I kept following the Exit signs but each Exit sign only lead to another Exit sign. Finally, I found my way out of the hospital and I was standing on the corner of 7th and 12th next to a hot dog stand. It was still morning but it was already hot as hell. I felt queazy. I hadn’t taken my morning shit. I felt around on my left side again. Maybe Sarah was right? Maybe it was just gas? A bead of sweat ran down the middle of my back. Cars were honking. A tall black homeless man was doing some sort of tap dance in the middle of traffic. I always found it amazing that more people didn’t go crazy. He was wearing a full on down jacket with a hood. It had taken me years before I finally realized the homeless had no place to store their winter clothes. He was barefoot and about all I could see inside that hood were his eyes. They looked neon yellow. My phone kept lighting up with phone calls and texts. I called her mother back first. “Phil, what’s happening?”
“She’s in surgery. It’s broken.”
“Oh my God! I knew this was gonna happen. I told her not to skate in that city!”
“I know, I tell her all the time.”
“Okay, I’m looking for flights right now. When are you leaving for Venezuela?”
“Well, I’m supposed to leave the day after tomorrow but...”
“Phil, don’t be silly. You HAVE to do that job! Sarah told me how much it’s for. You need the money. You guys are getting married.”
“I know. I don’t think I could get out of it now anyway.”
“I’ll call you back. If I can’t find a flight then I’ll just drive. She can’t be left alone in that apartment. All those stairs. There’s just no way.”
“I know. Thanks, Kath.”
“I’ll call you back.”
“Okay.”
“Bye.”
“Bye.”
I returned about half the phone calls and texts and then I walked across the street and got a triple latte from Starbucks and took it back with me to the hospital. I found the waiting room and I sat down with the rest of the people and waited. I flipped through a home improvement magazine and found this big ad I had done for these high end European faucets. In the ad I was shaving in front of a bathroom mirror. All I had on was a towel around my waist. Who the hell am I? I thought.
I had grown up in hospital waiting rooms. My mother was mentally ill- Munchausen Syndrome, the type where they do the shit to themselves. It’s amazing what a child can get used to. I always tell people, the worst part of all of that was when things were “better”, when I would come home from school and just like that, there she’d be, sitting on that orange couch by the window. Don’t get me wrong, there was no one on earth I loved more than my mother, but I had grown so accustomed to her sickness and her being in and out of the hospital all the time that it had become a large part of my identity and I was simply lost without it. Many times my father would tell me, “You know, one of these days she’s gonna really do herself in. You know that don’t you?” I took his word as truth and had so thoroughly prepared myself for her inevitable death that I was more than counting on it, I was banking on it. My most cherished asset was the sympathy I gained from her illness and I daydreamed endlessly about the spoils of my new life as a motherless child.
I sat there, drinking my coffee. There was a scrawny little boy sitting across from me with what appeared to be his grandmother. He looked to be around 7 or 8 years of age. I smiled at him and he smiled back. His grandmother just sat there, staring at her feet, clutching her purse in her lap. Everyone else in the waiting room was texting. I mean, every single person. There was no doubt about it, the human race was being corralled.
I remembered once as a boy this nice old man sitting next to me while my mother got her shock treatments. He turned and offered me one of those Werther’s candies. He had a whole bag of them. He had a buzz cut just like my grandfather. He wore black, square rimmed glasses. Long white chest hairs stuck out of the top of his shirt. One of the florescent light bulbs kept flickering in the long panel above us. He rubbed his nose and then he looked up at it, squinting. He asked me a few questions about my family. I told him the answers. Then I began to notice a clicking sound. I asked him if he heard it too and he laughed and then he told me that it was him, that he had an artificial valve in his heart. The sound hadn’t bothered me until then. But after that, it started driving me nuts. It was relentless. The man kept talking but all I could hear was that sound. I imagined it opening then snapping shut over and over again deep inside his chest. I couldn’t escape it. He was such a nice man too. I began to panic. He wouldn’t stop talking. There was nothing but the sound. It made me feel fragile, cold and weak. There was nothing I could do. I just sat there, smiling as best I could.
The coffee worked. I found the bathroom and I went in and took a magnificent shit.
The surgery lasted a couple of hours. When they finally let me see her, she could barely keep her eyes open, but she had this big ass smile on her face. She kept saying the funniest shit. Even the nurses were laughing. “Phil, Phil,... do you really love me?”
“Of course I do.” I said.
“No, no, I mean, do you REALLY love me?”
“I love you!”
She squinted at me. “Really?”
“Yes. Do you love ME?”
She kept squinted at me. “We’re getting married.”
“I know,” I said.
“No, no, Phil, Phil. You don’t understand. We’re getting married. We’re getting MARRIED!”
