Trix Excerpt

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Ruby Rose chucks a final ear of jerky into her mouth before throwing the empty bag to the floor (along with some sandwich crusts, some Reese's Peanut Butter Cup wrappers and some crumpled balls of print-out paper). There's a prick on the back of my neck  and it's not the Midas Touch this time.  It's irritation. She's so bloody selfish. I'm aware again of her as a complete stranger who is taking over my car, invading my life and littering both up. "A little bore who wants to be a whore," indeed!  I glance at the bright orange Cheet-O crust on the edge of the passenger seat and think that maybe she's right. Then I see the complete pig's ear she's made of a Lorry knot - a useful knot commonly used for tying one object to another - and I smile. I try to sound bored like her. 'What's the big deal with being a dominatrix, anyway?' I say. 
 	'The drug,' she replies, matter-of-factly.
 	'Cocaine?'
 	'Not the coke, Geek Girl. Seratonin. Remember the pig's guts diet? Seratonin's the happy juice that naturally gets released with pain? It's a huge rush. A huge wave of everything OK.'
 	'And what else?' I say, stiffly.
 	'What else?' She laughs her rich laugh.  
 	'Well, let's think...How about everything else in this world just going away. Because it does. There's just you and this person, and there's this tremendous...' (gestures) '...between you. You're so connected with the person you're aware of the flicker of an eyelash.'
 	'The flicker of an eyelash?'
 	'Yeah. And a grain of sand becomes as big as the whole world.'
 	I swerve to avoid a rattle snake that darts out from the vicious scrub lining the sides of the road. It squirms on its belly through the film of red flour that covers everything and disappears behind a cactus plant with sticky yellow flowers and spines as big as tiger claws. 
 	'But what about if one of your customers turns psycho?'
 	'Never happened to me,' she says. 'The important thing is not to get wasted on drugs when you're with a freak. If there's coke involved, the best thing is to blow it off the side of the table and then pretend you're dabbing the remnants onto your gums whereas in fact you're flicking it all on the floor with your hair. The freak won't notice.'
 	'But what if the freak's on coke?'
 	'That's OK. Except that he won't be able to get a hard on. He'll be tugging away for ages, trying to get off. Tug, tug, tug.' 
 	I ask her what happens if the pain starts to get out of control.
 	'Come on!' she laughs. 'You don't get so out of control that your bottom is saying "No! No!" and you don't hear it or don't process it.'
 	'I thought you had to say "peanut butter" or something. To mean 'stop'.' I fold my arms tightly over my lumberjack shirt.  'I mean...I read that once on an internet site.'
 	I get a withering look.   'No you don't say, "Peanut butter". You chose a thing called a "safe word" before you start.' She turns round and picks up a can of Easy Cheese from the back seat.
 	'You can say something like, "enough" if you want.'
 	I swerve again. I don't know what she's trying to say. Is she telling me that I can say "enough" and get out here and now? I don't know if she's trying to be significant or if I'm just being paranoid. I don't know anything any more. My head aches. Where's the bloody joint when you need it?
 	'But what pleasure do you get when you're doing it for money?'
  	'Stripper rush,' she says without hesitation.
And immediately, I'm back in the motel room in Van Horn utterly in lust with her. But I walk straight out again because I don't want to go down that path. I want to stop it now. Stop the stupid Midas Touch game. People were jumping out of  burning towers today, for heaven's sake. It's time to get back to reality. I start rabbiting on about the Sceptre. 
 	'I think I had waitress rush when I used to work in my hotel in Scarborough,' I say.
 	'Yeah? And what did you do when you had it?' She squirts cheese onto her tongue.
 	'You had to have a few beers at the pub afterwards. You couldn't get to sleep otherwise. How about you?'
 	'Sometimes I'd make love with some of the gay men who worked with me.'
I blink. 
 	'Why did you do that?'
 	'A gayboy friend of mine says that he likes sleeping with women when he's feeling dirty because it's such a taboo thing to do.'
 	'Yes, but...'
 	'I wanted to remember that things can be pure and beautiful.'
 	'How do you mean?'
 	'That sex doesn't always have to be something where you work things through because you're so fucked up.'
 	'Like your dominatrix customers?'
 	'You know," she says, ignoring me,  'In a lot of peep shows I've worked, a lot of the girls used to go bed together.'
 	'Lesbians then, were they?' I say, a bit too stroppily.
 	'It wasn't necessarily a sex thing. Women understand where other women are coming from emotionally.'
 	'Platonic orgasms, you mean?'
 	'What?' She leans forward towards the dash board and switches on the radio.
 	'Sounds like fucking to me.' 
 	She looks at me with barely disguised distaste. She starts to fiddle with the radio dial.
 	'Being held and made love to is different from having a fuck.'
 	There was flame upon flame upon flame... the radio says.
 	She tuts and discards another piece of shopping line, lumpy with failed knots.  
 	'The peep show girls sleeping with other girls - it doesn't mean they're lesbians.'
 	'Doesn't it? Why don't they just go shopping together if they want company?'
 	'You don't always feel like shopping.'
 	'You'll be telling me next that not all married people are heterosexual.'
 	'What is your hang up about sex, Mo?' she snaps suddenly.
 	'What do you mean?' I know very well what she means.
 	'Who fucking cares, is what I mean. Two men holding onto each other for dear life as they fall from a burning tower - do you think they were worrying about looking like fags?'
 	'I...'
 	'There are moments beyond love or gender.There are moments about being a human being.'
 	'Yes, but we're not all falling from burning towers.'
 	'Oh, you think so?'

