Back to Love Field - Teddy Nutmeg

Note: This is the sequel to Teddy Does Dallas. We highly suggest you read it first and/or anything else on The Literary Brothel.

BACK TO LOVE FIELD
Teddy Nutmeg

Bringing you back to Dallas. Back to Love Field. Back to the place where Crackhead Wayne and I had our little adventure three months ago which ended with me and Wayne's homeless crack ho spending the night together. This is about that part.

She looked fifty, but was probably somewhere around 35, dirty, hungry and grateful to have a bathroom to clean up in and a warm bed to sleep in on that cold night. Before you hypocritical brothelians criticize, let me say in the same honest tone with which I am telling you this that I took her in that night as a father takes in a wayward son. Well, maybe, just maybe there was a jadedly, desperately hopeful instant. The floodlights of the hotel parking lot quickly revealed her crackified features, however, destroying the fleeting fantasy and instilling a feeling of profound self-loathing in me.

Back in the hotel room, her unearned decrepitude was all too apparent; wrinkles on a face too young to wield them, lips too chapped in a country where water is free and abundant, and hair matted enough to qualify as dreds. She was a looker, all right.

She spent a good hour in the bathroom, bathing, showering, enjoying the comforts that a one hundred and thirty-dollar hotel room can provide. And I pretended to watch TV while mused at my own wretchedness, hiding all my cash in the toe of one of my Nikes. We ordered room service when she emerged, a clean, homeless crackhead, in room-service heaven. She slept soundly across the king-sized be from me.

The next morning, after she asked me if I wanted her to blow me and I quietly replied "no darling, I don't want that," but before she left, I ashamedly checked to see if my cash was still there in the toe of my sneaker and asked her to sign my journal. She wrote the following in handwriting neater than my own:

"I was so happy to meet a very nice person like you. I hope to see you again soon!
Love, Gayle From: Dallas"

And this inscription mere pages away from young Angel's own signature and drawings of her cheerleader friends; young Angel who I met on a flight eight months ago to DFW, Love Field's upscale counterpart. Young Angel who left me her email address, who ran track for her high school, who was dressed in chic capris and a DKNY tee, whose flawless skin and eyes so full of innocence had me wishing I was sixteen again and feeling like a dirty old 23 year old businessman.

But that's not what I'm writing about tonight. I'm writing about my return to the ghettos of Dallas, my return to depravity's parlor. Last time I was here I paid five bucks for fried chicken, mustard greens and a biscuit at a chicken shack and the adventure with Crackhead Wayne began.

Tonight was different, I wasn't in the mood for chicken and I'd been recommended a restaurant. So tonight I dined at Ruth's Chris Steakhouse, one of the best in Dallas and tonight I tasted a different, startlingly sweet flavor of sadness. The Cabernet I drank was from Napa and a mere nine dollars a glass, the aged, rock-salted, medium-rare Filet Mignon just $28, and the fresh asparagus salad only seven bones. As I ate the free meal (expense account be praised), I once again felt the isolation only a man dining alone can feel. Waves of strangely sublime wretchedness washed warmly over my soul as the strangely warm (in January?) Atlantic Ocean had washed over my bare feet three months ago in Miami Beach.

This wretchedness was different, somehow satiating like the USDA Prime steak. It felt good to feel bad for treating myself. After all, Crackheads Wayne and Gayle were out there somewhere, walking and sleeping in the mean streets, hoping to score some dough for a 60 second crack rush and perhaps meeting another sensitive, rakish young business traveler such as myself.

-TN