Naked Physics

by Kelly Jameson

SIMPLE HARMONIC MOTION = Motion that repeats in a regular pattern over and over again.

I don’t have to look far to find a piece of physics. Or a piece of ass, for that matter. I never finished high school, but nonetheless, I know about energy and momentum. As a stripper, I make more money than most of the girls in my old high school, girls who went on to college to study things like teaching, nursing and psychology. I drive a dented midnight blue Ford Escort even though I can afford a much flashier car with all the bells and whistles, and I’m one of a bunch of popcorn tenants who lives in a jittery, small building in a trendy city as far from opaque suburbia as I can get. I began my rebellion against authority when I was thirteen and they taught me I was bad, bad for developing breasts, for sucking cigarettes and wet beers, bad for sitting half naked with a boy on the top of a hill, watching for shooting stars, trying to forget the Ds I got in geometry, not caring about The Great Gatsby and not understanding the adults around me, like mortar shells, the world fucking blowing up in my face, all different colors of orange and red and black-blue, and how a wet beer bottle and boys eager hands taught me to forget about music, forget my dreams to be a great pianist, how the wet wind and sog and crunch of my parents 60-hour weeks, and our refrigerator covered in magnets and photos and art and coupons and prescriptions and report cards and shopping lists standing like a grotesque Christmas tree, finally taught me that they were afraid, their faces standing still, like places where something used to be, and I never looked back. I learned instead to dance and feel the cooling night air on my face instead, with a beer in my hand, and look for shooting stars and wonder, does anybody else, and I haven’t seen one in a really long time, but I keep trying, and when I was nine and I did see one, I made a wish, I wished I could fly, fly away from this place where something used to be.

It’s not surprising I’m as practical as the fog that sits on the collarbone of this smudged city every day, as no-nonsense about the transactions that occur in the back room of the strip club as a bank teller cashing checks or making deposits. Because it’s really not about the transactions. When it’s right, like a dance between two people that is perfectly choreographed without practice, it’s about connecting with someone, it’s about falling up, falling down, falling sideways, but falling together, after that first beautiful discovery of each other, you keep falling together, all the pieces of your lives, you grab every moment you can together, and it’s not about backs or stomachs or asses or breasts, it’s about feeling alive, in the moment, quick throb and spurt of time, and I’ve never felt that way for anybody but I keep looking back to that sky.

On Tuesday night, a steady rain fell. It didn’t let up, but continued on into early morning, tapping on the roof even after the patrons had all departed for home with their soggy, airless, tight-fisted dreams, hoping to snatch a few winks before heading into their sterile offices to drink coffee and trade idiotic business banter and play at back-nine politics with extreme importance.

I am part of the mechanics of closing time at the club. I stop and stand next to the grand piano in the middle of the floor, still in my glitter top, G-string, and white stilettos, and count the waxy green bills pressed against my skin by countless groping pale hands during the course of the night. I think, as I count them, that the grand piano may be the most complicated piece of hand-made machinery in the world today. I like to read, and once I read that it has 12,000 parts, mostly wood and mostly fashioned by manual labor, and it can sometimes take up to four years to go from being a tree to sitting in a concert hall or living room or, in this case, the strip club. I stroke the smooth, glistening wood with my fingers, wondering what it would be like to fuck one of the men who made the parts, suck the fingers of the man who forged a machine capable of producing the greatest sensitivity to the artist’s touch. A man whose world is the focused delicacy of hammers, strings, tuning pins, woodwork and sound.

As I stand in the residual cigarette smoke of the bar, in a haze of pixie dust and lingering sweat that is almost phonetic, I strike a few keys with my shiny, red fingernails. The sound eventually dissipates; in my mind, it weaves itself into the pedals and trap work of sex and lust and dancing, so vibrantly alive in the club only an hour before. This particular piano is fitted with a hydraulic lift that raises it slowly to the ceiling and also lowers it down, with a topless dancer on it during show time. It’s an expensive prop that is popular with the dancers and the men in business suits and ties and dark, sweaty work socks who fancy themselves strangled by clocks, mortgages, kids, and ever fatter wives. I’ve danced on it a few times. When I was ten years old, I could play, Fantasie Impromptu, Liebestraum, Unfinished Symphony, Pathetique Symphony, Minuet in G, but I’ve forgotten most of what I’ve learned as a kid.

I feel aroused as I think of lying across the top of the piano, getting fucked over the guts and strings of one of the great symbols of civility, my legs spread ignobly, my body tuned to the physical sensations of sound and movement, moisture and masculinity. I wonder why I haven’t done it before, on top of the modern incarnation of the invention of a man who was a harpsichord maker for a Florentine duke, a man who knew in the late 1600s and early 1700s, even though he couldn’t yet see it yet, that there was more to the world of sound than strings that had to be plucked and coerced to give up their sounds. I know the harpsichord dates back to the fourteenth century and the strings were stretched over a wooden sounding board. A pick made from a bird’s quill or leather struck the string and notes sounded. The harpsichord could not emit gradations in tone. Strike the keys hard or soft; you always got the same vibration.

