guy smiley, this is your life!

We spent the whole night in her cigarette stained apartment, dragging the edges of scissors across ribbon, curling them then taping them to her pubic region to hide her premature balding. This way the men she slept with might think she was just being festive.

"What do you think?" she asked, leaning back against the couch.

It looked sort of horrid. "I'd lick you," I said. I really meant it.

"Of course you would."

"That is why I asked you to marry me."

"Maybe a thicker tongue would have convinced me to say yes." She propped a mirror up against a cushion. "It'll be like mardi gras for pussy eaters," she said.

I finished another glass of red wine. Maybe I should get out of here. Was I really expecting her to let me go down there and sniff around, like a dog licking the frosting off of a birthday present that toppled into the cake? I tapped at my pants, but nothing much was really going on down there anyway. I guess when you're friends with an aging stripper you get bored of masturbation pretty quick. I decided to wander the city for a bit. Maybe I could meet somebody new. Someone daring. Someone that would let me be daring. Maybe I could meet the daring me! I twisted the edges of my moustache to make them pointy. I checked my reflection in the mirror on the way out, fast enough to see the points without getting the image of my face etched into my mind, like the ghost of patheticness pickled or marinated for 39 years. I tapped at my pants again.

"Knock knock."

"Nobody home."

Downstairs, everything was grey with early morning, an entire world living in the shade. "Nighttime is the shadows, twilight is the shade. Daytime, the sun." I said it again with a french accent, but it didn't sound any more sexy.

I heard the voice of an angel behind me. "Good morning, sir!" She bumped into me, but I had the wallet out and held at arm's length before her tiny fingers reached my pocket.

"Nice try," I said.

"I'll never figure this out!" she said, and ran around the corner where I could hear her crying. I didn't care! I was emboldened by the wine. Was this daring? I stooped down to her with my pointy moustache and said "little girl get lost!" Why I chose the french accent, I don't know, but that's probably why she started laughing. I stood back up. Wonderful, I thought, I just cheered up a thief. Nothing doing, mr. officer, just wandering the city cheering up the little girl who tried to rob me while the woman I'm in love with makes herself more festive for the men she lures in. I tried to picture myself happy, 30 years older, with her at my side. Instead, I saw my fingers cut, scraps of bright colors strewn about while some hideous voice called from the other room "make sure you get more toilet paper you pathetic mess, and tell that bagboy to come on by with his penis of his to put inside me!" It dawned on me, amazingly for the first time: I didn't love this beast. I wasn't even sure how she'd become my best friend, if she was my best friend. We spent more time together than people naturally do, but I think I'd become more of a pet than anything. Yes, this is it! A moment of truth. Oh, thank you wine, thank you pathetic crying girl. I would hug you, but I'm still angry.

I started back towards her apartment, then hesitated. Mine was too far for all the wine I'd been drinking. The girl peeked around the corner and giggled. Damn her! I lurched forward with a kick, but missed. She giggled again! How dare her! I kicked again, hit the wall, my wallet fell down, she grabbed my wallet and ran to a figure standing nearby.

"Damnit!" I cried. "Well, the joke is on you, I'm afraid! I have rigged my wallet with an explosive device that will spray blue ink all over you and all the money!"

"Sir," said a woman, "we know that you are local, we're just trying to run little practice runs for when we go into the city." As she spoke, I quietly pushed buttons on the cell phone in my pocket.

"We had no intentions of taking your money or your wall-"

The wallet exploded, covering them both over with blue.

"Little man wins!" I cried, and ran back into her apartment building. When I got upstairs she was lying in the bathtub watching the curled ribbon float about in little currents she pushed around.

"I wish I had thought of this when I was still stripping. When I still had the body for it." She sighed. "Why don't you go open another bottle of wine, and then maybe you can give it a try and tell me what you think." She looked up at me for a second, and I nodded somberly, using all my energy to hide my excitement. Tap tap? Come back later, something is cooking.