The Future I Grasp

There are places that one shouldn’t speak of. These are the places where the edges of Hell intersect with earth and the lowest cement crawlers edge along, their entrails leaving greasy stains on the decaying sidewalks. I’ve searched these places and know that caution must be held in hand like an industrial sized can of mace for these lowly beings can and will latch onto your ankle with their rotting teeth and their venom will rush to your central nervous system and you will lie twitching on the edge of the abyss that overlooks chaos. And this is of course where I lay when I closed my eyes for the last time before my metamorphosis…

I awoke with an empty bottle of Jack Daniels clenched in my fist; crusted blood sealing my hand to the bottle. Yes, of course I’d gone too far, this is of course is my nature.

“Fuuuuuuuuuuuck,” I yelled, as pain shot up my forearm.

The knuckle of my right index finger was swollen stiff and seeping puss. With my Leatherman utility tool I pried out some hapless cocksucker’s tooth. It must have been a Hell of a night; the feeling like a Buick Driving over my temple told me so.

After cleaning my wound with Jack Daniels I stood and looked out over the abyss and knew that I had passed the threshold to the other side. How I’d crossed would always remain a mystery but suffice to say that a series of heartbreaks and wrong choices had robbed me of the ever elusive dream woman I’d been chasing and at length I’d given up on the conventional and disappeared for several months so that I could reinvent myself. Those that doubt my sincerity need only check my resume; my assertions are listed there in bold faced type between my qualifications as a bouncer and my lengthy history as a non practicing teetotaler (Page 1, Paragraph 4). The how and why of my journey of course is irrelevant when the end is calculated into the equation and momentarily I will get to that.

You see, if you live in the manner I do, which is predicated on the notion that one’s existence should be a vast series of escalating monkeyshines, that you’re self worth should be determined by how loud people laugh at you, not with you, then you can expect happiness in only fleeting thunder like claps of other’s disapproval. It takes a man of a certain kind of constitution to survive such abuse, to readily accept the unacceptable. I am such a man but of course I’ve already said too much. It’s dangerous for me to be too aware of my own faults and other’s intentions.

* * *

It took me all morning to piece my life back together but by noon my head was screwed on tight and I was ready to confront whatever lay in the new day, which unfortunately for me was already half over and had thus far been filled with meaningless office work.

I chewed on the end of a pen and looked out my window. Outside I saw a rat thrusting itself against the brick wall of the building next door in some strange attempt to gain ground in a fight with a pigeon perched above him who seemed to have hijacked his lunch which apparently was a scone of some sort. This reminded me that it was time for my own lunch and I lit out for Second Street and restaurant row.

Pages of newspaper and leaves blew up in tiny twisters and the steam from the great industrial beast leaked out onto the street through the manhole covers. Human activity was scarce and the lower lizard section of my brain immediately jumped to conclusions of an Armageddon in which George W. Bush drove a gold plated Hummer and slayed the nonbelievers with Greek Fire (petroleum provided by our friends in Saudi Arabia) whilst I slept. It was a paranoid and cautious walk that led me to the Little Italy Pizzeria where I was relieved to spot a corpse dressed in a tattered black trench coat. It was sitting at a table outside the pizzeria with a lit cigarette in its mouth.

“Could I get a light,” I said, walking up to him.

To my surprise a leathery hand shot out at me and in the tips of the fingers was a worn book of matches.

“Gracias compadre,” I said, snatching away the prize.

He grunted which I guessed I was supposed to take as a “you’re welcome.”

“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh,” he screamed lunging at me.

There was a pizza box on the trash can beside me so I grabbed it and blocked him with it and then beat him over the head with it until he sat back down on the bench gasping for breath.

“I was just hungry,” he said. “Ever since I lost my job…”

“You should have invested your money in the stock market,” I said, lighting my cigar.

“I didn’t have any money to invest,” he said.

“Right,” I said, “that makes profit somewhat problematic.”

I took a twenty dollar bill out of my pocket and handed it to him.

“Go buy yourself a pizza,” I said.

As I stuck my hand in my pocket I felt the bottle of Jack Daniels and so I pulled it out and took a nip. They guy stared at the blood crusted bottle.

“Here wash it down with this,” I said, handing it to him.

