Rochester, New York
March, 2006
Pearls Before Swine sits nuzzled between a pair of depressed duplexes, just off Monroe Avenue on Scio Street—a street lined with depressed duplexes. It’s the redneck bar equivalent of a forgotten child’s toy jammed between the cushions of a rummage sale couch. The place is something of a downtown Rochester landmark, boasting reincarnations as a hippie coffee house (1968), disco deli counter (1976), punk dance club (1981), university Cabaret Voltaire (1990, named after the Zürich cabaret that launched the Dada art movement), and today as a neighborhood bar & grill. It has a single 8-foot slate pool table with cheesy gold-colored felt, a genuine re-painted antique with webbed pockets. The table is strategically located in the center of the place, just close enough to the barstools and walls to prevent making anything but the simplest of shots, which in most cases doesn’t matter anyway as the few locals who do wander into the place prefer to use the cues as makeshift weapons.
Each night at 2:00 AM the bartender and University of Rochester philosophy major Johnny Kravitz (he dyslexically calls himself KJ) sweeps up whatever detritus the evening’s patrons have left scattered on the floor.
By 1:00 AM on a Wednesday night, the place is deserted except for a girl in white shorts, sitting at the bar, sipping a warm glass of mineral water. Perched on a Naugahyde-covered stool, she watches the snow swirl around the bright, red neon sign just outside a frosty bay window, and half-listens to a Johnny Mathis tune on continuous play on the CD juke box. She hums the familiar melody to herself, and intermixes off-key harmony with bad self-advice. KJ sweeps, whistles, and talks to her—a mix of Schopenhauer and shop talk. She nods and sips and stirs, and recites important facts about herself.
“I really needed more,” she says clinically. “More than he could ever give me.”
KJ sweeps in narrowing circles that draws around her like a noose. “Yeah? Tell me about it.”
“I mean there were times, really, when he just did not get it. I mean everything KJ.”
“He—you mean Peter?” she doesn’t answer. “Sure, kid. Everything. Life is like that.”
She nods her head. “Yes. Exactly. Life is like that. No it is! Listen to this,” she leans back and fences the straw in her drink with her tongue. “I could be playing Chopin or Mozart or Gershwin or freaking Schoenberg and do you think he’d know the difference? Well, do you? Jesus Christ, it’s what I do. He’s my goddamn husband. How can he not know that?”
“Jeez, I wonder.”
“Him and his Indian cooking and sitar music. Who is he kidding?”
The story is pretty much public knowledge. Molly had started going to Pearls Before Swine soon after leaving Peter—just showed up one night with her new lover in tow. Why she had picked the sleaziest place in downtown Rochester was somewhat of a mystery. It was within walking distance of the Eastman School of Music where she taught piano and composition, but so were a dozen more upscale places. The bigger mystery to anyone who knew her, was why she had picked Tom Hancock, a man who seemed to delight in sleaze.
“I guess there’s just no accounting for taste,” he says. He stops sweeping for a moment and adds, “Jesus Molly, how can anyone not tell Chopin from Schoenberg?”
She sighs, “B.T.F.O.M.”
“Huh?”
“Beats the fuck outa me. Tommy got it,” she says, taking directly into her drink. “He knew the difference. Too bad he was such a fucking ass-hole!” She screams the last three words and grips her drink with both hands as if she were about to throw it across the room.
“Molly, you okay?”
She looks up from her drink to the blowing snow outside. “I would be if someone would be kind enough to drive a steak through my heart. And what’s with this fuck-king weather, anyway? It’s March for god’s sake.”
“Ah yes, my sweet, but alas, this is Rochester. A place short on warmth, and long on…”
Molly fills in the blanks, “men who tear your heart out.”
The wind picks up, blowing a steady stream of snow through the cracks in the walls, along the floorboard and into a wound in the neon sign’s electronic guts causing it to flicker and sputter like a badly wired hobby-kit strobe light. Random waves of red light spray thin flashes of blood across a young, sunken face and short blonde curls. Her white shorts glow like coals in a roasting pit. And still she stirs and sips. She pulls out a cigarette and lights the filter end instead, pretending she’s drunk when the last drop of alcohol has long since been pissed away. KJ laughs harder than the situation demands and sweeps a little closer.
His circle of clean converges to her barstool; she looks up and throws her arms around him, nearly falling off the stool. She tries to kiss him but misses and leaves a trail of saliva across his face; she licks it off on the return trip.
“KJ can I ask you a question? Why the fuck am I here?” Absolutely the worst thing to ask a philosophy major.
“Don’t know, but watch this.” He tosses his broom into the corner; it picks itself up, walks into the closet, and does a dainty flip onto a hanger. The dustpan waddles out and slams the door shut; inside there is cooing and dustpan love.
She listens to his fantasy melodrama and claps with a childish enthusiasm. KJ takes a bow and joins Molly at the bar. He puts his hands around her waist with just enough force to let her know who’s in control. Molly tilts her head to one side, throws her arms around his neck and wraps her legs around his. She kisses him deeply, as if sucking the life from him, letting his anxious tongue explore her mouth. They separate and she lets a glistening drop of saliva drop from her tongue onto his. Before he can follow up, she pushes him away with an exaggerated dramatic gesture worthy of any soap opera.
“Enough already,” she says. She slings her purse over her shoulder and heads for the door, oblivious of the connection between the snowstorm and lack of a coat.
He grabs her bare arm and pulls her toward him.
“Look Molly, it’s really bad out.” He pulls his eyebrows together in a worried sort of look while easing his hand around to her ass. She takes a deep inhale from her melted-filter cigarette and blows the smoke into his face; she saw someone do this in a movie once.
“Fuck you KJ,” she says in a delicate voice.
