Girl from Baku

by Russell Bittner

I once idly wandered the wharfs of New York,
carousing like Carroll, but hunting for snork,
and saw there a girl set to pass on review:
a petulant pet parvenue.


I curtailed my search on a quay in Paree
for a French lass du jour (but who’d toujours love me);
instead, vowed to wow this "gιnue" from Baku
to love me till death us undo.

She sent me away – a degenerate jerk,
to diddle with donkeys in dingy Dunkirk,
or else, to get clued in on ewes from Baku,
who do it with didgeridoo.

And so from Moskva, where I'd spied in a spa
a spry thing from Riga in sporty red bra,
I queued the news home to my girl from Baku,
who milked it like one mad emu.

I next found a floozie in boozie Berlin.
"Just try her!" I hawked with Catullian grin.
"Refreshingly hip!" quipped my girl from Baku,
forgetting that I'd had her, too.

I then stripped a kid of his id in Madrid,
who'd offered me whores as baksheesh for my bid
to find him a strumpety girl from Baku
as fetching as my Guinea Pooh.

I last hooked some kink in the heart of Helsink' –
a pert pair who plied me with VSOPink.
I flung both Finns out for my girl from Baku…
who finished me off with 'Fuck you!'

[First published at LauraHird.com [June, 2006]]




[ 1 ]


"Coney Island Avenue!" the driver calls out with single-minded authority as we approach the stop.

I look to the left, scan the avenue for signs of a pearl … of a girl. A girl from Baku.

No Bakunese, Bakuninin, Bakunonian here. Like the cheap plastic slippers she left on deposit for visiting hours. Translucent lime-green – the slippers; transparent – the gesture; a mere flight of fancy then, gone now – the evidence. All of it, as ephemeral as the "s" in "island" and the June mermaids on parade on that island – on that sometimes horny, always corny Coney Island.

Our B-82 bus continues on in the direction of Nostrand, Flatbush, Uttica, and a final stop – at Ralph, in Flatlands. What can I say? To me, 'sounds like 'Nigel in Blackpool.' '‘Udo in Neukφlln.' All of 'em, 'hoods full of last exits, crash palaces, chop shops. Places where a man might look to mend a car, but never – ever – heal a heart.

She withdrew those slippers, and herself, last night following a much less ephemeral final fuck. One of the few English words she knew well – "fuck." Too well, turns out. And so, following the fuck, I went for the throat: "Ja lyublyu tebia," I said – but then snoozed off. Both the confession of love and the snoozing off perhaps a tad hasty. When I awoke an hour later, she was gone. I'd barely registered the deposit – much less the withdrawal.

"Coney Island Avenue!" from the driver, once out, doesn't bear repeating as we're already well on our way to Nostrand.

Slippers, no more. Caviar and sweet-smelling snatch, no more. Out the door and gone. Gone after just the inkling of an interlude – never mind the trouble of an ιtude. Girl from Baku is now, tonight, just my phone ringing. With regrets, second thoughts, or possible self-recrimination? Somehow, I doubt it.

I let it ring. Once withdrawn, my girl from Baku ain't mine no more.



[ 2 ]


What? You think this girl from Baku got to be this girl from Baku by waiting around for someone to pick up the phone?

Two nights later, she steps up to my door and rings. I answer; it would be rude of me not to. Not that I'm particularly eager to test the mettle of one scorned Azeri. Hell hath no fury I can't deal with – except, that is, one of the present-tense progeny of Genghis Khan.

I open and she comes in – regular as rain and the rotation of the planet. Which, at 66,000 mph, ain't exactly whistling Dixie. Nor is she. I don't know whether she's got conversation in mind, as conversation, at least to date, hasn't been our strong suit. No. Our eureka lies elsewhere – and she goes straight to it like fishtails to bouillabaisse.

Before you can say 'rickety-sprit,' she's out of her thong, between my sheets and, well, you get the picture.

It's a night to tax even the moos of Calliope. Youth – so they say – is wasted on the young. And, for the first time in my life, I'm thoroughly onboard thathackney. What had I been thinking all those years with the classics, memorizing long, portentous passages in the original? Jesus! There's more poetry in her pizdah than in any sunrise, sunset, or abracadabra of moonbeams I've ever known, biblically speaking. 'Fact is, her mons is nothing if not the font of myth – as, entre nous, are her moans.

When not writhing, we're writing – our own saga right here between the sheets. And this scion of Paul Bunyon is chopping wood so furiously, calluses would grow on his thrifty member faster than kudzu on cypress were the chopping not all so lubriciously wet, warm and friction-free.

It is, in the end, all about energy. And even if the delta between static and kinetic in this instance is negligible, I'm beat. Exhausted, really, to the bone – and so slip away once again for a snooze. When I awake an hour later, she's – you guessed it – gone.

