The High Heeled C*ntessa

Once upon a time (yes, that is how all great stories start), there was a scraggly little girl who was always a big fucking mess.  She was never well maintained, and always a step behind the rest of the game.  While most ladies living in NYC shell out the big bucks for a cut and color every couple of months, weekly mani pedis, the latest in BB Creme foundation, and Brazilian waxes, little Gemma was not most ladies.  She usually had chipped nail polish that she painted on herself, razor burn from shaving, flaky skin from sleeping in winter foundation three nights running, clumpy, drug-store brand mascara, and an array of brightly colored bruises from her drunken revelries and daily life.  Yes, while most ladies spent the summer achieving a goddess-like bronze tone from vacationing and weekend trips to the Hamptons, Gemma maintained a deathly palor thanks to her inability to tan, and a job that kept her inside during most hours of sunlight.  She was a bit pudgy because she also didn’t give a fuck about doing spin class and pilates three times a week, nor did she subsist off of organic arugula salads with a spritz of organic lemon juice for daily sustenance.

Gemma was a far, far removed cry from the blown out blondes, with their anorexic fawn legs who pranced around the upper East side with their Chanel bags and their lash extensioned eyelashes.  She was also a far cry from the tanned, toned, lip-filler filled gold-diggers hanging around Meat Packing.  She was a long shot from the bony, cigarette smoking, diet coke guzzling models who hung out at VIP Room, and she didn’t really fit in with the edgy scene kids taking molly every night and partying in Brooklyn either.  Basically, it is safe to say that Gemma was, for lack of a better word, a reject.  She was an outcast for as long as she could remember. Her friends were few and far between.  As flawed as she was, Gemma somehow managed to find a very, very hot foreign boyfriend one summer.  She wasn’t sure why he liked her, or why he didn’t abandon her after they slept together on the first date, but she couldn’t believe that she would ever land such a hot bloke.  The issue with this gentleman was however, that he was an up  and coming rocker.

Yes, Gemma’s boyfriend was out almost every night of the week playing gigs.  When he wasn’t playing at one of the city’s coolest music venues, you could find him promoting at clubs like Tao Downtown, Avenue, Provocateur, and the rooftop at the Gansevoort.  As I’ve previously stated, he was very hot, and very foreign, which meant that he was a target of women everywhere.  Poor Gemma felt so inadequate every time she went to watch him play a show or went to one of the clubs he promoted at.  She felt like a little, disheveled field mouse standing next to the waif like creatures who belonged to agencies like One Model Management, Elite, and Ford.  She wondered if she starved herself for 3 months straight if she could even begin to come close to such ludacris levels of emaciation and beauty.  She wondered if she shelled out 700 for a cut and color at Oscar Blandi if her hair might be even a quarter as immaculate as the gorgeous,  Argentinian models with the waist-length brunette tresses doing lines in the corner of Electric Room.  “Maybe if I get some botox I too can be beautiful,” she thought to herself one night as she stared at her reflection in the bathroom of Electric room.  Then she caught site of a group of blonde, Ukrainian models exiting the stalls behind her… “Maybe not,” she sighed.

Poor Gemma.  As the years went on, she only became increasingly ugly.  There were fine lines around her lips and eyes when she smiled.  Her lips thinned out, and her skin lost collagen.  Her boyfriend’s success grew, and even though he was not opposed to the idea of them getting married, he always kept it to, “some day, not now… but maybe someday I will want to.”  Well, I tell ya’ kid- 7 years flies by pretty fucking fast in this cold-hearted town.  Gemma was a young girl of only 25 when she had started dating Max… she might not have been a great beauty, but at that time, she was in good shape.  Her skin hadn’t aged due to stress, a diet high in Cheetos and coffee, and hormonal acne.  She had a more positive outlook on life then, she had been hopeful for a bright future.

