t h e   g i r l   f r o m   b a k u   :  2

:  r u s s e l l   b i t t n e r

Q: What? You think for a moment this girl from Baku got to be this girl from Baku by waiting around for someone to pick up a 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. But when it comes to one of the distant daughters of Genghis Khan? Nyet, spasibo.

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, 'nough said.

It was 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 that hackney. What had I been thinking – or worse – doing 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 seen. 'Fact is, her mons is nothing if not the font of myth – as, entre nous, are her moans.

We're writing – when not writhing – our own saga right here between the sheets. And this particular son 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.

N:Fs Fk, I think. And even if the between static and kinetic in this instance is negligible, I'm beat. Exhausted, really, to the bone – and so slip off 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. Dawg-gone.

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

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