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Help me! Please help me! Oh, God!
"Starr Bright" thrashed about wildly, flailing her arms, kicking, fighting for her life… and woke suddenly to find herself in a strange bed, a damp rumpled bed in a room that hummed loudly with air-conditioning that yet did not dispel the odor of whiskey and cigarette smoke and human sweat and the underlying stench of insecticide. She was not alone but beside a stranger, naked, a fattish man who lay sprawled on his back in the center of the bed, head flung back and mouth ajar, wetly snoring.
Mr. Cobb it was. Who'd been unexpectedly rough, impatient with her. Reddish-veined pig's eyes contracting and his vision going inward oh! oh! uhl as he'd grunted grinding himself stubbornly and then desperately into her. Twenty-two solid minutes she'd clocked it as the night before she'd clocked their earlier episodes eight minutes, twelve minutes, sixteen, a part of "Starr Blight's" brain detached and even clinical despite the generous lines of coke she'd snorted with her froggy-eyed friend whose first name, or names, momentarily eluded her. They'd checked into the Paradise Motel in the early evening and had sexual intercourse then gone out again hurriedly not taking time even to shower and cleanse themselves as "Starr Bright" so badly wanted, yes and to shampoo her sticky hair as well, scrub thoroughly between her chafed legs and run the shower as hot as she could bear it but Mr. Cobb had insisted upon going out at once to purchase a bottle of Jack Daniel's whiskey and several grams of cocaine i
This time, "Starr Bright" woke sobbing and choking out of her drugged sleep. It was 4:46 A.M. There would be no more sleep that night.
Through a cracked Venetian blind a fluorescent-pink neon sign flashed rhythmically. PARADISE MOTEL. PARADISE MOTEL. "Starr Bright" slipped stealthily from the damp rumpled pigsty of a bed shivering in the air-conditioned chill though her naked body was covered in sticky sweat. She dared not wake Cobb, had to escape from him, a dangerous man. He had hurt her, bruised her breasts, the insides of her thighs, grinding himself against her oh! oh! uh! as if he'd have liked to kill her, eyes bulging and flushed face swelling like a balloon about to burst. Drunk, and high on cocaine, he'd turned into a beast, he'd lied to her, too, promising her she could bathe herself undisturbed, shampoo her hair, like all of them he'd lied to her; he had no mercy.
/ must change my life. Help me, God. I'm run to earth.
For God had sent her, si
Quickly and fumblingly "Starr Bright" dressed herself in the dark. Stepping into the black satin lace panties Cobb had ripped from her, struggling into the tight-fitting skirt, the fake-gold lame halter. And where were her shoes? and her overnight case? and her sequined purse?
One day they would ask her: why hadn't she simply fled Billy Ray Cobb and the Paradise Motel? For indeed "Starr Bright" might have done so, seeking refuge on foot somewhere in Sparks, Nevada, in the early morning hours of whatever day, whatever month and year scarcely known to her panicked mind. For indeed it would not have been the first time in the more than twenty years since she'd left her home in Shaheen, New York, that she'd fled, on foot, in such haste and desperation. It would not have been the first time she'd known herself, in a fury of self-loathing and disgust, run to earth.