“I know!” I laughed.
She tried to shake her head but it just sort of wobbled around a bit. “No you don’t. You don’t understand.” Then she looked at the nurse and pointed at me. “Tell him. Tell him. He doesn’t understand.”
The nurse looked at me and smiled.
I stayed with her until visiting hours were over and then I got a six pack at the deli and went back to the apartment and fed Billy and ordered chinese food and then I sat down at my desk with a beer and smoked a hit off my pipe and looked over the short story or what I thought might be a short story that I had been working on the days before I left for Providence but when I tried to pick up where I left off, I found that my energy didn’t line up with the energy I had while I was writing it and most likely never would again and I began to consider the very real possibility that there may never come a time when I would be able to get the words out of me in any meaningful way and then a horrifying vision popped into my mind of an older me shuffling in line through a chain link gate toward the entrance of some evil looking factory somewhere and I winced as a wave of pain fired through my knee up to my back and through my shoulder and into the base of my skull and I looked up at the enormous thick plume of white smoke billowing out of a smokestack up into the cold, grey sky and then I looked around at the other workers and every one of them wore either a ball cap or a jacket with a Yankees or Mets or Giants or Jets logo and just as I was about to enter the building, I was sucked away from it all back into my room where I had this amazing epiphany about how to tell the story in a completely new way, perhaps a way that’s never been done before or even attempted and I highlighted the entire 15 or 20 pages in that glorious blue light and without hesitation, I hit the delete button and I found myself drifting into that wonderful trance where all my fear dissolves and it’s as if I’m merely a spectator watching the magic appear in front of me on the screen as my fingers tap the keys and then, of course, Billy jumped up on my lap and looked up at me and batted his eyes and purred and I began to believe again that perhaps I really had a chance for I had clearly been chosen by the Gods who had gifted everything that had ever happened to me in my stupid life and all I had to do was follow it and honor the calling without guilt or remorse and the only redemption I would ever need would be that some day at least one person in this God forsaken world would read my words and their heart would be crushed and filled at the same time because they would know how deeply I felt the pain of our ridiculous existence... But just then the buzzer buzzed. It was the delivery man with my chinese food. I never went back to my desk. I ate the chinese food on the couch beside Billy and drank beer while I watched some show on the Discovery Channel about cave diving but I kept having to pause it because people kept calling to ask about Sarah. They were genuinely concerned for her but I could tell that mostly they wanted to know if the wedding was still on. I told them, as far as I knew it was. I fell asleep on the couch just as the team of divers stumbled upon a corpse stuck in the rocks deep in a cave in Jamaica. The diver had been there since the 70s, his remains somehow preserved in the water. Poor bastard.
I got a call from the injury lawyer the next morning. “We should really get this ball rolling. One of us will be down there in a little while.” Sarah was still drugged up but she was eager to hear what they had to say. In our minds it was a cut and dry case. There was simply no way we weren’t getting at least some money. My friend, Lon, had recommended the lawyer. Sarah’s sister worked for a big law firm up in Canada and she had given me a list of some ones in New York that her boss recommended we should call. She said it was very important with these types of cases that you get with a great firm, a powerful firm, but for whatever reason I just sort of went along with the one Lon had recommended. I always did that sort of thing. My first modeling agency in New York was the first one I walked into. They offered to sign me on the spot. My agency in Dallas had set up like 5 or 6 appointments for the day and they just happened to be the first. I didn’t even bother going to the others. They were terrible but I stayed with them for nearly a decade. The year I finally switched to a good agency, I made almost three times the amount of money. Come to think of it, until the day at the bar when I left that little poem beneath the beer bottle for Sarah, I don’t think I had ever made a conscious decision in my entire life. My first wife? Well, one day she was just there, sitting on my lap. It was right after my first real bout with depression. I was completely lost. I had been traveling for years. I was exhausted. I just wanted to hunker down somewhere. I moved in like a week later. What can I say? She had her name on the lease of a two bedroom apartment. I only proposed to her because I was drunk and she was crying one night because she felt we were never going to get married. Anyway, I called the number Lon had given me and I spoke with the lawyer. He told me they were a family business. His father had started it but now it was just him and his sister. I thought the man sounded great, very down to earth. At one point in the conversation he had me hold on while he yelled at his dog.
I was telling Sarah about him when the nurse came in to remove her catheter. Like I said, she was still a little drugged up. “I don’t understand. I thought Anne gave you some numbers. Who is he?”
