They say the first rule of poker is to know your opponents. I’m more inclined to side with less conventional but more time-honored advice: know yourself.
I find myself hosting the first major poker showdown since my college days, and I’m already down. We aren’t out for blood exactly; it’s a friendly game…twenty bucks on the line with which at least one of us shouldn’t be playing.
“Pair of deuces, queen high,” smiles Everitt from behind a pair of gray shades.
“I can’t believe you kept me going that long,” laughs Ron, sipping a glass of marginally too hoppy IPA I’d secured from a local microbrewery. “Full house,” he scoffs, casting his cards on the table. A quick glance at his watch sneaks across his face as he scoops up a modest pile of chips with gold and silver encrusted fingers.
“Whose deal?”
“Mine,” Trace speaks up, claiming a pre-shuffled deck from Everitt across the table. “Ante up.”
I cut the deck and Trace deals. A three of clubs and the jack of hearts makes its way into my fist. I seem to have lost track of the exact value of my dwindling pile of chips, and frankly don’t much care anymore. I simply match bets and relight my cigar.
Ron taps his nose and throws in, and so it goes around the table for the better part of the evening.
I worked with Ron in the deli department of the local organic market before he quit to grow pot full time in his attic. Ironically, that’s when he quit smoking it, or so he claimed. He had no problem getting the rest of us stoned before the game, though. When he took out the giant spliff and lit it, we all laughed and passed it for a few minutes.
Everitt was the first to call him out, an ironic side affect, I’m sure of his recent employment at the sheriff’s office as a deputy. He held his hand on his hip, proudly exposing the shining silver buckle in the shape of a star with the state insignia imprinted on it. His sagging gut shook with ire, and he lifted his glasses to his forehead and stared at Ron with a face expressing somewhat less than the intended intimidation.
“He’s fucking right, Ron. It ain’t fair getting us high before the game. There’s some serious cash involved here,” said Trace while inhaling, his southern accent shining. It did so every time he smoked. I’ve known Trace since our junior year in college, fellow podunks at a Podunk University . Just two years ago he’d begun wearing western attire and had taken to smoking copiously and claiming he was from “North Texas.” He’s become somewhat more of an inside joke than a friend, but he never said no to a bet and lost nearly as often.
He leaned against the wall, one leg propped up exposing the recently waxed steel-toed boots he wore constantly, and tilted his brimmed hat down slightly. It was his feeble defense mechanism, as his eyes became bloodshot with the marijuana in his system before he even took a drag.
“Listen, this isn’t the way to start a friendly poker game,” I said, attempting to diffuse the situation.
Ron simply smiled. “C’mon guys, you all know I gave that shit up.” He accepted the joint without further remonstration, however, and killed it after a large hit. “Let’s start this thing,” he gasped between coughing out billows of greenish smoke.
It becomes clear enough once the game is under way, however, that Ron is so blown from drugs in his childhood (he’d smoked his first grass at the tender age of eight and moved on quickly from there) that he isn’t trying to sabotage anyone, or even if he is, he isn’t capable of pulling it off.
Everitt took control of the table nearly from the beginning, though Ron and Trace and I each made valiant efforts, mostly due to a number of lucky draws and a transparent attempt to emulate Everitt’s superior game play. Someone once told me that the cards don’t really matter, so long as you knew how to work the table, and I try to keep this in mind as I watch my pile of chips gradually (but steadily) deteriorate over the course of the evening.
Now, it’s close to two in the morning, we’ve finally tired of the game, and we jump at the suggestion of dividing the cash and taking a collective nightcap.
“You boys are fine driving, right?” I ask, with a glance in Everitt’s direction. He pats his jacket pocket where his flask rests as he leads the way down the stairs and in the process shaking the foundation of the small apartment building.
I walk them to the lobby, exchange plans for the next game, and begin to walk back up the stairs when I realize I haven’t heard the latch click. The fools are still standing in the lobby, frozen to the floor.
“Something wrong?”
“Take a look at that car,” says Trace. “Stupid bastard parked on the sidewalk.”
Upon returning to the lobby I can see that indeed, a small white American model rests at an angle, it’s front half straddling the curb and the trunk sticking haphazardly into the street. There aren’t any visible indications of a wreck, and the bumper rests adjunct, but not actually in contact with the fire hydrant.
“You think someone abandoned it?” asks Ron.
“Probably just got tired of driving. ‘Guess I’ll just leave it here; looks like as good a place as any,’” imitates Trace, tipping his hat, to which a few of us respond with a nervous sniff.
“Probably ought to have a look,” Everitt says, ambling towards the street.
No one argues, and we follow him to the edge of the street. It’s the middle of January, and though the rest have their coats and hats, I’m in stocking feet and a sweater. It’s close to zero, including the wind-chill, and I shudder but am too curious to let the prospect of frostbite dissuade me from a glance at the car.
