Napoleon

I feel like I should be on drugs. I want to be on drugs. But I can't decide on what kind of drugs or how to get them. I'm too indecisive to be a drug addict. I have also read that if I use drugs there is a substantial risk for sexual dysfunction. So I'm not on drugs. I'm as clean as a whistle.

Whoo-whee.

To think that life started out so well for me. My family name is Hess and my mother named me Rudolph, after the deputy führer of the Nazi party. She wasn't a Nazi, but since our name was Hess she figured it would be good for me to have a famous namesake. She didn't know much about the Holocaust.

My father wasn't around to care either way. They met at a bowling alley and he didn't give up his league to be a husband or a father. Apparently, he couldn't do both. He is out there, somewhere, chasing the perfect game. My mother was a beautiful woman with an uncomplicated mind and a heart of gold. God rest her soul. 

My namesake, Rudolph Hess, in a stunning act of bravado, flew in a fighter plane to Scotland to attempt to broker an alliance between the United Kingdom and Germany, unbeknownst to Hitler and despite the fact that a war raged between the two powers at the time. Hess knew Germany could not win a war on two fronts, and Operation Barrabossa — the invasion of Russia — would have created just that. A war on two fronts.

Upon learning of Hess' actions, Hitler was outraged and decried his former number two as delusional and crazy, stripping him of his position and ordering him shot on site upon his return to Germany.

But Hess did not return. He was imprisoned in Scotland during the war. He was sent back to Germany in 1946 after Hitler was dead and the Third Reich fell, tried at Nuremberg, and sentenced to life in prison. But he had it by 1987 and hung himself at the age of 93. By coincedence, the year I was born. The words "Ich hab's gewagt" were etched upon his tombstone, which translates in English to, "I dared it." They've since destroyed his tombstone and the place where he was imprisoned for fear of neo-nazis turning it into a shrine.

Whoo-whee. 

I had Rudolph Hess' portrait hanging above my bed through school. He was a handsome man with a glorious unibrow. He looked on with some measure of excitement and optimism, like a man full of confidence, even though all he ever did was watch me sleep or jerk off or pick my nose. For a while, I think he enjoyed watching me playing GI Joe's. He probably admired my military strategies and maneuvers. My secret missions. I like to think they amused him.

No one dares to do anything anymore, really. Everyone plays it safe. They try to stretch their boring life out as long as possible. Except for terrorists and assholes, who don't seem to mind when they die. This I learned all my life. I made this realization for the first time doing a crossword puzzle in the hopsital where I was being "observed." The doctor asked me what was wrong.

"Nothing," I replied.

"Come on, Rudy," he goded me. "Tell me what's wrong."

"Well, nothing really exciting ever happens to me. Nothing has and probably never will. I'll never die in a plane crash. I'll never be taken hostage in a bank robbery. Or win a hot-dog eating contest. Nothing exciting at all."

"Nothing?" he repeated with that incredulous look in his eyes. I think he was analyzing his own life. His bifocals slid down his lumpy nose. A mustache grew like a womb brush under the boulder of his beak. It was a true crag. Like Karl Malden's.

"No. Nothing unusual or fun. I was never kidnapped or struck by lightning. I never choked or nearly drowned like other kids. Never been bitten by a shark. Never abducted and molested by a stranger, teacher, or babysitter. I never won a spelling bee or contest of any sort. I didn't survive a fire or nearly die of some exotic disease. I've never been adopted or abducted by aliens. I've never seen a ghost. No one has ever fallen ridiculously in love with me, or slit her wrists or stalked me when our relationship ended. I have never been out of the country. I've never been sprayed by a skunk or bitten by a pig. I've never been arrested or fought over or beaten up because my face has caused someone disgust. No one really considers me at all anywhere I go."

He had a term for it. Dr. K, he called himself and his big brain. He went by Dr. K because he had a Polish last name that no one could possibly pronounce, much less spell. Why they didn't change it at Ellis Island is beyond me. I don't remember his term for my condition, but it was a term which explained the feeling of being socially invisible, which often gets ascribed to minorities.

But Dr. K moved to New York City, and I never saw him again. I highly doubt that he thinks of me. Maybe about as much as a pimple he had once on his nose. My face isn't one that would appear in his mind, or anyone's mind, after some time apart. My face is one that would get lost easily in the complexity of everyday thoughts. I feel utterly faceless.

To add to my invisible dilemma, I work for a company that doesn't exist. I suppose that's relatively abnormal. I have an office in a building in town where I sit and do nothing all day long. My title is community mental health case manager, but the company is on paper only. They bill the federal government for non-existent patients and rent the office space just to have a physical address to put on the W9 and to receive mail. They hired me over the phone. Some guy named Tony who sounded like a cowboy from Pakistan.

