Literary Death Match Miami!

So my first ever public reading was a hoot! Much mroe fun than I had expected, and I hope to continue. It was a seven minute reading, so I memorized the whole text, which mad it a lot more fun to interact with the audience. Called it Mr. Sunrise, it was a combination of a finalist in the Opium Bookmark Competition, my latest story ‘Losing Found Things’ in the current issue of The Battered Suitcase and an as yet unpublished work called ‘Mr. Sunrise.’ Here’s what I read:
     The women stand in velvet pens like flowers waiting to be picked and stripped, fake Gucci purses bulging with condoms and gum and hand sanitizer.
     Inside, the work goes quickly. ‘No’ just means that you fucked up in some small, correctable way. ‘No’ means next time. ‘No’ means…wait.
     The pick-up artists forage and roam, cartoon gangsters hovering and clashing. They rush in from the unlit corners, crabbing sideways with I-phones extended, trapping silicon sluts in their grapplers and fighting over the scraps until every shred of flesh is tagged and mapped.
     Drunken models whisper in hairy grey ears. Cocktail waitresses glide by on memorized tracks, dressed in translucent black and slinging trays of drinks with glow-in-the-dark ice cubes. They stumble and curse prettily,keeping us oiled, their thin arms traversed with colored lines of drainage from the swooping trays, snakes of pricey liquor tinkling down their armpits and disappearing into unwashed bras packed with soggy filler.
     I sit in the back an old sagging couch. I poke at my phone, scrolling, texting, calling, deleting. I Facebook and I Tweet. I Nerve, I Match, I Cupid, nudging and tweaking my digital selves as they evolve and encircle the electronic women they stalk. I am between 20 and 40 years old. I have never been married and/or am divorced. I am a Republican but I also like to kiss. I am agnostic and a strong, malleable believer in whatever eases your guilt and relaxes your abductor muscles. I am fit, rich, stable, sensitive, happy, tall. I am a fireman who writes poetry and in my spare time I work as a CEO for the Last Bank Standing. A social yet non-promiscuous Type A, I am the life of the party who will deflate my balloon on your command and weep profound tears of love and empathy as needed.
     I love Jesus, but I’d also fuck the tooth fairy.
     Martha ducks around a corner and I sink a little further into the dirty upholstery. It’s too early for her, and I’m too sober. This is how we live when we get tired of living. It is rehab for romance, a halfway house of emotional bulimics. Lives carefully planned yet poorly executed. The waitress brings me another drink and a useless smile. I growl back and hold it up to the light, looking for lipstick.
     The way I feel about vodka is the way fat people feel about ice cream. Damage done in small, senseless bites.
     We met at the bookstore, Martha and me. A prime gathering spot for libidinous females with mediocre social skills and workable levels of self esteem. I was in personal growth with one foot in cooking, carrying tomes on meditation and senior care and floral arrangement and pacific rim vegetarian gourmet. She was lugging heavy art books to accentuate her biceps. I wore boxers. She wasn’t wearing a bra. We kissed in self help, and it was the last time I ever saw her in daylight.
     The thing about girls like Martha is that you have to sleep with them on the first date. If a girl sleeps with her doorman on her way upstairs, it’s your own fault, and she’ll never see you again. She’ll tell her friends and colleagues and bartenders and they will laugh at your inattentiveness. Your inability to unzipper her will race through your social media circles in no time at all and it will be over for you. Big cities are very small places. Don’t fall for the nice-guy routine. Don’t go slow. Whatever bullshit she slings at you while you twist and yank at her bra clasp in the back of a cab is just more noise. She doesn’t want to be your friend. Her friends have vaginas. You don’t.
     And really, at this advanced stage of civilization, whatever little bit you’re still holding back is worth a lot less than you thought it was.
     I start dialing again as I hover in the bathroom watching unzippered elephants shuffle listlessly into unisex stalls and blasting out minutes later on electrified rails. The phone burns my palm. The bathroom attendant hands out Dentyne for oral fixations and Q-Tips for bloody noses. Another snowy night in August.
     Welcome to Miami.
     You have reached a non-working number at American Express.
     You have reached the law offices of Diddle and Diddle.
     You have reached the rejection hotline.
     You have reached the quasi-mail server and we don’t reach back.
     So here it is. Sit on the couch and give yourself CPR. You’re a fag in the best sense of the word; you love men because you are one, or at least plan to be one someday. The women want you to be like them, but they need you to be you, and they can’t take what you won’t give. We all deserve more. And you don’t have to be the best; but you could suck less.
     Three am in Miami is the magic hour. Three am is when decisions are to be made. Blurry watches are given up on. The kinds of people who go home, they go home at three. The women decide which person or persons they will have sex with. The men start thinking logistics. The insecure eliminate competition. Daily cash limits are exceeded, and the credit-card dealers bump their prices and cut their weight. It is the continental divide of excess, the meridian of maturity. If you’re not setup by three, you’re an orbiter, a scavenger, another loser raking the trash for emotional and sexual leftovers.
     In the dark back rooms the soundtrack is mucous and despair. A dismal merger of exhaustion and desperation and hope. Last minute women notice me and latch on, converging in narcotized spirals with blowjob smiles, old sunflowers twisting towards a fake light. Ugly, used up people, turning like dirty snow, terrified of facing the sunlight alone, of the hour long drunken drive home.
     I give you my best blind man’s turn. How long have you been sitting here? I’m not sitting here, you say. And I believe you. I reach down for one of my five minute fictions but there’s nothing there. I’m all out. I look at you but I cannot see. I will not hear. I do not feel.
     All I see is that other you, two abortions later, naked and screaming and bleeding and murdering my flatscreen with a curling iron.
     Love is a dirty drug with hideous side effects. So wash your hands after touching my heart. My addiction is loneliness, my hangover is hostility. I’ll tell you one last time and you’ll forget me instantly. You will not like me. You cannot have me.
     I can give you a ride on my beautiful lies.
     But I won’t be there when you shrivel and cry.
     I’m giving away what you’re trying to buy.