Red Night

The crimson stain peeled off the once used dress. That's how dry the red mark was. It dripped off the perspiration of the geisha-styled skirt.

The droplet had its own story. It came off of the syringe of Kittie, who died in it. "There's no point in living," she wrote in a note before purposely over-dosing. It was 32 days before she was found dead and that stain from her arm did not come out of the outfit.

Rog used to be Kittie's lover. As he stood there he remembered her wearing it with a brass anklet on. He snapped back to the moment at hand when he zeroed in on the ruby red lips of the dancer wearing it. A 17 year old girl started talking to him about music and the band that was playing. She motioned over towards the bass player and near Rog, in order to be within earshot of Roger.

The drummer nearby was dancing with excitement in-between a segue that was layered over with the bass. Tattoos coursed through the room as if they were snakes being charmed by the music. The keyboardist's rhythm massaged the surrounding walls and ceiling. Compact and cheap strobe-lights faded out the closing set of the music.

Rog was invited to the after-party. He walked the girl who talked to him to her car with the drummer on the other side of her. He loaned his denim jacket to her as they walked. When Rog got into his own car he scarfed down the mushrooms that were left in the glove-compartment of his parking brake. He drove for a while. He went to the beach beforehand to mellow out and get some fresh air. Then Rog drove back to the party as the colors of the night were so vivid that he could taste them on the sweet-and-sour parts of his tongue.

The house was a little ways off. He could not find it immediately. Besides the psychedelic awareness he had subjected himself to that late, he couldn't find a place to park. It took him 15 to 20 minutes to figure it out. The minutes were elongated and slowed down as he could take in the remainder of the colors of the picket-fences and brown from the apartment buildings.

Rog knocked subtly on the open door and after the host let out a wince Rog walked inside. The host of the after-party was off to the side sharing an aqua-colored pipe of chronic. Normally Rog worried about stuff that was laced because he was allergic to coke-joints or PCP. He didn't care though. Not this time. It was halfway through the college semester and he had too much on his mind to give a shit. He took a puff.

"Ya' know, it's really crazy going back into college right when you're about thirty. I get afraid of running into the parents of the 18-year-old female classmates I hit on."

The vocalist he was talking to shrugged her eyebrows and tried to find a less awkward segue.

He told her after she spoke half-gibberish, "Yeah. I just hooked up with this one 45-year-old chick a few years ago and I don't want to go down that road anymore. I don't like that attachment shit."

The vocalist flicked her hair in a fashion that was sociably flirtatious, neither a sexual advance nor overly friendly. "Well, you know. It's like- Sometimes you've just gotta fuck. I say go for it. I mean you aren't getting any younger..."

Rog slugged shot after shot down his throat with every word. He avoided the cigarette smoke permeating the living room because he quit smoking cigarettes a few months earlier. Before he realized it, he was talking to a dark-haired latina woman with luscious and well-proportioned curves. The psilocybin mushrooms he had on the drive there made gaps or advances in time that were as well arranged as a dance or the pulse of a harmonious musical beat.

He opened his mouth before he thought. "Um, what d'ya think about James Dean?" He impulsively thought to himself that she'd think about the movie Giant and the interracial relationship between the latina character and Dennis Hopper's character. Instead, she just returned a puzzled look.

"James Dean??" Her eyebrows curled up in the center.

"Yeah."

"Oh. Jim Beam? How do I like it?" She rotated a small bottle of labelled whiskey like a pendulum before his eyes.

His pitch-black pupils followed the bottle like magic 8-balls. "Oh, yeah. I love that guy." He took the flask before she noticed it was in his hands.

"Go ahead. It's yours." She smiled at him.

He took in each sip with a contorted grimace not of pain or pleasure. Each swig hit like the snapping jaws of a rattlesnake but in a more pleasurable way, like the tingling endorphins that danced on the nerves of his arm when Kittie whipped him in bed at just the right pressure.

He looked down at the floor and traced the view as his head swayed upwards. The latina woman was wearing the red geisha dress. The room span. Seconds and minutes moved by with each shot he quaffed down. He spun into a bed with her on top of him holding her in his arms. The corner of his right eye spied a picture of Shiva, the goddess, in one corner of the room. In the other corner he saw in his periphery a picture of the 50s actress Natalie Wood. The ceiling and walls enveloped like a dome in his recreational state of deliberate hallucination. He felt her legs lock around his own like an intense buckle. She pulsated on top of him with such passion that the temperature of her body burned his waist and thighs. As she turned beet-red from the ecstasy of his body he felt himself heat up. He saw her face contort into five different women he knew before. And then she was none of them. The one-night stand and Rog felt as if they were levitating out of their bodies and their spirit was one. Their flesh was secondary. Their movements were so much in sync that their essences blended together. He felt his psyche cross a schism as he was peaking on the mushrooms. Both of them were one. Momentarily merged into a revolution superseding the trap of the ego.