Free Kamikaze Lust by Lauren Sanders

thousands of b-b-b-b-buuups, be-beeps, and boops.
    Rowdy was sent to Rikers; I went to confession. I’d seen enough movies to know exactly what to do when I walked into that cold, intimidating booth. “Forgive me Father for I have sinned,” I said, and then recounted the story of the telephone fiasco, altering enough facts to protect my fraudulent claims to Catholicism. At ten years old I was already quite the little story teller. I talked. The priest listened. Then he blessed me and sent me on my way.
    I went back a few times until he started asking me whether I’d accepted the ways of the Lord Jesus. Now, I had no great love of the Jewish religion, which came to me in a genetics of weakness, assimilation, and death, but never did I think of becoming a full-time Catholic. Besides, I couldn’t see that confession actually did anything. I wanted change, not absolution. I wanted better brothers.
    “That’s a bit scary, trust me.” I was shaken by Alexis’ voice; Brothers Do It Deeper fell to the floor. Alexis scooped up the tape and walked back behind her desk. “I was such an ingenue back then, so young and stupid. Then again, we all have our crosses, don’t we?”
    “Oh, yeah,” I nodded, still flustered by streaks of childhood.
    “Anyway, I’m sorry, but I have to cut this short. My A.D.’s resurfaced with a list of demands. Apparently, she thinks it’s Lebanon or something. She runs off my set and has the balls to come back with demands—like I have time for this. I have an exam at five.”
    “Oh, okay.”
    “A mid-term no less.”
    “I thought you finished your degree?”
    “You listen, I like that.” She set down the tape and stared across the desk at me as intensely as she’d eyed the woman who interrupted our earlier conversation, and, once again, I experienced the subterranean tug of her personality.
    She smiled. “You want all the answers, don’t you?”
    “Just one for now.”
    “Fair enough. In the real world, my dear scribbler, I’m in law school. I have a torts exam today.”
    “Wow.” I half-laughed, feeling as dumb as my language and a bit out of my league. Alexis Calyx wasn’t supposed to be book smart. Interesting, yes. Worldly, sure. But law school?
    “What can I say?” Alexis said. “It took me so long to finish my degree I got used to having school in my life. Of course, it’s not really that simple, but you know that. Or you will soon.”
    She turned around and shuffled through the stack of videotapes on her desk, every so often placing one in a pile for me. I watched her shuffle the porno tapes with her glittering fingernails and tried to imagine those same fingers lugging a briefcase full of legal documents downtown. She would have to use a different shade of polish. No lawyer I knew wore iridescent blue.
    “You don’t mind if I do the contract myself?” she asked as she led me back outside through her industrious minions.
    “Not at all.”
    “Good. I think we’re going to get along just fine, Miss Rachel from Bay Ridge. The thing to remember is this is a business like any other….Hey, hey, Alia.” She stopped a woman in big brown sunglasses and a tight satin overcoat who must have been about my age. “Un-uh, not on your life. Once shame on you, twice shame on me.” The woman laughed as Alexis turned to me. “Rachel, meet Alia, my stellar A.D., the one with demands. I’m surprised you didn’t take hostages.”
    “That’s a good idea. Next time.”
    “Trust me, honey, there will not be a next time. Are you this much trouble over at that Hollywood finishing school?”
    “Hollywood finishing school?” I asked. The three of us walked outside into the crepuscular haziness, a cocktail-hour laziness.
    The stellar A.D. smirked, “N.Y.U.”
    “Back in the seventies we would have laughed if anyone came to us from film school, but what’s that Dylan line? Come on, help me out here.”
    “Dylan Thomas?” said the A.D.
    “Dylan Bob.”
    “ The times they are