Kimmy poked her head over the futon and smiled her big, dumb, early morning smile. “Good morning, sleepyhead. Your place is disgusting.” She looked really well rested, so she must not know that a futon is just as terrible at being a bed as it is at being a couch.
Jake put his hand over his eyes, worried about the if and what. He knew Kimmy was still smiling down on him. Did she smile down on him like that last night?
“What happened?”
“I think you’re an alcoholic. Coffee?” He could hear Kimmy bounce off the futon and into the kitchen. She was bubbly at goddamned eight in the morning.
Jake sat up again and the room spun its normal amount. “It’s easier than killing yourself, and yes.” He stumbled over to the bathroom to shit, but then remembered there was no door, so he just leaned his head against the door frame and felt the cool paint. He closed his eyes tight.
Kimmy walked over and put a coffee cup in his hand. “I didn’t find any in your cabinets, so I walked up the block and bought some. Did you spill syrup in there?”
Jake took a sip of coffee and shook his head groggily. His eyes kept closing whenever he tried to open them, so he let them stay shut. “It was like that when I moved in.”
I think maybe I lived there last because my cabinets used to smell sickly sweet like that too. I didn’t spill anything in there. I also named the mouse Fernando, but nobody knows that. He learned how to get on the kitchen counter by climbing up the back of the refrigerator. Once I accidentally cornered him and he just stood there on his hind legs not knowing what to do, terrified like Jake was right now. He never did that for Jake.
When I moved out I learned that there were probably four or five Fernandos running around. So that’s one illusion destroyed.
She was making him nervous. This was not where she belonged. She wasn’t Alex, she didn’t belong. He could see the ceiling fan blades spinning and he was in high school all over again, holding his breath and holding back the tears. Suddenly the blades all flung loose, driving themselves into his walls and out his bedroom window. He opened his eyes and realized he had sunk to the floor. Somehow, it was her fault.
She crouched down next to him, alarmed. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah…,” he said, looking at the undershirt. He had added coffee stains to the blood. “I’m fine. It’s just—”
It’s just he didn’t know what was going on and he couldn’t remember anything and he felt like everything was crumbling around him and he had to take a shit and he was wishing for a way out of this situation. Kimmy smiled down at him sympathetically and said, “Don’t worry—you didn’t break any rules of management.”
He looked over at her and returned her smile with a weak one of his own. She wasn’t as dumb as she looked, but that wasn’t what he was thinking. “Good, I wouldn’t want to have to give you a raise.”
Kimmy looked around his apartment, at all the empty cans and empty cases sitting on the card table and the floor and stacked up by the garbage can. “Why do you do this to yourself?”
Jake looked down at the ratty-ass carpet and saw one of Fernando’s little turds. As I’ve said once, when he didn’t know what to say, he drew from his encyclopedic knowledge of the metaconsciousness of the scene. A place like Chicago or Boston had a lot more soul and a lot more to say about the pain of growing up alone without really growing up at all. “The sun was up for far too long today,” he said.
“What?” Kimmy looked at him but he wouldn’t look her in the eyes to see the honest-to-God concern. She didn’t catch the meaning and this is why Jake sees her as dumb—she can’t read a closed mind.
“nothing.” And he sipped his coffee slowly.
“I’m really worried about you, you know.”
“You shouldn’t be. I’m not your responsibility.” He said it with a certain bite, and he knew he would hurt her if she didn’t back off. He changed the subject. “What happened last night?”
Kimmy shrugged a little and said, “I really don’t know. You went over and talked to the singer, and he seemed to get pissed and threw his shirt at you. Then you tried to apologize and gave him your shirt. It was really weird.”
Jake sat there and drank his coffee, trying to remember something, anything, after that. It was the kind of drunken logic that made perfect sense at the time—dude, give him your shirt, it will make up for everything.
She continued, “Then we got a cab back here and we talked for awhile and then you fell asleep on the floor. You were really sweet about it.”
She would have got them a cab. Jake would have just driven home and hoped to get lucky. Get impaled on a steering wheel.
“Hey, listen,” Kimmy said, touching his shoulder. He wanted to shrink away from it, but he was against the wall already and didn’t want to slide down it sideways to sprawl out limp on the floor. That would just attract attention. “I had a lot of fun last night, but I think maybe you shouldn’t drink like you do.”
Jake looked over at the bucket he had slept next to, scrambling for the exit as the flames licked their way up the walls. “Did I throw up on you?”
“No, you didn’t throw up at all. I was pretty surprised—you’re one of the easiest drunks I’ve ever taken care of.”
She would be the one to sit by the toilet and roll them over on their side and keep them from running off to the spare bedroom with some guy.
“I guess I’m a pro. I haven’t thrown up in five years.”
“Really?” Kimmy said, and why didn’t she ever stop smiling? “That’s impressive.”
Jake looked up at her and smiled back a little bit. “Before that it was second grade.”
Kimmy’s laugh was really warm and Jake didn’t want to like it. “I can’t imagine you as a second grader.”
“Why not?”