Now lying back and watching the smoke curl up from my cigarette towards a ceiling moving at 66,000 mph in a forward direction and at 600 mph in a circular one, I realize there is no accounting for taste. "Here today; gone tomorrow.' 'A bird in the hand...' 'Make hay...' 'Carpe diem.' All of history's proverbial punditry from the pre-Socratic right up to and including good Ben Franklin's is at my fingertips and on my lips. And yet, it doesn't matter. She is, once again, gone.

I'm beginning to think we really should talk one of these days.



[ 3 ]


New tactic?

Following the deluge of delights, it's silence once again for two solid days. Not a word; not even a ring. In the meantime, my testosterone is bouncing. Add random, chaotic ricocheting off the wall to the forward, circular and elliptical motions of the planet, and I'm ready to fuck or kill anything that moves.

Then she calls…wants to come over…wants to talk. At last, I think, dialogue!

She's here within minutes and seated in my garden room. In glass rooms like this one, people don't get stoned I think. I offer tea, instead, which she consents to take.

I wait, hover really, while she sips. "So," I finally say. "What's doing?" English idioms are not her forte I realize as she gazes back at me in stunned silence – and so I re-phrase. "Perhaps you could tell me what you have in mind. Perhaps you could make some sense of this, uh, relationship we have."

I can see from her gaze now turning inward that some of my words are not striking up the band. Or maybe they are – but in the wrong key. In any case, I stand up; walk to my library; take out my English to Russian dictionary; blow off the dust of years' neglect; walk back to my little glass house; sink to my seat. When in doubt – I think – consult. I have a hunch this particular book is about to become my new best friend. It will save us from pitfalls, hurricanes, volcanoes, earthquakes, maybe even asteroids and meteors of misunderstanding.

I translate – clumsily, though adequately and sufficiently – and she smiles in understanding. Then she lets me have it with both barrels.

"I think relationship good for sex and language," she says with the "r" in relationship sounding like the rumble of a real volcano. I don't mind admitting, I also like her particular susurration of the letter "s" in sex. Who wouldn't? But 'good for language?' What can she mean? I ask for clarification.

"I think you good for my language. For to improve my English."

So that's it. I'm to be her TESL boy-toy. Are there fates worse than death and is this one of them? "Let me think about this for a while," I say. "K?"

I mean – just between you and me – the concept is a fresh one. And while I don't want to appear mean-spirited, keeping the emotional and the libidinal in separate compartments in my current mental circus is no longer quite so easy. She smiles again, lips pursed. I already know what wonders those lips can perform and am eager for another recitation. I could eat leftovers a life long from this woman's lips and never tire of the regimen.

"Well, what are we waiting for?" I ask as she slams back the last of her tea.

"Nichevo," she answers as she stands up, kicks off her sandals and slips out of her slinky.

It's going to be another pleasant sunset, I surmise as I return the dictionary to its place on the shelf. Consultation concluded, the time to dally, I think, is done.



[ 4 ]


Why doesn't it surprise me that Girl from Baku has neither called nor shown her vigorous self in several days? I'm now thinking it may finally be time to face facts and spring clean.

There's little to dispose of. GfB (time, too, I think, to reduce the moniker to a monogram) left scant of herself behind. With hygiene impeccable, she left nothing to shake from the sheets before I prepare to hand them off to my Chinese launderette. Translucent green slippers are the first real memento to go. A later inspection of bathroom yields – how could it have escaped my attention up till now? – portable toothbrush in translucent green, economy-sized carrying case.

The efflorescence of green plastic jolts my memory back thirty-one years to another place and time: Vienna and the Goethe Institut; second-level German and my first real story – by either Gόnther Grass or Heinrich Bφll, I can't remember which. Something titled, I believe, "Weihnachten das ganze Jahr" ("Christmas All Year 'Round"). In which, in order to stave off depression, the protagonist refuses – week after week, then month after month – to retire the family's Christmas decorations.

I'm still not certain I've got it right. What I do distinctly recall is the labor of pushing around nouns, subordinate verbs, adjectives, articles. Then of holding the whole tedious load aloft until I could finally get to the principal verb at the end of a sentence and know how to dispose of the lot. Before moving onto the next, that is. German – a manly-man's language – and so not for the weak of mind, the soft of heart. For that, there's Russian – a man's language, certainly, but the language of a man with two hearts, two souls, two tongues. In sum, a woman's language with its soft sibilance, curvaceous letters, rumors and whispers between consonants and sheets.

At this point, there remains nothing but the sheets.

I drop the portable translucent green slippers into a bag and remember, in the same instant, striking streaks of red in GfB's hair. Hair on head, that is. Pubic hair – to my despair – too assiduously shaped, suggesting former foreplay in which I'd clearly not participated. Red hair, green accoutrements for teeth and toes. Christmas all year 'round. Would've been; could've been; should've been – had GfB not simply up and bounded. To bond with me no more.



