The Autobiography of Benjamin Abbott - Chapter 19: The Seduction Redux (Part Two)
Louie and his teammates were celebrating a victory that had moved them from 3rd in the standings of the Pacific Super Ligue 1 Bowling League to 2nd, the Dragons highest placement in over 3 years.
Big Tim was the captain of the Dragons and also the worst bowler on the team, however, as captain he had certain captaining duties that made up for his lack of hand-eye-foot coordination, such as:
Making sure team members knew the specific dates and times of upcoming league games.
Calling those same team members the night before those same league games to make sure they remembered the specific times and no family emergencies, such as those that had recently befallen Fingers, had happened to them in the intervening week since the last game.
Calling the team members on the day of the game to reiterate the appointed time of the game and to ensure everyone would show up a half hour early, especially Larry (the one they called Louie’s twin, not because they looked alike but because their names kind of sounded alike) who had a habit of arriving only 5 minutes before each game leaving no time to go over strategy or to account for various possible and probable parking emergencies that can happen outside Starlight Bowl (nearly giving Big Tim a heart attack every time, something his doctor had told him because of his age and size, Big Tim was not an ironic nickname, had roughly a 33% chance of happening within the next 3 years),
And to make sure none of the Dragons got drunk or high (Larry again) during their league games and concentrated on performing to the best of their abilities.
And Big Tim had done a very good job with all of these captaining responsibilities during this year as evidenced by the Dragons newfound perch in 2nd place. This meant of course it was time for a celebration and the usual limits for booze and other intoxicating chemicals were now removed. (I would like to add that if Big Tim was an even better more ruthless captain and leader of men like Bill Belichick or Sir Alex Ferguson, instead of using the Dragons rise to 2nd as an excuse for the entire team to get wasted through their individual narcotizing method of choice, he would have refocused his team on the nominal task at hand (bowling) and pushed them even harder now the possibility of a league championship was so close. Of course, Big Tim’s leniency with his men may also help to explain why Bill Belichick and Sir Alex Ferguson were in charge of professional sports teams and Big Tim works in a garage in Inglewood.)
Angel knew none of this as she walked in to Starlight Bowl and saw a group of men in matching hideous turd brown shirts fluttering around the bar like aphids around a recently opened prepackaged grocery store salad. The bar overlooked the bowling lanes and had the stale beer and stale breathe smell of a bar mixed with the smell of feet. Angel missed the stale body fluids mixed with Lemon Pledge smell of the various motels she usually worked in which compared to the bar/bowling alley had a certain pleasing familiarity rather than the ripe feeling of getting slapped in the face by a hard shoe.
She approached the gang of turd browns. Louie was easy to spot from Fingers’ description so she didn’t have any worries she might be approaching the wrong man when she sat down next to him at the bar. Louie was standing and talking to his teammates. Even in his drunken triumphant reveling state he couldn’t help but to notice the striking woman who had sat down almost within touching distance.
Angel looked nice. Oh wait. I’m not supposed to say that. She looked perfect (i.e. extremely fuckable). She was the best-looking woman in Starlight Bowl. Given the competition this wasn’t exactly the highest of hurdles to clear but she would have been the best-looking woman in many different bars and bowling alleys with the way she looked that night. And Louie noticed. And Louie noticed that she seemed to notice him. She smiled at him. Louie had to search the recesses of his brain to remember if this was a polite smile (along the lines of please pass the cashews) or if it was a flirtatious smile.
To be generous, Louie isn’t a particularly attractive man (and unlike me an attractive man won’t play him in the movie) and Angel is an attractive woman and Louie wasn’t/isn’t accustomed to getting flirtatious smiles from attractive women, especially after he turned 40 a half dozen years before this event and especially after his 3rd wife left him 2 years after those half a dozen years before. But now here was this beautiful woman sitting next to him at the bar, all alone, with a nice clingy black dress and beautifully sparkly white snowflake drop earrings, and it seemed like she was trying to flirt with him. A second smile flittered through the dense cloud of loud talking at the bar. And then a third. It was definitely ‘on.’ Apparently, Louie hadn’t lost his old magic yet. Or maybe his recent run of success on the lanes was now spreading to the rest of his life. I suppose a less optimistic (and less drunk) man might have been more cautious, but Louie wasn’t known for his caution and he smoothly (okay, not smoothly) began chatting to Angel.
I’m not going to traumatize you with the inanity of their conversation because it was definitely inane. But Louie made up for the inanity with persistence and volume, and Angel agreed to go back to his place after only a half an hour.
Over her years of working with complete strangers for one or two hours at a time, Angel had developed superior skills in the art of small talk. This was a defense mechanism as much as anything. If she could get them talk; about themselves, about their hobbies, about anything, anything at all, it made the creepiest of guys, well, they were still pretty creepy but maybe a little bit better, a little more gentle, maybe they would see her as a genuine human being instead of a non-sentient movable object to thrust into.
This didn’t come naturally to her. Angel isn’t extroverted in the traditional sense. She isn’t introverted either, she is somewhere in the middle, her Meyers Briggs personality was scored as ISTJ all 3 times she was forced to take the test at various probationary employment agencies she had been forced to go to by the law to apply for jobs she had no chance of getting (and probably didn’t want). However, each time she compiled her scores, her number of responses for the first aptitude on the test (I and E) were in almost perfect equipoise. This gave her a certain amount of flexibility and through years of practice she had bent this flexibility like frizzy pipe cleaner into extroversion when she was on the job.
By forcing herself to project this sheen of extroversion that covered her like prophylactic film when she was on duty, she protected herself (as much as possible) from the standard abuse (both in a physical and mental sense) and even some bizarre adoration from a certain number of her customers during her nights of fucking for money.
