It was a warm Saturday morning. Roy and I had offered to take over the entire Saturday shift so we could spend the day drinking beer and getting high. I brought a half ounce of weed to work and Roy supplied a case of beer, which we kept in the ice machine - a big white metallic refrigerator with the word "ICE" written down the side in frosted red lettering. The ice machine was used more by us employees than customers, since people rarely bought ice from us. Instead, we used it to store beer and food and sometimes took turns sitting in it during those humid, 100 degree Missouri days.
I was looking forward to the day - I knew it would be one for the history books. Not that that would have taken much at that point in my life. I had spent the past several months - practically all summer - being tortured by that atrocity of a job. That period of time was a waste, getting up at the ass-crack of dawn, sitting in that chair all day suffocating in the heat while Toad blathered on about things I couldn't even begin to explain to any rational person. Once my shift was over, I would go home, too exhausted and stoned to do anything but lie on the couch in my shorts and watch television with Sung nestled in my bent leg. Usually, she would lick my bare knee until it was almost bleeding. It probably would have hurt if I hadn't had enough morphine in me to kill several whales a thousand times over.
Part of my hermitic lifestyle was a leftover from Shafto. He had taught me well to avoid the world. And then my legal troubles. Any moment outside the apartment was potential to get arrested for something and sent to prison for five years. Then I'd be shacked up with hundreds of Shaftos.
Roy, Sky and I were becoming close friends. I was always somewhat aloof and hadn't exactly realized they intended to set me up with this friend of Sky's. In my recent self-absorbed ever-internalized world, girls were something to admire from a distance and not much more. Roy and Sky fully intended to change that, starting with the Cajun Festival that evening.
We got our morning duties out of the way quickly. I dragged out the heavy, greasy trash barrels. They appeared to have been painted bright orange sometime in the past but were now a dingy rust color. We always wore rubber gloves when handling them, since they were thickly coated with grease. The cans had metal rods bent into a u-shape welded to the insides, near the top, where we kept the long plastic funnels for filling oil and power steering fluid. The cans looked to have suffered years of abuse - they were dented so badly, they could barely be called cylindrical. They had heavy plastic brown covers that we placed over them.
Next came the squeegee buckets. They slid onto metal slats welded onto the pillars that held up the canopy. The tops of the buckets dispensed paper towels. Phillips had the best paper towels - far better than the Amoco's next door or Texaco's across the street - you could almost wipe your ass with them. Below the towel dispensers were the buckets, which were removable. They were always filled with plain old water, except when it was really cold outside, then we'd put just enough windshield wiper fluid in them to keep the water from freezing.
Once the trash cans were set out and decorated with their covers and the squeegee buckets set out and filled, we brought out the air hose and the water bucket, which had a spout for filling radiators. Finally, the pumps were unlocked and everything was switched on from the fuse box in the back room. We turned the "Closed" sign and were ready for business. I immediately rolled a joint while Roy opened a couple of beers and we got to work doing our jobs - getting wasted, watching television and doing our best to drive away customers.
Saturdays were usually pretty slow business-wise and Roy and I made the most of our leisure time. We went through both the pot and beer at speeds that would have dizzied Toad. We made fun of "90210" reruns and discussed all the latest gas station gossip. Evidently, Aaron was being driven mad by his days spent with Toad. I felt for him.
"So. Tell me about this Tracy chick."
"She's hot, dude. She doesn't go out much though, since her mom died. But she's cool. Kind of an alternative chick. She doesn't talk much."
Oh this was going to be fun. I didn't talk much either. I decided any chance with Tracy was a lost cause. Still, I was determined I would make the most of the evening, "I'm gonna go get some more beer."
"�
The day went by quickly, despite the lack of customers and receiving only a handful of visitors. Roy and I were both too wasted to do the books - we were doing well just to get everything inside and stowed away in the back room, the pumps locked and the "Closed" sign turned. We left the books for Toad to do in the morning, hoping maybe it would give Aaron some relief from his psychotic ramblings. I doubted it would work.
It was about ten minutes after seven that a car pulled in - a black Ford Probe. Though now it didn't look as new as the first time I'd seen it, with a large dent in the driver's side door. My jaw dropped. It was that beautiful angel with the long dark hair I'd seen the day Toad was pulling some crazy martial arts move on Josh. What a wonderfully small world.
Roy was right. Tracy didn't open up much. Roy and Sky sat in the back seat while I sat up front with Tracy, who had decided there was no way she was going if one of us two drunken bastards was driving. She had the radio going pretty loud. I turned it down a bit, the B52's "Loveshack" was grating terribly on my nerves, numbed as they were. I made idle chit-chat, and found out her father worked at a local Ford plant and had picked out the Probe for her while it was on the assembly line. She had an older sister, Susan, and a poodle named "Sheri." She loved butterflies and oil painting. She never mentioned her mother.
We got to the Art Institute and started celebrating Cajun culture. Tracy and Sky pretty much kept to themselves. I bought Tracy a couple of beers, which she partly drank. Roy and I mingled with the crazy throng of hippies, drunks and deadheads who were all there in intoxicated commemoration. We watched two lesbians getting it on in the bushes near the Art Institute and talked to some long-haired, homeless-looking guy wandering around handing out Libertarian pamphlets. I swayed forward, losing my balance in my drunkenness and fell into his beer, spilling it all over myself. I bought him another one and, somewhat embarrassed, went to wait in line to use the port-a-potty.
