# last weekend (language)



## kbsmith (Oct 18, 2015)

The place is busy, I am very drunk, and feel bitter toward the world. My feet ache, and my calves hurt, because I have walked around quite a lot – between and around and outside of bars all night.

I wear red, white, and blue shoes; white stars scratched out in black sharpie marker. I blacked out the stars because they evoked feelings of ‘rebel flag’ to the wayward black person; I did not enjoy the fact that I caused them discomfort, or strife.

A black skullcap covers short and balding hair: Darth Vader’s helmet outlined in grey. The floorgirl, when serving my drink, comments on the hat: she shows me a tattoo that looks very bright – even in the low light – with shades of green bursting behind a gray, monolithic phallus: technological inscriptions running through it. I reach out to rub it: her skin is silky smooth to my touch. I look up at her standing above me.

“What is it?” I feel my eyebrows move toward my nose.

“It’s a lightsaber,” she says, and I am sure I’ve fallen in love: tight black corset supporting smaller breasts to look stacked and exploding. Black panties tight around a solid hot ass, as she walks away. I sip my beer and smile knowing she gave it to me.

I watch the dancer on the stage. She is maybe good, I don’t remember. Because a girl to my left is speaking to two older black men. She is Pacific Islander; her skin glows a light milky tan in the blacklight. Her ass curls up and around her backside leaving a sultry shadow on the tender skin of her thighs. A miniscule black dress is fanned at the sides, like window blinds revealing her skin beneath.

As I watch her: she calms the conversation with the two black men, makes them laugh. Leaving them, she turns to look at me and smiles; I smile back. Her cleavage is tight to her chest. A strapless black dress lets her sandy blonde hair cascade onto her shoulders. She smiles a huge smile; more primal than any sober encounter a man could have. She walks over to me on stilts called heels. Her balance is beautiful to see.

She speaks clearly, in my ear over booming dance music. Drunken men chuckle with laughter. She stands leaning on a nearby halfwall, beside where I sit: in the corner of the dancefloor. We speak for a minute: she is beautiful and uninterested in me, but enjoys talking about her self; I let her. After a moment, she is disappointed that I do not know that the Chicago Cubs (her hometown heroes) have made it to the NLCS after some amazing curse had been lifted. I know the curse, but did not know it was broken.

She asks, “DO you want a dance?”

“You have to let me touch you,” I say.

“Ok, just not anywhere that’s covered,” she grabs my hand. She guides me to the back of the stripclub, left of the rear bar: VIP lounge. We sit down in a very soft couch; she removes her shoes. I sit comfortably underneath her, her legs are so fucking smooth across my stomach. I run my hand up and down them while talking to her.

“What’s this?” I ask, looking at the big black Velcro patch on her knee.

“It’s for support: I tore my m-a-…” She speaks softly, sensually in my ear. I cannot hear her very well over the music.

“How’d you do that?” I smirk. I only remember the voice not the words: I try to push her legs off my stomach, gently so as not to arouse suspicion. Sitting down in such a reclined position has me spinning, and her legs push against me forcing nausea. The next song starts, she stands up and drops her top down, revealing two beautiful breasts with similar shadow and sheen as her ass. She dances well, such a nuanced method: like a snake charmed and bobbing. I am smitten.

She places her ass carefully on my pelvis, increasing pressure to start grinding on my jeans. I reach up to grab her hips to guide her away. She stands up and dances in front of me for a second, removes the rest of her black clothing (except the panties). 

“Would you be mad if I went to the bathroom?” I test her, feeling ill.

“You’d still need to pay for this,” she almost laughs.

I say something like, “Oh, that’s right, cause I have to pay for every second.”

Still smiling and dancing, she gestures toward the bouncers: “It’s not me, honey, it’s them.” I jump up and walk past her briskly, cup her breast lightly in my right hand; I say “You can put it on my tab,” as I rush away from her. I do this because I am feeling so ill and spinning so fast that I fear I will vomit on her. I make long strides toward the bathroom in the far opposite corner of the club. I make pains to avoid the lobby, so as not to lose it there. The extra time is what killed me, because two steps from the bathroom door I feel it happen, the puke. I put my right hand up over my mouth and cough it out, maintaining the same quick pace. A girl in the hall looks on: I feel puke drip down onto my shoes and jeans, but keep walking. I get to first the urinal and vomit hard. Flush. Move over to the stall, shut the door, no lock. t wipe my hand and the side of the toilet. I kneel over the stripclub toilet for a moment and dry heave twice, then get up.

I immediately leave that place. I am disgusted with myself at the moment. Amazingly, I am not upset for puking in a strip club, which now seems an ultimate low on par with others, but feel deep remorse for rushing out on such a beautiful and exotic woman. I light a cigarette, speeding madly down the road to a different strip club, knowing my night at that one was over.

Pulling into the Gentleman's Club, probably at high velocity (it's a little fuzzy), I slam the car into park. I open the driver's door and put my feet on the ground. I sit spitting at the ground between my feet. In the parking lot trying to gauge my sobriety. Finally, I determine I am A.O.K. and get up to go inside.

Inside, a man looks at me and tells me the cover is ten dollars. I show him my I.D. "Five dollar cover charge," he says. 
"I thought you said ten?" I fumble with the money.
"Make it three, man, don't worry about it... we're about to close," he laughs.
I look down at my shirt, which is wet where I rubbed in the vomit to make it less noticeable. I toss three dollars on the table in a gesture of defiance and take a seat at the bar.

No attractive woman in view.

Eventually, a busty brunette, probably a single mother of two with a liberal arts degree, takes the stage. She is not particularly stunning, but I find her face to be excellently suited to my needs, regardless her physicality. I sit down at the edge of the stage and reveal a handful of cash which beckons her come my way.

