Pictures of Floyd

By Ed Moreno

Floyd had done well at his audition, and now he was headed out to the Springs. He’d be in films soon enough and could picture his own handsome face smiling all teeth and sparkle above Hollywood Boulevard. Homes across America. In the meantime it was time for a sunshine weekend. He sweated; he sweated and sand slurred slowly across the highway which brought him in from the 10, under the windmills, toward the gardens, the prospects, the freaks, the Springs. He made his way across the desert in his Bronco dreaming of all the different kinds of dizzy girls—even the buck-tooth ones—feeling too hot, teeth buzzing, wondering who was watching as he buzzed, mildly perturbed and pissed off. He was preposterously high but he was pissed off anyway since the AC wasn’t working and the road was too long and just a little too fuzzy round the edges for his liking, but the blue of the sky looked so darn cool, and him still anxious and sweating: sweating masses, he pushed it, faster and so finely high, tripping into town. The sand stuck to his sweaty face, his eyes spun, the sand dribbled slowly down around his blind eyes, he swam in sand, buzzing happily the Bronco hummed, approaching the Springs, crossing the desert. Floyd smiled for the cameras.

The mammoth windmills stirred a milky flame: thousands of steel soldiers uncoiling miles of wind, one-hundred-and-twenty degrees of hot electric wind, liquid and purring, reeled out across the looming desert, buzzing.

He’d stopped for a top-up at Morongo, pulled off the frontage road out there among hordes of cacti, out there in the presence of one-million-and-one shiny prickly spines and a thousand thirsty succulents, swabbed the purple crook of his arm, grinning out there in the desert, checked all the mirrors and doubled-checked them and then double-double-checked them all the mirrors and the other mirrors and turned his head every which way, and checking for cameras and grinning and checked again before he uncapped his works, pulled out clean and well-packed from the grimy glove box, measured out well and all the toil done before leaving home, leather belt tightened round his bicep, checked his mirrors again, catching his own dilated happy eyes real quick and pleased, injected himself real close and happy, the sky started rushing as he breathed a real cool breeze in, and out, even cooler, all electric ice closing in on his blue heart, skipping stones burning his bright skin, smile smoothed him out, falling into the seat, liquid and free. Should get him into town. Glides into the Springs through a milky flame feeling free and sweaty on a swaying slender belt of highway all smiles, pissed off and pleased about nothing, checks his mirrors again, pupils, smiles, feeling fine.

The desert people were crazy or decrepit and generally they were both especially just then, on the road behind the oldest fella in the world, grandpappy in a steel blue Caddy, snailing along like there’s nowhere to be or nothing to do which was in fact the case, but what does it matter: too slow, old man, too slow! And Floyd’s dizzy on girls again. Too slow, but what can you do: not much!: creeping along, sweating through his teeth, his eyebrows, his pupils sweating black bricks, wondering if he measured that last one out right, because it just seemed to be getting bigger and he wasn’t even sure if he was driving anymore. The Bronco wasn’t moving but the asphalt was. Finally he reckoned he was driving okay, but that the old guy he was following through a white-noise storm—very cool—wasn’t moving at all. It didn’t matter so much, because right then Floyd was gorgeous: he caught his eyes in the rear-view mirror real quick, then he wondered which mirror he saw that in or if he really did, but then he saw it again, his face all pupil, handsome as fuck. He worked out he wasn’t really driving anymore or if he was he shouldn’t be and next thing he knows he’s checking his reflection at Maxine’s: the faces of the diners seated inside superimposed on his billboard-ready face in the plate glass window: No pictures, Please. He’s moving on his feet.

The Brandys and the Alexas and the Jasmines are all breast and hip and lingerie: more and more flesh spilling over from one ad onto the next, but Christa’s ad is musical and self-contained: jet black eyes and one alabaster shoulder: Christa, Cream for your coffee, (760) 409-4168, www.christacream.com.

He ordered coffee from the Mexican waitress and then spilled it all over Alexa’s tits—wet now, coffee stained—but who cares: Christa smiled, her eyes lost and happy not quite looking back into his eyes: dreamy shy girl. Floyd was already well into imagining his second and third and subsequent trips out to see her, her move out to Los Feliz to be with him, her long dark hair on his bathroom sink, his brother’s jealous sulk when he introduced them, her red carpet debut on his arm: all those flashbulbs. He got her voicemail: dulcet tones, a real looker. She’d like the sound of his voice, he imagined, then take one look at him and want to do it for free. “I’m at the Hilton, but I wanna come to you.”

But wasn’t the Hilton: the Margarita-Ville d’Orleans Resort was patchy and white. Rough concrete. The pool was thirsty, the palms slouched. Nothing matched except for the gay couple who ran the place, Doug and Dave: bookend blonds with matching tattoos. Floyd awaited Christa’s call, lounging poolside with the boys, all of them tweaking fine and wired high under the valley sun. The mourning doves made cooing sounds, furtive flutters. Floyd watched them scuttle into corners and bits of shade. He watched them watching him with their glassy camera-eyes from behind a wall, snapping pictures, sending them out. Paparazzi pigeons. He tried to shoo them but they just purred and clicked, snapping series of photos: his screwed-up face, his windmilling arms. Always watched, always followed.

He rang the doorbell then counted his breaths. The door was ajar. He listened to her moving inside. “It’s open,” she said and he slipped in: she stood in the middle of the room, a room full of mirrors: he saw himself a thousand times over, and her just once, alone in the middle of the room, a tall, thin girl in a white slip of a dress, singular. She told him to come through and stood aside to let him pass into another room. Her eyes fixed on him for just a moment: they were dreaming about dreams and looking into their future together, which apparently lay just behind his head. She loved the look of him, she loved to love him. Floyd’s pupils pulsed and he counted his breaths in a hundred mirrors, hoping to slow them down, but he fell down the black well of her eyes before she even touched him, and when she did it was like she was trying to read him with her hands: he couldn’t hear anything except his own breathing. He didn’t hear her when she told him she was legally blind, though it was repeated in the mirrors: he didn’t hear the webcam whirring, though it cooed and clucked and had a little chuckle. All he heard was his own ridiculous breathing and the trickle of sweat on the inside of his eyelids.

Online, at www.christacream.com, the pictures keep coming: the young man on his back with his hard on swaying, a shaggy palm, a beautiful girl holding on, swinging off him, gazing thoughtfully at nothing, in the young man’s general direction, she coos, her hands flutter, touching him here then there: he breathes rapidly, his chest earthquaking, he’s out of control: it’s good viewing: the people are watching. Online, Floyd’s pictures keep coming.

Ed Moreno is an Australian/American bookseller and writer. He recently completed his BA, Hons at Melbourne University. His honours thesis, on the work of Carson McCullers, is concerned with the transformation of pain and loneliness into art. His short fiction is populated by outsiders, loners, and drifters.