The line didn't move at all and my bladder was about to explode. It had started to rain very lightly and that wasn't helping me hold it in. I was too drunk to care. I went over to the East wall of the Kansas City Art Institute, unzipped and urinated freely on the building. I turned and noticed the lesbians watching me, lying in the grass, one with her hand up the other one's blouse.
"Nice, you fucking jackass!" the bottom lesbian scowled at me.
I smiled in blissful relief.
Once I had finished my business, I zipped up and strolled past the lesbians whistling "Singin' in the Rain" and grinning like a butcher's dog on Thanksgiving. I was still whistling when I reached Tracy and Sky. Tracy smiled for the first time that night. "I love that song!" she exclaimed, "Have you ever seen A Clockwork Orange?"
And that's all it took.
The rain kept getting heavier and we decided to leave. We drove back and dropped Sky and Roy off at the gas station, where his white Rabbit was still parked. Sky drove them off into the darkness and Tracy and I went back to her place, stopping by a video store to pick up A Clockwork Orange.
Her dad had a nice house - big, with a recreation room downstairs where he had a pool table and an entertainment system. Tracy put the movie in and got a couple of glasses of water for us. We sat on the floor watching, laughing and talking until it was over. It was after 2am and I was still pretty lightheaded from the beer and pot.
I decided to get Tracy to open up gradually.
"You know, I was mostly raised by my grandparents. I mean, my mother married all these assholes and I just always sorta ended up staying with them. I know a little of what you're going through with your mom's death."
"Your mom is still alive."
"I know. But imagine if you were a kid and your mother married all these assholes and you had to stay with your grandparents to get away from them. Would you have a little suspicion somewhere that maybe they mattered more to her than you did?"
"So you blame your mother for abandoning you?"
"No, not really. It was my decision to stay with them. It was more stable that way. Somehow, I realized that even as a kid. It's not my mom's fault she doesn't know how to spot an asshole from a mile away. And you know, they always start out really cool and then after she marries them their true colors come through." I laughed, "I always thought that was interesting. It means they knew they sucked."
Tracy looked down at the floor, I could see what was going through her mind. She was beautiful. God, she was beautiful, but nobody wanted to go near that thing swimming around in her head. Nobody wanted to face that monster. Maybe the thought of their own parents dying scared them, or maybe they just didn't know how to deal with it. Whatever the case, I wasn't scared. I'd seen all the filth that life had to offer. I knew how to kill it and I knew how to use it to empower myself. Maybe I could help Tracy see a simplified truth: sometimes shitty things had to happen before something good could grow from the rot.
"So really, my grandparents had more of a hand in raising me than anyone. It was a pretty shitty time when my grandmother died. I was only fourteen. She got cancer of the pancreas and waited three years before ever going to a doctor. Not that it would have mattered. My mother married my last stepfather a few weeks before she died. We have a picture of her at the wedding, sitting on the front porch, wearing a robe that hung on her like a gunny sack on a twig. Everyone else was standing around the ceremony, about thirty feet away. Well. My cousins and I weren't. We'd gone off to play on the railroad tracks. None of us cared much for Shafto."
"At least she got to see the ceremony."
I pondered a moment, "Yeah. Too bad her daughter couldn't have been marrying someone worth a shit."
Tracy's eyes watered, "My mother won't even get to see me graduate high school."
"But those are just random moments that mean nothing. My mom'll never see me graduate high school either. Going to your kid's graduation, first birthday party, wedding... Going to the prom. That's all bullshit to make people who are zombies feel like they have some reason to be here. Don't focus on the arbitrary events you'll never have. Cherish what you did have. I can't see any other reason for being here. We have to make our own meaning in life. You and your mother did that. You experienced life together. That'll never go away."
Tracy was crying uncontrollably. Her entire body was heaving. I felt like a nihilistic asshole who had just plucked the wings off a butterfly. I expected any assortment of reactions to follow - I would be hit, I would be kicked, I would be slapped, I would have dog feces rubbed into my face or, if I was lucky, I'd just be asked to leave.
But Bob Barker had spun the wheel in my favor and I was shocked at the wedge the ticker had stopped on. Tracy threw her arms around me and held me tightly. I was a bit stunned and slow to react, but eventually realized it would be nice to put my arms around her. We sat there on the floor, in the dark, holding each other for what seemed like an hour. Her face was buried in my shoulder and my shirt was soaked with her tears. I rubbed her back softly, feeling every bump of her vertebrae. I felt a stirring somewhere in my chest. That richly-colored sky I remembered from when I was twelve, with the tall brick building reaching above the trees on the other side of the river. I was looking back now and realized I had crossed the bridge. At that moment, I would already give up anything for that girl. I would take away all the horror and loneliness and guilt and anger her mother's death had caused her all this time and gladly shove it all into myself. I would kill it for her.
Tracy looked up and I gazed into her eyes, the spark in them clearly visible even in the darkness. We kissed and though it was soft, gentle and short, the magnitude of the emotion attached to it made it the most powerful kiss I have ever had. We slowly got up off the floor and lied on the couch and I fell asleep with Tracy on top of me, holding her tightly, with her head on my chest and her long dark hair warming my arms.
Posted by DevilMonkey at 9:50 PM