This story isn't done.
I’ve taken it upon myself to write about the strange week I’ve had. Maybe someone will read this when I’ve gone the way of poor Mr. Gibson, may his head be in one piece in the afterlife.
That same evening I lay in bed with my own head (in its blessed entirety) on my dimpled pillow. The pillow in question, a baby-blue number from Macy's, had been worn in the middle from years of me lying on my back, always having my head in the same dimpling, perpendicular position.
I stared at my stucco ceiling and I imagined a scoreboard with my name written on it in broken, crumbling chalk. Below my name were two columns with titles above them. The first column read “years,” and below the scrawled word (it was my own handwriting, I noticed) were chalk lines: four groups of four vertical strikes, with a fifth, diagonal, through each group. It made a crude twenty.
The second column read “murders.” I smiled at the word, and the Nancy Drew connotation it brought to mind. The Hardy Boys had solved them, innumerably. Even Scooby and the gang had a feel for them. But in all the terrible capers, in every psuedo-scary episode, none of the crime fighters committed a single one.
On my personal scoreboard under the column heading of “murders” there was a single line.
I deserve my own cartoon.
It’s important to keep score of things. How else would I know in what part of life I’m lacking?
In the shower this morning, I ran my fingers across the discolored mounds on my forearms and head. Mr. Gibson had put up quite the fight. In the heat of the murderous moment I didn’t really feel them, nor did really I notice anything had happened. Daisy told me, and rightly so, that it would do us both well to concentrate as hard as we could on the task at hand. And not to look into his eyes. It might have given us second thoughts to see he was as real a person as we.
I had a bruise from the candle stick across my left shin. It was a purple and black welt right across the bone. As I looked at it I was amazed it didn’t split right in half.
I got out of the shower and dried my hair.
Daisy picked me up in the morning a
week ago. Her pickup rusted and bounced its way down
Grubville is a small chain burger
place that runs across the southern border of
It was Tuesday. Kids-half-off day. I was wearing thin.
“I’m sorry to bother you again.”Not as sorry as I am.
It was the redhead with the sagging cheeks. She had the screaming brats with the chocolate-stained matching yellow shirts, and was partly responsible for the tartar sauce incident last April. It was the third time she’d gotten back in line.
First it was because her fries were cold. We told her we’d get her new fries, but I’m sure Kathy Lynn Dempsey whipped her long blonde tether to one side and popped the little guys into the microwave for a spin.
Then the old cooter wanted some ranch sauce. I wanted to tell her that she smelled perpetually of ranch sauce anyway, so why would she want to make it worse? In fact, why don’t you shove those fries right up that wrinkling posterior of a senior citizen ass and get the hell out of my line.
“Of course.” I smile cynically and hand her two little pouches of ranch dressing. “There you go! Thanks!” As if she’d had any part in the effort it had taken to bend over and reach for the little color coded sauce packets.
Turquoise was ranch.
Yellow was salsa.
No, wait. Yellow was sweet n’ sour.
We didn’t even have salsa.
She was in my line again, and as she began to yammer, I began to daydream about my breakfast encounter with a stray dog. After I was rudely snapped back into the real world, I had no idea what the saggy lady wanted, although she had certainly repeated herself at least three times.
I absently bent over and gave her two little plastic sauce packets. They were maroon. Barbeque. She looked at me disdainfully, and I looked over her shoulder.
She stared at me for a long time, for what seemed like minutes. A precious long time in the fast-paced, fast-life world of fast food. Seconds are dollars. Ninety-nine cent menus. Super-sized Grubburgers. They rule the minds of the culinarily impaired. We at Grubville are a proud beacon to the frustrated housewife who broke that liquid diet, dragging her kool-aid stained, over-weight kids along for happy-meals. She always comes through the drive-thru and orders a Triple Grubbin’ Value meal, with cheese and bacon.
Bacon.