“One of Lon’s friends knows him. He’s supposed to be really good. I don’t know, I was thinking maybe they’ll take better care of us, you know, since they’re small.” I would say the look on her face could be broken down about like this: approximately 1/2, I-CANNOT-believe-you’ve-already-fucked-this-up!, 1/4, Anne’s-going-to-fucking-kill-you!, and 1/4, Oh-my-God,-what-the-hell’s-the-rest-of-my-life-going-to-be-like-married-to-this-stupid-asshole? The nurse began to move in towards her crotch. I had to look away.
I went and got us some bagels and coffee. Sarah said she wasn’t hungry but I got her one just in case. I got her two, actually. I could never get it right whether she liked Sesame or Poppy. I always got the wrong one so I got her both. I got an everything with lox and cream cheese, tomato, capers, and red onion. The damn thing cost almost $10. I could barely get my mouth around it. I was crossing back over the crosswalk when a big ass 1950s something Chevy convertible pulled up. I looked at the man driving. It was Richard Dreyfuss. I smiled at him. He was wearing sunglasses. He looked at me and nodded back. It was definitely him. No matter how many times I saw celebrities, it still threw me a bit. You try to act like it doesn’t but it does. I kept walking. I loved Richard Dreyfuss. Some people just sort of make you feel better about life. You don’t know them but just knowing that they’re out there, living in the same world you were in, somehow helps. I wanted to look back and get a better look but I kept walking. The song Too Much Time On My Hands by Styx was still playing in my head from the bagel place. Just think, a grown man had written those lyrics! What was his name? Tommy Shaw? It was unbelievable how idiotic and unoriginal most lyrics were. That song had been a hit. It was actually on the better end of all the shitty-ness. My favorite television channel was CMT. It drove Sarah nuts. I couldn’t get enough of it. That bald, turtle head looking fucker, Kenny Chesney. That Toby Keith asshole. Oh, who’s that Australian dude that’s married to... oh, what’s her name? Oh, yeah, Nicole Kidman. Anyway, all those pieces of fucking shit motherfuckers. I hated them so much! My favorite game was to watch videos and guess the next lyric. I was rarely stumped. By the time I got back to the hospital I was really high, a little too high. I forgot to mention that I smoked a big bowl around the corner while I waited for the guy to toast the bagels. You gotta toast the bagels.
Sarah wasn’t hungry. I was sitting on the chair, eating my bagel while she flipped through the channels on the t.v.. She looked over at me, annoyed. “Are you humming a song?”
“Try to guess what it is?” I started in on the opening. “Dunt dunt dunt dunt dunt dunt dunna... Dunt dunt dunt dunt dunt dunt dunna.”
She stared at me like I was crazy.
“It’s Styx, Too Much Time On My Hands.”
She shook her head and went back to changing the channels. “God, there’s nothing on,” she said.
“Hey, I saw Richard Dreyfuss!”
“You always think you see someone.”
“No, I’m serious, it was really him. He was driving this big ass convertible.”
She finally found Three’s Company. It was a scene with the Ropers. Mr. Roper was standing with the vacuum cleaner for some reason. Mrs. Roper, of course, says something about them never having sex and, of course, Mr. Roper cuts her down and then hams it up to the camera. It was the first time I had heard Sarah laugh since she got ran over.
“Oh, man, I love when he does that!” I said.
“I know, it’s amazing!” she said.
“It’s like the greatest decision in television history. I wonder how it started? I bet he just did it once and they said, fuck it, let’s just let him do it from time to time. It’s fucking brilliant!”
“I love it! Maybe he was this talented theater actor and no one had the heart to tell him to stop. I used to hate it when I was a kid. We all did. We couldn’t understand why he would do that. We all had a big problem with it. It made no sense why he did it. We were supposed to believe he was in this Three’s Company world and then he would do that. It really pissed us off. Why would they let him do that? Like, hey, hello, we see you doing that.”
It was really nice to see her laugh.
Then I had a thought. “Hey, you know," I said, "that’s sort of like what I’m trying to do with my writing, you know, like have these little like Mr. Furley moments or something. You know what I mean?”
“You mean, Mr. Roper.”
“What’d I say?”
“You said, Mr. Furley.”
“I DID?” I really started laughing. I couldn’t stop. I almost chocked on my bagel. I coughed and then I laughed some more.
She looked over at me. Her eyebrow went up. “Did you smoke pot?”
