Dear Readers,
From the original censored manuscript, here is the prologue of Part Three of
THE MUSLIM ROMANCE TRILOGY, The Arab Sprung, While Muslims Sleep in the White House. Available soon through CreateSpace on Amazon.com
My author's page: www.amazon.com/author/julietmontague
PROLOGUE
Veterans
Day, November 11, 2013
Current
Price of Moving On: $37,600
Novel
no. 1, $3,500
Alcohol,
$5,475
Vent
Decontamination, $300
New
Front Gate, $1,500
Tankless
Water Heater, $2,800
One
Pretentious Billboard, $4,200
New
Neck, $8,000
Nicotine,
$5,570
Online
Dating, $160
Novel
no. 2, $3,200
Electronic
Cigarettes and Nicotine Oil, $295
Escape
to Ireland, $2,200
COCO
Mademoiselle by Chanel, $175
Reams
of paper, ink, and highlighter, $225
Who
is he carelessly fucking now? I ponder the constantly recurring null question.
You broke up with him before
he officially broke up with you; remember?
And as I flip myself to one side and
peak at the clock, I jerk the covers up and over my head. I am sure that right
now in this pre-dawn moment, he is fucking no one, lest he has moved to another
time zone, Afghanistan perhaps, as he had portended. It was not Ali’s custom to
be up and out and away from his mother before nine a.m.
Under the silently spinning, dust
free—clean, clean, clean, you sad lonely woman—plastic palmed ceiling fan,
where once he had shamed me, in this room now chilled with the slightest hint
of a California autumn, I awake still in darkness to what I hope to be the end
of my international jet leg.
Always contemplating the current degree
of my insanity, I tug the twisted, hot-flashed sheet tightly over my shoulder
in the realization that, yes, foolish woman, even a trip to the Emerald Isle in
search of a rugged potato farmer has failed to yield a diversion from your most
intimate yearnings.
In that sweet, hot summer of 2010, did
it truly take my very own personal Aladdin just a few days less than Mickey
Rourke’s 9½ Weeks to knock me from my
imaginary tower of significance in his mystery life to a puddle of humiliation
at his sandaled feet?
Just as the ghost of Emily Bronte’s
wild and cursed Cathy taunted Heathcliff from the fairy caves of Penistone
Crag, I hear him whispering to me from beyond the draped sheers of the bedroom
window, beyond the metal trellis tossed with barren jasmine vines, beyond the
bungalow walkway leading to the sleeping streets of Hollywood.
Perhaps it is from behind the dormant
vegetable garden of Mr. and Mr. Gaylord, the tidy newly married neighbors, that
my charming, black-eyed, chiseled chin Middle Eastern lover chastises me in a
haunting whisper.
Julie, Julie, Julie,
Don’t you miss me yet?
So today, the three-year anniversary
marking the execution of a ruinous and feckless relationship and the beginning
of my sexual hiatus—time enough alone to vainly publish the first two volumes
of the longest love letter ever written for the entire judgmental world to
read—Ali has pierced the fourth wall of my pitiful life stage to thrill me,
presumably, posthumously once again.
The clock radio still quiet, the time
five fifty-five, tossing to find the perfect spot, I pull the cool satin
comforter up over my camisole-cupped breasts. Lying on my back, I settle in
deeper. Bill Handel on the KFI early morning Los Angeles talk show would soon
mumble out his fractured sarcastic version of the noxious news of the week,
prattling on at the prescribed alarm time of six-thirty. No sense in starting
my day yet, although two overstuffed suitcases urging my immediate
procrastinated attention lay sprawled open on my living room floor, as my first
day back on American soil was spent making a one-hundred and eighty mile
turnaround to my aunt and uncle’s to fetch the one unconditional love of my
life.
Ali is here beside me under the sheet
asking me timidly in his culturally appropriate ta’arouf manner if I am ready.
And, of course, I am.
The pastel gold-framed watercolor of
the resurrected Jesus watching over me, my legs open. I skim the toenails of my
right foot under and across the top sheet, where it stops at the bump on the
bed. Brute answers with a staccato snore and a robust spurt onto his blankie.
The old Maltese with minimal teeth and dreadful morning breath, who has
acquiesced to sleep on my bed one more time, wisely ignores such occasions of
my lustful despair, and the seductive spell has been broken for only a shameful
moment, as my hand furtively takes position.
I am so easy, a masturbatory slut.
While I am battery poor, evidenced by my various solar-powered Victorian garden
lights, flameless LED porch candles,
and the Sony Walkman tape player, there is no need for the Energizer bunny in
the bedroom.
I seem to regularly walk about with a sweet
burning somewhere between the descending crux of the V and the very point at which my plush inner thighs begin. On
mornings when he returns to me, I awake with a painful swelling that is only
soothed by gently soothing fingertips through satin pajama bottoms. He’s just
taken a shower, dried himself with my rubber ducky bath towel and smells of his
favorite blue Rainsoft water conditioner body wash. The long black hair swept
about his neck glistens. Within a very short time, with his promise that he
will enter me at the beginning of my climax, the gentle soothing fingers work
themselves into a familiar frenzy as I turn my face to his, my eager thin walls
painfully pulsating in the empty chamber, and beg for him to fill me.