I had bacon for breakfast, along
with scrambled eggs that were covered in ketchup and a glass of O J. I dripped
ketchup on my jeans, and hid the stain at work with the standard issue quarter-length
apron. I had been happy during breakfast because the
There was a stray dog in the house while I ate. It was a brown, dirty mongrel dog, and it stunk like tuna and garbage. It wandered from room to room, and occasionally growled at nothing.
These types of things, I remember thinking, keep me from being a dog-person.
At one point it came into the
kitchen and stared at me. Its eyes looked like the eyes of a rat, bulbous and
poking out of each side of its head. They were like turrets or the eyes of a
chameleon, darting this way and that, completely free of each other.
I calmly ate my bacon, sure not to drop my eyes from his gaze. He was measuring the dimensions of the room, maybe to see if an attack in that particular space would be the best present option. Thankfully, he opted that the situation was not to his advantage, turned, and padded away. I didn’t see him again after that. He must have jumped out of the window he jumped in through.
It would have ruined my morning to kill that dog.
Her mouth was moving but I didn’t hear her voice. Something beeped to the right of me. It was a distant, hollow noise that brought me a couple inches closer to the present, away from the mutt of breakfast and the halos in the kitchen. It was definitely the machinery, maybe the bubbling deep fryer, or the machine that cuts the chicken into thin, little strips. Casey Plumber got her hand stuck in the chicken strip machine. She only has seven and a half fingers now, and she quit Grubville a long time ago. There are all sorts of recurring jokes about Stubby Plumber. One, which I don’t feel I should go into particular detail about, involves a Shiatsu and an angry lesbian barber.
The beep of the machine slowly gave me back my attention, and the saggy cheeked lady was saying, “I want to see your manager.” She had a horrid, angry face that was turning a remarkable shade of pale blue, almost the color of my pillow.
“Sure!” I smiled so big it hurt my jaw. My saliva condescended her. I swished it around in my mouth, preparing to spit. “I’ll be right back.”
Her fries were cold, her ranch wasn’t good enough and she just had to have some ketchup. She bothered me. Interrupted my chain of thought, which had been customer service laden, in superior form, all day long. She had bothered me.
And I get fired for it. What a bitch. Not her, specifically, just life in general.
I scare myself sometimes.
Just like anyone, I'd seek the unattainable answer to the oldest question ever. I’d drive above the speed limit and come to an overpass. And then I would think of how easy it would be to know, before anyone else on the earth. To know what happens. With the smallest effort, just a movement of a hand, and the guardrail would pop like a debutante’s bra, and a-sailing I would go.
I would have the truth, so far away from everyone’s imaginations, the mysterious void, and the world where things make absolute sense and everything always has little halos, even when it’s cloudy.
And then I remember that there could also be nothing. It all just ceases, and there is no conscienceness I realize that, in all actuality, this world is as good as it’s going to get. No one flies and sometimes it starts to rain. These are things I have to live with, I tell myself. To live with.
I drive on, to continue in the world. But I always wonder if nothing would be better.
Mr. Gibson walked by and said, “Hello.”
“Hey Mr. Gibson, how are you?” I replied. It was a Thursday, and there had been a lot in the news. They were fighting somewhere. And there was an earthquake somewhere else. Some bullshit killer whale is dead or dying, or killed something. Mr. Gibson wanted to talk about all of it.
Everyday.
Our conversations, sometimes mercifully brief, could be confused for newscasts
on WBAB,
Between his rambling, discordant views on the plight of the northern musk ox and his ideas on what should be done to further the involvement of Naydo in this action against that country because these people need this and that and blah blah blah.
Naydo the ninja warrior will save the indigenous people of…
“Oh yeah? How about that?”
“Wow, that’s terrible, Mr. Gibson.”
“Gee, someone should do something about those guys.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean.”
“Oh, yes. I saw an episode of Twenny Twenny about that.”
My generic answers came from a list I had compiled for situations just like those. I didn’t like the news, and I had no interest in what was transpiring anywhere but directly in front of my face.
I was hungry and wanted some pie. Apple.
Mr. Gibson said he’d see me later. I assured him that he would, and continued my gardening.