Just then, a tall beast of a woman shuffled in. She was the strangest women I had ever seen in my life, straight out of a Dr. Seuss book. I put my bagel down and stood up. She informed me that she was the sister of the lawyer I had spoken with. Her body just didn’t make any sense. She was fat and skinny at the same time. Her feet pointed out while her knees pointed in. She had a great big ass but it was completely flat. It looked like a pizza pan had been shoved down the back of her pants, an extra large one. She was ugly but then she wore a ton of makeup which only accentuated her ugliness. Her ears stuck out. They were more than twice the size of normal ears with a large percentage being lobe. She had short, frizzy permed hair. Her hair was black but then the more you looked at it, the more it began to look red, or reddish orange. She had a bit of a mustache and there was a little booger flake clinging to the hairs inside one of her nostrils. She grabbed the back of a chair and drug it across the room. The noise was awful but she didn’t seem to notice. Then she sat in it beside Sarah and smiled. Even her smile was strange. It was like someone had once explained to her how to smile but she had never tried it until then. Sarah looked over at me for help. I shrugged. She asked Sarah a few basic questions and the she asked her to tell the story from the moment she left the house the morning of the accident.
“You mean when that women intentionally ran me over with her car?” Sarah said.
“Look,” the woman said, “you’ve gotta get that out of your head. First of all, she wasn’t cited by the police. And let’s say you’re right...”
“I AM!”
“Okay, well, let’s say you are and she DID do it maliciously. Even if you could somehow prove it, that would make this a criminal case which means her insurance company would no longer be liable for her actions.”
“What? Why? What do you mean?”
“We could only go after her at that point, and, well, who knows if she even has any money.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. They insure her driving.”
“Okay, well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. Why don’t you just start from the beginning, the moment you left the house on your skates.”
Sarah started in on the story but the woman kept cutting her off. She kept asking Sarah to repeat everything. Sarah was getting annoyed. The woman didn’t make us feel very positive about Sarah’s case. She said juries usually aren’t very sympathetic to people who rollerblade in the city. It’s hard for them to identify with what most people would consider to be reckless behavior. She actually shrugged her shoulders and laughed and said, “I know I wouldn’t be.” She looked at me and then back at Sarah, saw that we weren’t laughing, but then she still kept laughing. Sarah was getting pissed.
“It’s the way I get around. It’s called transportation. And I’m really safe. I’m always looking over my shoulder.”
“Okay, okay, so you said you were on the left side of the street, correct?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure. I always skate on the left side of the street.”
“Well, see, now that right there’s a major problem. You’re supposed to skate on the right side of the street.”
“No, that’s not true,” Sarah told her.
“Um, yes it is.”
Sarah raised an eyebrow. She winced in pain as she sat up on her elbows. The woman had no idea who she was dealing with.
“No. You’re wrong. I’ve been skating in this city for ten years. Look at the bike lines on 6th Avenue. They’re all on the left side of the street.”
“They ARE?”
“Yes, they are!”
“Hmmm,” is all she said.
Sarah looked over at me is disgust. “Sorry,” I mouthed. The woman only stayed about another 5 minutes. The tension was incredible but the woman either didn’t notice or she didn’t care. Sarah stared straight ahead, answering the rest of her questions with only yes or nos. She never once looked at her again. Then the woman stood up and said, “Okay, thank you. I know you’re in a lot of pain today, Sarah. I hope you feel better fast. I’ll be in touch.” Sarah kept staring straight ahead and just gave her a half-assed little smile. Then the woman looked at me. “You DO have the rollerblade, right?” she asked.
“It’s at the apartment.” I told her.
We shook hands and then she left.
I could hear her shuffling down the hall for some time. “Maybe she’s like some badass Erin Brockovich or something?” I said to Sarah, “You know, just weirder and uglier, taller...”
She wouldn’t even look at me.
Some person came in and had Sarah sign some papers. Then the nurse came in and told us Sarah would be released anytime. The doctor just had to sign off. “When would that be?” I asked.
“Very soon,” said the nurse.
We kept waiting. They said a half hour but then the half hour passed. They said no more than a half hour again but then that half hour passed. Finally, the doctor came in and signed off on her chart. We got up to leave but then they said we had to wait for a wheelchair. It was policy. We waited. Another half hour passed. The wheelchair never came. I went and asked a nurse. “What are you guys still doing here?” she asked. “Hold on, this is crazy, let me call someone.” She called someone. “Sorry about this,” she said. “They should be right up.” I went back into the room and we waited. The wheelchair never came.
“Fuck this! We’re leaving!” Sarah said. I helped her up on her crutches. I grabbed her bag and followed her out. We went down the hall to the elevator, pushed the button and got in. “Hey, you can’t leave without...” we heard as the door closed.
The cab driver tried to take it easy but the pain with every stop and turn took her breath away. The hardest part was getting her up the 5 flights of stairs into the apartment. She had never used crutches before. I swear, it took us over half an hour. And, of course, Billy was right there at the door, waiting to greet us. “OH MY GOD!” Sarah screamed. Billy had just taken a big shit. The smell was incredible. Insult to injury. I laughed but then I saw a tear roll down her cheek.
