7/11/2006

The late-night air-conditioner banshee, and other stories

This one opens with a girl, see, because if we’re to be quite frank to each other it always begins it a girl. It does so not because of this specific moment in time but because that most stories, hell, all stories, should begin with a girl. Otherwise what’s your excuse for moving mountains?
She never smiles. She has dark brown hair, straight but with some volume going on, and it cascades down her back to I don’t know, just short of her lower back? And big brown eyes and a small chin- actually it’s kind of funny because in a sense it’s like she’s got no chin at all- and her nose is just a little too big. Yet this is beauty that was probably carved from marble, see? This description would never do her justice because she’s a goddess wearing human flesh and I can’t believe how sexy she is and that we’re actually living in the same world. Eyes that are borderline unreal, you know? No, scratch that. Not unreal; the way she looks at you, it’s downright sidereal.
My world goes up in fireworks every time we say hi to each other. She’s usually clad in jeans. Blue jeans, back jeans, then a sweatshirt. Girls in jeans. Jesus Christ.
Still she rarely smiles, not really, and I’m thinking of the things I could tell her to make her smile.

There was this North-American president from circa the Depression, I’m thinking say not really FDR but Herbert Hoover- There’s a joke about him in Home-Alone 2, that’s pretty much all I know about him- So, he allegedly said that what his country really needed back then was a poem.
Me, I still think that what the world really needs is someone with the right smile. That’s why guys like Lex Luthor and Dr. Doom could never take over the planet, enslave mankind and etc; they could never pull such a stunt. That’s how you work an audience, see, with the right smile and a pair of big brown eyes.

But anyway.
This is me going back to the office, from the bar, it’s about 9:30pm and I have just realized I should return the key to the room we’ve rented in the building for this training thing we’ve been delivering during the week, and I’ve left a book on my desk (one thing totally unrelated to the other).
Everybody’s gone home for the day, for the night, and it’s dark all over, I’m trying to unlock my drawer with the lights off for no good reason whatsoever. It’s then that I hear the wailing.
It’s whoooo-hooo in a rather girlish voice but it’s the noise the air conditioner makes when everything’s so damn quiet.
So I turn the lights on, leave the key, get the book, take a leak, turn the lights out and it’s whoooo-hooo the whole time, like some crazy banshee coming at me like a bat out of hell. Then I lock the glass door and I’m out then into the elevator and when the doors are closing shut- for that briefest last second- I could swear that there was this blond girl dressed in a white gown waiving at me from inside the office, through the glass doors, wailing like a banshee- whoooo-hooo, whoooo-hooo, whoooo-hooo, etc.
Of course I was mildly drunk during that part. A few beers on an empty stomach will do that to you.

Also when mildly drunk, now returning home:
I discovered that I can really hit those falsetto bits in A-Ha’s Hunting High and Low just like Morten Harket, how cool is that? This is me after getting out of the bus, crossing that big avenue home under a starless, crimson night sky: “Do you knoooooow what it meeeeeaaaans to loooooove yoooooou”.
Wailing just like a banshee, see? A few beers on an empty stomach will most certainly do that to you.