“Great things will happen to you,” he said. “You’re like Jesus’ brother or something.”

“No, I’m more like Billy Carter. The former President’s brother. It is more likely my brother would be in the White House and I would be the sibling featured many days for incidences that involved inappropriate displays of carousing while intoxicated…”

He frowned.

“Oh, well thanks anyway,” he said and made to hug me but his body odor was atrocious and I artfully dodged him, turned, caught him by the scruff of his jacket, turned him back towards the pizzeria and gave him a little shove.

“Remember,” I said, as he turned back towards me, “you never saw me.”

I made my way to a small eatery on the corners of Locust and Second and seated myself at the bar. Patrons were scattered about and a guy sitting adjacent to me was hungrily shoving down a Caesar salad and his fork kept clanging against his teeth which in no time got on my nerves.

“You ought to use a plastic fork. You’re going to chisel the enamel off your teeth,” I said.

He looked up for a moment and then went back to banging his fork off his teeth.

“Cocksucker,” I said under my breath.

While I paged through the menu I felt the presence of someone sitting down two bar stools down from me.

“What would you like to drink?” the bartender asked.

“Guinness,” I said.

“Guinness,” a female voice said almost simultaneously.

I turned and there seated but two seats away from she sat. Yes, it was her…or at least I was pretty sure it could be her; my American Dream woman. She was hot enough to melt the wax top off a bottle of Maker’s Mark. There too was the matter of her eyes which drew me in and spit me out like the chaw of a burly baseball player. I was beyond smitten and in the interval between the tics and the tocks of the clock on the wall I was lost to the present and had traveled the universe in search of the perfect words to say to her.

“You like Guinness?” she asked, flipping back her light brown hair.

Like a loutish fool my mind ceased up on me and I was unable to articulate the affection I held for my favorite Irish stout.

“Guinness,” I mumbled.

“Yes,” she said and smiled.

She wouldn’t know I’d changed, that I had completely reinvented myself. How could she? She didn’t even know me. Perhaps though the change had seeped through my pores and was as obvious as a new bright red silk shirt and a pair of platform shoes with hollow Plexiglas soles in which goldfish swam.

“Hey there,” the guy that had been clanging his fork against his teeth, said. He sat in the empty seat between me and her and it was all I could do not to throttle the arrogant little cocksucker.

I peered around the dirty little scoundrel clinging to the barstool beside me and she was staring at him intently and I knew all was lost and strangely I didn’t care. You see the change that occurred in me had made it so. I didn’t want to be a part of that world anymore. It was a place that was hopeless and which I had grown to detest.

My self appointed job as a writer is to study people, to know when a woman has a boyfriend she isn’t telling me about, to see the slight of hand behind the velvet smiles of the corporate whores that claim to be politicians, to turn and catch in mid air the knife I know is headed towards my back. Everyone had become too predictable, even me. I was bored with it all. It was then that I realized what a professor had meant when he told me, “You were born one hundred years too late.” In a nutshell I didn’t belong. He was right. I would always be on the outside looking in.

Finishing off my Guinness I threw down a twenty and made for the street where the rain was pouring down. As I walked back to the office I contemplated my options and I knew my partial disappearing act wasn’t good enough that something more drastic needed to be done.

Outside the back door to my office I ran across the rat that had been thrusting himself against the brick wall. He was sitting on cinderblock eating the scone. How the Hell the little bastard had gotten a hold of it was beyond me but I admired the filthy little vermin and decided against crushing him with a garbage can.

AND THEN IT OCCURRED TO ME! A plan to escape all the treachery and it came about thanks to this scraggily little rat. Of course I can’t divulge the constructs of my strategy here but I can tell you that I took the lace out of one of my Burmese Jungle Boots and made a lasso with it.

It was hard catching the rat with the shoelace but eventually I did. He hissed and gnashed his horrible yellow teeth at me as I sprayed him down with Lysol.

“Hold still you little cocksucker,” I yelled. “I need to make you presentable.”

When my rat was good and clean I managed to put a collar on him and then a leash. In time I was able to present him to others.

“A rat as a friend?” my neighbor asked me one day as I took the rat outside to go to the bathroom.

“Of course not that would be too metaphoric. He’s simply a rat,” I said.