I got her situated in bed with 2 or 3 pillows under her leg. I got her some water, cleaned up Billy’s shit, and then I raced down to the pharmacy to get her prescriptions filled. There was an old man standing next to me with what looked like another person stuffed into one of his pant legs. What the hell could that be? I thought. These bodies we’ve been put into. What a horrible fix. Then I saw that the agency had called. I listened to my voicemail. “Bram, how are you? How’s Sarah? Are you done with your fitting?”
HOLY FUCK! How could I have forgotten? I called the agency and told them I was running late. I got the prescriptions and I grabbed a couple bags of chips and a few Bridal magazines and also the latest Star, In Style, People, and Us Weekly. I ran home with it all and put it on the bed beside Sarah. “I gotta go to a fitting!” I said.
“What?”
“I forgot all about it! I’m late! I gotta go!”
I kissed her.
“When are you coming back?”
“I’ll be right back!” I was about to leave when I saw her crutches by the door. What if there’s a fire? An image flashed through my mind of Sarah screaming amidst the flames as she crawled her way slowly across the floor, dragging her leg behind her. She wasn’t even halfway to the door when the entire ceiling collapsed upon her. I saw the headline: Injured Woman Dies In Fire. Fiance Leaves Her Alone In 5th Floor Walkup. I imagined having to face her family at the funeral, especially her father. I grabbed the crutches and brought them over to her, propping them up against the wall by the bed. I checked to make sure she had her phone and then I left.
I took the A down to Canal and got to the fitting about 45 minutes late. I ran up the stairs for effect, to make myself even more out of breath. I busted in through the door and told the receptionist or whoever she was that I was sorry and then I went right into the whole story about Sarah getting run over and how she had to have surgery and that it was only three weeks until our wedding and how we had to wait for the doctor to sign her out and then how we had to keep waiting for the wheelchair but it never came and how we just left and how hard it was to get her up the stairs and then I had to get her prescriptions filled and that with the stress of it all, I guess I had just completely lost track of time. Telling her made me even more out of breath. She gave me a little smile. “Yeah, no, it’s fine,” she said. “The stylist isn’t even here yet. I called your agency and told them you could come a little later.” I looked at my phone. I must’ve been in the subway when they emailed me. “Bram, take your time. They’re not even ready for you yet.” She had me wait on the couch. All the magazines were high end fashion industry magazines, mostly european. I was pretty sure I had worked with one of the girls on one of covers. I picked it up and looked at her. Yeah, it was definitely her. It was years ago on one of my first jobs in Milan. She was from Sweden or Finland, or maybe it was Denmark? I remember everyone was making a big deal about her because she was dating some big movie star. I had forgotten who it was but it had been a big scandal and everyone thought he was a pig not only because she was so young but because he had left his pregnant wife for her. We had to change together in a little corner of the studio. She was so skinny, even her little thong would barely stay on her. (Hey, maybe this is why I hate thongs so much? I never thought about it until now) She had a cold and she kept coughing and you couldn’t help noticing that her lymph nodes were all swollen around the inside of her upper thighs and crotch. It looked like a long string of pearls had been inserted beneath her skin. Her tits were nearly nonexistent, a waste of nipples. Her face was beautiful, of course, but it was devoid of expression, of life. She looked the same in every shot we took- absolutely miserable. The photographer loved her, of course. I was having a hard time with my changes. The shoes they had given me were 2-3 sizes too small. It happens all the time. There are many things people don’t realize about modeling. I mean, you try posing and smiling naturally for 8 to 10 hours a day while your toes are going numb and now they’ve got you in a suit that’s all pinned in the back and you’re dick is hanging the wrong way and you’ve got a tight wool sweater on under the jacket that’s itching the shit out of you and the photographer is getting more and more frustrated because he keeps having to stop everything and he says shit to the girl like, “No, darling, it’s not you. You just keep doing what you’re doing, you’re doing great” and then he calls the makeup lady over because you’re still sweating profusely and every time she comes over, she keeps asking, “Are you sure you’re okay, honey? Can I get you some water?” and you say, “No, thanks, I’m good, I’m good” but, of course, you’re not, you’re far from it, because once again you’ve been holding back a belly full of shit because they flew you in in the middle of the fucking night and then you had to get up at 5 in the morning and there was no coffee in the room and by the time you finally got some, that same makeup lady was already calling you over and you said, “hold on, just a minute” but then you saw that the bathroom was right beside the kitchen where everyone was hanging out and laughing and eating fruit and muffins and sipping coffee and worse than that, it had one of those smoked glass doors where you could see the silhouette of whoever was in there, but still, you said, fuck it, no way. I’m a grown man, goddamn it! I am NOT suffering through another day like this! and you went right in there anyway but then the lock was questionable and there was no fan or any air freshener and then someone knocked on the door and so you just pretended to pee and you flushed and washed your hands and opened the door and smiled at the person and you walked over and just as you sat down in the chair you heard that loud grumble as the first big wave from your bowels rolled like an earthquake through your body and you had to focus so hard on keeping your sphincter muscle flexed that you didn’t realize the makeup lady had already asked you for your name twice as she stood there, waiting for you to shake her hand... So anyway, that gives you a little bit of an idea of the untold horror of it all. Now where was I again? Oh yeah, the girl. So I was trying to cram my foot into a shoe when I turned my head in pain and found myself face to face with her pussy. She had unwittingly pulled her thong down with her pants. It was one of the most revolting things I had ever seen in my life. It was bright red and bald with dozens of ingrown hairs all over it, little white pustules. And then to have it surrounded by all those swollen lymph nodes. I was already having a rough morning with my stomach. I mean, pussy’s strange anyway when you’re not ready for it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m one spelunkin’ motherfucker, but sometimes even a nice one’ll make you take a step back. Like I always say, it’s more in the way that it’s housed than the thing itself. I tossed the magazine back on the pile and looked over at the window. A pigeon was sitting on the sill. I wasn’t sure but it seemed like it was looking at me.