“Who does this?” I ask, trying to keep my mind off of the weather.
“Drunks, probably,” belches Everitt.
“Maybe it was abandoned on purpose,” offers Trace. “Like they wanted it to be found or something.”
“I doubt that,” scoffs Everitt, approaching the vehicle. He leans over the car, and indicates for us to come and take a look. The interior is pristine, as if it had just been driven off the dealership lot. There are no license plates, however. We circle the car briefly, looking for signs of life but finding little in the way of anything interesting.
Everitt slams his fist down on the hood, presumably in frustration, or perhaps in attempt to pop it. Regardless of the intent, the trunk of the car cracks ajar slightly at the impact. We step back and squint to see what’s inside. Everitt, more surprised than any of us at his incidental discovery appears genuinely startled as he quickly jostles around the car to the back. He puts his hand on the lid, doubles over and vomits into the street. We stand back, waiting for an indication of what has occurred.
“Ugh,” he eventually gasps, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. “Don’t come over here unless you want to try your dinner a second time.” He leans on his knee, crouching at the curb.
“What is it?” asks Ron.
Everitt coughs twice before he responds with a feeble, “Let’s take it back inside for a minute, guys. It’s colder than Satan’s ass out here.”
I, for one, am happy to oblige and we shuffle back up the stairs to my warm apartment. Everitt borrows the washroom and emerges after a few minutes of running water. He helps himself to giant swig from his flask before I can ask him if I should brew coffee.
“Anyone else?” he laughs and takes a seat, passing the bottle to the left.
“There’s a body in there, right?” asked Trace, while I accept the flask.
“Christ,” Ron mutters under his breath. He pulls his cell phone from his pocket and began to mash some buttons silently.
“Now hold it right there, gentlemen,” Everitt exclaims, reaching out to put a hand on Ron’s shoulder. “Before you go calling your ladies or responding to customers,” he winks at Ron, “I think this should stay between us, at least until we decide what to do.”
Ron looks up, still punching numbers, and continues to do so silently until the expression on Everitt’s face shifts from annoyance to amusement.
“I don’t know what’s in there,” Everitt continues, ignoring Ron. “It certainly smelled like something rotting, but I can’t really say.”
“What do you mean, you can’t say? Haven’t you ever smelled a corpse before?” demands Ron, returning his phone to his pocket. When no response is attempted, he adds, “Have you even seen a dead body? What the hell kind of an excuse for a sheriff are you?”
“Deputy,” mumbles Everitt, but makes no further self-defense.
“I’ve seen a body,” Trace quickly chimes in. “On the beach when I was nine. I’ll never forget that shit. He was all covered in seaweed and smelled like fucking sewage. His eyes were wide open, except that one of them got plucked out by a seagull or a crab or something and was lying all deflated next to him.”
“Well, you wanna go smell that trunk down there and tell me if it’s the same thing?” Everitt asks, folding his arms sullenly.
Trace tips his hat a bit. “I mean, the guy really smelled more like the ocean than anything. I probably wouldn’t remember well enough to be able to say.”
“You know, smell is the sense most closely linked with memory,” Ron adds sardonically. “I bet you’d remember it if you went back down there and stuck your nose in it.”
“This isn’t helpful,” I protest, passing the flask. “Any constructive ideas?”
“Mind our own goddamn business,” Ron says flatly. “Pretend it never happened.”
“But someone’s dead in there,” says Trace.
“Why don’t you call the office, Everitt?”
“The sheriff ain’t there at this hour.”
“Well call 911, then, or take care of it yourself. You’ve got your badge.”
“I’m too fucking drunk to take care of it,” he says with a head tilt and another hit of the sauce.
“Why don’t we call a tow truck?” asks Trace. “Get a neutral party involved to take it off our hands.”
“What if the driver catches the scent?”
“So what if he does? It’s not like it’s our car. Give them a fake name, pay in cash, and get the hell out before he knows what he’s got on his hands. Then it’s his problem.”
“You guys are talking about this like we’ve got some sort of responsibility in this shit. Ain’t my car. Do what you want, I swear to god I won’t say a word to anyone, but I’m leaving. I’ve got bigger fish to fry,” Ron finally says, retrieving his phone and standing up to go.
“Shake my hand before you leave, Ronny. I want you to say that again and look me in the eyes while you do it,” Everitt stands up and holds out his palm. It quivers almost imperceptibly.
“Jesus,” laughs Ron. “Alright. I promise. Not a word to anyone,” he swears, one hand on his heart and his eyes rolling.
“Be safe getting home,” I say as he leaves. “I’m just going to go ahead and call the cops anonymously.”
I stand up, but Everitt catches my wrist when I brush past him.