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

I take my fingers off the keys (did you know piano keys are generally made of spruce or basswood and not ivory? Ivory-yielding species are now endangered and protected by treaty) and look up to find Jones, a muscular, tattooed bouncer, standing next to me, six-foot-two, two-hundred thirty-five pounds. If I stretch my imagination—a lot—he reminds me of a Florentine duke. Jones is a man who has failed to win riches and fame from the world but doesn’t care; he possesses a certain careless dexterity. Besides, I don’t say no to a bouncer whose job is to keep me from being pawed or raped by drunk, overzealous men every night. In fact, I’ve fucked him before, but never on the piano, and it was nothing to complain about.

“There’s always time for a little physics,” I say.

I’m tired but the thought of having a cock inside me, of demeaning myself by begging for it, of having Jones, like Gottfried Silbermann—an organ builder and clavichord maker from Dresden credited with constructing the first two pianofortes in Germany around 1730—moving over me and in me, looking for the music inside me, demanding, as Johann Sebastian Bach once did, better sound, searching, maybe, maybe, this time we’ll find it, excites me. I can’t explain why I want to be demeaned by my fantasy Italian count, my grand duke of Tuscany, so I won’t try. We’re the only two in the club; I reach for his pants, push them halfway down, and begin to fellate him.

RESONANCE = Transmitting a vibration (energy) from one body to another when the frequency of the first body is exactly, or almost exactly, the natural frequency of the second body.

He is so hard I could bounce a quarter off his dick. I bend down, lick and bite the inside of his thighs, matted with a soft layer of hair, and he moans. I lick his skin to ease the pain and after I lick his cock and suck him a little, my lips polishing the knob of him, he makes me stand up and strips off my glittery top and G-string. Impatient, he kneels at my feet. All I’m wearing now are my white stilettos. He spears my curls. “Christ, your wet,” he growls, sucking his own fingers. He quickly discards his own clothing, a muscle shirt and a pair of jeans, his underwear, socks and sneakers, and carries me to the piano. I imagine he’s a man who has been expelled after the sack of Rome in 1527 for lewd acts with all kinds of women. It’s a distortion of the history in the textbooks, but I imagine he is a man from a long line of Italian music patrons who will restore the luster of his family name, a man who is a musical chapel of bone, muscle, sinew, and lust. He pushes me down on the piano and climbs on top. I notice distractedly he has beautiful feet. I wonder if he gets pedicures. I think about how being on my back is my least favorite position; I prefer to be on my elbows, my buttocks in the air. I prefer to be in a position where I have no choice but to bare all to him, a position where I am forced to give him all my smells, all my sounds, all my intimacies, including the faint smell rising from just above my cunt—between shows I had to take a shit, and I used moist wipes afterward, but I didn’t have time to shower in between sets. I prefer to be dominated, to be in a place where he will fuck me so hard it will feel like he is bursting from my throat, in great gobs and spurts of time, where I can forget maybe for a little while that I’m getting too fucking old for this, that the beer tastes stale, that I haven’t seen a shooting star for years, I wonder, has anybody else, and think that my body is just something I have to live with.

AN APPLICATION OF THE DOPPLER EFFECT = The siren on a passing emergency vehicle will start out higher than its stationary pitch, slide down as it passes, and continue lower than its stationary pitch as it recedes from the observer. An astronomer, John Dobson you think, explained the effect: The reason the siren slides is because it doesn’t hit you.

The cock of the man inside me? I imagine his genealogy. It’s complicated by numerous illegitimate offspring and by the tendency of some of the members to dispose of each other by assassination. He is a dangerous man with experienced lips and hands. Those hands squeeze my breasts, painfully tweak my hardened nipples; his feet clumsily strike a few keys in his haste to get on top of me, the keys make a few awkward sounds and then he pushes himself inside me. The sonorous echo of notes is a discordant jumble of randomness. Black and white inside my head, I am sharp, I am flat (remember they told me I was bad, not in so many words, but in stale-beer, crowded refrigerator, shooting-star looks, so I guess I am), so okay, I am the metal frame of the piano, the strings being struck by hammers.

My Italian count is not a patient man. He is already sucking air through his teeth. As he repositions himself, he somehow flays his legs outward and I think I can hear the strings inside the big piano vibrate even though no keys have been struck. I think I can hear the moans of a thousand peasant women from the fourteenth century as the count pushes himself inside me. Then I imagine myself as the count and I know if I had a dick, I’d wear him out. I’d wear him out. I read books about art and physics in my spare time. But nobody needs to know that.