Seven years of being led-on with the false hope that marriage was in her future later, Gemma woke up one day and realized she was a 32 year old woman, with decaying looks, a burgeoning waist-line, and deteriorating hope that things would improve.  Her boyfriend of seven years now had minor success in the music industry and was getting recognized by passerby on the street.  Her boyfriend had been cheating on her for the past three years of their relationship.  Every time that Gemma couldn’t make it to a show due to her early-morning work schedule, he would end up going home with a bartender or a 22 year old Brazilian.  She had tried to have “the talk” with him many times, which usually went something like this:

“Hey babe, I know that you don’t want to get married right now, but you know, some day I do.  I don’t see why I should waste anymore of my time or these precious years with a person who doesn’t want the same thing that I want.  Should we even be together?”

His response was always the same:

“I TOLD YOU A MILLION TIMES!!! I don’t want to get married now or ANYTIME SOON!!!  Goddammit!  Why do you always pressure me?! How many times have I told you???”

But the fact of the matter was, she didn’t really know what his version of “anytime soon” meant anymore, seeing as how seven years together had past.  Gemma knew she wasn’t getting any younger.  She certainly wasn’t getting any prettier.  She always said that she didn’t want to wake up to find herself 34 and unmarried and here it was becoming her reality. She kept hanging on though because she loved him and didn’t know what else to do at this point.  She decided to give the relationship another couple of years.

And so it was that Gemma woke up one day at the ripe age of 35, unmarried, and having spent the past 10 years of her life loving a man who she knew wouldn’t give her the future she wanted, cheated on her, and clearly didn’t love her back.  It was on her 35th birthday that she awoke, alone in bed.  It was strange to wake up alone since Max almost always slept in later than her.  She meandered out of the bedroom to the kitchen, to find a note on the table that read the following:

“Hmmm,” she thought to herself, “that’s funny- Max usually sleeps in later than me and he doesn’t even drink milk.”  Curious things began to cross her mind.  “It must all just be an elaborate surprise for my birthday” she thought.  Gemma decided that he must have forgotten to buy her a present, or perhaps had to run out for a card or something and that he would probably be returning shortly.  She went into the bathroom and looked herself in the mirror to pretty up her face before he returned home.  As she went to dab some concealer under her eyes, she observed herself.  She was a far cry from the girl she had been at 25.  She had dark circles under her eyes, crows feet at the corners.  Her lips were thin and turned down at the corners.  Heavy lines on either side of her mouth.  Her skin was beginning to sag on her jowls, and her hair was spotted with about 30% whites now.  She sighed, and thought to herself “Maybe this is the year- I can still look good in a wedding dress with a little botox and the right make up.”  Then she turned out the light and walked back to the bedroom to dress herself.  She put on an expensive piece of lingerie and some thigh highs from Agent Provocateur.  She used to wait for her boyfriend all the time wearing lingerie like this- however, even after slipping on her seven inch heels, the lingerie just didn’t flatter her body the way it did when she was 27.  Her boobs were beginning to sag, her arms had filled out on top and her hands were extremely veiny.  She had vericose veins in her calves and her butt kind of sunk into her meaty thighs.  Oh well- it was an effort at least.  She poured herself a glass of champagne and waited around like this for about an hour for Max to return.

Max never returned though.

After an hour of waiting, she called him and his phone went straight to voicemail.  She would go onto call him about 100 times that day, all the while telling herself that it must be some sort of elaborate effort on his behalf to surprise her for her birthday.  Every last call, all 100 placed calls, went straight to voicemail.  Finally, it was 9pm at night- Gemma was wasted, sobbing, had called every single mutual friend and acquaintance they shared to see if anyone might know of Max’s whereabouts.  No one knew.  She thought about calling the police and placing a missing persons report, but in her heart she knew the truth.  Max was gone forever.  He had left her.  Abandoned her like an old, mangy dog is abandoned, tied on the stake in the front yard where he spent his entire life, by a welfare family living in a trailer park upstate.

