“Hey… hey,” a voice hollered from a balcony
sagging under the weight of a past capacity crowd. “Show me the goods,
sweetheart!”
Ruby laughed at the slurred stupidity.
“Hey! Don’t be shy sweetie,” the voice called
again, somewhere above her head. “Let me see your tittays!”
Ruby looked up and saw a young man in a
University of Colorado T-shirt spotted with sweat stains shouting down to her.
She still wasn’t sure so she looked around her and found herself surrounded by
men. Not another pair of ‘tittays’ in sight.
“Yeah,” he nodded. “You” he pointed down at her.
Ruby felt the point like a small knife in her
chest and put a hand there to hold herself together. She opened her eyes wide
and felt a deep blush start in her neck and crawl quickly upwards like rising
mercury in a glass thermometer.
He screamed, “WHOOOO!!” as if she had agreed to
his proposition, shaking a hand full of beads in the air, clenched in his fist
like plastic pirate booty that had tumbled out of a piñata. “Yeah! Show me your
tittays!!”
Ruby shook her head and tried to wave him off.
People were starting to look at them. “No, please don’t shout like that.” She
held her finger to her lips.
He untangled a string of blue beads and dangled
them over the edge of the balcony, waiting like a hyperactive child, hopping
from foot to foot. “WHOOOOHOOO!”
There was no way in hell Ruby was going to take
her damn top off. Not for this geek, licking his lips and clapping his hands
like a perverted jester, not for a million dollars, let alone a lousy string of
plastic baubles she could buy herself. She had no interest in amusing a street
full of tipsy tourists, no interest in becoming a spectacle. She backed away
from the balcony, off the sidewalk and into the street.
“Awww,” he pouted, teetered and then leaned the
upper half of his heavy body dangerously over the edge of the railing, beads
dangling, sweaty t-shirt pulling up over his prematurely flabby belly. “Fine,
have'em anyways.”
He half-heartedly threw the blue strand down to
her as she turned on her heel towards the other side of the street.
In that moment, both the boy and Ruby would have
sudden intuitive leaps of understanding - unexpected epiphanies. Theirs were
diametrically opposing visions, though both involved Ruby standing in the
middle of Bourbon Street and a set of scuffed blue plastic beads.
Those beads looped through the air like a Mardi
Gras lasso, spinning around and around with the precision of a drunk’s aim ,
descending towards Ruby as she turned away. She saw them out of the corner of
her eye and immediately wished them away, didn’t even want the acknowledgement
of them glancing off her shoulder and clattering to the ground with the tiny
tinkering of hollow plastic.
She waited for them to hit. Instead, she felt
the warm steam of a halted engine when the waxed string hooked onto the curves
of an inconspicuous cranial universe. The diamond cut beads, like two-dozen
blue disco balls, fell into the orbit and became a garish milky way that
inexplicably hung above Ruby’s head.
Almost immediately she could smell the stench of
burnt plastic, an invasive smell that made her think of old curling irons and
hot August days when the rancid garbage on residential curbs keeps kids from
their hockey. She reached above her head, perfectly aware of what had happened
and not at all surprised. She grabbed a handful of beads before it got too
tightly wound like a shoelace in a bicycle wheel, and yanked.
The beads snapped along the thin string and fell
to the ground. She looked at them, lying in a puddle of spilt beer at her feet
instead of being draped gracefully around her collarbone like the other girls
she saw making their way, arm in arm, up the street. And although she didn’t
want them to begin with, there was a part of her, a hard lump of Longing that
burrowed through Envy’s wake, that did. Why was she never the beautiful one?
Why did all the flattery, all the attention get caught up in the turning of a
dozen planets and fall at her feet, broken and forgotten? She blinked three
times and walked away, stepping over the broken beads.
The boy on the balcony almost looked away from
the pretty girl in the black skirt. It was clear she wasn’t going to take her
top off; it was obvious he wasn’t going to see any boobs. He’d been throwing
these damn beads all night with not one lousy nipple to show for it. Unless
those ‘Girls Gone Wild’ videos lied, he’d been having an unusually slow night.
And they couldn’t be lying. He’d gone through too many bottles of baby oil in
his dorm room by himself and now his summer job savings on the ideology they
espoused. But something made him hesitate, arms dangling off the balcony after
his heroic throw. And just before he stood straight, intent on getting to the
bar to grab another Bud, he saw something miraculous, something that would
haunt him even as he slept fitfully, hung-over beyond all recognition, on the
plane back to Colorado, even years later, lying in bed beside his quiet
suburban wife in their red brick bungalow with the extended back sunroom.
The beads spun towards the girl as she turned
away. He grew excited, thinking that he may have just made the perfect throw
with an aim that might garner him a quick flash of skin. It looked as though
the necklace was actually going to make it. How awesome would that be? He
raised his arms as the necklace descended, falling straight over her head. He
filled his lungs with warm Louisiana night air, ready to scream it back out in
victory. But instead of falling around her shoulders, the beads just hovered
there, blurry as if they were being viewed through an unfocused lens.
Before his inebriated mind could wrap around the
phenomenon, she reached up and yanked them down, not once looking back at her
dumbfounded spectator. The string broke and the beads floated like hardened
wontons in a puddle of spilt beer, but still he stared. She walked away, up
onto the sidewalk on the other side, and he continued to stare, arms still
raised above his head, warm night air still trapped in his lungs.
He knew the girl was pretty, that’s why he’d
propositioned her. But he never would he even have guessed that she was an
angel, a real live angel. How else could he explain the beads caught up in a
halo just above her hair? With the beads hanging there, as ordinary and
astounding as planes in the sky, she was rendered beautiful, became
inconsolably heartbreaking. It was a miracle, a bloody miracle. He, Jonathan
Davidson from Littleton, Colorado had seen an angel in New Orleans. It was
amazing, it was historic and he would never forget her, even if he didn’t get
to see her tittays.
Ruby walked under a green and white striped
awning on the other side of the road. “C’mon now Miss,” a tall man holding a
leather bound menu in one hand ushered her into a smoky doorway. “Best jazz in
New Orleeens.” She
allowed herself pliancy and was ushered into the club.