“Little kids can’t really pull off brooding alcoholism.”
Jake drank his coffee like he didn’t want to think about it.
Kimmy squeezed his knee and got up. She started looking around his apartment. Jake ignored her as she faded to the edges like everything else.
“Hey,” Kimmy called. He didn’t answer. She called again and he grunted in recognition.
“What’s with this box of tapes?”
“Nothing,” Jake replied. He got up as quickly as he could and went over to her, but he was wobbly. “They’re mix tapes.”
“Oh,” she said. She looked up at him with her wombat eyes. “Can you make me one?”
“No.” Jake said it flatly and coldly and what he really said was get out. She was pushing him too hard and he forgot to be nervous. He wanted her out of here now. They weren’t for her.
He resented and hated her now—her perfect life and her perfect friends and her prying eyes. Go back to your in crowd, get away from me, you don’t understand and you won’t.
Kimmy got the point. “Oh. Okay. Well, I have to go catch a bus and pick up my car and then get ready for work. I’ll see you there.” Her voice was quavering, and she looked down at Jake’s clenched hands. She wasn’t afraid of him, but she knew she had to leave.
She gathered her things and left. Jake stared at the door as she closed it behind her. “You’re better off without him,” he said to nobody, even though he hated that band now since they jumped to a major. Such a petty reason to feel betrayed, but then that seemed appropriate.
Jake went to take a shit and shut everything out. No Kimmy, no apartment, no Barker, Texas, no Fargo’s, no knives in the kitchen, no shit in the bowl, no toilet paper, all of it gone and him torn free from his desiccated reality.
Jake stared at his clipboard without talking to anybody. He was leaning against the wall, covering the sign that said If you’ve got time to lean, you’ve got time to clean. Kimmy wasn’t smiling, and everyone asked her what was wrong. Nobody asked Jake what was wrong. She told everyone nothing was wrong, and he told everyone nothing, but they all knew it was something. Jake was very comfortable in his pitiful existence that he eked out one day of not killing himself at a time. He wanted to be closed off. He wanted to be a stone. He wanted to be invisible. I’m not going to let him.
It was at this very moment, as Jake was working at being a stone, that the scrawny kid with the red hair walked by outside and stopped to read the Help Wanted sign. Jake happened to look up from his clipboard and was dumbstruck. The kid chose to walk in and headed straight for Jake. He was chewing gum loudly. Jake was still wearing the white t-shirt with the marker and blood and now coffee—an apron covered all three.
The kid walked behind the food line and leaned on the wall next to Jake. “I’ll take it,” he said in between smacks of his gum, and it was said as a favor.
“Take what?” Jake asked, trying to decide if he was just hallucinating. Some of the crew had stopped to stare at them, and Jake thought maybe it was just because he had actually said something.
“The job. Tell me I’m hired.” He walked off and started looking under the hot stations, poking his head between the employees as they assembled their crappy sandwiches. “Where are the aprons?”
Jake looked at him with a certain degree of awe and stupidity. “What?”
The kid sat down on the rubber mat and started digging around behind the towels as he spoke. The guy with the uneven sideburns whose name I can’t remember stepped over him. “Last night you told me not to quit my day job. So I figured I need one if I’m going to not quit it. So hire me already. You owe me that much.” He was at ease and casual and knew he was going to get it. He also had just found the aprons, so Jake felt like he couldn’t stop it.
The words came out of Jake’s mouth automatically. “Okay, you’re hired. Let me get you a name tag. What do you want on it? Most people put some stupid nickname.”
“Nathan.”
Jake put his clipboard down and went into the office. When he got inside he stopped himself. What just happened? He wasn’t sure if this was the smartest move, and hiring someone without the GM’s approval could land him in deep shit. But in all reality he just wanted to be in the proximity of this kid. Maybe it was fear of conflict, maybe it was that this kid could do things that were oddly beautiful to a broken little man like Jake. Maybe it’s just because I made him do all this. He came back out with a label maker and a button and Nathan was standing next to the door. “Have you ever worked a griddle, Nathan?”
“Scooter, and I’ll figure it out. I always do.” He looked around. “So what’s the deal here?”
Jake handed him his name tag and said, “You cook the meat and try not to get fired. It’s pretty much the same as anywhere, but it smells like salami.”
Scooter put his nametag on and swallowed his gum. “Sounds pretty shitty.”
“It’s not so bad.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
In three years, no one had ever noticed that Jake hated every single second of his job. Externally, there’s a fine line between being laid back and utter hatred for your life, and most of the crew chose to see laid back. If the manager wasn’t happy, then what hope did they have? He didn’t know if Scooter had pinned him down or if he was just being himself.
He decided to play it off as a joke. “I’m not.”
Scooter clapped Jake on the back and said, “Come on, man, I’ve been places that don’t smell like salami.” As he was walking away, he added, “Do I need to fill out some paperwork, or do I just start cooking shit?”
“The second one.”
“Cool.”
And that’s how the Help Wanted sign came down.
1 comment:
ha ha
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