*Carefree* Gum Presents: Mistletoe Moments

I walked by a bus stop that asserted all prostitutes are "sex slaves". 250,000 reside in North America. Does that make the husbands of women who married them for money or financial security "slave owners"? Am I allowed to wish that it does?

Pretty Woman came out when I was eleven. It was the first movie I ever went to alone at a theater. It was also the first--and last--movie I ever sneaked into. Over the summer I'd asked a girl to go with me to a fun park and to get out of it she lied and told me her mother had leukemia. My mother reads palms for a living, I know a curse when I see one. I was convinced that if a girl would go to such egregious lengths to avoid a date with me there was a significant chance a prostitute was the only way I'd ever get near a girl in my lifetime. I was resigned to it without much hope. Pretty Woman was going to be my Rosetta Stone in uncovering my future wife. Richard Grieco, fresh off his success as "Booker" on 21 Jump Street---shot at my high school---was going to show me on the big screen how to seduce and marry a kindhearted prostitute in fairytale-like fashion. Maybe even one like Julia Roberts, who I knew was the sister of Eric "freakin'" Roberts, star of such indelible classics as "Best of the Best" and "Best of the Best II", for which I had devout admiration.

Little did I know that my spike haired hero Richard Grieco was never to be in this film. After they misspelled his name in the credits I went on looking for him in every distant, out-of-focus leather jacket in the frame until it finally sunk in it was in fact this aging Richard *GERE* entrusted to educate me in the ways of becoming a future slave owner. Julia made it a tempting proposition. Craft? Or, perhaps, as an actress engaging in sexual relations for profit on film, potentially she qualified as a "sex slave" herself---one of those 250,000 mentioned on the poster---albeit an exceedingly well compensated one.

Looking back on the performance---with the new heads up on context courtesy of the bus stop)---I like when lies tell the truth. Or part of it. They usually do. Maybe they always do.

I have a confession: up until about 9 months ago, the best kiss I'd ever had was with a "sex slave". I'm not entirely sure I can blame Julia Roberts, but her crying at the opera Gere took her to didn't help. It took 3 years to know that my kiss was with a "sex slave" because she failed to inform me of her involvement in the sex slave trade at the time. I may also be culpable of attempting to become a "sex slave" owner as I did pick up the tab at Denny's at 4:30am after we'd walked around Stanley Park for a few hours the evening I'd met her. And, oddly enough, it never went beyond a kiss with her. Just one night that was a pack of wet matches the next night and---POOF!---gone.

It's nice when professions you don't know much of anything about, that posters on bus stops presume to speak for, mess with your preconceptions a little. While I've never minded stereotypes, I do intensely resent people who *aspire* to be stereotypes. I've always found it poetic that the one thing a prostitute is famous for withholding from their customers turned out, somehow, to have more feeling in it than, say, my *first* kiss. My first kiss wasn't a frivolous thing either. I stayed with the girl who belonged to that first kiss for nearly 5 years. The other poetic thing about them that she ("sex slave") told me---a few years later when I bumped into her---was what sort of people she had as clients. "Everybody. There's no *type*" I was working on a book about a school shooting at the time and there was symmetry in this. You know what the profile is on a school shooter? There isn't any. That's not riddle or enigma material, it's poetry.

It's burned now, but wanna know what the inside of my binder in 6th grade looked like after the movie?

Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts

Wanna know what the inside of my notebook looks like today:

Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara

Maybe Lewis Carrol was right, "We're but children growing older."

If you listen very carefully you can hear all the kids playing dress up snickering at me...

Merry Christmas

Her Giftshop In His Museum

We were close to where I was gonna be dropped off to stay that first night in Brooklyn. I was nodding off in the backseat. "Yo, Brinny, O.D.B grew up in the projects a little ways down there. On the other side of Fort Green." I opened my eyes. There was a deafening moment of radical ambiguity about *why* this information should be passed along to me. I wasn't sure if O.D.B's legend was a punchline or a solemn ambassador of the neighborhood. Our windshield had been focused and all the windows were fogged up. It was too cold and too dark to roll down the window to soak anything up. I was the first one being dropped off while everybody else was going to Brownsville. "Here it is, I'll getcha for work early tomorrow. Here's the keys."

There was a plaque outside the building for a dead poet who'd lived there that I'd never heard of.

She'd told me about his apartment. It left an impression on her. She was very uneasy I was staying there. She didn't live far off, twenty minutes walk, but she'd told me she wouldn't visit. This was a place she didn't use similes or metaphors or examples to describe or compare. I learned about it in her pauses; many different kinds of pauses---pregnant, stillborn, miscarried, aborted. The state of whatever she had with him had been the same for a couple years but she still wasn't used to it. The paint was still wet. She'd fallen in limerence with him and been picking at the scab ever since.

It was a walk-up. I was a little nervous and smoked climbing the staircase and flicked the cigarette out a window when I reached my floor. When I got inside the apartment the lights were off but I could hear two different sets of people talking in their rooms down the hallway. I walked past them and found his room and flicked the light switch. Large wine colored made bed in the corner. Bookshelves lined the walls and leaned under the high ceilings of the room. His library was 95% the same as mine. His mother was born in the same place as mine. I unpacked my shit in the corner and hunkered down with my back against the door facing the bed. I'd heard about the laundry list that stained those sheets before I'd known about her being included. Which was before I had any idea she'd be underlined in my laundry list, or that he was underlined in hers.

Couple months back, across the continent:

"I guess I might as well ask at this point. How do you know this guy?"
"He didn't tell you?"
"I didn't ask."
"He's the only guy I've ever been in love with."
"Past or present tense?"
"I dunno."
"You have the same expression as the Sphinx when you lie."

I shut off the lights and cleared my throat to test out the acoustics in the room.

The breadcrumbs lead here... so are you supposed to find this dynamic amusing or violently beautiful? Don't you want a flashlight to go prowling around her sewers? Is that smirk across your face supposed to make the room a little queasy over its secrets? It's not. All her kites become your anchors if you let them. If you can't give your phone number without giving something of yourself---why didn't her museum lure him over to her gift shop? Maybe she was waiting for somebody to steal all the originals. Trip the silent alarms.

I stole a couple pillows and slept on the floor.

Punchline

I am an uncomputed sum of what will happen ( c )