My Many Loves: Green Lady
Atlantic City, 1987. I saw her across the smog of a dim casino. She was stunning. Gown the green of mentholyptus, with pumps and a purse to match. Red hair up. Dark eyes cast down to the slim cigarette in her left hand from which emanated a pillar of smoke that seemed to hold high the plaster and neon ceiling.
Lovestruck and cocksure, I made my way to her as a magnet to a fridge. Leaning close, I whispered some brutish entendre, my lip near split by the sharpness of her green arrowhead earring. She laughed, instantly intrigued. We strode to the bar, arm in arm. With just a nod she ordered amaretto sours for both of us.
“The bartender’s an old friend,” she said.
I replied: “Not too old, I hope.”
“What does that mean?” she asked.
I sipped my drink. She led me to the blackjack table where drinks arrived like intrusive thoughts and she gambled my money away in careless, fifty dollar increments.
Still I felt lucky when she at last ran her finger tips along my neck. “How about we get out of here?” she whispered. Reader, I became erect.
We kissed in the elevator up to her 14th-floor suite, and again on her narrow balcony. From there, the Atlantic Ocean could be heard and smelt but not seen. My head swam from the salt air, the booze, and the rohypnol bitters, of which I was just becoming aware. “Come here,” she beckoned, half undressed on the circular Secaucus King waterbed with rectangular sheets. I did not reach her.
At dawn, I awoke on the floor with no money, no identification, and the disappointment that comes with not have had sex despite really thinking you were going to. I made my way to the lobby where the Czech concierge cited policy while closing up his guestbook before my prying eyes, and the bellhops feigned ignorance of the language entirely. On the gaming floor, I interrogated the bartenders but they failed to produce a name that fit the description of my sweet green lady or her mickey-slinging accomplice. Defeated, lovesick, and regular-sick, I summoned my driver.
He took a while to text back. It seems he was across town and brunching with his own overnight dalliance.
I killed time swigging pepto bismal on a boardwalk bench and watching stray cats claw at each other in the gray sandy dunes.
How I longed then to see that girl again, and still do now, to save her from the hard life she’d built around her. In the cold light of morning, between my sour stomach and aching skull, I still felt love for her and was certain she felt the same.
