Alicia

Alicia has curly red-blonde hair, stands just barely five feet one, weighs about a hundred pounds, is universally called “pretty.”  I saw her around town quite often, and had always assumed she was street walking, so I’d been aware of her for at least a whole year. I always found her very attractive, and thought about her often, even before I ever picked her up.

I had tried to pick up Alicia one night after work, but it was the night after a snowstorm, and I lost her behind a snowbank and slush puddle. I couldn’t stop the car, it was the middle of winter, after work, frigidly windy and cold but still wet, and I may have left Alicia with a bad impression.

The first real encounter I enjoyed with her was in late June or early July, and I was driving through town on a weekday morning, about 6:45 am. I stopped for her, and she skipped right over and got in the car. We ended up parking in the outdoor lot next to Maine Medical Center, facing the Brackett Street Market, in the golden rising summer sunshine and she proffered an excellent fun and energetic blowjob, complete with humming moans indicating how hard she’s working, which I was able to enjoy while simultaneously rubber-necking, slowly turning 360 degrees around to make sure no one was nearby or observing us. I spoke quietly with her the whole time, letting her know how much I’d anticipated this moment, and savoring the shuddering rush as I climaxed in her lovely mouth. She looked up after a moment, grinning skeptically to inquire whether I was done. “Did you come?” Making small talk afterward, driving her to her down connection’s house, I tried to establish the best time to pick her up, and I said, “I think you’re a ‘morning person.'” Silly me. I learned later 7:00 am was the end of Alicia’s day, not the beginning. Every day time stretched like this, released, boomeranged. Early in the progress of every day, I learned, the end of the previous day must come to pass.

Alicia is a stoned junkie crack ho and does not always look as attractive as she did when I first met her. Her partner beats her up quite regularly, at least once he received months of jail time for Domestic Abuse, and so over the years, her face has been changed by the broken eye sockets (both), and the broken nose (also twice). Her few tattoos seemed spontaneous and skanky. And yet, she is still beautiful. Alicia is quiet and thoughtful and lives in her head, loves anything “pretty” and “artistic.”

The first time we smoked together, we puffed and then messed around, then smoked some more. Her BJ was pleasant but unsuccessful because that’s what rock does to me. After a couple minutes of her sighing, moaning purposefully, and nose breathing, with a seemingly genuine enthusiasm if not quite passion, her head bobbing up and down, I suggested she stop, pulled her kneeling figure upright and pressed her bare body against my mostly bare one. She had a way of playing the martyr, setting me up to relieve her of the obligation we’d already sealed with cash, to lift the burden from her shoulders of being a slut whore who, though she had been legitimately engaged to perform oral sex, didn’t really like sucking dick, was known to stop outright mid-act to renegotiate.

I suggested another “bump,” gesturing toward the drugs on the nightstand. She acceded. Puff, puff. Then she asked if she could take the stem. Like, take it home. I gave it to her. The tip was broken but it was otherwise serviceable. And she asked for “a forty rock” in lieu of the cash for the BJ (“I’ll just use it for that.”) but I said no, not because I wasn’t inclined to give her some, but because I didn’t have any to spare. I did legitimately pay her forty bucks in cash. She knew my rock was better than what she would get in a forty bag in town. I had no idea how much a forty-rock weighed, what it looked like, and I didn’t think Alicia was the right person to ask. So I said no that time, but I did say yes to her requests to take some rock home since then. Not in lieu of cash, but because I knew her boyfriend/pimp sent her out to get them some rock and didn’t care how she got it. I also came to the realization I was interested in getting it out of my house, because lately when I had it, I smoked it. I wouldn’t sell it, but I’d give it away.

This is a fair portrait of Alicia. She asks for what she wants. She remembers the flavors of soda I keep in my refrigerator. She suggests I take her to the beach, and she wants to go to the drive-in sometime, because she’s never been. She asks and asks, not forcefully, nor pleadingly, but just the bald request, as if she knows if she doesn’t ask she’ll never receive, and there’s exactly no downside to asking. We stop at Dunkin Donuts for a free Coolatta, because she has a coupon in her handbag. Redeeming it requires the purchase of a donut. I put the donut on my card; found it later in the bedside wastebasket, uneaten. Our conversations are mostly about what she wants.

I found her beautiful, almost achingly so, despite that she’s 30 and has had four children. She doesn’t have custody of them, but she posted their pictures on her Facebook. Alicia is a ginger, fair, curly-haired, red-headed and tiny. She could have been one of Henry VIII’s wives—Mary Queen of Scots, one who was beheaded. Her kids are tall, round, and dark-skinned, like their father I suppose. Women who have babies when they’re very young and eat a reasonable diet when they’re pregnant seem to recover their bodies better than women who wait until they’re older to have kids. Alicia is a strawberry blonde, curly-haired, blue-eyed symbol of American female beauty, who sucked dick like a champ when she could be bothered. I never stopped loving Alicia’s attentions.