"Kadush," or Pudding Skin: Soundtrack to a French Neo-Noir Tragedy.

"Kadush, kadush, kaaadush," God, she's got pointy fingers, "This fucking thing won't work, Luc."

Shut the fuck up, shut the fuck up, shut the fuck up! Stop pressing the damn record button and shut the fuck up. Patience is a virtue, right; life lessons: like sex is a disease, religion is an empty wallet, knowledge is an anxiety disorder, eating is a release, and shitting being the opposite of eating must be a . . . fill? No, no, start again, this is backwards, we are off track. Damn't she does this to me, fills my mind with, well, if it's being filled then I guess shit.

"Ha, well baby maybe you better stop pushing it so hard, I just bought that thing." Aka I'll hit you so hard you're wearing steak over both lids if you break my new toy. God, isn't that just the metaphor for our whole relationship; she keeps pressing record and all we get is empty space and time . . . and steak, for some reason room service won't stop bringing steak. A release from my wife, originally that's all this weekend was, watching this 22 year old little hard body, well it's turned into button pushing. How did Thursday turn into Saturday and where are my pants? How'd I end up here in a hotel room in Vegas staring at this patch of bleached blonde pubis while she fiddles with my "Sony record your sex;" leaving me flaccid as a pedophile in a nursing home. She says the cameras is an eager, albeit perhaps desperate, attempt to satisfy her Auteur cinematic needs. I say it's a gift for a little girl whose dad died on Christmas.

Let's say I won her number in a raffle the winning ticket: D-E-L-T-A 1751. A flight attendant more interested in tending than flight. Today's in flight movie "How Chelsea gets man in 1D off while serving stale Cheez-It's." She was my prize and Vegas her foolish handler. She said she liked pudding, that's all she'd share really. Pudding was usually chocolate Snack-o-pack's with crushed up vitamins, that's vicodin, percocets, oxy, synthamesc, drencrome, Moloko-plus, anything artificial really. I asked her about school and history was tapioca to vanilla cream, remember the crust that used to form at the top; there's a word for that; no its not "pudding skin," though Urbandictionary.com does define pudding skin as "the first lick of a vagina during cunnilingus." God did she love pudding skin. Science was frozen pudding (she usually got confused here; no change in state of matter; both pudding and pudding pop are solids my dear). Reading was "Chocolate Pudding: a how to." Gym was; well gym was all the places you could rub pudding on the human body keeping your heart rate under 100 bpm's.

"Je suis un petite fille," I have never heard this more in my life. You tell a girl your family roots are French Canadian and she assumes you shit brie. She's young though so I mess with her head, there's still time for her to be a mature contributing member of society if she could only wipe the layer of "I'm not with stupid, I am stupid" off her face. So its touch me here, lick me there, hit me way too hard under here (all in French); and I. . . . well, I have no idea what she's talking about so I sit there staring, pretending like French is my first language, and I hit her because I feel like it, I lick her because my tongue is salivating and she smells like orange shasta, and I touch her because I'm afraid I can't feel. Nothing she says makes sense and nothing we do is ever recorded because she can't press buttons and we don't work.

Sunday morning I glance over and she smells like motor oil, like a car that's been driven too hard. I think of Marie, and the children she's growing and I think of this young girl. I remember "Je suis un petite fille," and I think, Jesus 22 isn't that young, I owned three hotels and an airline when I was 22. So I lick her again, and she tastes like burnt rubber, I touch her and realize I can't feel, and I slap her to check if either one of us is alive. I come to the conclusion that she might be, but I definitely am not, and if she wakes up she may want breakfast. So I leave her a credit card that doesn't work, and I write her a note in someone else's handwriting about the physics of suicide from the Bellagio roof. I clean up my clothes, take a bite of old Filet Mignon and a box of dark chocolate pudding as a souvenir and I head for the door. The camera turns on from the corner of the room and finally starts to record, its response to touch two days too late, a metaphor wholly wasted. I leave the room and let it record, people will want to see the nothingness that occurred, years from now they'll want to know neither of us were really there. Vegas was an illusion; Vegas has fully faded from my memory.

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