“Don’t do that,” he looks up at me. “That happens, and I get a buzz from the sheriff and have to come down here. But of course, I’m already here, and drunk. How the hell does that look?”
“You aren’t involved in this, are you?” Trace asks.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Everitt snaps. “If I had a hand in this debacle, I’d be asking you to take the body and store it in your goddamn fish freezer.”
We all sit silently for a moment, pondering what to do. I had begun to pace, and as I meander past the window, I look down on the street silently hoping the car has disappeared. Snow is beginning to fall, just now visible under the streetlights. By morning there would be at least three or four inches, though there is no accumulation yet.
Trace and Everitt approach the window cautiously; curious of what has caught my eye.
“It’s snowing,” observes Trace.
“Goddamn!” Everitt shouts, smacking his knee. “Let’s push it into a space and let the snow cover it. The body will be frozen in the morning, the smell will be gone, and it will be out of our hands.”
“Outside of my apartment? Are you serious?”
“It’s the best I got. How about you?”
I shake my head and began to tie my boots.
The car is heavier than we had anticipated, but the parking brake hasn’t been applied and we eventually edge the colossal hunk of freezing metal off of the sidewalk and behind the row of other vehicles on the street. Still in front of the hydrant it will certainly be towed after the streets are cleared.
We shake hands in the snow without exchanging another word and go our separate ways.
I raise myself groggily the next morning, and as soon as I remember that the previous evening was not a twisted dream of my own creation, I peer out the window. The ground is covered in snow, the streets have been plowed, and the car is conspicuously absent.
My phone rings after I emerge from the shower, and I answer, still nursing a slight headache.
“Hello?”
“Jack, this is Everitt. We’ve got a problem.”
“Shit,” I breathe. “What is it?”
“They got my prints off the car, I’m using my phone call on you. Can you find me a lawyer?”
“Are you an idiot? Do I look like your go-to guy? You’re the cop, figure it out.”
I hang up the receiver coolly and regret it. Not because of conscience: Everitt’s just a guy I played poker with, I tell myself. But I should have asked what was in the fucking trunk.
This piece was originally published in peacejournalism.com, until the site was gobbled up by AHN.
The important thing is that you still hold your convictions when it’s over. The estimates and politics, the drugs and paranoia, even the solidarity don’t mean a thing, really, unless you can discover the relevance of your actions in the multiplicity of phenomena.
Take my friend Miles, an old college roommate of mine, political advocate and occasional journalist. When I heard about the march on Washington, before I even decided to go myself, I asked him to come with me. We’d taken road trips before, including an ill-fated midnight drive from our college town in Tennessee to Pensacola where I played the role of a third wheel while Miles and his girlfriend decided they were no longer on the fast track to married bliss and abruptly switched sexual teams. But that’s another story.
When he set foot in the car with his ex-boyfriend of three months, Jacob, I had a feeling it was the beginning of the end.
“I’ve never been on a road trip before,” says Jake, all boyish grins and excitement. “Except to Six Flags.”
“What’s that, like three hours?” Miles turns to ask him in the back.
Before he can answer, I turn the key and hit the gas.
Dean meets us downtown, closing up the café. He strolls out, pants tight as a wet suit around his hips and flaring in faded greens and browns around his ankles. He throws his shit in the trunk of the Chevy and hops in the back.
“Hey, babies, let’s go get drugs.”
Miles and Jacob convince Dean to pick up an eight ball of coke in addition to the two bags of weed. Fifteen minutes into the trip and we’ve collectively blown over two hundred dollars, not counting gas and the sacs of oranges, bananas, and apples from the market I picked up before leaving home.
We drive back downtown to caravan with a Pontiac full of hippies, who take a cool twenty minutes to pull out of the parallel street parking. They’re good people, really. Just smelly and slow.
“You know where you’re going, right?” says Aimee, the driver. We were hitting the can and finishing vegan burritos before leaving.
“Vaguely,” I say between mouthfuls. “I printed out a map from the internet.”
“Oh, I never trust those things. Follow us, we’ve got a whole binder full of maps.”
I don’t start laughing to myself until we cross the state line and pull over for a rest stop/smoke break a mere hour and a half after leaving the city.
“We got hungry,” says Kris, all bloodshot eyes, strolling into the McDonald’s in bare feet. I had no idea hippies ate cow.
As soon we first met Kris, Dean took us all aside for a smoke and laid claim to him.
“We’re kind of a thing,” he giggled.
It was going to be a fantastic weekend with a truck full of fruits and drugs, and an army of cops and protesters waiting for us 600 miles away.
We pull away from the rest stop, and the boys break into the candy while I drive the eleven hours to the nation’s capital, playing a rousing game of cat and mouse with the other car through the night to keep me awake. No drugs for the driver. That’s my only rule.
