A date to see a movie. we stop at mcdonalds. "they play great music at this mcdonalds." He goes to the bathroom and I wait. Private schoolkids everywhere. He gets out, we start walking toward the trolley station. He tells me he's got to get a rat!
To dye it!
"What color?" he asks me.
"Green."
"That's right, I dye it green, I call it Navy Bean!"

We're sitting in the station, he's considering another rat color. Pink! "I'll call it Pinkie. But its got to be a girl, because I don't want people thinking that rat's all over me, you see what I'm sayin'? They tell me my rat's got balls a third the size of its body."

"I can see why you're attracted to me." He says. I give him skeptical eyes. I feel that all my facial emotions are magnified, like I am in a movie. I convey skeptical. I cut my eyes to the right, I lift my eyebrows. He's off in another world.
"What if I got my facial piercings back? I used to have fifteen. Two snake bites," he shows me the scars, "Three in my tongue in the shape of a pyramid," he sticks out his tongue. I regret that I am aroused. I feel like a butterfly collected, wings spread and pinned to the cardboard. I feel like a female lead in a Tom Robbins novel.

"I am a prostitute, but I got to survive, I'm not sorry. My mom was a prostitute too, she used to dance in Vegas. She made thousands of dollars an hour, before I was even born." he's facing me, straddling the bench.
"You're a prostitute?"
"Used to be. I'd rather be naked and beaten and starving, I'll starve to death, I'll go into shock crawling on the ground before I--shit, you see, love is for sex, and sex is money and music is money, you see what I'm saying? You know that song, what's love got to do with it. But I don't think she meant a dude. But no, you can't pay me for anything. Save me from it, maybe. Whatever's left of me."

On the trolley he faces me talking and touching me. I wish that didn't feel electric. "Man, you're great, let me ask you, let's see this, the LIVER, man. What do you call a doctor for the liver?"
"Hepatologist." I have no idea, but yet I know.
"Fuck, yeah! That's what I'm talking about. Hepatologist! That's what I mean about you. Hepatitis C," he says wistfully. We get off the train and walk into the quarter.

We're walking this way and that. I can't tell where we're going. Suddenly he veers off the sidewalk.
"You want to go to the movie or you want to take a nap?" I have no idea what he's talking about. He's leading me into a fancy hotel. People are looking at us strangely. This is a really top-notch hotel.
He's bringing me up to the desk!
"What are you doing?" I ask. I feel fourteen and twenty-eight and eight years old.
"Thought we were going to take a nap."
"No, no, we're not going to take a nap." I exit. He's unflappable. He drags me to a bar, dances. I walk out, he runs after me. I tell him I'm going home. I feel like a giant snail, curving into a giant abalone shell against his constant verbal presence. I wish I was an actual woman or man or anyone who wouldn't feel like an alien shellfish hooked on a bait of desire, strange hermaphrodism unvisible to male eyes, cut up and packaged as female love, shrinkwrapped in styrofoam.
"Can I walk you home? Can I walk you home?"
"If you want to." He does. We go to McDonald's and he makes a hilarious scene. We walk back to the trolley stop in the center of downtown.

---

"You're so hot. You're so fucking hot."
"Why do you think I'm hot?" stiff in my cowboy boots, on a date with a straight man, peering down the empty tracks to look for the trolley.
"you look just fucking like that woman from the Fifth Element, you know, with the red hair. Yeeahh!"
I look at my shoes. Fuck, no.
He dips his finger into his fries, coating it with grease and salt. He drags his finger gently down the inside of my thumb.
"Little worm," he says softly.

He stares at me and raps continuously. I wish I had a mini recorder, I wish I was with him to record him, and not this. He puts his arm around me, I remove it. I shrug away from his touch. He stares at me and licks his lips and babbles and cuts his eyes and pulls down his baseball cap. I feel as if I might fall off the planet. I'm finding that being in the same universe as him is a sexual experience, let alone the same trolley bench. I want to exit this play, to find myself on Neptune's empty shores.

"You and I," he says, "Could have the hottest sex in the world. Triple fuck, no joke. But I see how it is, you and I are going to be the best friends in the world. Hottest sex, yeah, shit! I want to just - ugh -- right here!" I wish I was Evangeline. She would know what to do. But then, she's a girl. They'd go nuts together. She's the kind of girl who will go to Hell with you if she gets to dance and punch you in the face on the way.
We're in a trolley station, next to a haggard-faced blonde he calls Paps. She's on his wavelength. They trade rhymes, laugh, fall into each other.
"Isn't she beautiful?" He gestures to her, wearing his baseball cap.
I can't think of a word to say. She's the ugliest person I've seen in weeks, transcendental love aside.
"If you like that, just imagine her naked with me giving it to her from behind beside the McDonalds!"
This is real horrormovie stuff. "I'm all set." I say stupidly, and he grins at me as if I'm reasonably intelligent. I feel like I've fallen into a vat of tar and pleistocene bird bones.
"I want to conceive a child...we could make a baby, right here in the station, man, oh..." He puts his arm around me, then his hand on my knee. He continues to babble about the baby until trolley comes.

As it pulls up, he pulls me into his arms. "French. Like the french."
I divert his kiss into a hug, step onto the train. "Thanks Charles."
"Am I your hero?"
"Yes."