He thrusts harder. “You’re a dirty whore,” he breathes. “Bitch…whore, beg me for it.”

I use words that other people find dirty. But words aren’t good or bad or dirty, it’s only how people use them. There’s nothing elegant about my words. It’s not like I’m Tchaikovsky or anything. A stretched string, plucked with care, will ring with pure tone. But I’m not pure, am I? The difference between you and me is I know I’m just the part that takes the impact, the part that is struck by the hammer.

He strikes into my core and soon I actually feel as if I’m ascending. His strokes are deliciously rough. His mouth covers mine and for a moment it is so forceful I can’t breathe. His jaw is bunched and strained; the veins in his neck bulge and throb with blood and lust and vitality.

Then, “I want to fuck your ass,” he breathes into my neck. I know about Jones. He always wants to fuck the girls in the ass but that isn’t my thing. I clench my muscles tight around him and he moans. “Forget about my ass,” I say.

“God,” he holds there a limp, sweet moment. “I’m going to come. I need to stop for a minute.” And that’s when I realize we really are ascending. The ceiling is getting closer. Jones must’ve knocked the switch on with his foot when he started to fuck me. The switch is out of my reach. It’s out of his reach. He doesn’t realize what’s happening as he’s back to fucking me hard and grunting.

All grand pianos have a special repetition lever in the playing action. This repetition lever, a separate one for every key, catches the hammer close to the strings as long as the keys are played repeatedly and fairly quickly. In this position, with the hammer resting on the lever, a pianist can play repeated notes, staccato, and trills with much more speed and control than they could on a vertical piano.

I kick at him, bite him, harder than before, but this only makes him more frenetic. He pumps me like he will rip me in two. I scream and bite his ear enough to draw blood. “What the fuck?” he barks. Then he looks over the side of the piano. He looks up, realizes there’ s only a few feet until the piano crushes both our bodies into the ceiling.
“Shit,” he says.

He looks into my eyes, his pupils dark marbles of shock. “Shit,” he says again. He is still inside me when he runs out of room and becomes intimate with the ceiling. The way we are positioned, one of the heels of my stilettos snaps off. It sounds like bone breaking.
DOPPLER EFFECT = As an ambulance speeds towards you, sirens blazing, the sound you hear is rather high in pitch. This is because the sound waves in front of the vehicle are being squashed together by the moving ambulance. This causes more vibrations to reach your ear per second. As you know, more vibrations per second results in a higher pitched sound. When the ambulance passes you, the sound becomes lower in pitch. Behind the ambulance there are fewer vibrations per second, and a lower sound is heard. This change in pitch is known as the Doppler Effect.

Did I mention that Jones weighs two hundred and thirty-five pounds? I feel a great constriction in my chest as we are crushed against the ceiling; I can’t move anything, not my chest, my hips, my legs, my arms. He is still inside me. He tries to speak but only grunts come out. And then spittle. He is gasping, trying to speak, but he can’t of course, because his torso is being crushed and he is asphyxiating against the ceiling of a run-of-the-mill strip club that tried to jazz itself up with a levitating piano-and-girl act.

I am numb. I am many octaves above the fundamental. I feel heat, wetness, liquid, something, and I don’t want to think about how things are being compressed in Jones’ body and being forced out of his anus and his mouth. I find myself thinking about medieval torture devices, how people were crushed to death on purpose by other people because of their religions or views or words, crushed to jelly, flesh lacerated by bone, and soon I feel something, his bones beginning to poke out of his flesh, his marrow gushing out? I feel like crying, I feel like I’m cradled in an Italian tourist trap, the weight of hundreds of people pressing down on me, their mouths, with their black, rotted teeth, gaping open, heavy and hot and stinking, laughing at me, like I’m an exhibit in a museum that houses ancient torture devices. I think I hear something, some kind of sound, but it’s far away. Wailing maybe? I’m taking shallower and shallower breaths and thinking about how Jones was a star defensive tackle in high school and I start to see little pinpricks of light behind my eyes, little shooting stars, and high school and even this morning and even just five minutes before was a long time ago.

I had this science teacher in middle school, he told our class about an experiment where dogs were suffocated by placing an air-tight rubber mask over the dogs’ heads and it only took 8 minutes for the dogs to go into cardiac arrest. It made me feel so sad. Jones’ struggles, gasps, the sound reminding me of mud sucking at the boots of a man. The dogs went into convulsions right before death. Jones is convulsing.