The sun rises over the Mason-Dixon line, but apparently Aimee and I are the only ones who see it. Fiona had asked me at the last pit stop if I had picked out what cd to listen to when dawn broke, but I couldn’t come up with the answer. I realized once we were back on the road that it wasn’t my selection of music she was interested in. Abbey Road, of course, would have been the logical choice, preferably with “Here Comes the Sun” cued precisely to meet the ascending globe over the Eastern horizon.
Instead, New Order is spinning for the third consecutive time, as I have no access to alternatives and the boys are asleep. I secretly wonder what Fiona is listening to. She is possibly the only other person on the trip in whose sanity I had confidence.
As it is, however, I’m caffeinated out of my mind and still barely conscious, watching the sunrise. The sight is rather spectacular, with cigar-smoke mist huddling around the waistline of the hills while the sky splits in two with color. My bloodshot eyes wince at the brightness as we hit the beltway.
“Can we eat? I’m fucking starving and have to piss,” Miles groans from the back. We’re thirty minutes from our destination.
“Can it wait?”
But of course, it can’t. Miles eats McDonald’s for the third time while the rest of us stay by the cars. I peel an orange on the bed of the truck, watching my breath frost. It’s close to an hour before we make it out of the parking lot. No one says a word when we pull into the garage of a Whole Foods supermarket downtown where the rest of us eat breakfast.
Somehow my parents find out I’m back in town and I reluctantly agree to meet with them before we rally on the mall near the Capitol Steps. My mother has baked scones with raisins and we chat while my father throws my old Schwinn in the back, on top of the backpacks. I suppose he was more concerned with preventing a love-in than a break-in. At least they are kind enough to ignore my choice of attire, my aroma, and my cause. They’ve always been religious and right wing. We talk about my wife and job for a few minutes before we awkwardly hug and they leave.
Later, we convene on the mall, about halfway between the Capitol Dome and the Washington monument. Dean is quick to point out its phallic significance loudly as children in strollers with gaping eyes and mouths look on.
Jessie Jackson and Jane Fonda spit in our ears over loudspeakers while we hastily make colorful signs with clever slogans like “Bombing for Peace is like Fucking for Virginity”, and “Wage Peace.” I keep wishing I had dropped acid to make sense of it all. Meanwhile, Miles and Jacob stand over us and shake their heads while we get our knees dirty.
“You should wear one of these,” Fiona says, handing me a pink bandana.
“It’s not really my color.”
“We’re all wearing one, so they can’t identify us.”
Who exactly “they” are, Fiona never mentions, but apparently they warrant her attire: a Blues Brothers mask. It makes me a little nervous the extent some have gone to disguise their appearance. One of our troupe wears roller skates and a Mardi Gras mask made of red feathers. I’m already wearing a hat, and resolve to hold my sign in front of my face until Miles takes it from me and tapes it onto the back of one he picked up off the ground.
As the march winds its way around the Capitol Steps, I follow my sign until it is lost in the distance and I make my way back to the rest of the group who are chanting and marching alongside a small collection of protesters in orange prison garb—grotesque images of the incarcerated in Guantanamo Bay.
“You don’t seem that into this whole thing,” says Dean, laying a hand on my shoulder while the crowd shouts, “We want peace, not an increase.”
“I am,” I reassure him while snapping a picture of the helicopter that was circling above us. “I just don’t believe in mantras.”
“I thought this was a no-fly zone,” says Aimee.
We look back over our shoulders as we ascend Capitol Hill. I thought we were near the back of the crowd, but the line of people snakes out of sight behind us and we can see the throng streaming down the other side heading towards the finish. We are a force to be reckoned with. The papers that chose to cover the event said tens of thousands. The organizers said half a million.
When we come down on the other side of the hill, a few fellow peaceniks had begun to stage a sit-in. A few drummers roll out a beat with their hands on synthetic hides while the small gathering calls for the passers-by to sit down and surround the Capitol Building. As solidarity reaches its breaking point, the weariness of 36 sleepless hours begins to catch up with me and I gladly take a knee next to my brothers and sisters.
All told we number less than a hundred sitting on the street, but it is enough to block the path from sidewalk to sidewalk and attract at least a dozen photographers and as many more shooting video. My film has run out, and no longer encumbered by the camera straps I feel like making a statement, when my phone rings.
“Where are you?” asks Miles on the other end.
“At the bottom of the hill. We’re squatting.”
“Jacob and I are back on the mall, come meet us when you get here.”
“I gotta go,” I say as the chant rises to a fever pitch.
He calls three more times, and I finally stop answering when the police ride up in a row of motorcycles and horses and begin to edge forward. For a while their sirens are overpowered by our cries of protest and outrage. As the emotions intensify and the officers grow in numbers we begin to disperse. Our point has been made both peacefully and without arrest.
Dragging signs in our weary arms, we meet the two on the edge of the mall.
