Summerford Confession

Dear Lolita,

 

It is the name I have given to you, a beautiful stranger. But I don’t think I see you the same as Nabokov sees pretty young women. I’ve watched you for sometime. You start off most evenings with a cup of coffee which you bring into the bookstore and run off to the second floor, to a corner with a high table, rummaging through a collection of Vonnegut’s novels. It’s a nice spot that overlooks rows of books and rows of people. You don’t read much. Your eyes always stray off from the pages to the people, the people reading, the people looking, the people doing people things. Except talking. They rarely talk. There exists a peace in the silence that blankets the store, a peace that might become unsettling. You go mad if you haven’t been disturbed by a human voice in a long time, believe me. Looking at these people, I wonder if you speak for them, inventing conversations for people talking to themselves or to other people. I do the same. It would be nice if the two of us could create scripts for all of them, conjuring made-up dialogues for strangers.

You started Vonnegut’s collection at the beginning of February. It’s the end of April, the beginning of May. There is never a wrong time to read Vonnegut, which I love. He speaks to readers as if he knows what they’re feeling, he sympathizes, and carries on with a story that neither nurtures nor worsens your emotions. I would go over there to speak with you about all his books, but I’m afraid something more might happen. Something always does. I might use words I don’t mean and pull you into bed. We’d enjoy a one-night stand and we would never see each other again. It’s happened countless times before. I’m guilty and shamed. But with you, for you, and for myself, I’ve tamed and kept a distance, only my mind and eyes in the works of kissing you, caressing you, entering you, pressing my naked body to yours. To hear you moan and feel you curl through warm hazel eyes, through the scent of your dirty-blonde hair.

I’m not a pedophile. I’m not a rapist. I’m merely a lonely man in a world I see as peopled. Everyone with everyone, everything with everything, a harmony I am not a piece off, perhaps because I’m an extra or that I don’t fit anywhere of this earthly puzzle. I cannot settle. It scares me. To be ball and chained to a woman for the rest of my life, unable to love anybody else, terrifies me. I cannot love one woman and one woman only. I need a plethora, a feast. I have an appetite that is always hungry and growing.

It’s my terrible nature not to stop imagining such sexual wonders. I am man. I am animal. And I can’t help it. Of all women, I admit this to you. I’m not sure why. Perhaps it was time I talk to somebody about my problem. And what better way than to cast it to you, a stranger, to bite the line and be lured into a hellhole of mine. I’m not so sure as to how you’d help me, but admitting all of this to anybody would be a first good step.

Lolita, beautiful stranger, this is the closest thing I will ever get to meeting you besides the fantasies and the spying. I hope you will forgive me. I hope you will not see me as a monster so much as other women have. Do not be like other women, Lolita. You aren’t like the others for I have not felt the smooth of your lips like a poet’s pencil and paper, eternally romantic. So, I ask of you one thing, the last thing, to hear of my criminal mind and to forgive me. Physically, mentally, and spiritually forgive me. Otherwise, I will have to pretend you have forgiven me, a white lie that comforts too little. And with that, I should be able to get by and by, through and through, until I am cremated, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

 

With love and squalor,

 

Joshua “Josh” Summerford

(this was written a while back. i wrote it after i finished Lolita)

Bebop.

The simple foods I had eaten had turned into an ambrosia for me to sit here and write and write, the clicks of the typewriter sounding at an even pace, there was no room, no time for silence, but for the clicks and clacks. So involved, so concentrated, sweat beaded on my forehead, running down into my eyes, my weary eyes, but wake eyes that kept open to write this story. Blinded, I continued writing, wounded, I made several typos, but I kept writing and writing. If I would stop, I would lose everything, the rhythm, the beat, the feel that the night riders taught me, the drinkers taught me, the screaming and the laughing that echoed throughout the neighborhood, the bop of the black man’s sax along with the strumming of the bottom-bell bass, and the blood-curdling scatting. Not music to dance to, music to just listen, to rip your ears open and listen, listen till the blood rushed out of the brain and out of the ears. The salt in my sweat got me, pulling me away from my typewriter, some invisible hand grabbed me away from my work. And I stopped.

And for a moment, when eyes were clear and open, I saw myself sitting at the typewriter. I wasn’t typing, just staring at the pages written, at the desk lamp burning, at the dust particles dancing, and I saw myself struggle. The beat of the typing slowed to an unsteady pace like normal nights, nights dry of juice and drive. That was my body. That was my carcass, that poor lynched soul writhing and wringing out empty energy to move. Then who’s body was mine? From these eyes, who’s body was this? I wasn’t myself. I wasn’t myself. I was somebody else. But I felt the same, these eyes, this body, these hands, this feeling.

I shut my eyes and opened them slowly. Back at the typewriter, my hands moving slowly, the beat gone, the rhythm gone, the story lost, lost, lost, I’ve lost myself and the self that watched me. Thinking curved, head in pain, I moved away from the typewriter and to a window for a cigarette. I saw myself in the glass of the window. A reflection, but not a synonym. Antonym. My better self was in that reflection. I took a cold, aching hand, balled it into a fist and punched my face in, my body shattering into a million pieces, a field of stars that flashed out into the streets. Bloody hand, I went to bed at ease and slept and slept as if nights were spent with restlessness.