Apathy and Other Small Victories (22 page)

“I didn’t, think so.”
Shit
. “Why, is he?”

“Is he what?” she said.

“Is he trying to kill me?” I was working very, very hard to keep my voice under control. I wanted to scream like a little girl on the playground whose pigtails were being pulled by a mean boy.

“I wouldn’t worry about Bryce,” she said.

“I wasn’t.”
Until fucking now
.

“He would never intentionally hurt someone.”

“How about unintentionally?”

“Maybe, but anybody can do that. You can’t really predict those kind of things.”

“What about Mobo?” I said.

She opened her lips on her cigarette, then finished the smaller drag she was taking.

“What about him?” She blew smoke up towards the fan.

“What’s his story?”

“He has a pet guinea pig.”

That he fucks until it shrieks for mercy. I wondered if she knew about that.

“That’s it?” I said.

“He wears a black leather trenchcoat. He looks like a pharaoh.”

He certainly did. That much was fucking true. She smoked her cigarette down and crushed it out and then lit another. I knew she wasn’t telling me everything.

“So what do you think?” I said.

“About what?”

“About the situation?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean me? Getting murdered?” My voice was an octave too high but there was nothing I could do about it.

She looked at me.

“You’ll be fine,” she said.

“What about Bryce and Mobo?”

“They’ll be fine too.”

“But could they be in on it?”

She blew out smoke and lowered her eyebrows like she hadn’t been following the conversation.

“In on what?”

“On my assassination?” I was ready to fall apart.

“You think it’s some kind of conspiracy?” she said, smiling.

“Maybe.” I was shattering into tiny pieces.

Then she laughed.

“If there is a conspiracy to have you killed I doubt Bryce or
Mobo
are part of it,” she said. And even though she was mocking me it was comforting to hear.

“Not an important part anyway,” she added.

And that was less comforting.

I watched the smoke twist under the ceiling fan and I thought about crying, literally fucking breaking down and curling up on her shoulder so she could rock me and whisper to me and quiet me until I fell asleep. But I couldn’t. I don’t think she could either. Maybe she could have, but you never know with those sort of things. Unless you’re in rehab or married to a nice lady or paying a complete stranger for it you usually can’t. It’s flawed and it’s a shame but that’s how it works.

“Could you tell Bryce to go bowling on Thursday nights too?” I said, which maybe was my way of doing the same thing.

“I can’t,” she said.

We lay there for a long time and I was thinking. She was smoking slower and making it last and I thought about my fortune cookie: “The world is your oyster, but you are allergic to shellfish.” It would be a good fortune cookie. Maybe it would be important to someone at just the right time. People put their faith in strange things and give credence to all kinds of unintentional signs and symbols and stars, so why not a slip of paper inside a lump of Chinese dough? It was your fortune after all.

It would be a good fortune cookie, but it would be a better bumper sticker, slapped on the back of an eighteen-wheeler and driven all over the country for people and tourists to see. And in that inevitable twelve-car pileup after the tractor trailer had jackknifed, those same people and tourists would inch by in their cars, staring out their windows, and they’d see “The world is your oyster, but you are allergic to shellfish” on the detached bumper of that totaled wreck, slowly being engulfed by flames. And maybe they would finally understand.

“I thought of a good bumper sticker,” I said.

“Do you even own a car?”

“No,” I said.

And all the world seemed hopeless and against me.

  Chapter 10

There wasn’t much left to do after that. I made some vague, half-assed plans to tail Bryce and Mobo, maybe even Doug. I wanted to see him get his head smashed in a bus door once before I died, and apparently I didn’t have much time left.

But I didn’t tail anyone. What was I going to do, run around after them like fucking Mr. Bean, hiding behind bushes and pretending I was a statue whenever they turned around? I didn’t have a car. I didn’t even have my shitty bike anymore. The best I could do was an old pair of binoculars and a cheap Spy-Tech listening microphone that I’d picked up at Goodwill. It had a range of four feet and no batteries. I was fucked.

So I sat in my apartment wallowing in salt and I waited for the other shoe to drop and kick me in the face. Sometimes I went out and walked slowly past the Mickeypot Tavern on the far side of the street, casting furtive, girlish glances at the door. But no one ever came out looking for me. No one came out to welcome me back home. Sooj did not care.

I was hoping some terminal illness euphoria would kick in, and that since I knew I had a death sentence hanging over me I’d immediately learn to cherish each day and every breath as a beautiful, wondrous gift from the God I now desperately believed in, and that I’d vow not to waste any more of my precious life that would very soon be ending. Then I could go out and hug strangers and sing out loud and twirl around on top of a mountain like the fucking
Sound of Music
and be inspirational and brave. Maybe then I could finally do all the things I’d been putting off all these years.

Unfortunately I didn’t know what any of them were. It takes more than one kick in the pants to reverse a lifetime of unplanned apathy. I should have been keeping track all along like Gwen. Then I could have just gone down the list. But even that wouldn’t have helped. It takes a special, ironic kind of person to use their own impending death as an impetus to finally live. Maybe I could use someone else’s death for that, but my own only scared the shit out of me and made me want to hide. And having a terminal illness is different than probably getting mowed down by the General Lee the next time you step out your front door. There’s nothing brave about getting hit by a car.

I thought a little bit about Bryce’s wife, and how she’d never asked me why I thought someone was trying to kill me. That bothered me some, but not in the suspicious way that it should have. It just bothered me.