Still holding on to her, he inches her slowly back towards the pool table. “You could crash here. I have a little place upstairs, not much, but comfy where it needs to be.”
She tries to wriggle free, the smile becomes forced. Reaching behind her, she feels the hard edge of the pool table.
“I really have to get going,” she says, the song in her voice suddenly flat. “I need to make a phone call.”
“I have a phone upstairs.”
“I said I have to go.”
“Come on now, let me make it all better.”
“Screw you, Johnny.”
KJ grins wide and leans her further back. He picks her up and laying lays down on the hard, golden surface. Overhead a fizzy, 40-watt bulb casts a sanguine shadow through the red plastic panes of the fake Chippendale lampshade. The red and gold mix to the color of tar.
He pushes her down and pins her arms over her head and behind her. A leering face breathing beer and tobacco, the sweaty tee-shirt, and invading grind of his impatient erection into her tight shorts brings a sudden shock of awareness. She struggles, working her head wildly from side to side, searching for some means of escape.
“What are you doing?”
“What’s it look like I’m doing?”
“Get off me, you bastard,” she screams.
“You stupid little tease,” he pants. “Shut up and enjoy it.”
“God damn you. Get off or I’ll scream.”
KJ smiles as he works a hand under her blouse and bra. Molly screams and then screams again.
“Relax will ya? No one’s going to hear you anyway.”
He pins the weight of his body over hers and uses one arm to hold her down and cover her mouth, the other to unbutton his jeans and pull them down just far enough to pull his dick out. She pushes back, rocking violently from side to side. He snarls and presses down harder, jerking his hips into hers as he forces her legs apart.
Her eyes scream in fear, a wave of panic rips through her and sends a bolt of strength through her arms. They search for some escape. Her fingernails tear slivers of flesh from his arms and fabric from the felt. One hand breaks free and creeps toward a pocket in the pool table. She uses the leverage to pull herself back, but he only laughs at her feeble escape attempt.
“You love it. Let me get a taste of that wet pussy,” he croaks in a hoarse voice. His free hand works down her chest, to her belly and attempts to unbutton her shorts. The button frees, he works the zipper down and slides his hand into her shorts with an impatient frenzy just as her hand finds a pool ball.
“You’re so fucking wet. I knew you’d…”
A blur of color crashes into his temple. He shakes his head in shock. A surge of animal fury crosses his face, but before he has time to strike back she smashes the pool ball into his face a second time. It connects square on the jar, splits his lip and knocks out a tooth.
He howls in pain and falls to one side, leaving himself open to a strong knee jammed hard into his groin. He rolls over with more curses, and Molly, rent with anger, jumps on top of him. She beats him repeatedly on the head and face with the pool ball, until he is bloodied and unconscious.
She sits on him, resting for a moment. In a final act of rage, she takes the ball in both hands, raises it high over her head, and smashes it into his mouth, knocking the front teeth down his throat.
Molly jumps down off the table, leaving KJ lying there looking like some comic sideshow stunt with that pool ball jammed in his mouth. She grabs her purse and flies out the front door.
Driving home, the snow squalls form crazy hallucinations—weird creatures condense out of nowhere, great gaping mouths open wide to devour her and every mouth is Tom’s. The roads are empty, wasted, formless things that go nowhere. Tom whispers to her from the back seat, he whispers soft and sexy, he whispers dreams and desires, he whispers longing and touch. She screams at the voice and the voice becomes a choir, and the choir a city of despair.
Molly bowls over a few mailboxes and plows into a small Saab in the parking lot. She leaps out of the car, leaves the door open, runs up two flights of stairs and into her condo. She slams the door behind her and does a mad search in her purse for her cell phone.
“Where is it? Goddamn it.”
She dumps the contents over the floor. “No, no! Come on…” Not there. She must have left it at the bar. Molly screams with rage and runs to her remote phone sitting on the desk in her office. She starts punching buttons before realizing that she doesn’t know his new number—it was programmed into her cell.
“Damn, damn, damn! Where is it?” She’s written it down somewhere. She searches frantically through the desk drawers, scattering papers around the room. “Goddamn, no!” One last drawer she pulls out and throws across the room. It smashes into wall and shatters into a million pieces.
Exhausted, she falls to the floor and buries her head in her hands. A moment later and her mind clears a little. She jumps back to her feet and calls information; she knows name of the Florida town where he lives, but that’s all. It’s enough.
Without writing it down she calls the number. 2:20 AM. and he has to be home; he has to be alone. But a woman’s voice answers.
Terrified, Molly disconnects the call. Sitting in the dark, the only light from the LEDs on her clock radio, she listens to the sound of her own breathing. Don’s not there or she had the wrong number. So now what?
KJ—he’s dead. She just knows that he’s dead. She killed him and ran. How can that be, she can’t even kill a spider. No, he’s alive, he must be. He’s alive and he’s called the cops—that crazy woman attacked him for no reason. No one would believe her tale of attempted rape. The sex was consensual. It would be her word against his.
Consensual sex—consensual philosophy. Suddenly it all seems quite funny. She should call Tom and tell him but she has no idea where he is.
Molly walks slowly out of her office and down the hall to the bathroom, undressing along the way and carrying her phone like a magic shield. Jean had answered the phone. How does she know that? They had only met the one time at her and Peter’s wedding. Jean was the missing bride’s maid of honor.
She switches on the bathroom nightlight and stares at her image in the mirror. There’s just enough light to see the cuts on her face.
“Of course,” she says to herself. “I need a bath.”
Molly starts hot water running in the tub. She climbs in as it fills and brings her phone with her.
Copyright © 2010 Donald W. Bacon
revised 09-May-2010
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