“Where were you assholes?” Miles demands.
“We were squatting. I told you.”
“No you didn’t. Did he tell us that?”
“I can’t believe how little trash there is,” says Fiona as we pass a trashcan filled to the brim with broken signposts and a pile of printed signs. The mall, however, is green as far as the eye can see. Not even a biodegradable water bottle mars the relative cleanliness.
We reach the car. Miles takes shotgun while Jacob slinks into the back. The rest climb into the Pontiac.
“How did you feel about the solidarity?” I throw the words into the air as a distraction as I half-drunkenly slalom down 11th street towards the beltway.
“Good,” is the best response Jacob can muster.
“Didn’t you see some of the signs? The slogans, they made no sense. ‘Enough is enough.’ What does that even mean? I felt so diversified. I wish there was a greater sense of a singular cause.”
“That’s the point, though,” says Miles. “We were thousands strong, gathering with different voices to express our outrage. E pluribus unim.”
“I guess,” I say, screeching to a halt at a red light. “I’m just afraid that that’s all the critics are going to see, you know? The ten percent of the marchers who have nothing thoughtful to say are going to represent the whole thing to the opponents. They’ll just think we were a bunch of brainless, smelly hippies and disregard the whole thing. Not that what we did was going to make a difference anyway, but I felt like we had an intelligent, important point to make and that it may have been undermined by the mindlessness of a small minority.”
“The point was made by the numbers. We were there in force. It doesn’t matter what was said or how we said it. Quantity, in this case, speaks a lot more than quality.”
“Hell, no. That’s what we were trying to do when we sat down in the street. Make a point we couldn’t with numbers.”
“That makes no sense. No sense at all,” Miles begins to shake his finger at me. “What the hell was that anyway? It’s totally against everything the rally was about.”
“We were peaceful, we dispersed without arrest. What ever happened to freedom of expression? We’ve got a right to speak out. They’re our fucking streets. Who the hell do you think paid for them.”
“What exactly did you prove, aside from the fact that a bunch of lazy pot-smoking tree-huggers can’t make it a mile without taking a break?”
“I don’t think you understand. I had an obligation to sit down, to let the impact of my actions speak louder than my voice could, and I’m fucking proud that I did it. You know that as soon as the last marcher passed us the cops were on top of us with their fucking motorcycles and sirens like a pack of roaring lions.”
“Lionesses,” Jacob chirps.
“Whatever. The point is we were serious. It wasn’t just about being a member of a march, it was about proving that we were pissed off and not settling for a fucking walk in the park.”
“The point was the march. We made our point by marching, not by taking a seat.”
“Maybe you did. But you can’t talk me out of thinking that what we did was important. I don’t know, what do you think about all of this, Jake?”
“I thought the girl with the roller-skates was more concerned with the attention that she was getting than with the protest.”
“Yeah, probably,” we all agree, and drive in silence to a bar for dinner and drinks.
Six hours of sleep and a massive hangover later, I awake in the apartment of an old friend who was kind enough to lend me a corner of her carpet and a pillow. A copy of the Post lays on the coffee table, a picture of the masses on the mall slapped on the front page under the headline “Thousands March.” Miles snakes it before we leave, proof that he was there on the 27th of January, 2007.
A bitter taste creeps down my throat. It makes me sick to my stomach when I read the coverage, or lack thereof. I had hoped we could raise awareness, change the heart of a senator, end the war. But all of this seems so dim in the glare of the daily news.
Why were we here? The war in Iraq started more than four years ago. Soldiers with automatic weapons and hand-shaking, cheek-kissing diplomats had failed to end the violence. What made us think we could?
And then it hits me, a moment of clarity as I fade in and out of consciousness in the passenger seat on the way back to Chicago. Despite our bullheaded disagreements, maybe Miles and I weren’t so different. Whether or not I concurred with his opinions and methodology, for a few hours on the steps of the Capitol, we were Democracy.
Filed under: Fiction
Sartre once noted that the universe is devoid of signposts. The unsettling comfort of an existence completely lacking anything resembling guidance or direction was appealing to me until I discovered life outside of dormitories and regulations enforced by totalitarian regimes.
Sophie, a barista at the local café, mentioned to me over a cigarette that life without signposts is mostly absurd. And I guess I believed that for a while too.
Ade’ met me for coffee the other day. I had recently lent him my copy of Dr. Thompson’s experimental analysis of the American dream, and in light of my friend’s unique position as a journalism student, I was curious as to his opinion of Gonzo’s school of thought.
“Maybe a little overrated,” he said, sipping a slightly bland cup of El Salvador. I don’t remember the region. “That being said, Hunter S. Thompson was revolutionary, no doubt. I mostly agree with his tactics, and I fucking loved the piece on the Kentucky Derby.”