It is around this point that I realize: I never washed my hands.
I am sitting at the edge of the table when this makes me laugh. She drops to her knees: her asshole is inches from my face. I put a dollar in her shoe straps.

She turns around to sandwich my face between her breasts. I reach up and flick her nipple, then breathe hard on her neck as I rub my dirtied hand off on her pillowy chest. She stands up, keeping her distance after smelling my breath.

The music stops. She looks down on me from on stage. I don't move. 
She laughs: "Thank you!" Pops her hips to the side so her boobs bounce.

"I have two hundred dollars for you," I say: and I want to hint that I'll to give it to her in the streetlights out back.

She walks over to the DJ, who has been making "LAST CALL" announcements for the past hour. She stilts back over to me.

"Sorry! Maybe tomorrow?"

I get up. Go to my car and go home. I don't go back the next day.


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## Gasher (Oct 18, 2015)

Hi kbsmith,

I would highly recommend you take the extra minute before posting to separate your paragraphs with lines of whitespace. It makes it a ton more readable!

I've come to understand these boards are home to stories of all types, and some are more about sketching out a scene and less about painting in a story with some semblance of conflict and resolution. This seems to be the former, but the problem for me was that the scene was extremely muddled. Your language and voice is acerbic, seeming to want to shock and awe us. But sometimes, it would behoove you to reign the snake in a bit in order to give us a more comprehensible picture of what's actually going on. Take paragraph 2 for example:

_Also, covering my shitty haircut is a black skullcap: Darth Vader’s helmet outlined in grey. The floorgirl, when serving my drink, comments on the hat: she shows me a tattoo that looks very bright – even in the low light – with shades of green bursting behind a gray, monolithic phallus: technological inscriptions running through it. I reach out to rub it: her skin is silky smooth to my touch. I look up at her standing above me._

I understand that she is showing off her tattoo and only later understand that he is misidentifying it, but the context is muddled. At this point, I guess that he is in a bar or a strip club. I don't understand the role of the "floorgirl" but I take it that her responsibility is akin to general manager and she is giving out free drinks and free feels of her tattoo to keep the clientele in a good mood. I don't know that I buy him mistaking a lightsaber for a phallus, especially when he falls in love when he finds out it's a lightsaber. All in all, there is too much catch-up reasoning that the reader has to do to stay along with the narrative and keep the scene in frame. If your goal is to sketch out a scene, it would help if you slowed it down a bit and let us understand the protagonist and the context of his thoughts and actions a bit better. At that point, you ought to decide if the scene is about him or about those around him, and give more depth to that, so that the imagery has time to resonate. 

The strong voice also detracts from solid sentence structure. The opening line:

_The place is busy, I am very drunk, and feel bitter toward the world_

Is stream of conscious in nature, yet there are other lines like:

_Also, covering my shitty haircut is a black skullcap: Darth Vader’s helmet outlined in grey_

That feel removed and more akin to a third-person narrative. To begin with, I don't like this sentence because it's passive voice, but I don't like it even more because why would he be thinking about his black skullcap when he is drunk and bitter to the world. The scene is riding on the character's voice and that voice needs to be consistent and believable. 

Speaking of consistency, what is the point of the detail about the Cubs? It sounds like small talk that need not be brought to the forefront, unless you're specifically trying to say something about the MC being behind the times for whatever reason.

Questions abound with this: why is the MC bitter to the world? Why did he throw up--was it simply from being too drunk? Why the attitude? Why does the MC--or you with your authorial commentary--seem to be encouraging our judgement about his behavior? What should the reader be taking away from this scene you've sketched?


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## EmmaSohan (Oct 18, 2015)

This was very vivid.


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## kbsmith (Oct 19, 2015)

Gasher said:


> I would highly recommend you take the extra minute before posting to separate your paragraphs with lines of whitespace. It makes it a ton more readable!



I went back and edited this, as you suggested!




Gasher said:


> All in all, there is too much catch-up reasoning that the reader has to do to stay along with the narrative and keep the scene in frame. If your goal is to sketch out a scene, it would help if you slowed it down a bit and let us understand the protagonist and the context of his thoughts and actions a bit better. At that point, you ought to decide if the scene is about him or about those around him, and give more depth to that, so that the imagery has time to resonate.
> 
> ...
> 
> ...



Very good feedback there, thank you. I especially like the bit about catch up reasoning. 
I have edited the sentence in question to make it less jarring. And, he is not thinking about his cap, but the situations around him incite him to remember his own appearance. Perhaps you are wanting foreground, or background information. Maybe you'd like to know that he has walked all around and into 8 separate bars for the past 3 hours, trying and failing to speak to women, trying and failing to make new friends. THe ole faithful, unmovable American stripclub remains a cheap doppelganger for affection.



Gasher said:


> Questions abound with this: why is the MC bitter to the world? Why did he throw up--was it simply from being too drunk? Why the attitude? Why does the MC--or you with your authorial commentary--seem to be encouraging our judgement about his behavior? What should the reader be taking away from this scene you've sketched?



I only wanted to tell a story, dear friend. I am not trying to inject it with feeling or some grand moral statement: I don't wish to guide the reader toward any kind of interpretation. I do not mean to relay an attitude: but I definitely wish to encourage judgment toward his behavior. What behavior does not warrant judgment from the surrounding individuals whom it affects?

As always, I believe that a good piece raises more questions than it answers. Thank you so much for your broadhanded feedback: I found it most helpful. In response, I added another 500 words or so to the tail end of the story, for - how should I say - semblance of narrative closure.



			
				EmmaSohan said:
			
		

> This was very vivid.



Emma, thanks! Forgive my increasing depravity.


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