I want to pull him close—ha!—and cover his almost screams with a kiss, only I feel like a damper pedal under a giant foot, stationary, and I realize I am trying to scream but nothing comes out of my mouth. I’ve just had a man die inside me, his cock still inside me, at least I am pretty sure he’s dead, and why am I still breathing, the air escaping my lungs in little meteor streaks, small spirals of milkshake-through-straw-breaths? Shooting stars are a bonus of stargazing, if I watch the sky on a dark night for half an hour they say I should spot several brief streaks of light—meteors mined, dog barking in the distance, all I need is a blanket, a clear view of the sky on a dark moonless night, a cool beer, but if I watch too hard I’ll never see them. I’m not sure how long we’ve been up here. It’s been more than 8 minutes for sure. It feels like 8 hours. But then someone is hitting the switch and our compressed bodies and the piano lower to the floor again in a gruesome, carnal dance of expired lust and shock and dizzying diamond numbness. (Shooting stars are mostly grit from space colliding at very high speed with air molecules high up in the sky.)

“Don’t get up yet.” A paramedic peers down at me. They start to carefully move Jones’ body off me, then one of them says, “Wait,” they realize his penis has been jammed inside me for the last 8 hours, or however long it’s been, and they talk quietly together.

“You’ll experience a sudden change of blood pressure when we move him,” the paramedic says. They talk again in low voices and I feel another little death as they unconnect Jones from my body.

“We have to determine what kind of injuries you have. We’ll be flying you to the trauma unit.”

“I’m alive?” I say. I feel an irresistible and illogical urge to scream, “Sex is good for you!” That would’ve made Jones laugh.

“Just relax and trust us, okay?”

“Okay,” I say.

“Is he…?”

“I’m afraid so,” the paramedic says. “But you were lucky. He was crushed slowly against the ceiling and died but his body cushioned yours.” I wonder if Jones kept his football trophies from high school, if they are in a box in a basement somewhere now, collecting dust. Grit.
I’m lucky? My breasts are like pancakes. There are tiny indentations from Jones’ body and bones and chest hairs on my skin, like I’ve been lying on a bed of nails. I amaze everyone when I sit up and try to walk away. Except I forget about my broken stiletto, and naked, stumble into the arms of a waiting paramedic. “Easy,” he says. “Easy.” Still, I let them take me to the trauma unit and put me through their tests. Nothing is broken. No other injuries. I will be taking horse pills to ward off any infection that might be caused, say, by having a dead man’s penis inside me for 8 hours or so. I will try not to think about this later as I sit at my tiny kitchen table in my tiny apartment eating my Fruity Pebbles with skim milk and drinking my coffee.

One week later I’ve finally mustered enough courage to dance at the club again. The night is over and I’m getting ready to leave. I know I’ll never dance on top of the piano again after what happened. I see the owner of the club talking to a rough-looking man.

”So, this is the infamous piano,” he says. With his rough hands, he plays something beautiful on the keys then shakes his head. “It’s out of tune. What a shame.”

The piano tuner is like I imagined he would be. Not a handsome man. Not careful in his appearance. Past his prime. A bit of a belly on him. We lock eyes. And though I am wearing tight jeans and a tiny white T-shirt that leaves nothing to the imagination, he doesn’t spare me or my tits a second glance after he’s introduced to the piano. After she spreads her lips for him like a dime whore, he can’t look away from her strings, her guts. His jeans are worn, his hands are callused, his knuckles uneven, even gnarled. I know I will fuck him until I am pushed so far out of my consciousness that I almost don’t exist, and the sluggishness afterward, staring at the sky, watching, breathing, looking for shooting stars, waiting for something to connect, waiting for wisdom and connections of time and place and accident. I am already imagining my buttocks in the air, my legs spread wide as he pumps me with his fat cock, those rough fingers spreading me apart so he can examine me like he examines the grand dame piano. I can’t explain it. So I won’t try. What is there to fix? What is there to be punished for? I am who I am intended to be.

Cristoforo? The Italian count who invented the first piano three hundred years ago? He died in obscurity. Jones will be remembered for time to come.

I look at the piano tuner. The piano and the man are the perfect blend of art and physics. In his startling imperfection, he is the most beautiful thing I’ve seen. He looks like he could take the devil in a fistfight. I can’t explain it. So I won’t.

_______________

Kelly Jameson is the author of Dead On, optioned by Gold Circle Films (My Big Fat Greek Wedding). In Mid-March, Dead On was #5 on the US amazon.com genre horror/erotica best-selling list. Kat Martin, best-selling author with over 11 million books in print, calls Dead On "Brilliant. A chilling erotic suspense that will send shivers down your spine. A sensuous, gripping tale or murder through the ages." Kelly is working on two other suspense novels and a collection of short stories. She’s a member of the WritersCorner USA, the PA/NJ Horror Writers Association, Bucks County RWA, and Sisters in Crime. Visit Kelly at: www.DeadOnNovel.com

Naked Physics
© 2007 by Kelly Jameson