Bits And Pieces Of Sam's Day Off--

*****Betty The Smoker was having a day of epiphanies and ovate smoke rings-- standing on a corner and staring into faces as she sucked on butt after butt of road-scored unsmoked street-side tobacco, blowing rings and scuds and dragon snarls, her staring growing daringly more stern with each passing stranger. She looked right at people and tried to see what each held fearful within themselves. A fear of heights. A fear of others knowing about this. A fear of others knowing about that. A fear of simply being discovered as a fearful person. A fear of being looked right through like a wisp of smoke and being seen as fearful and fearfully inconsequential. Betty The Smoker hadn’t had this much fun in almost fifteen years.

And the thing of it was, people were afraid. She could see this as they turned away from her, time and time again. Her face would gaze straight into their gaze, and they would turn away. The palpable fear was now their fear and was no longer something to be frightened of.

All this time, she thought, it had been her. But it was them. They turned away. They were the ones who would not meet her in the streets. They cowered and moved away as if meeting her would cause such terrible pain.

So here she was, running out of cigarette butts and not caring for the first time in a long time, mainly mesmerized by her own ability to stand firm in her place in the world, to make those others move around her, to look away, to be in fear of her and feel her stature in the masses of human frailties so evident today.With hair like Einstein’s and skin like her deceased grandmother’s, this was almost too much to consider real. There was no rhyme nor reason for this fear to be turned away this way. How could this fear be manipulated like a vision in a mirror? How could fear-- this fear or that fear-- be turned back to where it never came from to begin with?

*****Chester was having a hard time keeping his pants up. They were too big in the waste and too short in the length. They needed a rope, and a rope seemed in short supply. Chester thought the best way to get a rope was to simply ask for one. He was, after all, dressed to ask questions. A trench coat and matching slacks-- sans the era fedora-- was an acceptable outfit for a detective on the streets of Big City. A trench coat and slacks were fine, as well, for a mission to find Mimi..
“Do you have a rope” seemed like a reasonably acceptable place to start, thought Chester. But if Chester released his pants from the grip he had on a folded bit of waistline, they simply fell..
“Who would answer me then?“ thought Chester. “Who? Answer me that!“
And wouldn’t it figure-- Chester's sex was in stand out mode again. It ached and pined like a full bladder with a distinctly different set of alleviating directives It pointed and pleaded. It throbbed and twisted Chester's words like it was directing Chester looking nervously for a date.
But Chester was a man-- and now a detective-- and not the molester everybody tried to make him out to be. He wasn’t looking for a date. He never was. He was looking for Mimi. He was helping Sam. He was annoyed by his erection, and that was all. Chester was not ever going to be a Molester. And that was that. Which meant touching sex was taboo. All sex.. Even his own, which stood out often like a cannon-fired preacher and begged and begged.
The only thing holding Chester’s pants from cascading to the floor, was a mindful and determined Chester. Chester the Upholder. Chester the Determiner. Chester the super heroic man with the will of steel and the fortitude of a fortress made of steel.
Chester was indeed a self-imposed determined man, in marvelous ways, with an amazing power of will and self-control. Chester knew all this. He gathered himself by the thoughts of such. He could handle all of these distractions while he entered the bakery and did what he needed to do. He could keep his pants up, ignore his sex’s impulses, and simply ask for rope. Chester was a man on a mission, a man on a quest, and this was his first test for the day. Chester needed a rope, of course, before he could find Mimi.
The woman behind the counter looked foreign and kind.
“If I had a rope, I could...” Chester tried to query the woman.
“Excuse me? I not understand.”
“If I could use a rope, my pants would be better off...”
Chester pulled his trench coat open to show her his pants. He did this without realizing what he was presenting. Chester’s Chester.
“Your pants off?” asked the woman.
“I need a rope for my pants off,” Chester tried. It seemed like good simple English. He tried to demonstrate how they would fall if he let go of them. The robust woman moved forward and leaned over to see more of what this situation offered. Chester should not have released the fold of waistline he had held in his hand for quite sometime. Things fell down from there for poor Chester.
All the way to the floor.
Chester had just met Bettina. Bettina from Hungary. Bettina’s English was not ok but her libido was fantastic. Bettina didn’t understand Big City men. She was a ripened purple plum just waiting to be picked, a ripened orange just waiting to be squeezed, an olive full of oil; but most men only wanted donuts. That’s all they seemed to come here for. Glazed and unglazed. Old-fashioned and full of cherry filling. So Bettina’s fantasies were created while getting up at three am, twisting twisty glazes and dipping maple bars and pouring yellow custard out of a bakers’ decorating bag and watching porno on videos while she worked.
And here was Chester. A man with a staff, looking for a rope? What was a hungry Hungarian to do? She had no panties on. She had no one in line. This man had come on into her shop and dropped his pants. She had seen this on the TV before. She knew her favorite part.
She rushed Chester by leaping over her counter in her skirt, knocking creamers and straws and napkins and business cards to the floor and colliding into Chester’s chest and lust with an old world passion. Passion that came from Istanbul by camel caravan and sweltered in the sun. Passion that ripened in olive groves for centuries. Passion that grew with the seasonal grapes and was stomped into wine. Passion that intensified like a war of the world. Passion that intensified like another world war. Passion that would cross the sea and end up in a donut shop, climbing atop a bespectacled Chester-- like a molester-- mounting him with a single stab of ass that found his piercing staff, throwing herself onto him and taking Chester’s untested sex into the history of her soul. Chester could feel a strong swell stirring. Chester could feel a wet dream coming on. Chester could do nothing but hold on to the hammering hips of a hungry Hungarian, and hope she didn’t rip the dang thing off.
Chester’s nightmare became a dream. Bettina became a real event with unintended consequences. Her boobs were cut loose to Chester and Chester took one in his mouth and suckled it with a newfound fondness for boobs He took the other nipple in his mouth. This too, tasted like a dream.
Donuts were shaking on their shelves. A fat man eyeing donut holes for a dollar a bag skipped the impulse to buy and simply watched. Bettina took in Chester like a frisky, naughty naked nun cutting loose on a bishop. Everything was building to explode.
Everything did. Chester. Bettina. The man in the window. Everybody secreted something in a moment of pure abandonment and amplitude. It was a moment of unrepentant pleasure. It was a moment that smelled of white sugar and grease.
Bettina fell into Chester’s chest and the two of them caught their breaths and clung to each other’s satisfaction and held this moment for quite sometime as Bettina let his sex toy shrivel in her like a passing fad.
The fat man at the window moved on.
Chester’s eyes had blurred by orgasmic lust on a donut shop floor. Chester’s glasses had been knocked off. But Chester saw the world anew and he sniffed in the new smells as well as old familiar donuts and a whiff of coffee.
“This is great,” said Chester to himself. “This is frigging fabulous..”

