GROVEL
By Adam Emerson Pachter
 

When I was sitting on a bus in Crete, way back in 1995, I met this guy who had an enormous spider-web tattooed on his right elbow. Man, that thing was massive, nearly spilling up to his shoulder, and really detailed too -- you could see all these subsidiary little webs spinning off of the main one. I was really in awe of that tattoo, and I started to get all kinds of flashback feelings about how my life would have been different if I had just been blessed with enough courage to mark up my own little spindly frame. Probably wouldn't have lost my lunch on the swing set out in front of that grade school in Charlotte, downing grain alcohol like it really was Kool-Aid. Stuff can make you go kinda blind, after all. Who knew?

Anyway, this is not a story about grain alcohol. It's a tale of Spidey, and how I was so in love with the tattoo that I never even got his name. Probably had a really cool one, too, to match his shaved white head.  I bet he was called Beaker, or Wolfgang, or even Betty Sue. He could be named whatever he wanted -- nobody'd mess with him once they saw that tattoo. And he was wearin' the sort of muscle shirt that only farmhands or Skynyrd fans can really pull off, all white and pulled back and diverting nothing from that great tattoo.

When I'd stopped staring at the damn spider web, I got around to hearing Spidey's story. Everybody traveling in Europe has one, and as you move east they just get stranger. Crete was pretty odd, by that scale, although he'd actually taken the ferry from Santorini. In fact, Spidey started out in London, as I now recall, which isn't that bizarre, but it was only a start.

He met her at the half-price booth in Leicester Square, the place where everyone who doesn't already own a vacation home goes to score cheap same-day theater tickets. Spidey was wearing his only sleeved shirt for the occasion, and she was just recovering from a difficult breakup with a French archeologist. He left her to begin a search for the resting place of Nephrotitti, and as she explained, the only thing worse than being dumped for live shit was having your boyfriend leave you for some shit that died ten thousand years before you were born.

Spidey liked her, or at least the fact that she offered to treat him for the tickets, just so long as he'd see some Andrew Lloyd Webber show. 

"Anything's fine, as long as it's not Cats," he said, which made him all right with me.

"I'd see it again and again," she said, which proved that she was all right too.

They hooked up somewhere in the second act, and pretty soon she suggested that they take a plane to Santorini. Spidey didn't have the money for this maneuver -- he'd been earning keep by emptying ashtrays down at some soulless pub in Notting Hill, and that was just enough to get some filthy mattress for his head. Spidey was American -- originally from Eau Claire, Wisconsin, aas he later would admit, but it's tough to get a good job emptying ashtrays there. People just don't smoke enough, I guess.

Spidey owned up to not having enough greenbacks for the trip, but that didn't faze his new girlfriend. "I've got some funds that Jacques left me in our separation agreement," she said, although they had only been dating.

"Separation agreement? What is this guy, a Rockefeller?"

"No, the Rockefellers aren’t French. Jacques won some genius grant, from the McDonald's people or something, and he had to give me some for tax purposes. Said it'd be better if I kept it."

So Spidey and his sudden girlfriend went to Santorini, and for a while they had a grand old time. She'd buy him ice cream on the Caldera, and he'd listen to stories about Jacques and his lame Nephro-freakin'-titti. But then Spidey and his dame hit a rough spot. She started talking about how he didn't give her enough attention, like listening to the stories on the Caldera wasn't enough. All Spidey really wanted to do was walk around the red beach at Akotiri, where the sand sparkled off the sides of his tattoo. That was cool enough for Spidey, if not for her.

"So then one day she left me, and I rolled on down to Crete."

"Why'd she leave you, man? You two had a future together." I almost laughed, but Spidey wasn't even looking at me.

"She met some chiropractor from New Jersey, said he'd give her all the things that I could not."

"But you hadn't given her anything, except some inexpensive lovin'."

If Spidey knew I was goading him, he didn't show it.

"He said he'd teach her how to windsurf on Mykonos. After that, I knew I was toast."

  * * * * *

 "So what's the moral?" my best friend Grovel said to me. He’s the one I told the story first, right after I’d gotten back to North Carolina.

"What's the what?"

"The moral, dude. Every story's got to have one. It's like an ancient code, goin' back to the Hare an' Turtle and shit."

"I dunno -- never get a Spider-Man tattoo? Beware of chicks you meet in the half-price Leicester Square ticket line?"

"No way, man," and he shook his head like I was just the dumbest mental midget. "It's far easier than that. Watch your back, dude. You may think you're in love, but you never know when she's gonna fall for some chiropractin' shit from Jersey." 

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Adam Pachter is a writer whose prior work has appeared in the Boston Metro; Word Riot, Anotherealm.com; and the Improper Bostonian. In 2001 he won the Improper Bostonian’s fiction contest. Adam's short story collection "Ash" is forthcoming from the Dan River Press.