The day is becoming more and more unusual. 
 	There is the rumble of the engine, the rattle of the skeletons,  the bumping of the pomegranate on the dashboard, Ruby Rose's talk of stripper rush and eyelashes and all this is framed by these other-worldly El Greco skies that look how you imagined heaven to be when you were a child.  I suddenly start to think about all the people who died today in New York. On the radio they're talking about unofficial estimates of 10,000 casualties. The roar of excitement and anxiety passes through me again and then another sound comes out of the radio - a terrible metal twisting sound and a woman in a street screaming in a wild panic: "They're jumping out the windows! They're jumping out the windows! I guess they're trying to save themselves... I don't know!" 
 	'Fucking knots,' Ruby Rose mutters. 'Fucking trick, fucking Brit. I could be hanging out at the Bloated Goat by now. Or shaking my ass making a little money,' and I hate her again.
 	Or maybe I'm just scared. You can get scared in the desert. Your mind becomes like an El Greco painting: hyper real.  That's why the pioneers  tried to tame the land. They pretended they weren't scared. They went round saying, "How y'all doing?" to suspicious-looking strangers as they gave them a quick once-over and they gave names like "Ship Rock" to an eerie immensity of 12 million-year-old volcanic mountain just outside Farmington that the Navajo Indians believed to have been a huge black bird that flew in from the land beyond the setting sun and was petrified to stone. 
The pioneers gave up in the end though. They started giving places scary names like, 'Devil's Elbow' and 'Slaughterhouse Spring' and 'Skeleton Ridge" because they finally realised they had to live with their surroundings rather then conquer them. And also because they were shit scared. 
Here in the desert, all your previous life is burned away - K-Mart, Mexican breakfasts, root beer, apple pie - everything floats away, everything is sucked up into the powerful skies above. You wonder how much putrid flesh filled this land, how many rotting corpses with twisted mouths and pulpy features lay on the ground covered with red flour veils and riddled with arrows and gun holes and vulture wounds. 
 	As an English person driving through the New Mexican desert, you have to abandon all thoughts of 'meadow' or 'lawn' or 'stroll' or 'quaint.' There's little to cling onto, few places to dig in your hooks, to orientate yourself back to what you know. Take the mountains. The word, 'sacred' keeps springing to mind and I don't know anything else which, just by standing in its presence evokes that word. They've stood here all these years, the mountains. They're more breathtaking than any man-made tower or dome. The shape hasn't been tempered by fashion or politics or ignorance or malice. These mountains ended up looking like carrot tops and cubist paintings and lions backs and fat buttocks and Roman noses just by standing still and being whispered and blown and hissed and spat upon by centuries of wind and rain and sun. The clouds blow over head to protect them from too much harshness.
 	I wonder why the people in New York were chosen to die today and where they all are now. I think that when bad English lawns die they go to New Mexico. They become dusty cacti left to scream out silently as they burn up on rocky mountain sides. Nobody notices them and their only company is a few surly lizards who were smarmy misanthropists in a former life and who've been abandoned to a dusty, desolate place where they can hate themselves to their heart's content.
 	The smell was like burning metal and plastic and sulphur... 
 	Sunset is coming. The sky is taking over: there is an alien space ship landing in front of us, the Second Coming to the right, a psychedelic heroin trip to the left and behind us, like an intense purple bruise, the devil is coming to get us...
To be continued

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