Tony told me to go to the address listed and wait there for someone to show up, but no one ever did. Instead I got a phone call. They never admitted exactly what they do, but I know what they do. I got a desk and a filing cabinet delivered to me. I got business cards with my name on them. Rudolph W. Hess, Community Mental Health Case Manager, Albatross Social Services.

I get a card on my birthday and Christmas every year that says how much they value me. I get a modest annual pay raise and one week vacation a year. I didn't think I was actually going to get paid at first, but I did. So I haven't asked any questions since. I have everything I can ask for. I even have dental.

Someone showed up to paint the door. They painted the company logo — Albatross Mental Health Services it reads above it in plain three-inch white Times New Roman font. There is the outline of a world shaped like a frying pan and a stick figure family inside of it. It looks like they are fried eggs. The white silhouette of a bird is flying over their heads. Everyone is smiling. Even the bird.

Whoo-whee.

I keep waiting for someone to call me and tell me what to do next, but no one ever does. It's been three years. I do my own performance reviews. I eat take out Chinese from a restaurant that is across the street from my office. I wonder what they say about me in Chinese as I wait for my food. I believe they catch stray cats and serve them to people. I can't prove it, but sometimes the lady who takes the orders meows when she is telling the cook what to make. Cat is chicken of the street.

I contemplate life and masturbate, often spilling my jizz on the desk. Sometimes I look at the mess like a Rorschach test, or like I once looked at clouds as a kid and I see abstract pictures of things. A rabbit jumping over a vagina. A turtle crawling out of a catcher's mitt. I have a framed picture of Rudolph Hess on the wall behind my desk. I have a painting of John Wilkes Booth shooting Abraham Lincoln in the gourd. Yesterday, I jizzed the head of a twelve-point buck. 

I am from a boring town with boring things in it. John Wilkes Booth is from my town, but there is no statue of him and it doesn't say so on the sign because people hold a grudge. Say what you want about him, he also ich hab's gewaged. He dared it. Maybe better than anyone in American history. He is in all the history books, for chrissake. He changed the course of American history for better or worse. Perhaps, there ought to be a theater named after him. Or at least a glory hole.

Whoo-whee.

There is a bunch of junkie methheads kicking around until they get some fentanyl and eat dirt. Smoking meth in the post office parking lot. Their pale faces scabbed over. Their eyes glassy. There are a bunch of people hanging out in the streets, sitting on rundown porches with pitbulls, smoking dope, laughing like idiots.

Every once in a while one of them will come to the door for services. A pregnant woman with scabs all over her face was the last one to reach out to the white bird of sorrow. Her tongue was as white as cotton. Her lips were chapped and bleeding. She shouldn't be allowed to have a child, if you ask me. There ought to be a law. Someone ought to do something about it for crying out loud. 

I told her we are not accepting new patients at this time, but I'll pray for her. Name the baby something fun, I said. Like Booth. She flipped me off and walked away. She didn't know who Booth was. Bel Air, Maryland is nothing extraordinary, by no means. It is a syringe full of old people, deranged people, litter, and trash in body fluid and Mountain Dew. It is another shithole. A little closer to the ocean than most.

I look average. Much like everyone else around me, though they pretend they're not. But rather than pajama pants and t-shirts, I wear a suit and tie at all times. Even on the weekends. Even when I am mowing the grass. Even in the heat of summer. Yet, still I feel invisible. I polish my own shoes every Sunday night.

Whoo-whee. 

We are boring and average people in a boring place. Like fish in an aquarium. Some fish are able to convince themselves that the aquarium is fun. You can watch them and tell which ones are the idiots. Or maybe they just make due because what does it help to be cynical and depressed about it when there is no alternative? But there is an alternative for us, yet we pretend this dump of a town is fine, this job pays the bills, this law is just. We pay our taxes, take our medicine, submit to authority, learn our role, and then create other little creatures who we teach to do the same thing. We are getting closer and closer to a boring grave we may as well dig ourselves. And if we have any sort of consciousness left, we will rue in regret that we never challenged authority, committed a crime, went on that vacation, slept with that beautiful woman, or did a single thing to be different from everyone else. We blended in, went unseen, and prolonged the inevitable as though it weren't there at all, as though it wasn't coming, but then we panicked when it did.

Dr. K insisted I make an effort to talk more about myself so I could verbalize who I am, thus, feel less invisible. He recommended I journal it and title it something clever, so here I sit and write of myself. I am of average weight and height. I have an average penis. It is an attractive penis, though. It could model if ever there was a call for penis models. But society treats penises like they are Medusa.

