Sacajawea. Birthday. How.

That's Native American for "Happy Birthday Julie." Julie's nickname is Sacajawea. It's not really a long story, but if I told it to you, you'd nod quietly while thinking "She used to drink way too much."

In honor of Julie's 38th birthday, I'm posting a story we wrote together many, many, many years ago Dolce Spazio's in Los Gatos, sometime back in '86 or '87 - I can't remember and nobody cares. Cue the story.

We each wrote two sentences at a time and this is what we ended up with.

-- Nature is a Whore --

It wasn't so much the smell, but those little, curly, black hairs that tend to stick to the perspiration on my back side. Upon realizing this predicament, it was clear to me that boning Josh would be difficult to lie about. The memory was forever burned on my brain. The scents of the animals in their cages and the grit from the sugared Winchell's donuts enveloped us in a rank, gravely, sticky, cocoon of love.

The way he methodically removed the kibble from in between my toes sent me reeling and made me oink like a piggy. It was for this world of scum and lethargy for which I would gladly die that convinced me were were living a lie. I had had wholesome romance before - I wasn't a stranger to real love. Moist bodies covered with rock-hard granola... unfiltered apple juice spilling on the night table while we practiced our sterile love. Those days are over now, and I have new asparagus to harvest, and I must seek a thicker, creamier custard filling for my maple bar of love.

Another yeast infection had thwarted my plans for trying on new jeans at Penny's. Dammit, is life a boiling cauldron of hate, and is my path bound to be laden with steaming geysers of lime grenadine? I never really wanted to be a dock worker, but the smell of old, shriveled hermit-crabs, always extra-fresh in my nostrils made me long for the sea. Waves of God-forsaken plankton crash upon my mollusked rocks. Sounds of seagulls screaming for "MORE potato chips! MORE styrofoam!" made the waxed brine in my ears drip down my chilled neck.

He was the one eating raw mussels... the juice running off his chin, soaking his parka, that luered me to the oceanside. He reminded me of one of those little, chiseled, balsa-wood, old-man-of-the-sea, pipe-in-mouth, never-without-a-yellow-slicker, beach-side tiki dolls. I desired him like the kind of desire that draws maple syrup to hot cakes. I would be insatiable.

Should I approach him like life's shit-messenger approaches me everyday? The delivery demon of bad tidings that turns my half-and-half to cottage cheese and injects stale oxygen into my glazed raised? Or would I act just the opposite, frolicking up to him in my hip waders, babbling about the best Dolly Madison fruit pies, then ask him if he wants to suck the lemon filling out of my own?

I am simply a pawn on Satan's chess board of naughty bishops and saucy rooks. Or maybe one of those cardboard cut-out kiddies from Chutes and Ladders, forever climbing 10-foot candy canes. Oh, the knife-like pain I feel every time I think of jilted love, flat cream soda, frenzied laundry days, and Ken-L-Ration Meaty Chunks in Real Beef Gravy. Love gallops through my heart like Ichabod Crane, only slowing to a trot to leave steaming road apples in the pasture that I call my soul.

It seems only fair and natural that I should see my calling in life coming from the bowels of the bureaucratic world of motor vehicle registration and licensing. I'm waiting in an intestinal line to pass or be passed. Sometimes I wish I had been born Chaka Khan, then life would have been so easy, so fulfilling, not to mention all that good food all the time.

Is this what is to be the end of my existence, or just the end of this particular story? Or am I just fixating on Chaka Khan's split ends? I need to know where I may fit into this grand, scheming plot: this vexing, twisting, whirlpool of grief, anguish and cramps. Maybe this is only a tale of woe written by a fictitious shadow. A good story is like a firm doughnut, and this one is lodged in my esophagus.