Right before the pandemic hit, I spent the night with a guy I’d been seeing for a while. He was great. I really liked him. We fit. Easy, fun, uncomplicated.
In the early morning, we were lying there in that half-awake, totally spent, completely-at-home kind of warm quiet before dawn. The room was still, other than our breathing. He was drifting off. Then he asked, softly, what I was thinking about.
I paused for a second, thinking about us, about how good it felt, and then just answered honestly.
“I’m thinking I need to get, like, a five million dollar loan from wherever,” I said. “Deutsche Bank. The Russian mob. Whoever’s handing them out. Then I’ll take it to New York or Chicago and rent a building in the trendy part of town. I want to open the spot. A multilevel, multi dance floor nightclub/restaurant, bars on every floor. Just the place. I’ll call it The Odder Water Daughter.”
“The Otter Water Daughter?” he murmured.
“No, Odder Water Daughter. With D’s.”
“Oh,” he whispered. “That’s a cool name.”
I kept going. “I’m gonna pour everything into it. Make it the place everyone wants to be. Amazing food, entertainment, staff. Serve the local celebrities for free. The cops too, in uniform or not. City council, everybody. Grease the wheels.”
“Grease… yeah…” he mumbled dreamily.
“Exactly. Just a little cheaper and a little better than anyone else for a hundred miles. And once it’s there, I won’t even care about making money. Just about being it.”
By then, his breathing was slow and deep, but every so often he’d still murmur, “Sounds fun,” or, “Yeah,” in the spaces between my thoughts.
So I went on, “Well, then on a Friday night, when the place is packed way beyond capacity and there is a line, five people wide, going all the way around the block, people just wanting to be seen there… Well, then I’ll set off a ridiculously overpowered bomb in the basement with like some thermite thrown in to kick up the heat and just detonate the whole block. Not like implosion style. No, I mean like geyser up the contents of a city block all over the rest of the downtown area.”
I heard his breath kind of catch in his throat like we were at the movies and the plot just went dark all of a sudden. It was really cute.
“Then, as all that material, you know, and those 1,000s of lives, come raining back down onto the nearby community as billions of bits of flaming, sizzling, people kibble and jewelry, along with all that, there will be like 100,000 index card sized metal plates that I’d embedded in the walls and the roof of the place, each engraved with a smiley face and the words,
“Why botha?
I thought I aughta.
Your Friend,
Narata Kata
‘The Odder Water Daughter Slaughterer’
PS- You, have a great weekend. Weather should be terrific for the outdoors.”
I gently tapped each syllable of the engraved words into the space between his shoulder blades with two fingers as I spoke them, then gave him a kiss on his neck, rolled over, and drifted off to sleep as the sun rose.
When I woke up, he was already gone.
What really sucks is that I haven’t actually heard from him since. I guess I shouldn’t bitch. I’m sure the pandemic fucked up all kinds of relationships for most everyone.
Damn, I’ll be glad when this shit is over and we can get on with our lives and dreams.
