This is my entry in Steve Weddle's "Noir At The Beach House" short story contest over at Do Some Damage. I'm not sure it qualifies as noir, but it was sure a lot of fun to write. It might offend a few sensibilities.
It’s never really been about tits and beads for me, but booze changes a lot of things. I have this thing with women. I fall in love. Being all knightly and shit left me blue-balled for most of my high school years. It’s simple, if I can’t say “I love you”, I can’t come. That’s a big problem when you’re hammered, on a crowded Florida beach with your wrecking ball of a brother and having nothing else to do but look for ways to get into as many panties as you can.
“Jesus Rob, talk to her. Do something. You didn’t drive a thousand miles to stare at her tits for three days, did you?”
Roman had never shared my romanticism. Five minutes ago, all of West Palm Beach could hear him screaming: “OH SWEET JESUS, TITTY-FUCKING CHRIST” then “BITCH, YOU ARE SOMETHING ELSE, WOW” before re-appearing with a shit-eating grin, under a thunder of applause. Spring break, yeah. Roman was too drunk to realize the girl was who they were cheering for. He bowed, while the cute, but chubby bikini-clad girl was getting offered two necklaces and left for the bushes with another guy. My brother didn’t take it personally. He hit the bar for another drink instead.
The girl I was staring at so intensely was named Sandra, or maybe Sabrina. I don’t remember. I overheard the guys around her call her that. Maybe they weren’t sure either. She was the kind of girl I dreamed of since I was twelve. THAT dream vision that every man has of the perfect girlfriend was standing right there, in front of me. My vision, my dream. Tall and athletic without being muscular, she had long, brown curly hair and eyes like the night. A wild party night like this one.
Sabrina knew I was looking at her. She threw side glances at me from time to time. She even winked once, daring me to go talk to her. I swear. But since I was paralyzed by beauty and ethics, Roman took care of that for me.
That suave fucker. He slid his hand on her lower back and whispered something into her ear. She chuckled, nodded and the next thing I knew, she was in front of me, introducing herself: “Your brother told me you’re very shy. Let’s go walk along the beach for a little while”. She grabbed my hand as I invoked the ancient spirits to help me fight back a boner and the urge to say something stupid like: “Are you the one I dreamt of?”.
I would have killed for another drink. I would have ran back into my hotel room and locked myself up with another forty ounces of Vodka. That would have made me the drunkest guy on that beach, I’m sure. If it would have happened during the day, Sabrina/Sandra would have seen my pasty white face turn red.
I would have married her on the spot. All she needed to do was ask.
But things didn’t last long enough for me to embarrass myself. After what seemed to me like fifteen seconds, I heard a booming voice coming from behind us, yelling: “HEY BRO, WHAT THE FUCK?”
Standing near the bar was a hyper-tanned, muscular young man with a glowing rosary around his neck. He looked ridiculous, but threatening at the same time. Sabrina, or Sandra let go of my damp hand and rolled her eyes. “CARSON” she boomed back. “LET IT GO, MAN. WE’RE NOT IN HIGH SCHOOL ANYMORE. WE AGREED TO THIS”. She seemed a lot less intimidated than I was. She looked like she’d known him forever. It was then that I had the bad idea to look at her right hand. Staring back at me was the biggest fucking rock I’d ever seen in my life, on her wedding finger. By the time I could think, “HO.LY.SHIT”, Roman had it all figured out for me. He’s used to this type of situation.
Let me explain something about my brother. When we were in high school, he took kickboxing classes for about a year and a half. He was good. He picked a few guys apart in sparring and all. But that belongs to a distant past. A decade and a half later, booze, weight and sedentary behavior made him completely harmless. In his head though, he’s still invincible.
He pushed Carson in the back and managed to make him stumble. Then, he threw the most pitiful spinning back kick in the history of martial arts. His leg never lifted above Carson’s knee level, though he managed to bust another girl’s kneecap with his heel. Roman’s a heavy fucker. He spun so slowly that another jock had floored him with a haymaker by the time he was done. I could've sworn I saw his teeth fly out of his mouth. Roman was asleep, the girl was screaming with her knee bent backwards and Carson and his friends were leaping over the bar’s handrail like handsome zombies. They were gunning for me. And Sabrina, I guess.