The fitting only took about 10 minutes. They pinned the pants at the break and made sure a couple of jackets fit. The job was scheduled to shoot the day after I got back from Caracas. It would be my first campaign since I’d gotten back into the business. Some menswear line I’d never heard of. I would be on billboards and magazines all over the world. It didn’t pay as much as you’d think but the agency was all excited about me doing it.
I turned the corner and saw our mailman’s little blue pushcart out in front of our building. The door opened and out he came, strolling down the steps, jingling his keys and whistling with his big brimmed hat and his blue shorts and tube socks. He tossed a bundle of letters into the cart and started pushing it towards me down the sidewalk. Alright, goddamn it, I thought, I’m gonna try this one last time. Maybe he’s just really awkward, you know? But this is it, this is the last time. Just as we were about to pass, I went: “Hey, how you doin’?” He looked up. Our eyes met. I smiled and nodded. But once again, he didn’t even respond. He simply looked right through me without the slightest bit of expression or recognition. It was as if I hadn’t said a word. Jesus, man! What the fuck? I stopped at the bottom of the steps and turned around. I seriously thought about running after him and saying something. I was more curious than anything really. I watched him park his cart in front of the next building and take out an armful of mail. An old woman came out, carrying her white toy poodle. The two of them stood there, talking and laughing. I watched him reach a hand out and pet the poodle. I shook my head and went up the stairs into the building. I opened our mailbox. I had received one of those faded yellow cards, the ones that read, Sorry We Missed You! He had tried to deliver 5 certified letters from the IRS. Death and Taxes. I felt around on my side again. A sharp pain fired through my left nut down to my knee and back up to my nut again and then over to my asshole where it whirled around and around until it shot up my spine and into my brain. My new theory about cancer was that it was the body’s way of sacrificing itself for the genetic stabilization of the species. I would tell this to people often but no one was ever as impressed with the theory as me. One of Sarah’s friends actually got angry about it. We were having drinks at that Spuyten Duyvil place in Brooklyn. I had forgotten that her mother had recently died of pancreatic cancer. “That makes no sense,” she said. “If the intent of the cancer is to kill the person then how would that work?” I mean, come on, how insulting, as if I hadn’t thought of that. You just can’t have rational, open-minded discussions with emotional people. Also, I found most people are simply unwilling to listen to your point of view just because you have no credibility. It’s like I always say, just because I made it up doesn’t mean it isn’t true. But you should’ve seen her face. I may as well have been mocking her mother’s death. I suppose I WAS being a little flippant about the whole thing. She had been really close with her mother. An only child. She never knew her father. She had been with her till the end, holding her hand while she took her very last breath. Sarah shot me a look and I decided to change the subject. I went into one of my other theories, the one about mankind being in the early stages of a long process where we will eventually lose our ability to speak.
Anyway, I suppose my problems with the IRS stemmed from my ongoing disbelief that I truly existed. One of my first memories was of a conversations I had had with my mother. I had just gotten out of the tub and I was standing on the bathmat, playing around with my balls. “Mommy, Mommy, what are these little bally things?”
“All boys have those, honey.”
“But what are they?”
“Well, they’re called testicles.”
“But what are they for?”
“You’ll find out when you get a little older.”
A little while later she was leaning over me, smiling while tucking me in bed. “Mommy,” I said.
“What is it, Philby?”
“I wish I was dead.”
“Don’t you EVER say that! You hear me? Why would you ever say such a thing?”
