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“Me and Jessica Lowlow”
by Sylvia Frangipani, summer 01, modified winter 04
I lived that year in a small apartment in the back of an empty store surrounded by a grove of trees, next to a giant park in the Modern City of Atlanta. Back then I was quite the party girl, I slept all day and stayed wide awake all night. But no one ever really knew I lived there, no workers at least, cause I snuck in and out of my home thru the alleyway and the vine-covered railroad tunnel. Why did I need to do that, you ask? Cause I didn’t like to attract attention. And I wasn’t really paying rent.
I didn’t have much use for that place except to store my stuff, which all fit in one room. Nor did I have visitors over; all my friends met and hung out about a mile away at a little bookstore and wine bar called Mort’s Grapes. Mort’s was (and still is) a kind of see-and-be-seen place for social and sexual outcasts like me, we could all talk and drink and smoke and have fun till after midnight every night of the week. It’s also a place for picking up potential partners, especially if you’re female. Mostly females hang out there, I don’t know why really, it’s just always been like that. Morticia is this black-clad lady who owns the place, and lives in the basement in the wine cellars, and she has this hidden side about her (like all of us) but that is the way she likes it, so that’s the way it’s been.
Anyway, I used to be part of the group at Mort’s who picked up new customers as partners. If I wanted to be with a female, it was an easy place. All the guys I had been with were either dirty holy men or introverted brutes (Mr. X was nice though!), so I was really in the mood for something different. It was late summer, almost fall that year, and the wind was blowing the leaves off the trees, one at a time. I woke up just before sunset, put my bodysuit on and grabbed a bottle of Wild Vines and ran out. My hair was still wet and I kept having to brush it behind my ears, but it was warm and I didn’t care. I was happy. The bus came and I rode it down past the warehouses like usual, letting me off at the Texaco station, only a few blocks left to walk to Mort’s. Traffic was bad tonight—there were lot of angry drivers honking at each other and homeless old men with canes gawking. Maybe there was an accident. Whatever the case, I couldn’t stop to help or I’d get some weird look, or worse, questions. IF police came, that would be the worst thing; I’ve been harassed by cops since and barely escaped jail—plus there’s that rule I keep forgetting about not drinking in public.
So I ran fast until I got to Mort’s. Floor creaked loudly as I hopped down the steps just inside the century-old building, down, down, down. All the women knew it was me coming in, so they turned and laughed at me. There were about six or seven of them, all sitting in a circle, drinking; all lushes, mostly older. Sitting on pillows on a rug around a hookah, taking turns smoking (opium, usually), talking about old news and old friends—and new lovers. Of course I had to join them, so I said hello to Morticia, grabbed a pillow and my Wild Vines, and sat down beside Marguerite in the circle.
Marguerite is French and wears long flowing dresses with lots of jewelry. Genevieve, sitting next to her on the other side, is also French and almost interchangeable with Marguerite, except that she wears flowers in her fair and lots of perfume. Both of them smoke massive amounts of opium and are very loud and annoying, especially the way they yap at Morticia even when she is busy behind the counter. Morticia is funny—she’d always tell me “I wish those French women would leave. Hey—are you paying customers?” Marguerite would respond “Dalling, if it weren’t for us, you’d be long out of business!” and Genevieve would follow “Ve love your product!” and both would blow Morticia kisses. And their passion for young female customers was pretty much out of hand at this point. It was a drunken circus that I couldn’t resist.
I said “Bon soir” to M. and G. and they kissed my hand and passed me the hookah. After a few hits I felt much better, and lied back to see the moon shining down though the store’s window. Damn, I felt so good. I ordered a glass of the special wine of the night and started chatting with the other customers. Two of them were newcomers (the other, I think, was the goblin-girl Thora.) Both of them I kinda had my eyes on, and by their look they knew what they were getting into. Their names were Enchanté and Jessica. Enchanté was a mail carrier down in the West End area; she’d been doing it for five years now and gets lots of benefits. But it’s a drug-free work environment and she was sick as hell of that, so she came here with her new friend, Jessica Lowlow, a withdrawn wannabe sprite who lived over near Six Flags theme park. At first I thought Jessica was a joke, the way she talked and played with her ears, so I whispered to M. “ Where is Jessica from, the faerie factory?” She laughed loudly and Jessica heard, so I felt bad and started with Enchanté. Enchanté loved to talk about her job and her overbearing boss and how he “just doesn’t understand women” and how the wine was really helping her relax. She got up to dance to the Tori Amos album that was playing and I started dancing with her. She was pretty, hard-working and real, plus a really good dancer (she knew how to lead and follow which impressed me!); but after a few songs I felt kind of bored. So I guess I was flaking out, but there was just something missing with her. I told M. about this and of course she had to blurt out that Enchanté would be hers by the end of the night or something. And that’s probably what happened, I don’t really remember, but when it got late and Thora left and Morticia changed the music to smooth jazz, my buzz was gone and I had to leave. The store was closing down anyway, so as the lights went down and the wine was put away, I acted super-fast and swallowed my pride—I pranced over to Jessica in the corner, grabbed her hand, and ran upstairs and out the door as fast as I could.
