A Night in Cameroon

By Kelly Jameson

SIMPLE HARMONIC MOTION = Motion that repeats in a regular pattern over and over again.

I don't need to look far for a piece of physics. Or for a piece of ass, either.

I never finished high school, but I know about energy and momentum. Make more money stripping than the girls in my high school who went to college to study things like teaching nursing psychology and can definitely afford a flashy ride with all the bells and whistles, but I'm loyal to my dented midnight blue Ford Escort. Living amongst a crew of popcorn tenants in a jittery little place in the city: got my ass as far from the state of opaque suburbia as humanly possible.

At thirteen rebelled against authority when they called me bad. Bad for developing breasts, for sucking cigarettes and beers, bad for sitting half naked with boys on the top of a hill, watching for shooting stars, trying to forget the Ds in geometry, not caring about The Great Gatsby and not understanding the adults surrounding me like bombs, the world fucking blowing up in my face orange red blinding white. How a wet beer bottle and my first pair of motorcycle boots and boys' eager hands taught me to forget about music, forget my dreams to be a pianist, the wet wind slog crunch of my parents 60-hour weeks, our refrigerator covered in magnets photos art coupons prescriptions report cards shopping lists standing like a grotesque Christmas tree. Taught me finally they were afraid, their faces place holders where something might have been.

Never looked back. Danced and felt the cooling night air on my face, a beer in my hand; learned to look for shooting stars and wondered does anyone else? and I haven't seen one in a really long time, but I keep trying, and when I was nine and did see one, I made a wish. I wished I could fly away from this place where something used to be.

No surprise I'm practical as the everyday fog resting on the collarbone of this smudged city, no-nonsense as a bank teller cashing checks and taking deposits with transactions in the back room of the club. It's not really about transactions anyway. When it's right, like spontaneous perfectly choreographed dance, it's about connecting, about falling; up down sideways but shooting together, coming together, all the parts of your lives, grabbing every possible particle of time together. It's not about thighs asses breasts, cocks; it's about feeling alive, in the moment. In the thick throb and stream of my flesh.

Never personally felt that way for anybody but I keep looking to the sky. Want to swallow it all.

Tuesday night. A steady rain. It didn't let up, continued into early morning, tapping on the roof even after the last patrons departed for home and soggy, airless, tight-fisted dreams, hoping to snatch a few winks before heading to sterile offices for coffee and idiotic business banter playing earnestly at back-nine politics.

I play cog in the closing-time machine at the club, hanging in the sudden calm of the emptiness. Still in glitter top, G-string, white stilettos, I stop and stand beside the grand piano against the back wall, counting the waxy green bills pressed against my flesh by groping hands during the course of the night. I think, as I count them, that the grand piano may be the most complicated hand-made mechanism in the world. I once I read that it has 12,000 parts, mostly wood and most fashioned by manual labor, and can take up to four years to go from tree to concert hall or living room or strip club. Stroking the silken wood, wondering what it'd be like to fuck one of the men who made the parts, suck the fingers of a man who forged a machine capable of producing the greatest sensitivity to the artist's touch, deft fingers that part, stretch, cram my aching cunt. Handled by a man whose world is the focused delicacy of hammers, strings, tuning pins, woodwork. Sounds.

whoa, look what we got here…the mouth. Rumor is she and the boss used to run with the same bunch of bikers…seems she was the service cow…turned her out for a this and that…mostly mouth jobs…blowjobs to strangers to keep the gang in cigarettes…say she once blew twenty guys in a men's room in a bar for free brews for the boys…now the gang's dead or in prison… 'cept the boss who ended up with money to buy this club… and the mouth here… guess that makes her a handmedown fucktoy…still passin her round…

Lingering in the cigarette haze of the damp bar, I press a few keys. Sound gradually dissipates; weaves into the pedals and trap work of sex and lust and dancing vibrant in the club only an hour before. Fitted with a hydraulic lift operated from the stool by another sort of player, this particular piano rises slowly to the ceiling and lowers again in a kind of harmonic entrapment, a prancing young woman atop it shaking her breasts, bearing everything to the men staring up. An expensive prop, popular with the dancers and men in business suits and ties and dark, sweaty work socks who fancy themselves strangled by clocks, mortgages, kids, and ever fatter wives.

old serviceable cunt running that mouth all the fucking time…boss says it don't bother him… just keep it full he says…then can't say nothing but mumph…

I've danced on it. When I was ten years old I could play. Fantasie Impromptu, Liebestraum, Unfinished Symphony, Pathetique, Minuet in G. I've forgotten most of what I learned as a kid.

thinks she's smart…bit long in the tooth for this business…least here in The City…the only one puts out for the boss, boss's friends, high rollers…spends a lot of her life on her knees in the backroom…men's room…boss's office…seems to like it…

Thinking about lying across the piano, fucking above the guts and strings of the great symbol of civility, legs spread, flesh tuned to sound and movement, moisture and maleness, hammer-rush of wetness between my legs. Why I haven't done it atop this modern incarnation of the invention of a harpsichord maker for a Florentine duke, a man of the early eighteenth century who knew, though he couldn't yet hear it, that there existed more to the world of sound than strings plucked to coerce vibration—

she could always work in Dubuque or some such shithole in the hinterlands but I don't think she'd be up to it…can't see her blowin in the men's room in Dubuque…then again easy to see her doing truckers at those all night stops just the thing for the old bitch's retirement.

"You thinking what I'm thinking?"

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A Night in Cameroon

By Kelly Jameson