But I am average. If I murdered someone, a witness would say that I was of average build. The sketch artist would draw the most average of average men he could draw and say to the witness: Is this the guy? Yeah. That's the guy, I think. But he is so damn average, I can't say for certain.

I get average-looking girls, which is alright by me as I detest affluence and arrogance as much as I do the notion of celebrity. They all ask what I do for a living and I say "nothing," but they don't believe me and think I am being obtuse because I do something boring. But what they don't know is that I was born without a sense of shame, which I've previously failed to mention. It is a terrible defect, or a tremendous attribute, however you choose to look at it. It is a rare disorder that psychologists like Dr. K would associate with an "anti-social personality disorder." But it isn't that. I can sometimes feel sympathy and compassion, just not shame.

Women are all the same to me — roast beef on rye — even the ones who think they're attractive. The dumb and the vain. They are worse than those who aren't attractive to me. They're not attractive. People looked deformed like I am an entirely different species and not radically similar to them. They are ridiculous running around on their two legs. Wearing skimpy clothes and showing flesh like its something to see. With two eyes and ears. Two nostrils. Two. Two of everything. Their absurd hairless human faces. Maybe I was a gorilla in another life, or a seal. It amazes me all the things that have two eyes. Why not one eye or three? God really liked that two-eye design of His, I suppose. I always draw pictures of people with elongated torsos, longingly. Maybe pinchers for hands. One eyeball. I'm very fond of midgets and their stumpy bodies. If I was to have a sultry love affair, to cheat on a woman, it would be with a midget. I hope she'd call me sugar.

I wonder if John Wilkes Booth was tired of being average so he sought to dare it and do something extraordinary by putting a bullet in President Lincoln's brain, even though it would forever villify him. It would, however, make him famous, which is a condition that is not average. Might he had delusions of heroism, as I've read. I think he just wanted to be an asshole because it is better than being a nobody.

I read somewhere that Lincoln's assassin was actually an angry midget actor named Horace Walton, but they blamed John Wilkes Booth because no one wanted to admit that a midget killed the president and jumped onto the stage shouting a defiant, "Sic Semper Tyranis!" before scampering off like a wounded little rabbit.

Whoo-whee. 

Like Booth, I, too, had a flare for the dramatics. In high school, I was president of Til Death Do We Fart — a dramatic fart club. Some kids played football or were in the choir, band, or chess club. I was in fart club. And until this day and time, it is the most extraordinary and unaverage thing I've ever done. A group of four of us premiered our talents at our high school talent show reinacting the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Teachers cringed. I was Booth and we only communicated in farts. Shortly after I farted Lincoln's head, who farted after being shot, while Mary Todd Lincoln farted in terror, I jumped from the balcony and my butthole shouted a defiant, "Sic Semper Tyranus." But we lost to a kid named Timmy with tiny arms who juggled bowling pins with his feet as he danced the Macarena. Everyone called him T-Rex. Somewhere T-Rex is jerking off with his tiny hand on his tiny arm thinking of some beauty. I don't really know that he is, I only presume. He had a fantastic torso, like a CPR mannequin. I wish he had a sister.

Whoo-whee.

I was on course to die average, until I decided to blow up it up. To do something so extraordinary that I could never be considered average anymore. Rudolph Hess, my namesake, convinced me — he dared it — I dared it. He came to me like Chef Gusteau in Ratatouille. I was the possessed rat. He told me to do something. To dare it.

I thought maybe I'd rob an armored truck. It seems like that would be a good time, but I didn't particularly care about getting shot by an underpaid security guard with an itchy trigger finger. Plus, I couldn't decide on what mask I'd wear. Ski masks seem so average for a robber. If I was a rubber-masked president, which would I be? If I was an animal, which would I be? I would probably choose an average animal by instinct. A horse is an average animal. I'd really like to see a horse rob a bank. That would have been a good episode of Mr. Ed.

Whoo-whee.

Banks got it coming, if you ask me, with all those fees they charge for using another ATM. But to rob a bank you need an accomplice, and there are too many cameras and not enough trustworthy people with the balls it takes to do the job. Then there is the substantial likelihood that I would be arrested and do 15 years in federal prison where I would be an average prisoner living an average life. So it seems there is no escape from average for me, as desperate as I am. Besides, I don't really care about money.

Then I had an epihany. I decided to be Napoleon. The Napoleon. Emperor of France Napoleon. I spent two weeks putting together a uniform that matched his in every detail. I bought a sewing machine and stitched it together. I bought replica leather boots. Replica medals. An actual sword. It was surprisingly easy to find most of the stuff apparently because there are many other people pretending to be Napoleon all over the world. It isn't as uncommon as you might think. There is someone in China. A guy in Saudi Arabia. I read an article about a man in Kensington, England who is convinced he is Napoleon who has a normal full-time job. They can't fire him because of the new laws that protect transgenders. He identifies as Napoleon. Who's to say that he isn't?