The only thing that helped me forget that I was fucked, for a little while at least, was a bubble bath. I hadn’t taken one in years. It was surprisingly frothy. And sitting in that small tub with my bare knees bent up in the air, soaking in my own filth, I felt so good and ridiculous it was almost right. As I began to prune and shrivel I thought about going to the police and falsely confessing to everything, anything they wanted, just to get it over with. After a few years a college journalism class would review my trial and see that I was obviously innocent. There would be embarrassing publicity. The governor would grant me a pardon and I’d be released. At my press conference I’d say, “I knew God would make this day happen. In my heart, I was always free.” And then I would weep. And then I would sue the shit out of the city and the mayor’s office and the police department and anybody else I could find, to make sure that no one would ever have to suffer such terrible freedom in their heart again.

I would be rich, and I would have my redemption. It was very Christ-like in the end. I’d just have to put up with all those brutal ass rapings every day for a few years, and try not to get shanked during any riots. That was not very Christ-like. But it’s the question all of us have to answer at some point: how much is your ass worth to you?

I would not go to the police. And fuck those sanctimonious college kids too.

I went to the movies instead. If I had to die it would be as I had always lived: like Abraham Lincoln. I had a twelve-second complete nervous breakdown as I walked into the theater and saw how huge and open it was. Stadium seating has made it much easier to be assassinated at the movies. After a frantic deliberation I sat in the back row in the corner, so no one could sneak up on me. There were no emergency exits nearby and it would be harder to escape, but I figured if I saw anyone coming for me I’d yell, “He’s got a gun!” and then get lost in the fleeing mass hysteria. There would at least be other bodies to stop some of the bullets.

As I sat there imagining this attempt on my life two high school kids sat beside me and surprised me and I almost went into shock. They started feeling each other up immediately, before the previews even started, even though I was right beside them freaking out. They looked like they were both eleven years old. They were small, but would make good human shields.

The movie was a remake of
The Maltese Falcon,
set in modern-day Los Angeles. Critics had said it was “gritty” and “edgy” and “astonishing.” The Humphrey Bogart role was played by an actor who’d gotten his start on
The Mickey Mouse Club
a few years before. That’s where he’d learned his craft. He looked about the same age as the high school kid getting the handjob beside me. The guy playing Peter Lorre’s part had been in Menudo. His solo debut a year earlier had been a crossover sensation, and his newest single, “Ha Cha Cha!” was available exclusively on
The Maltese Falcon
soundtrack.

I recognized the Fat Man from soup commercials, and the women all seemed to be playing the same role, which I didn’t remember even being in the original. They spent most of the movie taking showers and firing automatic weapons. At the end everyone had a dance off to see who would keep the falcon. Even the soup guy was shaking his ass to “Ha Cha Cha!”

In the middle of the dance off one of the women, who was straddling a folding chair like a stripper—all of the women danced like strippers actually—stood up suddenly and flung the chair away from her to show how empowered she was by her partial nudity. It flew across the room and knocked the Maltese Falcon off the table. She had been sexy yet inexplicably clumsy throughout the entire movie, and I finally understood why. As the falcon shattered on the floor in slow motion everyone gasped, with quick-cut close ups on each of their shocked and horrified yet slyly comedic faces. Then they realized it had been a fake all along. The real falcon was still at that evil pimp’s house, being guarded by a team of deadly knife-wielding bitches. But that didn’t matter. They all looked at each other and laughed, then started dancing again. The End.

If disgust was a shotgun I would’ve blown my own head off.

I waited until the credits were finished before I left. I always do, whether I’m about to be murdered or not. Sometimes there’s an extra scene or some throwaway lines or outtakes that nobody else sees because they’re already gone. There usually isn’t, and even if there is it’s never any good, but at least everyone else missed it. That’s the most satisfying part of any movie for me.

The Maltese Falcon
did have an extra scene. It was a digital mock-up of Humphrey Bogart and Peter Lorre, their real heads transposed onto the bodies of other actors. They were having their own dance off, while the rest of the new cast stood around clapping and shouting. Then Bogart and Lorre faced each other and did the Kid ’n Play dance from
House Party,
both of them standing on one foot and touching their free feet together in midair as they spun and flapped their arms while the cast chanted, “Go Humphrey, it’s your birthday! Go! Go! Go Humphrey!” Then the lights came on.

I had to step over the high school kids on my way out. They were still going at it. They were in love.

I was too consumed by loathing to fear for my own life anymore. How were people supposed to solve crimes these days with such shitty movies for mentors? I went in there looking for some old-fashioned Bogart advice, some ideas about how to be a real detective or at least how to act when everyone thinks you’re a murderer. Instead I got Mickey Mouse matching wits with Menudo. I got an old man who held a can of soup up next to his head and said, “Mmm mmm good” in the middle of the goddamn movie for no other reason than a campy laugh and a tie-in promotion. Who fires an AK-47 in the shower? Wouldn’t you go deaf? It was all gone to shit. If only I had danced more, none of this would have ever happened.

I was actually enjoying my hatred for a while. It was righteous and good. Until I realized that I was very, very lost. Luckily my innate sense of navigation and survival had led me down a poorly lit street that was completely deserted.

Shit.

“TURN AROUND!” a pinched, atonal voice shouted behind me, and I immediately knew that it was going to end badly.

“DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?”

I recognized him from the night he’d almost knocked me off the steps at Marlene’s party. I recognized his nearly incomprehensible voice from that time on the phone when I’d been tough. And it wasn’t like I fucking knew that many deaf guys.

Marlene’s husband. His eyes were close together and drilled deep into his skull, and his broad lunatic forehead glowed orange under the dim streetlight. He was standing with his legs apart, just far enough away so that he couldn’t reach out and strangle me. His arms were at his sides and he kept clenching and unclenching his fists.