Gemma cried for 3 days straight.  She had to have her now married girlfriends take turns coming over to spend the night with her.  She was inconsolable.  One night, about a week after Max left, Gemma finally decided to leave her apartment.  Her girlfriends finally managed to convince her that a night on the town would be good for her.  They had secretly wondered if it was good, given the fact that they didn’t know if Max had jumped town, or there might be a possibilty of them seeing him.  Sure enough, after a lovely dinner at a cozy French restaurant in the West Village, they decided to have a cocktail at the Standard.  As they entered the premises, low and behold- there was Max.  Gemma was the first to spot him.  He was sitting on a leather couch with a leggy, blonde who couldn’t have been any older than 23.  Gemma lost it.  She hauled ass across the roof top, as tears welled up in her eyes and her face gew hot with anger.  “You fucking cock sucker!  How could you do this to me?  How could you leave me out of the blue with no explanation, no break up discussion, not even a fight??? On my birthday?!” She started to physically attack him and the whore sitting at his side.  Her friends cheered her on, but security stepped in and pulled her off and quickly escorted her downstairs onto the street.

A month passed by, and Gemma received a phone call from a friend who was still friends with Max on Faecbook.  She called to tell Gemma that Max was engaged to a girl named “Olysia Slavojenski” … the same fucking cunt from the Standard!  Gemma fucking lost it.  In ten years of dating Max, they hadn’t posted a single photo together on social media.  He never would cater to her request to change his relationship status.  It always seemed to Gemma as though she wasn’t good enough or hot enough to be publicly in a relationship with given the bevy of other beautiful women that he was surrounded by on a daily basis.  Now here he was, a couple months into an affair with a girl half his age, wife-ing her up and announcing it on facebook, complete with engagement photos and all.

Gemma couldn’t even cry anymore.  She did the next best thing she could think of and had a gang bang with about 4 young hipsters 10 years her junior.  After she was done with that, she took a handful of painkillers and washed them down with a bottle of champagne.  She climbed into the tub and cut her wrists.  Sadly for Gemma, she didn’t cut deep enough, nor were the painkillers a high enough dose to kill her in her sleep as she had prayed they would.  Instead, she just vomited all over her bathroom and had the worst fucking hang over of her life.  The next day she had to clean up the spots of blood all over her tub and order new towels since they were all covered in vomit and blood.  Fuck this shit! She wanted revenge.  Gemma hit up an old friend who was in the army and conned him into giving her his gun.  She put on her seven inch heels, an expensive bandage dress, and hid the pistol in her purse.  She went to the music venue where Max was set to play his first large NYC show, and waiting patiently for him to go on stage.  Then she fucking Abe Lincolned his ass ass soon as he came out with his electric guitar.  Then she fucking John Lennoned his fiance too.  She ran out of the music venue and got hit by a taxi.  She died.

The end.

Anyhow, our maiden was not a very comely girl.  She had frizzy hair that was always a mess, and she wore thick glasses because she had poor vision.  The only reason she was ever even hired in the lounge where she worked as a cocktail server was because the GM had just fired a handful of people and needed help right away.  She was lucky she stumbled upon that Craigslist add when she did, because she had no money left in her savings account and was nearly starving to death- surviving on only a bag of frozen peas and a loaf of bread a week.  Sick of having to call home crying and asking her parents for money, she would rather starve to death and continue on in her job search suffering in silence and to the unawareness of those close to her.  She was at her wits end and contemplating suicide the day she found that ad on craigslist… “HELP WANTED ASAP: Needed: cocktail servers, bussers, hosts, and waitstaff- send resume and headshot to _____.  Open interviews on December 5th.”  Well, even though our maiden, Isadora, was homely as hell, she was blessed to at least be fairly photogenic, and so, she sent out her resume and headshot and was called for an interview later that day.

The rest is history.

She was happy to finally have a source of income, however, she quickly began to despise her co-workers.  They were all lazy as fuck, and mocked her for her frizzy hair and nerdy appearance, which was a sharp contrast to their own, well-put-together and polished look.  They made her do all the dirty work- candles, wiping down tables, and staying late to do inventory.  Her boss was an asshole in every sense of the word, and always gave the best customers and clients to the pretty girls- the girls with longer legs, and smooth, shiny, brunette hair.  Poor Isadora was left in the dust and constantly scolded for the mistakes of her coworkers.  If the glasses weren’t properly polished she was threatened to be fired.  If a customer walked out without paying the tab, she was forced to pay it out of her own pocket. Things became increasingly worse when she started to be bullied.  She never knew that it was even possible for an adult to feel bullied by fellow adults in the work place, but suddenly she started to get anxiety everytime she had to go into her shift, because the other girls would ridicule what she was wearing and purposely make messes that they refused to clean up and knew that she eventually would take care of out of fear of losing her job at their hands.