Her eyes welled up. I couldn’t understand why she was so upset. It wasn’t like I wanted anyone else to be dead, just me. It’s hard to explain. I just never felt like I was supposed to have been born. It may sound corny but there’s really no other way to say it- I felt like I belonged more with the trees and the birds, more with the clouds, the sun and the wind. God, that felt even worse saying than I thought. The more I was around people, the more my own existence felt like a mistake. The sound of my own name didn’t seem right. Why wasn’t it some other name? Why wasn’t I someone else? I couldn’t understand any of it. Why anything I did or didn’t do mattered to anyone just astounded me. Other people, well, I just felt bad for them. A person just seemed like such an awful thing to be. These feelings only increased with age. I would be in school and all I could think was, why does anyone care that I’m here? I remember getting chosen for bell choir. It was like the 4th or 5th grade. We did it during Christmas time. We wore white gloves and we each had two bells in front of us on a table. The bells went from big to small. I was in the middle. We travelled around, mostly playing at hospitals and nursing homes. Everyone seemed to know what to do but me. We had sheets of music with our parts of the songs highlighted. We practiced for an hour each day but I never had a clue as to when I was supposed ring my bells. At a performance, the room would get all quiet as the teacher walked over in front of the table. She would say something to the people and then she would turn and face us. She would give us a few nods and a little smile and then she would lift her arms. She would hold her arms there for a moment and then she would close her eyes and she would begin swaying and her arms would start moving around and then the bells would start ringing and it would sound like the song it was supposed to sound like and then every so often, a wave of bells would come rolling down the line towards me and my heart would race and then the boy next to me would ring his and then I would frantically ring mine. The teacher was always pleased with our performance. “You boys did so good. I’m so proud of you.” She even singled me out a few times and put her arm around me.
I also started wrestling at a young age. I always liked to win my own matches but I could never understand as a team why it was important that our team won. I couldn’t see the difference between our team and the others. When I got to high school, the whole thing just became ridiculous. Pep rallies, school plays, dances, the marching band, a home coming queen. What the hell did any of it mean? I remember the football team losing and all the cheerleaders and even some of the players would cry. It made me happy to see this. I wanted them to lose. We were called the Bulldogs, the mighty, mighty Bulldogs.
Nothing’s ever worked for me the way it was supposed to, the way things seemed to work for other people. As a matter of fact, more often than not, the very thing that I was told would never work was the only thing that actually would. For instance, in Algebra class, the only time I ever got the right answer was when I guessed. I’m serious, I would take a test and I would get over half of them right. I would look at all the numbers and letters and then over at the blank line to the right and I would just write in what I thought should be there. Then I would make up a bunch of equations and shit underneath because we were always supposed to show our work. Of course, the teacher was always suspicious, but I still passed the class with a D. Also, whenever I played basketball with the kids in the neighborhood, I would make all sorts of crazy ass hook shots or two handed granny shots from as far away as I could throw But when it came to making a simple layup or a free throw, I was shit out of luck. Many of the kids hated playing with me. It pissed them off for some reason.
Yep, nothing made sense and never has. This feeling has dominated my life. I have never voted. I have never shown up for jury duty. I would see my name on piece of mail and most of the time, I would just throw it out. So for years, when March and April would come around and I would hear all the commercials and everyone would be talking about getting their taxes done, I just sort of talked myself into believing that it didn’t really include me, that it was just a myth that there was some government agency out there that cared what I did or didn’t do with what little money I made. Every now and then someone else, a girlfriend or a friend, would step in and set up an appointment with an accountant for me and I would get my taxes down and it would be fine and I would feel so alive and free like I had been acquitted of a crime, but there were many years when April 15th would come and go and I would think, what’s a date mean? what’s a year even? Who the hell makes this shit up anyway? I would just forget about it and hope that somehow I would just slip through the cracks. But, of course, there are no cracks. Death and taxes. I was over in Germany when my jig was finally up. I went to use my debut card one day and discovered that I was completely wiped out! The IRS had lifted over $10,000 from my checking account. I had to take an advance from my New York agency just to get back home. It will never go away. At best, for the rest of my life I will be paying monthly installments that barely cover the compounded interest and penalties I incur. At worst, I will wind up in prison or hanging from that magnificent old tree just off the main trail towards the top of Mt. Beacon. You can’t miss it, it’s just a bit north from where the trail curves back around along that long slab of rock that gets all icy in the winter. It’s got this one big, fat, long branch that shoots out horizontally about 10 or 12 feet off the ground. I’m just saying, you know, in case I ever go missing and someone were to read this, then you will know where I am.