This extroversion was of course very different than the outgoing personality she showed in her comfort with me when we were hanging out together and her words and thoughts and emotions would flood our various conversations, and it was also quite different from the reserve she showed when we found ourselves in more formal situations (like having dinner at the Olive Garden) where she felt people were judging her based on her style of dress, her speech, her entire life history, which in the wrong environment she felt was holographically projected in front of her giving the opportunity for complete strangers to consume her past before she ever got the chance to introduce herself, for them to see incidents from her life she never wanted anyone to see, like her step-father entering her bedroom at night, nearly every night, for a solid year while her mother was passed out from either exhaustion or intoxicants in front of the tv, like the first time she had taken a hit of meth as a bonding experience with her mother, also in front of the tv (returning to the drug for comfort on and off for over 3 years until she was able to sustain long-term sobriety); this hologram contained a running total of every man (and woman) she had ever slept with and all of the various acts they had asked her to do (and those that she had done); in short, it projected every negative image Angel had about herself and assumed (perhaps not incorrectly) that others had about her when they saw her.
This is the area where men like Toledo can work effectively and it’s the area through years of practice Angel could completely put out of her head as soon as she punched in for the night. And it is also the societal mirror of the overinflated self-belief Angel saw from all of the teenagers and college students she couldn’t help but to resent whenever she went shopping at Macy’s or Nordstroms, who because of the overindulgence of their parents and the advantageous position in life they were born into saw the purchasing of a particular stunningly attractive ensemble or getting an A in an exceedingly grade inflated Sociology class as the equivalent of Goya’s accomplishment in painting The Third of May 1808. (Art appreciation was Angel’s latest hobby.)
Once she was with Louie in his apartment, Angel was in charge and she knew it. Louie was the one with all of the insecurities now, with the protruding potbelly (he was unsuccessfully trying to suck in) of a middle-aged man and hair in places lovers generally don’t find attractive. He went in for a kiss approximately two seconds after his door closed leaving the two of them alone inside, but Angel rejected him outright and Louie recoiled like a scolded puppy, backing up into the corner of his living room. Angel didn’t mean to be so harsh (and besides she had a job to do) so she brought Louie back to life by going for his belt, and then his pants, and then his briefs, and both Louie and his dick came alive again as she led him into the bedroom. There would be no sex tonight, Angel had decided that before she entered Starlight Bowl, in fact, right after I had given her the assignment. She was confident she could accomplish what she wanted to accomplish with only her hands and mouth, no need for more invasive measures.
And as she worked on Louie with her hands, and then her mouth, and then her tongue, she started asking deceptively fawning questions.
“What was a man like you doing at Starlight tonight?”
Louie moaned and then between slightly more controlled moans began a long dissertation/dissection of the Dragons’ victory over the Vipers, the current standings of the Pacific Super Ligue 1, the Dragons’ long running rivalry with the Vipers. Angel realized she had asked the wrong question and cut him off before Louie could describe his particular enmity for the Vipers’ second-best bowler, someone named Little Sal.
Take 2. “I want to know all of your dirty secrets. It gets me so hot.”
Louie, still moaning, as Angel started to pull back on the throttle (her throttle not Louie’s) so as not to finish the job before she could get the information, started reciting some dirty, very dirty, some would say downright disgusting secrets Angel tried putting out of her head as soon as she heard them and never wanted to hear mentioned or referenced ever again in her life. She cut him off a second time.
Take 3. “Your job. I want to hear dirty secrets from your job. I hear you work for powerful people.” Angel abandoned all pretense of subtlety but Louie didn’t notice, by this point he would have told her he was The Scarlet Pimpernel if she had wanted him to, and although David Humphrey isn’t as well known as the various celebrities his company employs, he was Louie’s closest brush to power and fame, and David Humphrey stories flowed like the blood rushing to the head of Louie’s penis, and Angel was right, she obtained what she wanted to obtain without having to resort to intercourse. Louie was simply overmatched on this occasion and Angel had floated half-hearted through the entire encounter like an NBA All-Star floating through a preseason game. “Damn, I’m good at this cloak and dagger stuff,” she thought to herself as Louie ejaculated all over his 400 thread-count Egyptian Cotton Bed, Bath and Beyond-purchased sheets. “I should work for the CIA or something.”
15 minutes post-eruption, Louie was lying in his bed like some jelly that had fallen out of a hastily made PB & J sandwich, and Angel was rearranging her clothes and hair in the bathroom and reapplying her magenta lipstick as she prepared to leave. Louie looked at her with “don’t you want to cuddle” eyes when Angel walked back into his bedroom, ready to go. She looked back at him with “I definitely do not want to cuddle” eyes as she demanded payment for her services.
“What?”
“I get paid, honey.” She held out her hand.
“What? What’s going on here? You… you picked me up.”
“Yes. And now it’s time to pay.” Hand still out.
“Oh shit.” Louie pulled the 400 thread-count (and now semen-stained) sheet up to his chest to protect himself. He was feeling a little violated. “Aren’t you supposed to get the money before?”
“Before. After. It doesn’t matter. But I do need to get paid or my pimps will come and break your legs.”
“Fuck.” Louie couldn’t believe his bad luck. “I thought you looked familiar. Don’t you work in Hollywood?” Angel didn’t answer, hand still out.
“Fuck,” Louie said again. It wasn’t the first time in his life he had paid for sex. It wasn’t even the first time in his life he had engaged in sexual acts with someone without realizing he was paying for sex. “Fuck,” Louie said a third time as he moved from the bed to get his wallet. This was like his 2nd marriage all over again.
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