The final straw came when she was closing down the side station at the end of the bar one night, and caught sight of two of her fellow coworkers doing shots with one of the assistant managers.  They were sitting at a table, with a bottle of Jameson and several wine glasses, enjoying themselves and flirting with the manager, as she was windex-ing and scrubbing the ever-living-shit out of the countertop.  When they noticed that she saw them, Ashley, the prettier and bitchier of the two, shouted from across the room, “Don’t forget to take care of the coffee in the kitchen!  Oh, and can you please cover my shift tomorrow?  I’m going to Tao with all the other girls.”  Isadore really didn’t know what to say- she was ready to blow.  She put down the windex and the rag she was cleaning with and walked straight to the office where she knew the other manager would be counting the end of the night cash.  She knocked on the door before she entered.  He swivled around in his seat to look at her.  He was a weasley looking man- he had a long, sharp nose, squinted dark eyes, thin lips, and black hair that was always parted on one side and looked as though he had doused it in black boot polish.  “Yes?” he said abruptly.  “I really need to talk to you about the other girls,” Isadora said in a wavering voice.  She was on the verge of homicide but holding back all of her frustration and fury was also making her tear up since she was restraining herself from shouting all she wanted to shout.  Before Isadore could even begin to spill all of what was happening, Dave, her manager, cut her off and said, “Listen, Issy, you’re only here because you are willing to do the shit none of the other girls will do.  The other girls are our money makers- clients come to see them and spend money at their tables.  YOU, on the other hand, are here because no one else is willing to properly clean at the end of the night or work on the week nights when the other girls refuse to work because no one is drinking or throwing down money for bottles.  Be lucky that you even have a job with us.”

The hot tears began to flow from her eyes- her face hot with indignation and fury.  Her throat was tight and though she had a million things lined up in her mind that she wanted to shout at him, nothing could escape her mouth- she was having trouble even breathing at this point.  She said nothing and walked out.  She walked past the table where the two other girls were now doing yet another shot with the floor manager, and one of them shouted after her upon noticing her tears, “Aw, boo hoo… little Issy is upset because she can’t work on Saturday nights and isn’t invited to Tao with us tomorrow.”  Isadora, started to run at this point.  She ran down the stairs, her face red and her eyes welled up with tears.  She could taste the salt that ran down her cheeks and touched her lips as she threw the doors at the bottom of the stairwell open and bolted out into the night air.  She hailed a cab because there was no way she could handle public transit in this state, and as soon as she climbed into the back of the car, she let go completely.  She was openly weeping when the Pakistani driver chimed in “Miss, miss, you not going to throw up in my cab are you??”  She weeped harder.  If she was pretty like the other girls, he would be asking her what dumb man broke her heart, but instead, all he cared about was the safety of his car upholstry.  “Pull over! I’m getting out here and walking home!” she said.  He pulled over.  She jammed two fingers down her throat until she started dry-heaving.  She forced herself to vomit up the family meal she had had at the beginning of her shift, and proceeded to projectile vomit in his car before she slammed the door, flipped him off through the passenger-side window, a sly smile on her face, and then bolted down the street.  before slipping out of sight between two buildings.  “Stupid FUCK!” she screamed to no one and anyone who might have been walking past.  She decided to walk home, even though home for her was a different borough.  She needed to blow off this negative energy and years of pent up aggression towards the world that treated her like shit, simply because she wasn’t hot.