I folded the card and stuck it in my back pocket. No sense worrying about it now. I took out the rest of the mail and shuffled through it. There was a check from my Miami agency. Finally! We had already blown through twice as much money on the wedding as we had planned. And Sarah certainly wasn’t going to be making any for a while. I opened the letter, excitedly. But the check was only for $400. Fuckin’ cocksuckin’ motherfuckers! It was bullshit the way the money came in. That agency owed me thousands. $7,200 to be exact. There were all sorts of reimbursements between the clients and the agencies and money was always being taken out for expenses or put into some sort of escrow account to cover future expenditures and so by the time I got a check I never had any idea how much it would be for.
As I made my way up the stairs, I began to hear a man’s voice, an angry voice. I came to the door where it was coming from. I stopped and listened in shame. “WHAT DO YOU WANT ME TO DO?” he yelled. “YOU WANT ME TO STOP PLAYING?”
“I’m not saying that,” said a woman, painfully.
“THEN WHAT THE HELL ARE SAYING?”
“I don’t know. Stop yelling at me.”
“I’M NOT YELLING!”
There was a pause. The woman sobbed. Then a baby began to cry. Now I realized who they were. It was the couple I would often see, him more than her. He was a guitar player, jazz guitar I assumed. I would see him coming and going from time to time, usually late at night with his guitar in its case. He was older, tall and thin, rather weakly looking with round shoulders and a slight pot belly. He had a long pony tail and a receding hair line. His attire was always out of date- high waisted, stone washed jeans, shirt tucked in with one of those skinny, western style belts with a silver engraved tip. Straight out of the early 90s, late 80s even. The woman got pregnant and I would see her less and less. She seemed Russian but I wasn’t sure. I was shocked the last time I had seen her. I had never seen a woman get so big pregnant. Maybe I just never payed attention to things like that before? She must’ve gained a hundred pounds. Her belly was the size of a dishwasher. They seemed happy walking down the sidewalk together. He was so gentle with her, holding her hand, the other hand upon her back. She leaned her head against his shoulder and he kissed the top of her head. They were bringing a baby into the world. Life forges on.
The crying stopped. “Look,” he said. “I’m sorry. I love you. I just don’t know what you want me to do. What do you want me to do?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “You’re gone every night. It’s not fair. I can’t do this by myself.”
“Jesus Christ! I’m fucking WORKING! I’m making us money!
The baby started crying again.
“Stop yelling!” said the woman.
I got up to the apartment and opened the door. I got my key stuck in the lock again. I shook it around in the slot but it wouldn’t come out. “Goddamn it,” I said.
“Just turn it to the left a bit and it’ll come out,” Sarah yelled from the bedroom.
“I DID,” I said, turning it to left like she said. It came right out.
I stepped into the bedroom. Billy ran up and rubbed his nose against my leg, purring.
“How are you feeling?” I asked her.
“I’m still in a lot of pain,” she said, looking at Billy in disgust.
“Sorry.”
“I don’t want to keep taking those pills though, I don’t like the way they make me feel.”
“Just take a half or something,” I told her.
“Okay, yeah, that’s a good idea. Will you bring me some more water?”
“Sure,” I said. I grabbed the empty glass from the nightstand and went up the stairs to the kitchen.
“Someone buzzed while you were gone,” she said.
“Oh yeah?”
“I thought it was a wedding gift. I tried to answer it. I almost fell onto the floor. This fucking sucks. It’s awful. I can’t do anything... There wasn’t a note?”
“No,” I said, opening the fridge. I winced again at the thought of those IRS letters. I will never get out of this, I thought as I filled the glass from the Brita.
“Are you sure? Did you check the mail?”
“Yeah, there wasn’t anything. Just a check from the Miami agency.”
“Really? How much?”
“Four hundred bucks.”
“What the fuck? I thought they owed you a lot of money?”
“I know,” I said, coming back down with her water. “They do.”
“What the fuck!”
“I know.”
I handed her her water. “Hey,” I said. “That couple had their baby.”
“Really?!”
“Yeah. I heard it crying.”
“Awe. That’s amazing. They’re so sweet.”
“Yeah, I heard them fighting though.”
“Really?”
She broke a pill in half and swallowed it with a big sip of water.
“Well, it’s gotta be hard. God, I would never want to have a kid in this city. When we get pregnant, we’re gettin’ out of here.”
I nodded as I thought, WHEN we get pregnant! I swear she could read my mind.
“Um, what did you think was gonna happen? What do you see happening here? What do you wanna do, keep going out every night? Get drunk? Have dinner? Live in the city? What are we doing? I’m ready for the next step. I want to settle down and raise a family. You can’t wait forever. What’s the point of it all? How long do you wanna wait before we try to have kids? What if we have a hard time? We’re not getting any younger. You’re fucking old, Phil. What did you think we were gonna do, get old together and raise Billy?”
I looked down at Billy and he looked up at me and blinked.