*******
Another pair of police trousers somehow connected to black shiny shoes had just kicked Minus in the nuts. This policewoman’s arms had grown weary and her voice-box dry and painfully hoarse and her mandibles were aching and her memories on fire and her 80 pound four foot ten perpetrator was shutting down his senses in front of her like a man. This policewoman did what any self-respecting woman-- who had been tied up naked on a bed for a week, approaching death and airing out her yoo-hoo for all who came to see-- would do.
Katunggggg!
Crushing the pair and splitting the pair and driving the point home to the navel.
Minus woke up and passed out-- all by one swift kick-- and stood up and fell down and silently screamed in his own screaming mind while his stomach tossed his nuts back down and grew queasy and threw up and his body writhed like a pitch-forked snake and his eyes blurred grass blades into vomit and his toes curled and the pain overran his thoughts which scrambled like he had just been pithed like a Halibut bound for sushi. Every pain imaginable within a millennium came to visit the soul of Minus and left a card and Minus thanked them one by one as they went away, as slow as the tide, one by frigging one like the ring tones in his scrotum.
“That’s for calling me chubby,” said the Policewoman, who walked away herself.

ADDENDUM FOR DUMMIES-- If you are not a participant of this year's Nanowrimo, then you won't get one of these. This is the email sent out at the start of week four, to encourage all of us crazies to burst our final brain bubbles in a mad rush to get to the end....

Dear Author,

We've been through a lot together these past 21 days. We've laughed at our books. We've cried at our books. And, in the last three weeks, we've progressed steadily together through the five stages of novel-writing. 1. Denial2. Anger3. Bargaining4. Depression5. AcceptanceAnd together we've grown as---oh wait. Those aren't the five stages of novel-writing. They're the five stages of grieving.

Well, there goes this week's pep talk.But you know what? Those stages actually work pretty well for NaNoWriMo too.Stage/Week One definitely had plenty of denial ("this isn't going to be that hard"). Stage/Week Two was full of anger ("why do I do this to myself every year?"). Then came Stage/Week Three's bargaining ("I'm spending Sunday in bed watching TV, but only because I'm going to get up at 4 AM Monday and write 18,000 words before I go to work.")

And now we reach Stage/Week Four. Depression.Why depression? Shouldn't this be the all-out party point? What about the stuff in last week's email about 35K and the gravity changing and the Tibetan yak farmer with the superpowered writing totem? Isn't Week Four supposed to be the point when everything gets easier?

In a word: Yes. This weekend, we'll hit the home stretch. Where our books leap into the 40,000s, and we bat out the last 10,000 words in an exuberant rush, crossing the 50k finish line with a few days (or minutes) to spare. A true storybook ending.

But there's also a certain bewilderment that comes with setting an impossible goal, working like mad, and then looking up to discover that you are on the verge of achieving it. Winning NaNoWriMo is something that you'll remember for the rest of your life, but winning means ending, and it's a little sad to accept (Stage Five!) the fact that the focus, pro ductivity, and imaginative mayhem of these last 21 days will go away soon. I'll talk about maintaining that momentum year-round in my final email, which will go out the first week of December.

For now, though, we have a challenge to complete. And whatever your word count, know that you are on track for completing it. If that means you need to write 49,900 words this week, so be it. People do it every year. We'll have the wrist-icer, massage technician, and a gilded novelist crown ready for you when you come flying around the 50K bend. The end is in sight! I'll see you at the finish line.

Chris32,100 words and counting