I Believe I Can Fly #3 (from DIARY OF A DAY-PROWLING PERVERT #1)

I waited, clicked the refresh button, watched the screen. After an hour my thread had been viewed 38 times, but no one was responding. I began to fidget. The feeling came upon me and I looked to my left, my right, up and down the library aisles. "Forget them, forget this internet world," I muttered to myself. I added another response to my thread. It said: " You all think I’m joking. I am not. I won’t be denied." Then I logged off of the computer and stood up and stretched, trying to look casual, my heart suddenly pounding.

I stood up and paced the aisles where people sat at long tables: reading, writing, studying. Teenagers, male teenagers, no no no: and old women, and old men...reading last week’s newspapers, dentureless gums working, chewing the words into a puree for old and worn brains. I was out of luck. No asscrack, no women for that matter, at least none born after the Korean War. Sweat broke out on my forehead, a cold sweat.

I looked out the window of the library. The trees outside seemed forlorn, the grass on the front lawn seemed sad and brown and lifeless, hoping for a cool breeze to stir it. But the breeze never came.

I looked up the street, at the cars, the heat out there, the smog of December bearing down, the hateful sunlight on my face. I felt like a bug beneath a magnifying glass. I closed my eyes and felt the hopelessness of a world arrayed against me, the need for asscrack keening, terrible. The need to huff ass blocked out everything . I could feel only a yawning chasm in my gut. All the puppies and kittens and cherubic children of the world could die in a smoldering Hiroshima to satisfy my craving, and I would sigh like a man settling into a warm bath...

Then I saw it. Up the street. At the mall. My mouth dropped open. I stood there at the bay windows of the Public Library, my eyes glazed over, trance-like. "Holy Christ..." I muttered. It seemed so clear, so obvious. I began laughing and a few of the old folks looked up, annoyed, from their week-old copies of the L.A. Times. "It’s so simple! And wonderful!" I clapped my hands and ran out of the library. I decided not to take the Pacer; too long to find parking. I walked very quickly up the street, my arms pumping. I tried hard not to sprint, tried to control myself. The sign and the building came closer and closer, a beacon. All of the sudden it felt like Christmas morning. I felt very, very good. The building was a Gap and the signs in the window read:

"LOVELY LOWRIDER SALE: LOW-CUT JEANS SUPER CLOSEOUT. SATURDAY ONLY. SAVE UP TO 70% ON OUR SELECTION OF FINE KOREAN-MADE APPAREL."

Today was Saturday. It was right; it was destiny. I’d make my stand here. I would touch the sky.

I walked into the department store. Bingo. Women of all shapes and sizes, all races: fat ones and thin ones and Asian ones and white ones. Just like that old War song. They milled about at the racks of jeans, frantic, absorbed in their addiction, the shopping addiction. There is a goddess for the woman and the goddess wears a chain mail made of Visa and Amex cards. The store was filled with the sound of plastic hangers clicking against other plastic hangers. I saw many anxious faces. Then I forgot the faces and watched the asses.

The women already wore low-cut jeans, but they wanted more. I felt a strange kinship: they needed low-cut jeans more than life itself, and I needed them to wear those jeans just as badly. It was almost romantic. They wore the jeans cut a bit too low, and shirts cut a bit too high. That way they could show off the lower back tattoo, the badly done tattoo they’d had done in some suburban strip mall parlor, the dragon or the flaming skull or the Tweety bird: a signpost for the red-blooded American male to read. Fuckable, the tattoo said. One bottle of Arbor mist and I’m yours.

I couldn’t care less about the tattoo: to me it’s a signpost of a different sort, a poorly drawn arrow pointing downward.

With these thoughts ricocheting in my brain, I walked toward the racks, I walked towards the women absorbed in their search for pants, I walked toward them and started perusing the goods.