On Sticky Floorboards

He sat on the torn and tattered couch outside, in the back yard, as he listened to the heart beat of the party, that is, the drums, the tambourine, the ecstatic foot-stomping he heard all around. His feet they were tapping too, but it wasn’t out of love of the moment. No, it was simply out of reaction, impulse, reflex. His head was not there – not in the bottle of cheap Russian vodka that was slowly emptying into his stomach, or on the psychedelic hash pipe being passed around and passed back, nor on the tablets he passed to the girl sitting next to him whose slurred words or rolled eyes didn’t tempt him in the least, but tempted the tattooed hipster sucking on a cigarette as he gently stroked her bare arms.
No, his head was faraway as he mindlessly navigated through the sea of broken beer bottles, broken dreams, broken nobodies. Friends were crowded inside as they danced on sticky floors, grabbing, grinding human flesh for a false feeling of fading partnership, fading fast into the night. The loud strum of the steel string acoustic madness emanated, burst from the beat and broken guitars and loud cymbals slap, and the clap of a dozen hands, the feet sweeping, the dervish whirl of the dance floor, and the croon of the strung out singer, strung out like the base chord, E chord. This, all this, had grown too tiresome, too heavy on the soul. So outside, on the front porch, alone with the lonely stars that hung isolated faraway, he lit a foul, filthy cigarette, and listened to the crackle of the burning paper, the drowned out madness inside, and the screeching tires, peeling on a turn topped with a magnificent grito, somewhere there, in the slums. For a moment he was far removed from the ugliness of this tragically beautiful lifestyle.
“What are you doing out here, Elias?” Walla asked, between hiccups and slurred words, clutching a glass of Andre. “The party’s inside!”
“I know, I Know,” Elias replied, taking a final drag from his cigarette.
Walla grabbed and brought him into the mindless dance floor, in the midst of the sweat and the static energy, where he was swallowed alive by the magnetic swirl of the beehive. But once a sweet Mexican beauty with black hair, honey lips, and the slight smell of gin slipping with her words came and hung her arms around him, he stopped caring about the lunacy. Just like that, he succumbed to the beauty of the madness, the eloquence of sin, the apple. He bit down on the apple, on the neck, tasted her sweet sweat and she let out a soft moan. He forgot about it all – the bad, the sin, the emptiness inside; the black vacuum of that fabled area where the soul once dwelled; and the dilemma of losing faith with one’s self, his life, his salvation – it all was brushed under the bed, while an act of contrition was performed on the sheets above. The sheets, they tangled, they swirled among limps, among sweat, among human flesh and sounds – it was all blanketed in someone else’s covers, someone else’s bed where they would lie not caring and not knowing that two people joined at the hips and became one for a feeling of fucking. It’s a phenomenon of mutual consumption and abandonment, as they both moved naked with one another, completely foreign to each other, eyes closed, unable to stare the sad truth in the eye. And when they finished, they reach for cigarettes, as they talked as though nothing happened, nothing ever happened, a kiss on the cheek at most.
And they talked. They talked of yesterday, of the sixties, and she wished she lived in the sixties.
“Cause, you know they were wild times. Wild, wild times. People were free, and they felt good, before the government came and closed up the collective euphoria of the people, you know? This country has come run by fascists, you know?”
“Mhhm,” he said, and he listened to her drone about the fascists, then Marx, and then some how dived into Beethoven, and his ninth symphony and Ode to Joy, and how we’re all going to hell, and then spoke of Nietzsche, and how God is dead, and the true path is Buddhism, though she hasn’t completely made up her mind on whether she likes Zen Buddhism or one of the older, Indian variations more, which brought her to Kerouac and Snyder and their adventures in The Dharma Bums. He said Kerouac is full of shit, and she grunted and continued on as though he didn’t say anything. He didn’t care, he couldn’t care –she was just like the rest of them, as he watched her lips move and words stroll over pretentious sentences on subjects that didn’t interest him in the least – at least not after sex. She continued to talk as he stopped to look at her naked body in the light from the bare bulb that hung, swinging from the ceiling as people talk a thousand miles per hour outside their door. He looked at her soft brown skin, the freckles on her arms, and the tattoo on her forearm. It was of a Lotus Flower and had some Buddhist chant written around her wrist. He sat up and smoked a cigarette, and pretending to listen until her tongue grew too tired and she left. He put his clothes on, stood at the breach of the door, and watched the moths flutter, shriek, and dive down, down, down outside the portal. There, the world was burning and the moths were fluttering in the fluorescent halos of the electric lights, in a desperate attempt to achieve a false nirvana, a vain pursuit of eternal happiness, perpetual youth and beauty.