Testosteronica. She may have been a girl I imagined in the maladies of my youth. She may have been, once, my idea of the perfect woman: intelligent, beautiful, witty, funny, strong, stingingly acerbic, powerful, angry, and unwilling to take bullshit from anyone. Or, she may be a false memory dredged up from a soggy, age-infused memory bank, tangled with alcohol and drugs and time. Regardless of where she came from, she is back. Let me tell you about Testosteronica. Her name is too long, so I call her 'Onica. If I called her by her real name, you might think I'm a latent homosexual. I assure you I am not. And, as liberal as I am, that suggestion makes me shudder. I have nothing against homosexuals, mind you, but I'm just not one. Not now, not ever. Oh, back to her name. Just so you'll get over the name thing, I'll call her, for now, Tonica.
This memory may not be a memory but, rather, an illusion, a hallucination, a fantasy, an unintentional zig-zag and thudding crash of neurons against synapses, with sparks that fly. I've never seen a neuron, up close, but I can imagine what happens when a neuron crashes into a synapse.
Whatever it is, it's the idea that's most important. It's the attitude, the mood, the architecture of the brain that it describes. That's what is most important.
On that night, the clock read only 9:00 pm and the night was struggling to stand, to bring itself up to its craggy, ugly feet and behave like a night is meant to behave.
Nights don't begin at 9:00 pm. They begin after midnight, when the simple people have all gone to bed to prepare for their days of office work and retail and filing extensions on tax returns and making motions to drop the charges.
Nights don't begin too early, as long as they haven't wrecked themselves early. If they have, they start from the beginning and try again.
This night is trying to start early, but by the looks of it, it doesn't have the bones. I look closely at it and ponder whether tonight might succeed in getting an early, dark, start or, more likely will fail as an imposter who can only claim the darkness as his proof of identity.
Real nights have a rough, growling, ugly edge to them. They're rough and hard and coarse and dangerous and they don't care who gets hurt. They're bastards. The bitches who court them are just as nasty and twice as brutal.
Are you wondering now why I haven't mentioned Tonica again? I'll explain later.
A hard night starts with a large bottle of red wine meant for a party of ten, but ends with the remnants of that bottle and a bottle of white wine the same size being used as a painkiller for one. That night gets comfortable with a funeral dirge, disguised as folk music.
A hard night cuts the jugular with a hacksaw and opens the chest with the claws of a hammer. A hard night has no room for sensitivity and love and caring. It has a short life that has precious little room for anything but rabid sex, broken bottles, a little blood and unearthly screams.
Tonica fit well with my idea of a hard night. I'd always wanted to be strong, tough, aloof. I pictured myself an intellectual, but allowed myself the fantasy of being a magnet for women who wanted a smart, hard-drinking player.
She called me early that night and made a point of breathing heavily into the phone as she spoke. She offered to bring me dinner and described a feast of raw tuna, rare lamb, raw oysters, lime-infused cilantro, tequila, onions, octopus, scotch, gobi Manchurian, kitfo, steak & kidney pie, and sex. I was unwilling to be bought cheap, so I requested the addition of nose-bleed hot Thai spices, fresh abalone, and hairy crab from China; she readily agreed.
We had our dinner outside, on the roof; the lights of the city were almost blindlingly beautiful, but they reminded me that everything...I mean everthing...I was used to was wasteful and detrimental to the planet. When I recognize that awful, ugly trait in myself, I become bellicose. So it was that night.
Just as Tonica finished the last of the raw oysters, my guilt caught up with me. I cursed and screamed and demanded to know what Tonica was doing to rid the planet of people like me, people like her, people who suck the life from the earth and never give it a second thought. Tonica was intelligent, beautiful, witty, funny, strong, stingingly acerbic, powerful, angry, and unwilling to take bullshit from anyone. That's when she decapitated me with one swift slash of her razor-sharp sabre.
My invention, prior to that fateful night, had been an instrument that was capable of downloading and storing the thoughts and memories of individuals who had been programmed into its remembrance sequence. I was one of those individuals. So, thanks to Tonica, my ideas and dreams and final thoughts were recorded for posterity or, more likely, as mechanisms to recover memory problems from bad downloads.
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