Pervical Chapter Four

Percival watched as Clarrisa closed the door and listened to her high-heels clip-clop down the steps. He ruffled his hands through his hair, and paced on the linoleum floor of the kitchen, thinking to himself that he should have said something, anything, like ‘I love you’, but did he love her? How could he tell? All he knew was that he liked spending time with her. She made him feel good, and he wanted her. Was it lust or could it be just that it was some form of forbidden fruit. What he needed was to find a nice girl with AIDS and settle down. He felt wrapped in Saran Wrap because he couldn’t get physically intimate.

He could still feel the heat from her lips. It wasn’t like he had never touched her, but he couldn’t put a finger on why letting someone enter the inside of a body was so important. He had fought the impulse for so long but the welling of sex overwhelmed his senses and he couldn’t think straight.

He laid on the bed and stared at the fake wood wall and tried to calm down. In the middle of one of the wooden panes were two distinct eyes, formed from two large round knots in the wood, and they looked ominously at him. The eyes pierced him.

“Alright. I love her,” he told the eyes. So be it, he was in love.

He needed to make reservations for Saturday, so he slid a few quarters off the nightstand and headed to the main office where several payphones were. The young receptionist sat behind her desk, gossiping on the phone as he entered. She chomped on her gum with the phone nestled on her shoulder and she stared blankly at a game show on a small black and white television.

Four payphones lined the right side wall. He put his change into one of them, which was titled, For a Good Time Call Sarah at 555-6784. He had an itching to call the number but instead uncrumpled a ripped corner of the phonebook, where he had written the number to the restaurant.

“Hello. My name is Larry, may I help you?” answered the man on the other end.

“Hi, my name is Percival Watkins and I would like to place a reservation for two for this Saturday,” he said.

“We have an open spot at seven.”

“That sounds perfect.”

“I will need your telephone number, sir.”

“555-2901,” he said and gave him the number to the main office. “Just ask for the Penthouse.”

“Oh, thank you very much, and we’ll be happy to see you.”

“Thank you.” He hung the phone up. The receptionist looked at him out of the corner of her eye. He turned and was almost near the door when she called out.

“You the person renting out #?”

“Yea that’s me.”

“Well you had got a phone call about an hour ago but I couldn’t get you. It’s from a…” She looked down at a sheet of paper. “a Philip.” She picked up a small note and handed it to him.
“He didn’t say if it was important, so I wasn’t to persistent.”
“Thanks,” he said and left.

It was to late to get in touch with Philip now, he would be in the middle of his shift, so he would have to get in touch with him when he got home from the hospital. He was glad that Philip had called because he needed to talk to him about Clarrisa. What he needed right now was some sound advice that he could trust. Since he didn’t have to work at the hospital today, the rest of the day was free for him to play around with.

Once inside his room, he headed straight for the toilet, leaving the door wide open and scoured a pile of old magazines near the plunger beside the toilet. Nothing there was worth reading, so he held his pants up with one arm and waddled to his book bag near his bed, where he had a magazine, which he had grabbed from the hospital waiting room. When he sat back down on the commode, he flipped through what appeared to be a liberal news magazine called The Ritchous Defactos. He scanned through the table of contents when he came across: Pharmaceutical Company Tests New Drug On African Children page forty three .

On that page a huge black and white photograph of a dieing African child that wore a Pepsi tee-shirt and mud encrusted shorts, clutching a rag doll, and he sat with a look of helplessness on his face. The scene behind him was of a back alley, where garbage piled high in numerous trashcans and on top of one of the cans was the South African flag. He began to read the article, which talked about several large pharmaceutical companies that used experimental drugs on the children there. Over eighty percent of the children developed malformities or died because of it and the companies weren’t taking responsibility. When they named Keiser, anger welled inside him, he was affiliated with them and possibly helped produce some of those hideous drugs. It was more important then ever to talk to Philip.