“You would,” I remarked. “Don’t take that the wrong way. It was my favorite bit, as well.”
Ade’s glasses slipped a bit down his nose, and he pushed up the brim and gave his nose a quick tap. I think this coffee must be laced. I don’t tell anyone about my rampant paranoia, at least not anymore.
Elle tells me it’s irrational. “That’s silly,” she’d say, striking a match to light her impeccably rolled spliff. No one follows you. That’s the point of living in a big city. You blend in with the crowd and get lost.”
And I know that this is true. Just last night on the way to a card game with some of her ex-coworkers a city cop shone his headlights directly into a car making an illegal u-turn. A little red pinto or something, driven by a woman with unusually distinct hair, even visible at night inside her car as it spiraled out in clumps from her head. She pulled behind us after the law enforcement passed, driving erratically, and passed us, pulling into an alleyway. Maybe paranoia is in the air in this town, or maybe she was really guilty. The glimpse of her eyes I managed to catch revealed the crazed look of a felon on the run, but I could be wrong. The point is, she got away, for whatever that was worth. Rack up another victory for disorganized crime. Or socio-political disestablishmentarianism, depending on your point of view.
But I can’t shake the feeling that someone or something is attempting some sort of voyeuristic, non-verbal communication with me. Maybe it’s just that the subtleties of spoken language seem less subtle to me, somehow. Maybe it’s just a warped psychological second-guessing I apply to myself and the way I read the signs, or lack thereof, constantly bombarding me like gamma radiation.
All that to say, I didn’t tell Ade about my suspicions that there might be illegal narcotics in our ceramic mugs. Never mind the fact that employees of the city’s water company were recently exposed for being in on an international cocaine ring. And never mind the glassy distance in the marketing executives’ eyes as they dart from shimmering coffee urns to glinting reflections on silvery patio furniture. And never mind the distinctly bitter post-nasal drip creeping up the back of my throat. And never mind the way my hands erupted sporadically into Parkinsonian tremors. Or the speed at which my mind processes millions of firing synapses as I involved myself in conversation and introspection simultaneously. Or the intense desire to chain smoke Pall Malls.
I wiped my finger under my nose and said, “Do you think Thompson was usually on as many drugs as he claimed to be in Vegas? I mean, aside from the ether.”
“Oh, I doubt it. I mean, despite the drug culture he was immersed in, there was no way he could possibly have compiled coherent notes, much less—“
“But that’s the point, he didn’t have coherent notes.”
“Well, no, not for Fear and Loathing, but for the greater body of his work, he probably just, well, you know, smoked a little grass and drank a lot.”
I sipped at my cooling coffee, frustrated at its lack of intensity. I should have gotten espresso. But I don’t trust espresso, or the baristas who prepare it, or the machines they use to make the stuff.
We caught the train heading north from downtown after a bit. The concentration of non-verbal communication on board the generally silent Metra is overwhelming sometimes. The book readers are always fascinating, prominently attempting to display the knowledge they are ingesting, which usually takes the form of mass-marketed spy novels and the like. But there’s definitely a message being sent by the literature chosen for train rides.
The car was packed, and an obese man sat across from us, wearing pants easily two sizes too small for his bulging waistline. The zipper sagged down to the middle of his fly, and instead of exposing embarrassingly colored underwear (which I came quickly to wish was the case), his pimpled and hairy upper crotch gaped open at us. I nudged Ade.
“You think he feels a draft?”
Three businessmen in suits and ties laughed loudly on the opposite side of the train. They couldn’t possibly have heard me.
Laughter in public makes me nervous, especially when it is clearly derisive and mocking. Most laughter sounds this way to me from a distance, and my immediate inclination is to check my stride and lower my eyes. It seems logical that it is directed at me.
The self-importance of the men laughing gave me a measure of security, however. They continued talking loudly, and I ignored their financio-babble.
A girl with dark hair and glasses dressed like a college bookseller in a navy jumper and black stockings kept bumping into me as we were standing on the packed rush hour express. I figured at first it was just the swaying of the train racing down its tracks. But with each run-in she inched closer to me and lingered longer at the point of contact, her unremarkable ass edging up slowly but surely to my hip. I caught her glancing at me, not directly, but through the dirty reflection of the windows. She turned her eyes away quickly, an obvious admission of guilt. I should have done something, but I endured the uncomfortable closeness for another twenty minutes until she disembarked to transfer.
I suppose that it’s because I wasn’t raised in a large city that I have a larger sense of personal space than most people tend to allow me. A coworker (for two unceremonious weeks until she quit) named Karen used to practically rub noses with me every time she spoke. She was also close to twice my mass, and I could always smell the distinct aroma of over-boiled asparagus on her breath. I mentioned this to Elle, and she reminded me of the episode of Seinfeld where Elaine dates a man Jerry dubs as a close-talker. After that it was all I could do to keep myself from calling her that to her face. Further support for my paranoid theories transmitted itself to me via the Fox network, when the very episode made a rerun appearance the next night. I neglected to mention my feelings on this supposed coincidence to Elle.