By now, clouds were filling the sky and it was about to rain. I pulled the girl along the main road, not getting any resistance whatsoever. We must have run a mile when I found the only place still open, this coffee-shop/bakery thing I had only been to once before. As the rain came down, I scrambled through the door but we were stopped by a bounce and I didn’t even have an ID—but I gave him a cute smile and lucklily he let us both in for free!
I ran to a well-hidden booth in the corner where it was dark and sat that wannabe sprite beside me, amazed at myself for what I had just done. I could basically do whatever I wanted with her. But I let her hand go and she didn’t leave or act weird. She just looked at me wide-eyed and spoke to me for the first time:
“What do you want from me, Sylvia?”
After a moment I responded: “You’re a mystery to me, Jessica. You’re really intriguing. I’m not really into other faeries. My loves have been either dirty holy men or introverted brutes, all very simple. You’re simple because you’re from the country, but I can tell all this is new and exciting to you—right?”
“Oh yes! How did you know?”
This was too much. I couldn’t say any more, so I just smiled and kissed her hand, which she liked of course. Then I got up and walked to the counter and ordered two scoops of chocolate ice cream, one for each of us.
It was about ten minutes later when there was a loud commotion behind us. Jessica and I were all cuddled up in the booth, slipping spoons in each other’s mouths, and she suddenly got really nervous. I looked around to see six demonic, brutish men standing in the middle of the shop. They were breathing loudly and acting obscene, but I’d seen that many times before, even thinking it pretty sexy on one occasion, so I tried to calm her down. But she was really afraid of these guys (“I can smell their dirty breath. They’re gross and scary!”) and before I could take her outside and explain everything, she got up and ran around the shop and behind the counter to where the bathrooms were, without finishing her ice cream or saying what she was doing. So of course I followed her.
The bathroom was down a long brown hallway which seemed to last forever, with bends and turns and offices on both sides. The doors were not marked and I couldn’t see which door she went into—so I started opening random doors. The first one was a storage room full of raw dough—it made me want to vomit so I closed it immediately. The next one was an office with a bear skin hanging on the wall, face staring at me. Pretty scary. The third door was the ladies’ room, filled with bright blue light. Jessica stood there, facing the mirror, singing a song to herself—taking off her fake pointy ears! (That’s why she kept playing with them.)
A very masculine-looking woman sits on one of the toilets, listening and watching with the door wide open. There is someone else listening too, but they remain hidden. This bothers me. We are all mystified by Jessica’s song, which is very low-voiced and simple, like a folk dirge—admittedly I was more turned on than ever before. After what seemed like a confessional life story, Jessica took pan-pipes from her bag and began to play them loudly, still staring sideways into the mirror. The bathroom felt so crowded suddenly, like hundreds were watching, listening and fingering themselves in the stalls!
Long pointy fingers wrapped around the doorknobs and stringy ghostly figures began to emerge like spiders. They came from all sides of us—some from the stalls and the vent, some from beyond the mirror. And they all went straight for Jessica Lowlow. At first I just watched in awe. The stringy figures surrounded the wannabe sprite and danced in a circle around her. She kept playing, ignoring them (and me) completely.
After a while, I started to get kinda jealous. I was going to have to fight for this one and I never would have known that back at Mort’s Grapes! So in the heat of the moment I jumped inside the circle and put my arms around Jessica Lowlow and squeezed her so tightly, feeling the figures closing in on me—so I grabbed those pan-pipes and pulled them out of her mouth. One of those long pointy fingers was wrapping itself around my neck as I gave her a long kiss on her mouth. I didn’t know what was going to happen.
But as we kissed, I could see out of the corner of my eye the stringy figures all turning to dust; then Jessica’s eyes suddenly swelled up and started gushing water. And for the first time I felt the ice cream goo still on my hands. Jessica was so sad. I wanted so badly to ask her what was wrong, what had been happening, but she pulled away from me once again, this time escaping though a hole in the wall I swore I had not seen when I came in. As she slipped though, I heard her say to me:
“I’ll see you again Sylvia…when the time is right! I swear.”
I had failed. I began to cry right there in the middle of the bathroom. No one seemed to care. So I ran out through the shop with my head in my hands, never stopping until I got back home, drenched in rain and tears and ice cream goo (and a tiny whiff of Jessica’s perfume). I couldn’t go back to Mort’s Grapes for the rest of the year. I was too embarrassed. But I was sure none of those French women had ever picked up anyone like her…