As she walked across the bridge, alone, still crying, she thought that she might actually like to be approached by some deviant on this particular evening.  She just hoped that some other fucking asshole might say the wrong thing or come at her and give her a chance to take out her rage upon him.  She wanted the chance to beat the ever living shit out of someone tonight.  After she made it safely home, two hours later, she went straight to her bathroom cupboard where she kept a small vile of Ketamine that she had found one night at work.  She was saving it for an occasion such as this.  She fully intended to end her life that night.  All of the years of feeling like Cinderella, the Cinderella who hasn’t yet had a chance to go to the Ball and meet her prince, she decided she couldn’t possibly go on.  She blew the entire contents of the bag, alternating between both nostrils, and then poured herself a glass of wine.  She sat down and once again burst into tears and tried to call home, but no one picked up.   As she began to drift into a deep K-hole, her thoughts focused around the years spent being bullied in school and always doing work for her incompetent and lazy peers.

She was always the one that did the brunt work of every school project so the team could get an A… she was always the one that was bullied into letting her less-smart classmates copy her Algebra homework.  She was always the one chosen last for the teams in Gym class, always the girl who never had a date or a boyfriend to accompany her to the school dances or proms.  She was the quiet, little mouse that no one seemingly gave two fucks about, except to pick on how smart she was, or how quiet she was.  She began to wonder how her life might have been different if she were beautiful like a model… if she were tall, and leggy, with a slender frame, and shiny hair, and full lips, and a button nose, and sharp cheekbones and almond eyes, she would be loved.  She would be the girl who got to carry bottles of champagne to the tables on Saturday nights and walk away with $600.  She would be the girl that every guy hit on and wanted to date.  She would be the girl standing outside Tao, in an Herve Leger dress and a Chanel bag.  She would be happy.

Well, Isadora, by some miracle, survived the night.  When she awoke the next morning, there was vomit on the couch and vomit on the floor.  She had 10 missed calls from her parents, and a headache like she had never experienced before.  She was still in a kind of drugged out haze, and hatched a plan to run away.  If she wasn’t going to make it in this city, she was going to leave behind the life, the people, and the struggle she knew.  She was going to start over and risk everything.  And by everything, she really had nothing to lose.  She had no boyfriend, no real friends, no obligations except her shit job that just barely paid her rent and student loans…. she felt more free just thinking of running away.  That’s when she decided she was going to go to… COLOMBIA.

Yes, Colombia… that seemed like the best option to her considering her back up plan was always to strike it rich with some drug lord and spend her days blowing lines in a private Cabana and sipping champagne.  And so, she hopped online and purchased a ticket, and booked two weeks at a little cabin she found on airbnb.  She called her parents and lied so as to prevent them from worrying, saying that a girlfriend had invited her to a vacation home in the mountains and she wouldn’t have very good cell service for a week.  She packed a small, carry on bag with the essentials, and the next morning made her way to JFK to embark on her new life.

When she arrived, she found a car who was willing to drive her to her rental in the countryside.  She knew absolutely nothing of the culture or language, but thanked him nevertheless and after she had settled into the quaint house, she decided to bike to the local village and secure some sort of job.  She was hired on the spot at an American-owned bar and restaurant.  She got very lucky indeed to have found the only other American residents of the entire community so close to where she was staying.  And so it was that Isadora settled into her new daily routine.  She loved the little bar where she worked.  The locals were friendly and all of the men seemed to find her attractive and loved to flirt with her in their heavily accented English.  She was aware they probably only found her to be attractive because she stood out with her hair and blue eyes, the local women were much more beautiful than her, but she didn’t care attention was attention.  One evening when she was about to close up, a handsome man walked into the bar, followed by three other men, all of whom were surprisingly well-dressed for this small town.  She stopped with her closing tasks and took their drink order.  As she continued to wipe down the bar and prepare for close, she noticed the handome man staring at her.  After the men had had a few rounds of Tequila, he approached her.  He had impeccable English, and was very smooth in his mannerisms and with his approach.  He invited her on a date, and though she was skeptical, she consented.  She had only been on a few dates in her life, and most of them had ended very badly.

