Flamenco Hips and Red Mud Feet

Jesus Loves You at the Venus Beauty Salon - Fifth Avenue, Fresno

93 | Jesus Loves You at the Venus Beauty Salon-Fifth Avenue, Fresno If the kid is there, I’ll tap my gritty quarters on the glass display of pink crullers and tiny, frosted inner tubes lined up at Jimmy’s Doughnuts. He’ll pass me his day-old smile, a maple bar, and overlook the quarters once again. Jesus Loves You, but he just puts up with me, I’ll sing out the door, passing the Sorry, We’re Closed sign of Open Door Ministries, my face bobbing over flocks of red, white, and blue angels and choirs of geishas at Shooting Star Gifts, on my way to Venus Beauty Salon, | 94 where I empty trash and sweep up tumbleweeds of hair. “I was married once,” Venus says, “to a doctor who gave himself shots and drank his own pee; didn’t last though, maybe he wasn’t a doctor . . . Fogged in shortwave, the second one muttered in the cellar all night with the door closed, big plans he had to warn the Pentagon— magnetic storms and secret codes he broke, with the others like him. Then there was Fred, big on curly fries and short on romance, born-again to Bowling For Jesus. Found the Lord myself a few times,” Venus says, “but kept misplacing him . . .” She pats her brown #5 waves smooth as one of Jimmy’s French twists and winks out the jingly abierto door. 95 | Hefting a King Cobra from A-1 Liquor, Jimmy toasts the rows of security doors where whiskey-sour blonde tumbles with mushroom pearl. Brunette Serenade rolls into unholy alliance with Jimmy’s greasy doilies, smudged tithing pledges, and rusty hangers from Fifth Avenue— one giant strip-mall hairball. “Business is picking up,” he says, offering Flaming Hot Cheetos with a quick bump bump in his eyes. I want to say that my guy has a big rig or that I am taken, married to a cloud in a ceremony attended only by two sparrows and a broom. I was given away by the sun, and my wild cirrus lover does not clean toenails with a steak knife, takes me duro y slow, and does not spit in parking lots. But instead, I say, “Gracias, no,” slide around the corner past the balloon bouquets and Jesus crucified on a palm tree shadowed | 96 by the #28 bus, a blurry altar of clouds and marked-down Marys. Please God, abierto, abierto— help the kid get through the next round of treatments—let Venus roll her horoscope into one more month of quarters, abierto, no appointment needed— as for me, no shooting stars, I can get by— just a window of sultry clouds at night, abierto, so they can slide over the sill into my room, one small sign of grace, por favor, the opposite of a miracle. ...