But he never does. His arms never
encircle me. His fingers never slip into the cotton cami to sweetly twist an
erect nipple. His thigh never crosses over my tummy to trap me in place. But it
is his right hand, delicate and light, that so cleverly parts the moist meaty
folds to find the little man in the boat and bring him safely and exquisitely
to shore. This is my fantasy of what never was, because I am the director and I
call the shots.
I brought forth the morning’s ablution
with hysterical tears and the accompanying pitiful sob.
Ali, Ali, Ali,
Don’t
you miss me yet?
I am truly mad.
From the bedside radio Bill Handel On The News abruptly shakes my
sensibilities as he reminds me once again that my inconsequential, small
spoiled pouting life is truly not worthy of sympathy, empathy, or even a get
well card. The result of Typhoon Haiyan crushing into the Philippines, the
strongest tropical cyclone to ever make it to landfall, has left more than ten
thousand dead and four million persons displaced. The people are seeking
shelter in boats and in freight containers. Crazed survivors swarm the airport.
Rotting bodies line the shores and fill the streets. All this mayhem while I
lay sumptuously under a polyester faux-satin bedspread.
Looters have taken over and Mr. Handel
votes vehemently for their immediate execution. “Shoot them on sight!” He’s
very good at ruling from his glass cage pulpit at the Clear Channel Studios in
Burbank, just a hop, skip and jump, as the crow flies, from my bungalow on
Cahuenga Boulevard to the other side of the Hollywood Hills.
My thoughts turn to my first
self-publishing company, Xlibris, where my writing journey began, along with
thirty-five hundred dollars, in the Midwest United States. From there it was
quickly dropped into a cardboard office cubicle somewhere in the Philippines.
Is my first Filipino grammar editor under water? I should have been kinder to
her, after all. And is my first marketing advisor seeking shelter in a
container? I should have stopped screaming at her each time she called with
another scheme to get more money out of me. Making amends might be difficult,
as all that ill-spent suspicious anger is water under the bridge now, so to
speak.
I leap from the bed in disgust of my
daily leisure routine, yet quickly return to my dry haven, but for the moist
sheets, with a cup of java foamed with whipped hazelnut non-fat creamer and my
Blackberry. Apparently, I am the only idiot in L.A. who still owns one.
The typhoon disaster story has now
moved on to more frightening news of the morning.
Iran, it seems, is still cultivating plutonium
in some dark cave in the hope of removing all infidels from the planet. More
frightening is the news that President Obama’s approval rating is collapsing,
which is frightening for Mrs. Obama, indeed. Mr. Handel repeated the
presidential quote heard round the world regarding the implementation of The Affordable Care Act, “If you like
your plan, you can keep it.”
Government enforced healthcare at a
somewhat surprising cost is being forced down America’s throat; a sort of
negative blow job for the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to
breathe free—and now anyone with a pre-existing condition. I have missed the
regulatory coming out of Obamacare and its penalties on those who refuse to
swallow. I am sixty-five and receive Medicare. Time will tell just how long I
shall continue smiling like a Cheshire cat.
I receive a text from my good friend
and creative guru, another married homosexual, Stephen. This town is rife with
them. During my celibacy, I’ve become quite the sought-after Fag Hag.
Monday, November 13, 2013;
7:25a STEPHEN: Remember, three pages a
day!
7:26a JULIE: Yes, of course. Thank you for the
wakeup call.
7:26a STEPHEN: What were you really doing?
7:27a JULIE: Masturbating.
7:27a STEPHEN: Well, cougar that should put you on
the bestseller
list right away!
As usual, my kitchen desk scowls at me
through scribbled post-it notes, journals lined up against maize walls, diaries
stacked like dead soldiers, mourned and not forgotten. I tire of the multiple
three-ring binder research décor in my small living room, the pages of
word-processed notes peering at me from the iron swirled cookbook stand on my
kitchen counter. Where there should be a recipe for humble pie there are
merciless memories, ideas, quotes, and song lyrics waiting to be illegally
unleashed onto a waiting world. And to my amazement, readers are awaiting the
release of Part Three—and I haven’t written one self-possessed, erotically
stimulating, hysterical word.
A review of Part One on my Amazon
Author’s page:
I started this book
yesterday and am now TRYING to
slow
down, because I’m almost done. Jumped back on
Amazon
to order the next two and praying she is writing
as
we speak. I have had moments where I am pissed at her,
but
I love her honesty. This book will hold your attention
and
make u laugh. This woman did not get the memo that
we’re
not supposed to let them know how crazy we are.
Paige
For Paige and all the beautiful,
emotionally starved, vulnerable, absolutely crazed women out there, Part Three
of The Muslim Romance Trilogy.
Juliet