Disembodied evidence like this frustrates me because I can’t respond any coherent way. I much prefer the kind of subtleties that come from actual people, because I am afforded the opportunity to add subtleties of my own to the conversation (or lack thereof, as the case may be).
Elle was waiting for us on the couch at our apartment, smiling sweetly as Marty wagged his stump of a tail.
“Some chick named Erica called for you. Does she work with you?”
“Yeah, she’s the boss’s new secretary.” I laid my coat on the orange step ladder in the middle of the living room. It had been there for probably two months now, used last to take down Christmas decorations in mid-February. “Did you take a message?”
“She said you left something.”
I stepped into the other room to make a call while Ade joined Elle on the couch to watch Simpsons reruns and fill the air with as many types of smoke as possible.
“Erica, it’s Chris.”
“Yeah, hi. You left your briefcase in the hallway. I thought you’d want to know.”
“Alright, thanks,” I said, strolling back into the living room. “I gotta go downtown again, left my journal at work.”
“Can’t it wait til tomorrow?” asked Elle. Marty looked up inquisitively from her lap.
“I wish it could. I’ve got to type a few things up to turn in in the morning, though,” I said, throwing on my jacket. “Keep the couch warm for me.”
“Love you, babe,” she said mid-inhalation, smoke rolling out of her nostrils.
“Love you, too.”
I headed back to the train station, my feet weary and my head spinning with a contact high. I lit a cigarette on the platform in front of the no-smoking sign.
When the train finally came, I found a seat across from a scraggly teen who hadn’t showered in weeks. His face was sunken and aged, and he blinked and squinted constantly. When he lifted a black sleeve to scratch his arm, at least a dozen infected needle-holes were visible.
I closed my eyes, pretended to ignore the stagnant presence of society’s underbelly. I hoped it wasn’t a prediction of my own demise. I was reminded of high school health class where they teach you about cannabis, and how it’s a gateway drug. It looked like this kid had found the gateway to hell, complete with Dante’s warning across the top.
I dozed off with the rhythmic clatter of the train’s wheels against the tracks, and woke up, staring strait ahead into blue eyes. Sitting across from me, clad in beatific sheets of pure white was a girl with a book in her hand. I didn’t even bother to glance at the gold-lettered title. Instead, I looked out the window and smiled as I played my favorite game: piecing words together on billboards until they spelled a message. It’s the best way I know to read the signs.
Filed under: Fiction
I’m in the half-dream state that is mid-morning. The winter sun burrows through the shades and romances its way onto the covers but she’s full of shit; it’s cold as the ninth level and has been for weeks.
Janet sleeps next to me, facing the wall. There’s a two-inch gap between her hips and mine, and each time I place my hand on her side it seems to rivet her like a needle. Maybe my hands are cold. Maybe she can remember in her sleep the agony I inflict daily.
I don’t envy her. Each time I withdraw into my own little world, she bears the brunt of my insulting behavior. I’m unequivocally a monster after my fourth bourbon, especially after a twelve hour shift at the coat hanger factory.
There is no pride in the employ of the largest coat hanger conglomerate in the United States. (It doesn’t help that the primary source for coat hangers is actually the Philippines.) So I, in turn, take little pride in my own life, deriving pleasure out of the most perilous and positively dysfunctional ways. My days off are spent drinking heavily, when I am at my least self-distructive.
This morning I groggily wander about the house, embroiled by my pounding headache and dry mouth. Janet still sleeps. Peaches, her rat of a canine, has made his way onto the receding warm spot I left moments ago, and looks up at me without any recognition of my superiority as a species or as an authority figure.
I brew coffee from a tin, cut it with what’s left of last night’s alcohol, and slurp it down while watching footage of the Korean War on PBS. I am confident I am the only guy at the factory who even knows what PBS stands for. I know Janet doesn’t.
The first glance in the mirror is usually one of disgust and the urge to break the glass, or the face behind it, is generally overwhelming. This morning, however, it appears someone has beaten me to it. The panes that once swung open to reveal a medicine cabinet lay in pieces on the sink and across the bathroom floor, intermingled with the occasional drop of dried blood.
The blood spots are so perfect, the splatter patterns untouched. I stare for a long time at the different spots, each with its own unique shape perfectly preserved on the bathroom tile. It is only after a few moments of this that I notice the difference between one of the spots and another: a new one has appeared, bright, vibrant and with the slightest sheen visible from the reflection of the light bulbs, in contrast to the dried brownish color of the rest.