I felt an immediate boost in confidence when I put on the uniform. The neighbors really must have wondered what the hell was going on in the building where I worked. My neighbors at home must have wondered what was wrong with me when they caught me mowing the grass in the uniform. Or when I took out the trash, checked the mail, walked the dog, on and on. The wool was a hot bitch. My dog, Ruby, looked at me no differently. She probably assumed I had an occasion, or just got some special clothes, which she didn't understand in the first place. I could have been Hitler and it would have been all the same to her.

So I decided to see what casual sex had to offer me, convinced by reading Cosmo that I was missing something. I lived without compunction and had sex with whoever I could get. You'd be surprised who isn't interested in having sex with you just because you're dressed up as Napoleon. You would think it would have had the opposite effect and I would have attracted them in droves being so distinguished and grand and all. But I had sex with some ladies who figured it was an opportunity to say they f#cked someone famous.

"How often can you say you met Napoleon?" one lady asked me giggling in her martini. What she meant was f#ck, not met, because a woman decides in her mind the moment you meet if you will ever f#ck her or not. I also read that in Cosmo.

One was in an Applebee's parking lot in her Honda Odyssey. We had to move the carseats. Most of them were as drunk as skunks. But so was I. Most of them tried their best to speak some French or make some French joke. I met a few at a downtown bougie bar with a patio which I frequented. They thought I was some part of the bar, or dressed up for some special reason they didn't know about. I learned to speak in a thick French accent. I sat by the gas firepit with blue crystals in it, listening to live music. A lady with a violin one night. Some bluegrass banjo picker another. Most everyone who plays live music will play at least one Tom Petty song.

One lady I f#cked was a school teacher who taught third grade. She was attractive and clean, but she definitely hadn't missed a meal, though. She was a chunky doppelgänger of Kristin Bell and she metioned it at least twice. She was Kristin Bell if Kristin Bell ate Kristin Bell. She came back to my place, pet Ruby, and we were on to bed. I buttered her croissant with that smug and disgusted look on my face I would have imagined Napoleon bearing during such a sordid act. Kwa-sont was our safeword, but it was never uttered. I iced her pastry and she lied there as though I had just steamrolled her until she fell asleep.

The next morning I made her French toast and boiled eggs before she left, and as we were enjoying it, she asked who I was supposed to be, anyway. George Washington? Benedict Arnold? Who was I supposed to be? So I wiped my mouth, drew my sword, and chased her off having no tolerance for her impudence. Ruby barked at her. Little did she know the sword was dull and all she had to fear was blunt-force trauma and a dog bite. I went back inside and finished breakfast and signed up for a dating site.

Napoleon Bonaparte

37

Bel Air, Maryland

Looking for my Josephine

Here to conquer your heart

Don't be my Waterloo

Whoo-whee

I figured in the least I could meet a few other people I didn't know and f#ck them. Supplement what I wasn't picking up in bars. Rudolph Hess came back like Chef Gusteau and gave me his approval. That is what I intended to do for the rest of my life with unbridled ambition — f#ck the entire world. If I couldn't rule it, I'd f#ck it. Of course, I couldn't be certain that whoever I met would want to f#ck me back, and if they didn't, it would be kind of akward. Maybe we wouldn't f#ck at all, which would also be anything besides average. Maybe she would tell me she was born without a vagina. That she was a permanent Barbie doll.

The first lady I matched with was named Gina. Gina was attractive and said she was looking for "a partner in crime." We had coffee, which was dreadfully average. But I brought a flask of liquor and when I asked her what crimes she wanted to commit together, listing several possibilities, she laughed for a moment, thinking I was joking. Then she said I was nuts when she realized I wasn't and left. I didn't even get a chance to tell her about my high school fart club.

Then there was Denise and Theresa and Amber and Rose and Stephanie and Marissa and Nikki and Laura, but none of them worked out. Some of them were seemingly only interested in me because they wanted to find out if I was for real or not. Or because I was different than the blue jean backwards hat-wearing, bearded, dad-bod, mullet-butch, country-lite, tractor-pullin, sports-watchin, bean-dick, cool guy with shitty tattoos. Or the hip-hop clan of preptual suffering and unemployment. The dime a dozen gentry. How often can you say you went on a date with Napoleon, after all, ate cheese and grapes with Napoleon, drank wine with Napoleon. Never. So I was a novelty. They snapped pictures, we took selfies, made jokes, had empty sex, and went our seperate ways. Eventually, I thought certain, my dick would fall off like Louis XIV's toe.