FAST FORWARD TWO YEARS…

Isadora is finally living the Cinderella ‘after’ the Ball life.  She is now married to the handsome man from the bar… his name is Andres Escobar, and he is an internationally known drug lord.   He has paid for Isadora to have breast implants, a personal trainer, and a personal hair stylist.  Isadora has ditched the glasses in favor of contact lenses, and her uncontrollable fro of hair is now smooth and usually worn up in a chic bun, to show off the face that has also been cosmetically enhanced.  She got the works- big, white veneers, collagen to boost her cheeks, lip implants, and a nose job… the kind of nose job that every Long Island jewess growing up in the 70s got when she turned 16.  A little bunny, ski-slope, all cute and small in the middle of her face.  Isadora basically looks like a clone of all the bitches she used to work with at the club, and now, she has started acting like them too- she does blow daily, is spoiled by her husband (even though she has to turn her back to his man-whoring, cheating ways- she thinks that it’s worth it in return for the furs, diamonds, Birkens and vacations he buys her), drinks champagne every night at all of the upscale restaurants she is chauffered to in their private plane, and acts like she is superior to all of the warm-hearted townspeople that initially were the sole reason she came to fall in love with Colombia in the first place.

One day, as she is blowing lines in the cabana over-looking the magnificent pool in back of the mansion he bought her, she looks up to see him entering the court-yard followed by a tall, slender brunette who looks like she is all of 20 years old.  “Andres!” she shouts, “Come here please, I need to have a talk with you about the new maid you hired.”  Her husband kisses the girl on the cheek and the girl walks away and climbs into a black town car that is waiting to carry her away.  As Andres approaches the cabana, Isadora removes her Chanel sunglass to look at him.  Her pupils are like pinpoints and her eyes are red from doing blow all afternoon.  She has also had one-too-many glasses of Cristal and is ever-so-slightly slurring her words.  “Baby, what did I tell you about the help?” Andres begins… “you know that as the man of the house, I make the decisions about who we bring in to work for us.”  “You slimy, whoring mother-fucker!!!!” Isadora yells, “I have been turning a blind eye to your affairs since the fucking day that I met you- I won’t fucking put up with it anymore!”  “You think you can treat me like this?!  Just because you buy me shit and take me places, you think that I have to put up with ..” Andres slaps her hard across the face before she can finish her sentence.  Isadora is stunned- her mouth agape as her own hand rises to touch the white-hot area of skin where her husband’s hand was a moment prior.

As her eyes begin to well up with hot tears, she slowly turns back to face him.  Her voice is calm and in her blue eyes, it is easy to see a fire slowly building up.  She raises her champagne glass as though she is about to take a sip and instead hurls it to the ground.  She quickly bends over and does another line that she had cut and waiting on the mirrored table below.  She slowly lifts her head and looks her husband dead in the eye.  He usually seems unmoved by her attempts to put him into what she sees as his ‘place,’ however, this time, there is a fear slowly building inside of him as he ascertains her level of rage.  “Baby, please, I didn’t mean to..” “SHUT THE FUCK UP YOU COCK SUCKING MOTHER FUCKER!!!!” She shouts as she stands up to face him.  She climbs on top of the white, leather chaise-lounge where she had been sitting.  The two girls that Andres has hired as ‘pool attendants/waitaff’ that have been going about their business tidying up the courtyard/outdoor bar area are now looking at the scene unfolding in the cabana.  “Now, baby, please, please… just take a seat, what are you doing???? You’re just making yourself look like a fool in front of the waitstaff.”  “I’ll fucking kill you and them.  Is that what you want?  It is, isn’t it????”  Isadore has a manical smile on her face now.  She is in full blown coke rage mode.  She picks up the half-empty bottle of champagne that has been resting in a silver bucket on the table and throws it at the brunette holding the pool skimmer who stands about 20 feet away.  “Take that you slutty bitch” Isadora screams after the air-born bottle which smashes to the ground about three feet short of its intended target.

Before she can throw anything else, Andres grabs her and shakes her hard, she struggles to free herself from his grip before finally wiggling out of his grasp and running barefoot in her white, floor length pool coverup into the house.  She locks the door behind her and takes out her phone.  She calls the owner of the American bar in the little town where she used to work and begins sobbing into the phone about how her husband is cheating on her and abusing her emotionally and physically.  Being a guy, and a fellow American, James, the owner of the bar, hops into his car and is making the 5 hour drive to come rescue Isadora.