I lift my right hand to examine it, and it appears that I am indeed the culprit. Perfectly strait gashes are scattered across what used to be my knuckles, and the cut on my ring finger has reopened and is glistening. This, too, proves fascinating to me, and I am enraptured in the slowly flowing shade of crimson over the crevasses of the back of my hand.
I stumble out of the bathroom, narrowly avoiding shards of glass with my bare feet, and return to the bedroom.
“Sorry about the mirror last night, babe. I don’t even remember it happening,” I say, lifting the dog from my place on the bed.
He whimpers slightly, and I wipe the hair from her ears. Then I notice the blood. It is no longer fascinating, and I lift her eyelids, revealing pupils dilated beyond recognition and rolling sloppily from side to side. On her nightstand, the pills are mixed and scattered.
“Oh shit, oh shit. Hang on baby.”
I race to the phone, my fingers are stained and they in turn stain the nine and one on the dial.
“Please state the nature of the emergency,” a cold and distant voice requests.
“She’s O.D.’d and bleeding to death. Send an ambulance,” I scream and hang up.
I return to the bedroom, and lift her head. A razor-like sliver of mirror falls from her neck, and an ocean of crimson gushes onto the sheets. I lift the shard into the light, glinting not unlike Excalibur must have the first time it was hoisted from the anvil.
I plunge it deep, deep into skin until I reach bone, and then repeat until the sirens take us both away.
Filed under: Fiction
He spat; his mouth was dry, and so what had started with the intention of being a phlegm-soaked splatter ended as a frothy dollop. It broke the plane of his lips, parched with fatigue and bitterness, and flew a cresting arc through the air, while his fists stretched the lining of his beige coat pockets to the point of breaking.
The name on the grave was J. Palmer Epperson, Jr., and the ball of spit landed exactly three feet south of the period at the end of ‘junior,’ directly above the left elbow of the man buried six feet underneath the soil. The rest of the rough stone read “1945-2003. Loving Husband and Father.”
The inscription on the beige jacket above the left breast pocket read, “James P. Epperson III.” He wore a matching set of beige pants, and a standard issue Navy hat.
He stood for a while above the final resting place of his father, his body shaking with rage and regret, alone under a cloud-streaked sky. It was mid-winter, and though no snow had fallen yet that year, the breeze carried with it the scent of wood burning stoves and a coming frost.
James shivered when the wind picked up, and pulled his coat tight around his neck and shoulders. He looked up at the threatening heavens as a hawk flew overhead, low enough to make out the rusty coloration on its tail feathers. The vaguest hint of a smile crossed his lips as he followed the hawk with his eyes until it dove behind a cluster of trees in the distance. James folded his legs underneath him and sat, propping his back against the side of his father’s headstone, and pulled a knife from his utility belt and began to whittle away at twigs he found on the ground around him. The grounds of the cemetery were well kept, and he quickly ran out of fodder for his blade, and returned it to his pocket and closed his eyes.
When he reopened them his field of vision was blocked by the scrawny legs of a young woman. The black stockings cascading down her calves were torn in numerous places, even down to her feet where toes stuck out haphazardly where shoes should have been. She wore a gray skirt and a navy blue hoodie draped over her shoulders; her fingers played with the zipper.
“How long have you been watching me?” James demanded, blinking his eyes and checking himself over.
“Long enough to know this is your daddy’s grave. Were you close?” Her leg shifted, pivoting on the ball of her foot, school-girl like.
“No,” James said, standing up and brushing himself off. “Who are you?”
“Name’s Raven. I live up yonder,” she nodded her head in the direction of the hill behind the cemetery. No dwelling was visible, just a patch of trees and tall grass like a mohawk on the crest of the ridge.
“I was just leaving,” James grunted, brushing past her.
“You didn’t leave no flowers or a note or nothing,” she called after him as he walked away.
“I didn’t intend to,” he spat over his shoulder.
“It ain’t right to disrespect the dead like that. You got to pay your respects, or it’ll haunt you.”
James stopped, spinning on his heals and pointing to his name tag, “He already does. I’m wearing his fucking name on my chest.”
“That ain’t all though, is it? He’s got inside you, ain’t he? And you can’t escape it, can you? I’ve seen your type.” She held her hands on her indistinguishable hips.
James stared her down for a minute, taken aback at her piercing appraisal. A hawk’s cry was audible, and the skies deepened and sleet began to pelt down like bullets.
“I went to war for him,” James called out above the din of the water and ice striking dead leaves and headstones.
“He died when you were away?” came her answer. She stood less than ten yards from him, but was barely visible with the haze interloping between them.
“Took his own life the day I shipped out,” he said, and turned away, covering his head with his jacket as he dashed for the edge of the cemetery. A hawk cried out in the downpour as it flew overhead, dodging marble-sized chunks of freezing rain as it soared upward and into the storm.