I grabbed her hand and started running in the opposite direction. There was at least a mile of poorly lit, overcrowded beach in front of us. Plenty of room to run.
Or not.
Coming from the beach, was twice as many muscled mutants, sporting glow stick necklaces, backwards golf visors and sunglasses. It happens a lot when there’s too much testosterone in one spot. Fast movements, shiny objects and tits destabilize the Neanderthals and they fight for stupid reasons. Sometimes no reasons at all, like tonight. At this very moment, I foresaw my own death. Crushed, or smothered or maybe my spine snapped in half by those sun screen smelling mastodons. Hand in hand with the woman I loved. How romantic.
One guy had a giant penis, drawn where sun screen had been, in the middle of the enormous burn on his chest. If I was able to notice this small detail, it was because things were about to get very personal between me and him. His friend somewhat lurched over us (in a very athletic fashion) to reach for Carson and his friends, who suddenly slammed the breaks. Unspeakable terror on their faces. A second later, things looked like a Rugby melee. Except there were chairs were flying over us.
That’s when Penis Chest, without a victim to punch out, decided I was a part of Carson’s crew. He removed his sunglasses and hung them on his glow stick. In the dark, his little beady eyes locked onto me and a demented smirk lit up his face. So, I did what any reasonable man would. I ducked, fell on all fours and crawl as far as I could, ending up under the first picnic table nearby. I’m pretty sure I went right between his legs. Clever of me, I know, but Penis Chest wasn’t as drunk or stupid as he looked. He reached for the picnic table and literally flipped it over, along with the three people sitting on it. From my vantage poin all I saw were legs, flying all over the place.
Forced into confrontation by destiny and an angry, phallic young man, I grabbed the nearest beer bottle. It just so happened to be one of those enormous, 1.5 liters ones. I slammed it as hard as I could against this shin. To my surprise, it didn’t explode like in the movies, but it made a cavernous sound instead. A low, reverberating thud. I hit him so hard that my hands were shaking, like I was holding an aluminum bat or something.
Penis Chest yelped loudly and face-planted into the sand. There might have been some concrete there too, because it fucked him up real good. He sprung back up after a few seconds, blood pouring down his face. He flailed his arms around and grunted some non-sense like “it’s not me, it’s not me, I didn’t put your cat in the toilet, Aunt Christine” and “it’s gonna foam, man”. He might have had a concussion.
ANYWAY, I didn’t help him, instead I started pelting him with everything I could find. Beer bottles, caps, footballs, burgers, everything. There’s nothing I didn’t throw at the motherfucker. Slowly, he steered away from me and into the water. He elbowed a teenager in the face on his way there. That got his girlfriend crying a whole lot.
I was pretty proud of that. In a hunter-gatherer way. I hadn’t been in a fight since Scooter McIntosh broke my incisors in the fifth grade. I puffed my chest out and yelled: “POLAND’S BACK BABY, YEEHAW”. I must have looked like the silliest motherfucker, drunk, with my bony ass in a baby blue Speedo. My voice fluttered. But it didn’t matter. Victory is the sweetest mistress there is. I walked back to the battlefield, where three or four jock soldiers laid wounded, bloodied and moaning , nursing their injuries. An old, bald guy with glasses held Roman’s jaw in between his hands and asked him: “If I do that, does it hurt?”
And Sabrina in all that? When the smoke cleared, we found her on the beach, fidgeting with a broken nose and a bad concussion. Carson was sitting not far away, nursing a gruesome injury. His front teeth punched through his lower lip and he was bleeding profusely from the mouth. He looked at me and shrugged. I looked down at her, poor girl with her nose smashed in her face. I picked up Roman and I left her there too. We figured out that somebody would pick her up. She wasn’t MY wife.