It is nightfall now, and Isadora is laying in bed next to the husband she resents.  The husband she wants to stab as he snores next to her.  She looks him over in the moonlight that comes in through the window and illuminates his face.  “He isn’t even attractive to me anymore.  I don’t know if he ever even was.”  Just then, Isadora’s cell lights up.  “Thank fucking God he is here!!!” she silently whispers.  She slips out of bed, and sneaks downstairs.  She slips out the door and climbs into the car where James is waiting.  She hugs him and bursts into tears as she thanks him for coming to her rescue and begins to tell the tale of all that has happened to her since he last saw her and how the fairytale life she thought she was entering was worse than the old life she had left behind in the states.  As she is talking, they are driving down a dirt-road in the dark countryside.  Suddenly, a deer jumps out and James swerves to avoid hitting it.  They swerve too far off the road and the careen onto the edge of a cliff.  The car rolls several times, and finally comes to a stop after hitting a tree.  Isadora and James are dead.

Upon hearing about his wife’s death, Andres marries the buxom, 20 year old pool attendant/personal cocktail server.  They live happily ever after and she has three of his babies.  He cheats on her everyday, but she doesn’t care, as long as the Chanel bags and Louis Vuittons, and European vacations keep flowing.

THE END

Once upon a very modern time,  there lived a little prince with Blonde hair and dark brown eyes.  He was a thinker, a philosopher, a poet, and a genius, but also, bat-shit fucking insane.  He loved nothing more than to wax poetic and pretend to be one of the great romantics he idolized… he also loved to mind fuck people and get into arguments with the vagabonds he befriended, because no one of a rational mind would cater to his thought trains or listen to his ramblings.  This is why the majority of his friends were homeless townies- drunks that counted bottle refunds for the cheapest vodka available, and  vagrants that slept in tents by the local river.  He worked as a bottle room attendant for a brief time period, and this is how he initially came to know these folk by name.  He heard all of their sad stories, and he could relate, because he himself had one of the saddest childhood stories of all….

But, alas, all of that is besides the point.  The point is, our tragic, little hero loved nothing more than getting fucked up- he would drink himself into a stupor and roll around naked on his living room carpet reading excerpts from Henry Miller’s ‘Tropic of Cancer,” or Tolstoy to anyone whom was willing to listen to him on the phone while he was in this lowly state of intoxication.  He also enjoyed doing ketamine to the point of k-holing himself into a world of disassociation, drinking cough syrup to the point of robotripping, and when he was still a high school student, he was so often fucked up on acid and weed, that for an entire month he went to school barefoot and wearing tie-dye shirts with grateful dead bears on them.  If you are wondering how his teachers allowed him to get away with attending school barefoot, it is because his jeans were so long and tattered at the bottoms, that his teachers could only see his toes sticking out and assumed he was sporting flip-flops.

Having come from a very broken home, our hero found himself on his own from the point that he was eighteen years old onward.   He filed all of his FASFA forms himself, paid for his own food, apartment, and books, and purchased all of his furnishings and the clothes on his back.  He chain smoked to the point of nearly contracting lung cancer by the tender age of 21.  He would skip class just to stay home and read Thoreau, and when a teacher called him out on his six, consecutive absences, he would make up a brilliant lie about how he was depressed having recently found out he had contracted HIV and unable to pry himself from bed in the morning… sympathy would usually be bestowed upon him and he would scrape by with a 65 passing grade.  He had the potential to be so much more than he was, but he simply lacked the conscience that makes a good student attend class and a bad one say ‘fuck this shit.’  He would write the most eloquent of suicide letters that often landed him in the Dean’s office, and letters that he would email to his professors outlining his contempt for academia as a whole, and the modern-day college system.  These letters also landed him in hot water with the Dean and with his professors who developed a fear of him and would remain wary for the rest of the semester that he was the type to bring a shot gun full of lead to school.

He probably was the type to do such, but he was rarely bullied as most high-school students who are driven to commit acts of massacre are.  In fact, he was usually the one doing the bullying.  Though he was far from being ‘popular,’ he was well-known for his in class commentary, sharp wit, and even sharper tongue when it came to verbally denouncing any idea he didn’t agree with or theory that he found dissatisfying.

