only did the man she go home with start fooling around with her, so did a few of his friends. They went upstairs to a bedroom and slowly started to take off articles of her clothing. She was kissing one of them as another sucked on her breast. The shy one watched as he did a few lines before pulling down her pants and licking her inner thigh. She moaned in triumph. This was who she was. The life of the party. She took all three of them as everyone downstairs drank beer laughing at the sound of her heavy "Oohs and Aah's."

Her husband was sound asleep in bed at home. Their children were in the next room snoring peacefully. Most people who attended the festivities at The Flamingo were also at home trying to get some rest before doing it all again the next following Thursday. The men downstairs had fallen asleep on couches and scattered pillows and blankets on the hardwood floors. She however... Moaned deep into the morning, drunk and fervently high on cocaine. She had one cock in her mouth, one in her pussy, and one in her hand. A warrior woman in a silently sedated world...

The Drink He Had To Buy

"There's gotta be some easier way to die!"
Tony blurted out after staring at the bottom of his empty glass for some time.
He had been sitting at the bar all night long moping about and trying to suck sympathy out of anyone who thought for a second that they gave a damn.
"Yeah. Yeah. Tony." Jake mumbled.
Jake had been bar tending there for 5 odd years now. He'd seen it all. All walks of life crawled into that bar. Bum's, cheat's, Guido's, harlot's, angel's, stranger's, musician's, mother's, father's, liar's, business folk of all kinds, etc. Lefty also crawled into that bar.
   Lefty was a hard looking man. A real drunk. They called him Lefty because one of the only stories he liked to tell was about an obsession he had with beating his dick off with his left hand. Lefty was right handed but he'd say "25 years... 25 years with my right hand. Longest relationship I ever had and within' keepin' up the tradition of things I thought I'd pay a little more mind to my left."
He was a regular at the bar back when Jake was still wearing pull ups. It seemed as though his
age had been beaten into his face with a meat mallet. His eyes were all sunken in and hollow but there was wisdom in there...
Somewhere.
He normally kept to himself. Had the casual conversation with Jake, and some of the oddities that rolled into the bar but he went in there night after night for the booze and if they would have him, he'd take a woman back to his $500 a month bachelor apartment. The apartment consisted of a bed with stained old sheets, empty, cheap beer cans resting on his decade old television set and dresser, and scattered boxes of macaroni and cheese beside their powder packets. If he had taken a woman home for the evening he would walk into the bar the next day just as broken as he was the night before and Jake would always say something like "How was she Lefty?" and laugh a bit to himself.
Lefty always had the same meaningless response.
"Jake...She was a cold bitch and a warm fuck."
 
"Tonight's the night! I'm sick of this shit" Tony yelled out.
"So get it done ya coward!" Lefty howled.

You see, This was Tony's routine. He'd stumble into the bar around 4 o'clock in the afternoon everyday. Right as rain. Calling out to everybody. Shaking everybody`s hand's and buying people drinks. There were some regulars who would make sure they were there for Tony's arrival just to siphon off a couple of the free shots of whiskey but they would always make sure to leave after Tony would hammer down about 6 or 7. This is when the act would start to take hold. Tony would get quieter and start to shy away from the people at the bar and grab a seat. Always somewhere near Lefty. Lefty didn't usually mind. He was to hard and didn't care for fools like Tony, until that night.
"He does this every god damned night." Lefty spoke up.
"Yeah so what! The timing just wasn't right Lefty. I'm going to do it and nobody's going to stop me."
"Nobody is going to stop you because nobody gives a GOD DAMN! Asshole." Lefty's temper had drained from his alcohol withered body, finally. You could almost see his pale face turn a subtle shade of beige.
"Alright. Alright." said Jake trying to keep as much peace between the two as he could.
"Buy me a round and I'll show ya Lefty. Well... How bout' it?"
    In all his years Lefty had never seen a man die. He was asked to go to war when he was just a teenager but got out of it due to a serious case of asthma. It was about a year or so after that he started drinking, and with the drinking came the smoking only further worsening his condition. He woke up some mornings coughing up handfuls of deep purple blood before his beer and toast with peanut butter. Lefty didn't give a shit. He knew he was going to die. He just hadn't the slightest idea of when it would happen. He thought of Tony's request as not so much of a cry for help but as a gift of insight he could give.

"You're on hot shot. Get him a scotch and water..." Lefty demanded.
"Now Lefty are you so sure that this is a good idea?" Jake asked.
"Hell! He's not going to do the damn thing. The man's just trying to sucker me into buying him a free round. I'm just pissin' my money away on this deal." Lefty said to Jake reassuringly.

        So the three of them had a round of scotch and water's wondering what exactly Tony had up his sleeve to get out of this one. There was a younger couple at the end of the bar drunk and blissful, kissing each other and staring deep into their partners eyes. There were two or three other fellow's that had popped in the occasional time for a few drinks sitting at a booth in the quite bar as well. Lefty, Jake and Tony finished their drinks.
"Everybody! Follow me." Tony yelled out to the whole bar.
"This should be rich." Jake proclaimed.

They all put on their coats and walked out into the cold winter air. It had been snowing for a few weeks now and everyone was just settling in to their new winter skin. They trudged through the snow, up three or four blocks to where the overpass just above the highway was.
"Come on man! Lets go back inside. I'm freezing my balls off!" Jake yelled to Tony who was just up ahead of the group.
Lefty was first in line about ten feet behind Tony. They got to the overpass. Without saying a word or a final goodbye of any kind Tony threw himself over the railing. His body fluttered through the air, weightless and at ease. It was at that moment that Lefty felt time stand still. He thought Tony looked like an angel, or a mystical bird just flying through the snowflakes in the winter cold before the aggressive... Thud.
    Lefty had never seen a man die before that day. He thought about the war he could have been sent to and all of the years he had spent coughing blood out of his lungs. He even thought about all of those women he cared so little about and that shitty littered apartment he used to never want to go home to. They all stood there at the top of the overpass with their cigarette's and their beer in silence looking down at what was left of Tony's body on the pavement below. Jake, Lefty, the drunk men from the booth, and the happy couple from the end of the bar. They all stood there in silence and the only thing that passed through Lefty's brain in the strange silence was that suspended moment in time. The fool of a man that he could not stand had now become something else, at least in his eyes. He saw something real, something that even beauty itself probably could not feel. He saw an angel that night and it was worth every penny of the drink he had to buy.