Whoo-whee.

It was one of those women, however, who told me about Napoleon's dick. Nikki. She said she read an article that said Napoleon's dick was cut off and given to a Corsican priest he had insulted, and then kept for a hundred years before it went to America. It was displayed in the New York City Museum of French Art for decades until it was sold to a private collector, perhaps deemed as distasteful by the uppity-ups. A man's decaying penis. I was only half-listening when she told me, but later I looked up the story and discovered it was true.

So I embarked on a quest to reclaim the penis on behalf of Napoleon who I had become — in exile. Exiled to another life, but still the great emperor himself. Ordained by God. The penis was in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in the private collection of a dentist named Louis Lassiter. So I requested two weeks off from Albatross Social Services, where I did nothing at all, and drove to Philadelphia to reclaim my dick.

It was a beautiful mansion in the heart of Philadelphia. Not in the infested dump of the southside that stinks of cheese steak and pot, but in a neighborhood that held on to some semblance of culture and sophistication. It was a large brick mansion and I had no idea what I would say when I got to the door. But perhaps when I stood there and shrugged, they would know that I meant business. They would know what I was after without me saying a word at all.

I wondered what Dr. K would think of me now. How I went from invisible to such prominence in the blink of an eye. My mother would say that Napoleon was such a great man. She always thought the best of everyone. 

Whoo-whee.

So I stood there in front of this beautiful mansion and I took a breath. I saw a purple curtain in an upstairs window shake. Perhaps it was only a cat, but I had the feeling I was being watched. With all the confidence in the world in my two nuts, I climbed the stairs and rang the bell. A beautiful young servant girl opened the door and I said I was here to reclaim property that belonged to me.

"Pro-pear-tee?" she asked confused. She spoke in a thick French accent. She had the prettiest mouth I had ever seen in my life, but I wasn't quite sure of her age. But, as they say, you can't go to jail for what you're thinking.

"Get me Monsieur Lassiter, immediately."

"Monsieur Lassie-tear ees no longer weef us, monsieur," she politely replied.

"Then get me the man of the house so we can settle this at once."

"Dare ees no — as you say — man of dee house. Dare ees only –"

"Cela suffira, Suzette," a beautiful voice called dismissing the girl. Suzette vanished like a shadow. The voice came from up a flight of stairs and as I boldly stepped into the foyer, feeling indignant still standing out on the stoop. I caught a glimpse of the woman, a truly radiant and beautiful woman who descended the steps much as I would imagine angels would descend the clouds of Heaven if ever they should desire. Alongside of her were two well-groomed gray French poodles that wore ribbons in their hair. They didn't dare bark or move past her. They remained at her hip and accompanied her down the stairs.

She was a beautiful woman. A ravishing woman and I did my best to hide my admiration as she came unto me for being obvious is a weakness. I was a poor actor and I felt uneasy and out of place in such a fine mansion. I was of lesser breeding than her dogs, after all, and slowly amongst the splendor of my setting I was feeling invisible again. Like I bled into the drapes. I nervously rested my hand atop my sword, puffed out my lips, and gripped my hat which I had removed upon entering the house. She slowly got closer. I cleared my throat and took a deep breath. Never before had I felt so inferior to anyone or anything in my life. I could have melted and became a pool of blue, white, and red wool on the floor. It was as though she was about to devour me. Or I was to have my head lopped off by the national razor.

"Tu viens chercher ton pénis, n'est-ce pas?"

I could have died. I put my hat on for lack of anything else to do and stuck out my chin which was the last bit of pride I had left in me. She let me squirm for a moment before graciously translating with a coy grin and a heavy French accent.

"Come for your penis, have you?"

I cleared my throat. "I have. Oui."

She stopped at the bottom of the stairs. It isn't a very easy thing for a man to come for his penis and for that penis to be in the possession of a woman who knows exactly what she has and who enjoys the power of possessing it — a very wealthy and attractive woman that could not be bought or bullied. It was as though it were in fact my very penis, and if I was to look in my pants, I'd be as dickless and smooth as a Ken doll. A crotch of smooth plastic.

I stood there awkward like, feeling like a parakeet must in a gilded cage, and she chittered with her teeth and her dogs left the room. She had a stunning white powdered wig that sat atop her head, a luxurious gold dress, and wonderful jewels on her neck and fingers. Her face was pale and her eyes were doe-like, large and observant, as though they absorbed all that they viewed.

"Venez avec moi, s'il vous plaît," she said holding out her hand.

