My girlfriend’s roommate, Tawdry, wants us to go out with her to celebrate her second successful abortion. Melanie, my girlfriend, tells me this over the phone. In desperate need of alcohol, I hang up and head down the street to the small dive bar. I am supposed to meet the girls there in thirty minutes.
I park my Ford Escort in a handicapped parking space and walk into the bar. I look around and do not see my girlfriend or her roommate anywhere. I hate being in places like this alone. I am always uncomfortable around people that I do not know. All of the patrons look up at me in unison and stare at me with their blank, lifeless eyes. My dying soul will resemble theirs soon. Slowly and inevitably, I am merging into the heart of their flock. Individuals do not stand a chance against the encroaching hungry teeth of life. I let the stares of their judgment pour over me. Under my breath, I am cursing my girlfriend for not arriving first.
It seems like days pass, before the girls finally walk in the door. Both of them are already hammered and they are singing, “We are the Champions” at the top of their lungs as they stumble up drunkenly to me at the bar. The regulars do not seem to mind the racket, however. Apparently, the drunk and disorderly are well received here. Melanie orders shots of Cuervo for all of us and tells her roommate to get a pool table. Mel steadies herself on a barstool, looks me in the eye, and asks boldly, “Why are you so weird?”
I wonder if she knows that I hate her. I am so embarrassed by her appearance that I do not like to take her out anywhere. She has masculine features that make me feel like less of a man. Her shoulders are broader than mine, she has bigger hands than I do and her countenance looks like Patrick Swayze’s. There is nothing for me to do. I am not good-looking, I lack self-confidence, I work at Arby’s and I do not think I have ever experienced any emotion in my life that was not a product of pain. Unfortunately, I had to settle. A six-foot three-inch Amazonian with the personality of a snail is all that I can attract. Redeeming qualities are absent. Just the memory of the acrid aroma in her apartment is enough to make me gag. The scents of cat piss, cigarettes, incense and cheap perfume always hang thick in the air like a painful blanket of stench. Sometimes, when she goes to store, I will stay at her apartment and punt her cat around her place like a soccer ball. I do not have a grudge against cats, I just hate my girlfriend. I wonder if she knows that the only reason I am dating her is that she is the only girl that will have sex with me on a semi-regular basis. And when we do have sex I always try to imagine myself ravaging Jennifer Love Hewitt or Britney Spears or Cristina Aguilera.
As Melanie and I make our way past the drunken natives towards the pool table, we notice Tawdry sparking up a conversation with some random shlub and his schlubbier friend. She invites them over to play pool with us. Tawdry adjusts her bra and then walks over to me to get her shot of Cuervo. I tell her in a respectful tone, “Congratulations…you know… on the whole abortion thing.”
“Thanks,” she says dryly, “I am so happy right now.”
Tawdry is a fat, pale, unkempt redhead who loves NASCAR and the Blue Collar Comedy tour. Her body odor wafts off her, up and over the burly perfume, and into my nostrils. She lifts up her shot glass and salutes me as she says, “This one goes out to the best $300 dollars I ever spent!”
We both down our shots in picture-perfect harmony. She looks at me and adds, “I am so glad that the baby is dead.”
I mumble under my breath, “I think the doctor should have killed you and let the baby live.”
She inquires, “What was that? I can’t hear you.”
“Never mind.” I say.
Mel and Tawdry select their pool cues from the wall and start placing the pool balls in the ratty, plastic triangle. I tell them to go ahead and play with the shlubs and I will sit back and watch. The thought of having to talk to these shlubs stresses me out so bad that I notice that I am grinding my teeth together. A picture of me stabbing them with my pocketknife flashes through my mind but then I hear someone on the radio singing: “It’s getting hot in here, so take off all your clothes.” Those words ring like a siren in my head and I try to contemplate their meaning and ultimately decide that a real-life human could have never written such chaotic prose. Only a dead machine could be capable of writing such a lifeless verse. My head jerks back and forth around the dimly lit room in search of the man behind the curtain. There is nothing there. Nothing there but the flock.
The pool game begins as someone breaks. On the muted TV hanging above the bar, there is a closed-captioned news story about a 12-year-old girl that beat her father to death with a hammer after he raped her. I pondered on whether or not the little girl will receive the death penalty. At the bar, a man with one arm and vomit on his shirt is hitting on a fat, old woman. I have to down another shot to expunge the brutal, honest horror of this obvious display of sexual selection.
Back at the pool table, I notice that one of the shlubs has taking a liking to my girlfriend. He stands behind her with his arms around her waist as he is whispering something in her ear. Mel looks me dead in the eye and does not try to pry herself from the shlub’s embrace. She turns around slowly and mechanically in his arms, reaches up and kisses him. I try to muster up some type of emotion. Something, perhaps, that I think normal people might feel. Jealousy falls flat, anger does not materialize. I actually just feel sorry for the shlub because he is making out with a manly woman; a manly woman that smells like cat piss and cigarettes. My mind drifts suddenly to something more beautiful, something intangible that stands at the polar end of what I am experiencing now. All I can think about is the Paris Hilton sex video that a friend of mine from Washington State e-mailed me today. It excites me to my core to think that Paris Hilton will do things that I have only heard about and have never experienced myself, firsthand. I start picturing myself slowly taking off her clothes as she whispers commands into my ear… when suddenly my girlfriend noisily sits down on the chair next to me.
As my mind wandered into the only place that it finds ecstasy, a good amount of time must have passed, because now Mel is completely obliterated and her breathe smells like vomit and tequila. She has her head down on the table and she is crying hysterically. She jerks up suddenly, and throws her arms around my neck. I ask her what is wrong, surprised at how genuinely concerned I sound, and she manages to say through her tears, “I am dying.” She puts her head back on the table and resumes crying. At this point I know there is no chance Mel is going to let me have sex with her tonight. A couple seconds pass before I say, “You look like Patrick Swayze.”
I walk out of the bar alone, get into my car and start driving back to my apartment. I try to convince Paris, in my head of course, that nobody will ever stand between us. I drive like a maniac into the dark, moonless night with my windows rolled down. My stereo is turned all the way up. It is so loud that I hear no music, just the white noise of the speakers exploding and the passing wind beating on my eardrums. I run over a cat. I cannot stop laughing feverishly at the thought of my girlfriend dying before the night’s end. My car lurches the last few feet into the parking lot and I run up the stairs to my apartment and I turn on the computer. The monitor casts the only light in my dark lonely room. My stash of pot is still lying on my dresser. I roll a joint and take my first few puffs as I sit down at the computer desk. As I begin to bask in the comfort of my digital romance, I hear a baby’s cries coming from somewhere outside my window. I cannot help but think that he is crying because he just found out how shallow and soulless life really is.
JRPerez September 2010
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