There are certain definite advantages to living in a town with a meager population of six thousand. There’s the endless deciduous forests for miles in each direction. And there’s the quiet. Never could I imagine a better place to study for a microbiology exam or read some Hemingway.
There are also some aspects of small town life which are decidedly not advantageous. First of all, the goddamn woods go on for miles around. To go almost anywhere to drink in this bastard town is to visit the woods after dark, and thus welcoming a demise the likes of little Robby Spence. His various parts are still frequently the cause of local septic back-ups. People are far passed mourning, and starting to be annoyed of little Robby Spence.
And second of all, the quiet. Parties are broken up before they begin. It’s a bit depressing: completely sober kids getting hustled home by the cops.
The night of the day I was fired
from Grubville, Annabelle Carr and I were drinking Pyukalova vodka, sitting on top of the liquor store downtown.
It was close to nine-thrity and
Annabelle was telling me a story about abduction. Her own, as a matter of fact.
According to her story, she was on her way to a job interview at Fireball Fuel a couple towns over. About to cross a street, she hears a meek, “Excuse me.” A black sedan with a front-end camper attachment was parked down the street a ways.
Conspicuous.
Annabelle Carr’s no idiot. Had it been a man she would have kept walking, she told me. But it wasn’t a man, in fact just the opposite. The lady in the car looked fiftyish.
“You have a very interesting look,” the woman began as Annabelle approached the car. “How would you feel about being paid just to be yourself?”
The question even confused me, and maybe that’s why Anna remembers it so vividly. It didn’t make a damn bit of sense. She said the lady’s teeth looked like they had been professionally whitened in the last twenty-four hours.
“What?”
“You should be a model, really,” the woman continued. “You have the walk, and the hair. Definitely the hair.” As Annabelle told me the story she mocked the woman, waving her cigarette in the air. Her impression was quite good. It reminded me of Carol Burnett as Miss Hannigan in the movie version of Annie.
Annabelle got swindled into the car
eventually, and off they went to a quote-unquote audition. Only the car didn’t
end up at any hot new studio lit with hot spot lights or spacious artsy flat
with hot models lounging around on hot-pink suede couches. It drove on until it
reached
By the time they’d reached the rent-by-the-hour hot tub/sauna, Annabelle was quite suspicious, to say the least. But the old woman, her name was Edna or Ethel or Emily, seemed friendly enough, and after all, she was just an old woman.
Twenty five dollars got Edna an hour in room 7. She wasted no time: first the shoes go flying, then the panties come off, and then everything else. Ethyl was, in no time at all, bare-assed naked.
She sat on the side of the hot tub as it began to bubble. Anna told me she almost burst out laughing. She was embarrassed for the woman.
“Well,” said Ethel. “Let’s see it.”
“See it?” Annabelle laughed as she took a step to the door.
“The package, let’s see it.” Edna nonchalantly slipped into the tub. “Take your clothes off.”
“………What?”
“Look, if you want to get into modeling, you’ll have to do a time or two in the nude. Don’t be shy. If you want you can get right into the tub after you’re naked.”
“…………….”
Anna said, “ I’ll just take the bus home, thanks.”
The guy at the concessions counter looked at Annabelle like she was a hooker. She bought a coke, ripped the tab off of it and drew Edna a picture of a cow on the hood of her car. Annabelle also stole Edna’s license plates for some strange reason.
So, we’re drinking on the roof of the Deveraugh Lucky Liquor, and who should drive up to the building in his old wood-paneled station wagon, but my good friend Mr. Gibson. His cigarette lit up the tip of his nose in the inside-of-his-car dusk. He mashed it into the dash ashtray.
Annabelle and I crouched down
behind the lip of the one story building and watched Mr. Gibson open his door,
drop something small and white on the pavement, and again close his door. He
reversed and sped away like a parolee in
Annabelle Carr and I jumped from the roof to the garage to the dumpster and down to the street and walked over to the little package. It was bubble wrap and it was bleeding.
I was sitting, taking a piss the other day, plotting up how I could get someone to give me a thousand dollars. Nothing was coming to mind.