This dirty man with his beard, his dirty beard with bits of cottage cheese lingering on the ends, or whatever else that chunky white stuff could be. - he needs a bath and a shave.
A dirty girl with smelly armpits and permanently stinky clothes needs a bath and a good talking to. She must not know how rancid she is, how the endless days of beer and smokes and nights of beer and smokes and coke and fucking has addled her sense of personal hygiene. And the fuck musk is from a few different men, a pheromone soup that is actually repellant and disgusting. Any man who’d touch her now has to know it’s dirty thirds he’s doing, and must be desperate enough to just fucking suck it up and make it happen anyway.
Dirty girls getting dirtier by the day, hanging out with the local scuzz and trash, spraying perfume on their coked-out sweat-slick skin in the old French fashion, pasting on the foundation and blush and eyeliner and redred lipstick hoping it’ll cover the corrosion of too many longlong nights and poorly-slept days. One falls and falls hard, on her face, busts her nose or breaks her elbow, maybe cracks a rib or two, and, black-eyed, blames it on the ice. Another one spews her trash all over town, old smelly dresses and computer cords and little notebooks filled with lists in a teenager's handwriting. A bracelet left behind, an empty pack of ciggies and a plastic cup with a half an inch of beer with a stew of nicotine, tobacco and fiberglass filters in it, all left behind as a reminder that you let her sleep on your couch. She’ll fuck all of you for sure, if you’ll have her.
They roll down the street in revelry, once-shiny and full of potential. These are intelligent women! They have degrees, but who wants to hear about their education spewing forth as it does from behind unbrushed teeth and white-coated tongues. Their breathe smells like death, some rancid fecal evil that, if analysed in some spectrometer or other, would be colored a sickly bile green. They proclaim proudly, screw water, I haven’t drank anything but alcohol in five days! just before their fall.
They grow weird sores on their faces, what they call spots or pimples but what we know is their nerves frayed and exploding in anger under their pasty skin. These are women with diplomas, but try telling them that sleep would serve them well this far into their personal party hell, and they chuckle and brush the thought away. What they need is another whiskey, darling! So serve it up, straight!
I want to take them home and bathe them, and give them chamomile tea. I want to hold their hand on the walk home and tell them stories about how in the old days we learned to use soap and our wits to our advantage, to keep us from falling too far into the sink of love despair. I want to tell them that holding our heads high wasn’t just some social ritual now to be scoffed at, but the only way we could manage all the lust and dark nights and all the unrequited love. If we didn’t have our decorum, what did we have while all the men rutted in our direction and tried to ply us with just one more drink, or a taste of something illicitly destructive? I want to tell them what one small time pusher told me: that women really can’t handle their cocaine. It’s the death of them and of all they want to flaunt as sacred. Soak in the bath, take a long, hot shower and consider your destiny. Is it worth it to lose a tooth or break an arm in your revels? Did you get what you were drinking and smoking and snorting for?
They tell me that they’re proud of their long-term ability to stand all night and suffer all day, it’s a mark of their dedication to the destruction of the patriarchal protocol. They can do what men do, and more, and faster, and, they think, better, because they’ve been watching all these years and studying men's patterns and paths and habits. And as Women, they can match a dude in his worser states any day. Bring on the keg, the ounce, the shots, the bud, the junk. This used to be the domain of the masculine sex, but see, they say, we can do this too!
They don’t want our baths and our philosophy. They just want to fall and fall and fall until they hit dirt earth and are picked up by some or other enabler who promises to fix them up for sure. The party goes on.
A drunk woman walks into the bar. She waves in the general direction of everyone, then taps and grabs the first arm she can reach out to. He’s a tourist, and he tries to be nice. She just wants love, and touch and a tiny bit of reality to tell her that she’s still here on earth and is still someone’s mother, daughter, and is still alive. She hangs on him, she's a drunk older-middle-aged local, totally unaware of how bloozy she looks or how sad she seems to the barely-tipsy crowd. He shakes her off and somehow she finds the exit and is gone again, on to find another seemingly-welcome door, with warm bodies inside and shelves full of booze. Maybe someone will buy her a drink, or give her a hug, or if the gods are on her side, take her home for a bout of dirty, smelly, sentimental, half-night love.
Young woman, you in your youthful glory, will you be her someday? Do you intend with all your fancy intelligence to bypass that particular destiny? You may turn out instead to be like a Dickensian powdered matron, holding your purse and your gin close to your chest and stepping and turning slowly so as not to spill a drop or trip on the frayed lip of the carpet. Step slowly and hold the handrails so that you don’t bust your coccyx one more time slipping on the stairs of your favorite haunt. Re-powder your nose at every chance and lighten the dark smoker’s circles under your eyes. You look fine! your brittle companions say, we’re lovely! Nothing wrong with us that another whiskey couldn’t fix.
© Maria Alva Roff December 2013