I knew she wanted me to take her hand and go with her, so I did. She took me into a large adjoining room that was painted black. There was an oil-painting of a dog, some sort of terrier, that was growling, it appeared, or suffering lockjaw. It had bulging beedy black eyes. There was a large green leather couch beneath the painting and a keyboard lying on the black-and-white marble floor. The only occupants of the room were two large orphaned plants on either side of the sofa, and I looked up to the enormous ceiling and the pendulous light that hung down from a heavy chain in the shape of a large golden head. It was, needless to say, a very strange yet elegant room.

She took me to a desk that sat on an opposing wall, and on the desk, in a gold case, was the dick.

"Voudrais-tu que je te laisse tranquille avec ça?"

"Non," I replied without hesitation.

She smiled and bowed to me. I understood her without thinking of it. She asked if I would like for her to leave me alone with it. There it was in a gold box under a glass cover sleeping like Snow White. The approximate size of a fig — a shriveled two inch dry fig that time and the elements had not been kind to. Oh, the shame of it! It was on a white linen cloth and there was nothing for me to do but to imagine all the unsavory holes it found itself in when it spewed its gook inside of whores of every distinction. Including that of Josephine's pink luxurious baby cradle.

"Est-ce que tu sais qui je suis?" she asked softly behind me. Do you know who I am. I was no longer translating it in my mind. What she was saying I immediatley understood. I looked at the penis as though it were a dead pet of mine. A pet I had been very fond of.

"You are Josephine, and I am — Napoleon."

"Oui," she smiled.

"Réincarné," I whispered. "Je n'ai pas choisi cette vie — il m'a choisi." I didn't choose this life — it chose me, I said.

"Oui. We've been eagerly awaiting your return. We are fabulously wealthy, of course. You'll not want for anything. Not desire anything that you cannot possess, well, other than the entire world. You may not be able to rule the world, but if it is of any consolation, we do have a very nice globe in the solarium should you want to remove it from its walnut encasement and hold it like a child of your own. Comme un bébé."

I smiled at her, at last taking my eyes off that shriveled dick which had beckoned me like a homing signal. I had felt invisible for all these years because I was someone I was not. Born to a life in which I did not belong. 

"Vous n'imaginez pas combien de personnes me confondent avec Marie-Antoinette," she mentioned with a chuckle. People mistake her for Marie Antoinette, she said.

"Off with your head," I teased her.

"Le vôtre en premier," she grinned, standing in front of me, lifting the opulent golden skirt of her dress. Yours first, she said. "Bon appetite."

I bowed to a knee on that elegant marble floor and looked into the cave of her hiked skirt. Her cream-colored legs as pillars to a kingdom I knew well. She was not wearing panties. But to my surprise there wasn't a small forest animal at the fork of her woods. There was a bald and perfect vagina that stared back at me invitingly. A squinted cock canoe. A perfect pearlescent clam that smelled delightfully of pastries and flowers and perfume rather than a damn fishing boat.

I dared it.

Jospehine was skinny beneath all the lace and silk of her dress. She was a beautiful lady. She was mentally-ill. She whimpered exclamations in French as I lapped her up. My tongue drank from her fountain. I peeled layer after layer of clothing from her body as I did. Sat her on the desk with her stockinged feet resting upon my shoulders like my shoulders were stirrups.

It had been far too long since I indulged and I was insatiable. The more agressively I ate, the more she puddled and it dripped down my chin like a delectable cream sauce. Crême de le crême. I was thankful I had gotten practice with all those other women for I knew what I was doing, I was battle tested, and I commanded her body with the expertise of a general in the field. Looking over her with a spyglass from a vantage point as I simultaneously ravaged her. I ate as though I was searching for the bottom of the custard dish with my tongue, but there was no bottom, there was just more and more custard, and I gorged myself on her.

"Oui!" she gasped. "Oui!"

I knew she was mentally-ill and there is no one in the world who f#cks better than mentally-ill women. The more mentally-ill, the better. So I bruised her thighs with the force of my thumbs holding them open for my mouth to devour her inside out like she was some sort of fruit, and I left bitemarks on her inner-thighs as though to claim her. She squealed as I sucked hard enough to draw blood and occasionally I looked up to catch her biting her bottom lip, her eyes rolling back into her head, and her hands grasping handfuls of my hair as though to hold on. It was the greatest culinary delight I've known and it is a taste that no gourmet chef could replicate, or any other lady could hope to ever possess.

"Mon Dieu, comme tu m'as manqué!" she whimpered. Her back arching as though she was possessed while she nearly slipped off the desk due to the pool of her excitement that glazed her backside despite my fervent lapping. I held her in place for my feast, but I knew it was time to take her. She was ready and it was no longer strategic for me to hold myself in reserve any longer. This day was now mine to win.