Once, he set a bride on fire on her wedding night (on accident of course).  He enjoyed a fine wine more than anything else, and though he was far from being well-traveled, he read so much about history, geography, language, and the sciences, that he could fool almost any stranger whom didn’t know his history into thinking he had traveled to all seven continents.

Our tragic hero’s downfall was though he thought himself to be a sort of Don Juan when it came to the ladies, he was so socially inept that he didn’t know a single thing about the way females processed their thoughts, emotions or their actions.  This is the exact reason why he couldn’t hold down a relationship.  He would either get wasted, verbally abusive, or both wasted and verbally abusive and there would be an explosive falling-out wherein she dumped him, but he would later claim to have dumped her.  He didn’t really know how to pick ’em either.. if you know what I’m saying.  He was obsessed by big breasts, to the point of being blinded to the rest of the body.  As long as the girl had huge tits, he thought she was beautiful, even if said tits were saggy as fuck, her face looked like a braying donkey, or she only had huge boobs because the rest of her was also huge.  He even dated a lesbian once who was on the girl’s rugby team and had no idea why she refused to kiss him four dates into their summer romance.

Many years after graduating college, he was working as a professor at a private university where he taught English and amused his students with stories of his reckless youth.  He received a phone call from an old friend and an hour into their conversation, he brought up the fact that they used to joke that they were going to marry each other when they both ended up 40 and alone one day… they agreed never to sleep with each other, just to have a beautiful wedding and to share the expenses of a beautiful house by the sea shore.  Oh, and they also had a common dream to open a day-home for the autistic, where they would blare the Kid Cudi song, “Day and Night” on repeat 24/7.  Truth be told, they had been planning the details of this marriage for years, whenever one of them was in the depths of despair having just been kicked to the curb by their significant other, or the other one had been single for over three years and they were both at the end of their rope, they would come to the agreement to marry each other out of convenience and the desire to never be lonely again… there were going to be lilacs, a vanilla and rasperry creme filled cake, and the wedding was going to be on a lake in the evening in May.

They decided to finally tie the knot since she now was past child-bearing age and looked haggard as fuck in the face, and he had the same beer gut that his father had developed.  What a comely pairing they were!  On the night of the wedding, after the cake was cut (and half of it went down the portly bride’s gullet) and the champagne had been flowing for hours on end (yes, the groom was in a state of black-out drunkeness comparable to that of his college days), the groom rowed out in a tiny row boat into the middle of the lake.   He planned to set off a fireworks display for his wife once he had made it further off shore.  He looked up at the clear, starry night sky and the full moon.  The fragrant and sweet smell of lilacs wafted above the water, and he could hear “lilac wine” by Jeff Buckley playing softly from the illuminated tent even though he was now quite far from sure.  The melody was punctuated by laughter of the wedding guests, and he smiled thinking about this happy little life that was about to begin.  Even if both of them never shared more than a single kiss and slept in different beds, at least he would have a companion to dine out with, travel with, and drink with.  he looked up into the sky one last time and struck a match to light the fireworks which he planned to send out and away from the boat on a little plank of wood he had crafted especially for this occassion.

The fire flew up the spark cord of the explosives at a rapid rate, and before he could fully launch the plank carrying the fireworks to a distance safely far away enough from the little row boat where he sat, there was a massive and firey explosion.  The poor sweet prince was blown into a million pieces that appeared as white and lilac colored waterfalls and twizzlers and bam-bangers in the night sky… he became a part of that firework extravaganza that evening.  The onlookers back on shore underneath the tent ooohed and ahhhhed not knowing yet that the groom was dead.  The bride cried tears of joy and looked into the distance in an attempt to see if her friend was smiling as big as she was.  She waited 40 minutes for him to come back to shore, and when he didn’t get back, she sent out a search party.  They found pieces of the blown up row boat, and a note floating in the water that simply said, “Just remember that you’re ugly, but try not to think about it.”

THE END.