[ 5 ]


En route to the corner Laundromat, I think back lasciviously to her thong – a sliver of a thing out of which she used to slink. Easily, quickly and with practiced hand. No muss, no fuss. But now? Now, dude, that particular show 'n' tell is done, over and out.

The mental jog skips me back thirty-seven years. My mind's like an old LP now, scratched and nicked, needle upon it jumping every which way. I'm sitting in history class. Patti – my first muse – wears pink. Pink Patti stands to make a point. My eyes first bob, then fall like lead sinkers. When she sits back down, I lean forward and my mouth makes one of its first and most terribly swift blunders.

"I like your panty-line," I whisper. The back of Pink Patti's neck turns from russet to crimson. At lunch, I notice, Patti's nowhere to be seen. Later that same afternoon, I catch sight of her standing in front of her locker. Same pink, but now over the camouflage of a slip, to the detriment of a soft panty-line. And so it's my turn to blush. Not only then, but now. Funny how a blush can sometimes last a lifetime.

As can a scream – however silent, alone and in the desert.

My best friend in junior high school. We were on the swim team together. Our daily ritual included a walk to Burger King following after-school practice. A whopper, coke and fries to replace the calories we'd just burned. Always the same food, but never the same jokes. Eddie was a natural. His mother – a Southern Belle from the old school – smoked a pipe. Brewed us fresh tea whenever I'd come to visit, and so I came often. Tea, to me, was plusher than punch. I came for the tea, for Eddie's jokes, for the smell of his mother's tobacco.

Fresh outta college, I was, but without two nickels to my name – and so I'm waiting tables at a restaurant in Nashville, Tennessee – a million miles from home. Dressed, I was, like a peacock in tux and ruffles – too absurd for words. I walk up to wait on a new party of two. It's Eddie's father – a traveling salesman, but not Eddie's mother – who, I imagine, is presently at home with pipe and tea. I blush; he blushes. His dinner companion? Already wearing rouge enough to render a blush redundant.

Years later, I get the news through the grapevine: Eddie found his desert in Arizona, drove out, put a shotgun into his mouth, told his last too trigger-happy joke.

Life's like that sometimes. And when it is, I s'pose, a guy's just gotta take the bullet by the horns.



[ 6 ]


At the Laundromat, my nose gets tweaked by odors of detergent and fabric softener; ears, by wooshing sounds; eyes, by neatly-folded towels, shirts, bed sheets, ladies' dainties. The olfactory, aural and visual ensemble knocks me over like a cinnamon bun, and I'm once again back to soft memories of GfB and of her cleanliness.

So clean she was – almost too clean. I like a bit of musk, a hint of femininity. If my nose doesn't flare up when a woman passes, it's only because I've learned to keep the animal in me in check. Eyes may still ogle that woman's calves as we climb the stairs from subway platform to street level, but I'll keep my flares and thoughts to myself.

I decide to go for a walk in the park, and so sludge through two blocks of subfusc gray and brown – the drub drab of Sunset Park asphalt and concrete – only to enter into a small, celebratory world of green.

"Bud," I whisper to myself. Followed by "bloom, blossom" a sprig-whisper louder. Spring, I find, explicates the plosives.

The first season of the new year is dependable, regular, right as rain. No one should bustle in spring. No one should have to cut logs, push paper, clean toilets in spring. We're animals, we are, and ought to be outside, free and unfettered. Spring is the time of year at which we should bop. Spring is the whole burst of being – while summer, fall and winter are mere bellhops to spring – the real deal. The worst thing in spring? To be alone, mateless, matchless – and without a sprightly, sprawling, springtime partner.

Which may explain why women's hems rise; neon glows brighter; timecards get trivial; and couples grow feckless, then reckless, then wreck on ridiculous shoals.

I suppose I miss her. Does it show?



[To be continued]

[Chapters 1 to 6 of Girl from Baku were first published in deaddrunkdublin]

© Russell Bittner

image Russell Bittner lives in Brooklyn, New York. He completed his first novel, Trompe-l’oeil, in September of 2004. His work has been published on paper by The American Dissident, The Blind Man's Rainbow, The Lyric, The Barbaric Yawp, The International Journal of Erotica, Wicked Hollow, The Taj Mahal Review, Aesthetica, Edgar Literary Magazine, Beyond Centauri and Swill Magazine.

On-line, he can be found at Edifice Wrecked, Girls With Insurance, Thieves Jargon, Salome Magazine, Laura Hird, Mad Hatters' Review, Opium Magazine, Southern Hum, Justus Roux, Void Magazine, Zygote in my Coffee, Yankee Pot Roast, deaddrunkdublin [where Girl From Baku first appeared], as well as a bunch of other places.