I shoved my face inside her as though her lips were drapes to a secret room, or as though her fluid possessed some sort of psychedelic property which caused me to hallucinate. And for a brief moment, I was back on the battlefield, emerging from a tent that was her pussy. The old familar smell of gunpowder and campfire smoke. Of horses and dew on grass and the metal of cannon balls. The smell of a clean wool uniform. Of old leather and blood. It was the smell of victory that had been foreign to my nose for more than a century of wandering aimlessly through other lives.

I withdrew my face from that view. Wiped my chin clean with a monogrammed silk handkerchief I kept in my breast pocket as though I had just munched on a dish of particularly delectable escargot, stuffed it back in that breast pocket, and hastily unfastened my pants.

She had enormous breasts. Everest-like natural mountain ranges with two moles on the left one summiting her nipple like Edmund Hillary and his faithful Nepalese companion. She only wore a corset and white stockings. Everything else had been ripped off her and lied around us in scraps on the floor. She was in the raw and she was ready to be assaulted with a full frontal barage of artillery and calvary. I pushed her down onto her knees.

As I grabbed her and administered myself through a technique of savage oral gavage, she submitted entirely so that she was nothing other than a simple goose floundering there at my mercy, my hands cusping her jaws, caressing her ears with my fingertips, thumbing her eyes, invading every part of her I wished to invade, intruding that which I wished to intrude, until she became my foie gras, serving herself up to me.

I admired her perfect hourglass image, which I caught in a large mirror across from us. The great secret of her naked body, presuming that she was somewhat chaste. Presuming that no other Napoleon who had come to her door had the luck I had. The Saudi or Chinese Napoleon. That fellow in Kensington with the fuss of the day job. Two nipples. Two eyes. Two ears. Two arms. Two legs. Two tits. Two hands. Two elbows. Two knees. Two lungs. Two kidneys. Two nostrils. Two lips. Two. God and His twos. Somewhere maybe on another planet everyone has threes. Three of most everything. Or ones. Why not just one? We could all get along with one of most anything.

There isn't two pussies, of course, but there were two ovaries. And my two testicles rocked like cannons firing as I thrust in and out of her, having moved from her throat south to the true purpose of the war, which was the conquest of her ovaries. What I did to her was criminal, but she took it with an insatiable lust and vigor that I knew, bar strangling the life from her, nothing was out of line. I thought perhaps we ought to have a safeword like I had with that fat Kristin Bell, like kwa-sont. A word to utter when things went too far. 

"Waterloo." It would be Waterloo, I told her. 

"Oui?"

"Our safeword. Waterloo. Say it if I go too far."

"Non," she shook her head defiantly, gritting her teeth, grinding back into me so that every bone of her pelvic girdle grinded against mine. 

I practically cannibalized Edmund Hillary, the mole, and his loyal guide, as I ravaged her moving from that slippery writing desk which bounced two feet from where it had been, where she would perhaps compose letters to me or I to her, to the more inviting green leather sofa that invited us like open arms. 

Imagine the indignation of that bull had he known he would be murdered and skinned, and his skin would be the support upon which two licentious humans would mate — not even to procreate — simply just to satisfy an inate craving to reproduce, to trick their minds, spilling body fluids of all sorts all over his green-dyed body. And I thought, looking again at those two moles, did Edmund Hillary ever fuck anyone on Mount Everest for the sake to fuck. The true "mile high club." His companion's name was Tenzig Norgay, after all — Norgay. Two cheeks. Two balls. Two men spooning in one cold tent, potentially facing death. Last chance, bud.

When it was over and I spilled inside of her my divine and noble seed, that which her ovaries would welcome and that which would seek her fertile egg, she smoked a cigarette lying on that dead bull sofa, indifferent to all those different things that possessed my mind because I hadn't said a word to her about them. They paraded through my mind. I lied on top of her like a corpse as she ran her fingers over my back softly. Her fingers felt as though they were made of silk. 

"Personne n'est fidèle à personne," she proclaimed wearily. No one is faithful to anyone, she said, before she told me she expects me to be discontented at times and to f#ck Suzette, the skinny demure maid who had opened the door. "Truly," she went on in English. "That is what purpose she serves. We both f#cked other people in our last life, why should this one be any different?"

"Pourquoi n’en serait-il pas autrement?" I countered, barely over a whisper, little better than a corpse might whisper it. I was a deflated man who covered her beautiful body like a inadequate blanket. I had asked her why should it not be different. Why couldn't we be faithful this time. Anything done a second time ought to be done better than the first. Clean slate. Mistakes learned. A second chance is an opportunity. On and on. 

"Il n’y a pas d’autre Joséphine dans ce monde," I whispered softly into her ear. In English, there is not another Josephine in this world. This I knew. 

She smiled as she ran her fingers over the back of my head and gently down the nape of my neck like she was playing a harp. I was an instrument of her desire and she was my sustenance. My nectar. Was I anything more than a bee, committed to his queen? 

I f#cked so many other women and it was all the same thing. Same ritualistic behavior, same ceremony, which usually included eating and sleeping. The hierarchy of common needs satisfied in one fell swoop. In and out. In and out. Tongues wallowing in mouths. Grunts and groans. Ooga booga. Dirty talking. Biting. Sucking. Licking. Sticking. And about as soon as it was over, I was on to the next one. Unsatisfied by the last. Not physically in some cases, but always spiritually. Emotionally. Let's watch TV, someone said. Let's not. Let's not ever watch TV if only not to contribute to the asinine pagan celebrity cult worship. Let's throw the TV in the trash and watch each other love and live.  

I recalled that my final performance for the Until Death Do We Fart performing arts club was The Death of Elvis. I bought a used toilet and spray painted it gold. I sat on it and farted a beautiful rendition of "Unchained Melody" before falling to the ground. Dead as a door nail. I was laughed at. I was booed off the stage by folks who loved Elvis and didn't want to see him portrayed in such a vulgar way. People just don't understand the performing arts.

"I was blind before I saw you," I told her. She ooed and she awed. She cooed and she cawed. 

Whoo-whee. 

Then we went back to the old ooga-booga after we caught our breath. I bent her over the table despite my trepidation of being left chafe, reliant upon a concoction of talcum powder and creams to relieve me. I opened up her juicy meat sleeve and stuffed myself back inside, probably too quickly because my dick convulsed and a spurt of baby gravy soon oozed out onto her girly gizards. A family of four in an Astrovan drove into her pink roadside rest to stretch their legs in her cervix. A future generation on their way to life in my second coming. 

But it didn't end there. I was under the spell of a force greater than I could imagine, and I gave her a third and fourth helping and she erupted and oozed her own sauce that mixed into mine like the ingredients of a secret recipe of pot-au-feu. We f#cked for so long I half-expected a baby arm to reach out and block my invasion, screaming "Pas Plus!," or no more. To force his existence into the world and end my good time. To trade sex for stroller rides and trips to the zoo and dirty diapers and boo-boos and the flu.

But that feared arm never came and I continued my work like a crusader sacking the Holy Land of her body. Pounding her with the heavy hooves of my calvary. Taking that which didn't belong to me at all so short a time ago, but now that did. That which was my God-given right to rule. Divinity. I kept going. Pounding her home like I was some cruel medieval torture apparatus. The Rack and Hammer. The Screw. The Iron Maiden. The Brass Bull. 

"Putain de merde!" she cried. Or, holy shit.

When it finally ended we collapsed in exhaustion on the floor. Suzette brought us water on a silver platter. It was the best water I ever tasted. Suzette wore the slutty French maid outfit and was a desirable young woman. She had perfect legs. Those of a young athlete. My face and penis were glazed in Josephine's juice which dried from a thick syrupy fluid to a sort of sparkly dust. 

"You ought to be in a talent show," I told her. 

"No," she purred back in English. "You have all the talent. You are the gondola boat. I am the canal. Do you possess any other talents?"

"I can fart the national anthem. I am the greatest flatulator in the entire world." 

She chuckled. Her head resting upon my chest. She had beautiful brunette hair that was kept up in pins, strands of which got loose from the clips and fell. For some reason it amused me how they did and I must have smiled like a goof looking at her. How vulnerable we allow ourselves to be in love, if ever we truly do. 

The powdered wig she wore had fallen off hours ago and lied like a dead cat on the other side of the room. "N'est-ce pas irrespectueux?"

"Farting the national anthem is not disrespectful at all. It would be if I kneeled, though."

She laughed and rolled over and back into me. There we were in that bizarre room with the orphaned plants and the oil-painted dog with the over-bite, the green leather couch, sore and bruised, and laughing. 

We are all manipulated versions of our true selves. Manipulated to fit in, or to get along, or to look smarter, richer, or happier than we actually are. To be people we are not. We are smoke in mirrors. But there as I caught a glimpse of us in her ornate floor mirror, I realized I had never been more myself and she had never been more herself. And we were perfect together.

I am Napoleon.  

I buried Napoleon's dick in the garden a few days later. It seemed to be the right thing to do. We marked it with a granite obelisk which was thirty feet tall. 

"Pensez-vous que c'est assez grand?" she asked me.

"Sure. It's big enough," I replied. 

And in French we had etched on it —

"Je l'ai osé."

I dared it.

Whoo-whee.