**************************************************
The blond girl reached Google’s top 25 most-searched items on the night she died. (Google lets you know when you’ve searched one of them.)
In the wee hours, I Googled her name, in order to put to rest a rumor that she had died. Rest hardly came.
CHICAGO — Blond girl squashed.
Black ‘n white on breaking news.
My reaction set in gradually. I told no one. Then I told those I trusted. I stared at the money in my bank accounts. I actually prayed. I stopped outside a church in the middle of a run and tried to talk to a statue. I took a wild vacation. I tried to prove, to myself, life is short.
Eventually I forgot about her.
**************************************************
Approaching the end…
Just what I could finish tonight.
**************************************************
I was just a teenage kid sitting in the back room of a restaurant-bar watching an adult show that passed for appropriate only because its means of communication involved mostly spoken-word performance, which was literary. A handful of teachers from my school were scattered around the place, boozing up and mingling and acting in general like normal social beings, which you might expect.
But I didn’t expect that, not then. Not at that age. I was at a table with other teenagers, hardly friends of mine but close enough associates that I could jump into their cars every now and then without feeling too weird or thankful. To be honest, I’ve remembered this scene so many times now, my brain doesn’t even need to pan across all the nooks and crannies of that place to pick up on the important details.
The blond girl who had driven me was reading every word off the menu, even though she had already decided on the fries. A dark brunette on the opposite side of her was pulling out money to split the bill, as was I. And an unexplained older male friend of the blond girl was working his way down a long list of beer-menu options. The only difference in the memory today, as opposed to all the other times I’ve recalled this scene, is an unsettling feeling I get when I realize the blond girl is dead now.
She’ll be hard to forget. She creeps into existence sometimes by entering my memories, frankly more often than keeps me peaceful. Her sudden appearance always makes me want to whimper. Or maybe what makes me want to whimper is the new unreal presence she takes on in my memories. Her behavior, anyhow, alive had always been good-natured. She had been totally aware, of course — perhaps precociously and certainly personally so — of all the debauchery in which people of the world engage. But she herself had remained always good-natured, tolerant of others and aware that to bring them out of the filth, she would have to mire herself deeply among theirs.
She didn’t look much different when she died, I suppose, than how she looked that night scanning over the menu. Except I’ll grant she was a good deal flatter, on account of the tremendous weight of the bus that squashed her. On some level I can’t identify the morbidity of that image, even though I’m sharing it. I’m frightened by its gore. But I’m also blinded, scientifically, by its reality. She really was squashed.
**************************************************
He kissed me, and I gripped tight for a ride. He moved in, took me, and for a single suspended instant, pure unadulterated brilliance shot through my brain:
“HE’S FROM CRAIGSLIST!”
Um.
“ABORT!”
Soon my morals tumbled shockingly farther…
“BOYFRIEND.”
(Blinks.)
“YOUR BOYFRIEND! YYOWZZZAHH!”
After a brute conquering of its compelling, my conscience fell ironically and poorly by the wayside of the exact commonsensical ineptitude that had years earlier disabled my boy-capturing abilities. All fixed now.
Hi there. Hi!
Situation Analysis:
A fundamentally demonic line divides the realms of Fun and Sagacity. The ride of Life whizzes you across, sprawls your hair, and even if you could see which side of Fate you were flanking (but no chance) you’d wonder: The Dark Side is which?
To pucker up and kiss your fated realm — future graveyard of your eternal carcass, which no matter what Truth, holds the Light either way— is to uncover Relativity in all its purposeless graciousness.
★★★★★ AeroMexico
+ Laudable customer service
+ Extremely lax carry-on scrutiny
+ No baggage fees (2 carry-on, 1 checked)
+ Meal service includes complimentary Johnny Walker (multiple labels), wine, etc.
+ On time flights, generally
~ Spanish fluency advised, even in US terminals
★★★★☆ Southwest Airlines
+ Excellent customer service
+ No baggage fees (1 carry-on, 2 checked)
- No complimentary meal, let alone booze
★★☆☆☆Taca (S. Am. domestic)
+ Takes off from A, lands in B
- Bumps passengers without notice
- No physical customer-service presence in (at least the) Buenos Aires airport
- Frequent unannounced last-minute gate changes
- Unannounced STOPS in foreign countries (piled onto announced stops)
- No compensation for said bumping
★☆☆☆☆American Airlines
Time-honored status symbol, not an airline
+ Flies A to (almost any) B
- Checked bags: (1) $25 + (2) $35 + (3) $100
- Impersonal personnel
- No seat-request immediately upon taking money for a ticket
- No complementary meal (nor drink-drinks)
- The audacity to sell said meals for $10
- Failure to replenish checkpoint bins during a standardly protracted stint in security
- Borderline totally automated check-in (But what’s the difference? Ref: negative #2)
As the last whore ass giving show to Serendipity 3 slipped out of my view and ostensibly its skirt, I fished for a purpose:
Eaten?
— Check.
Gambled?
— ‘Betcha.
Drunk?
— What, noon already? Not enough.
Al Surname suddenly appeared at my side eating a carton full of hotdog. Surname had removed his black sunglasses. He ate, observed, and finally lit those naked eyes on me:
“Are you bored?” he inquired.
Them eyes knew.
“You have a choice,” said Surname. “Drink gamble eat shop.”
I reflected. (For show.)
“Drink,” said I.
Them eyes narrowed. Surname leapt, poked me up too, and ran a circle around the nearest bar.
(Mongoose shushed the table. “Guys,” he said. “Surname’s taking 21 somewhere.”)
Nobody moved. Let them make their own mistakes, their wiser dispositions said. And do let’s watch.
Absolutely nothing at the bar.
Booze, booze every where nor any drop to drink.1
Surname sized up a staircase nearby. “Come here,” he said. The stairs screamed white-hot promise. Every step blinded me, and I wasn’t even drunk.
Surname’s eyes scanned the strip, then darted one direction. The strip flew by. We turned our noses at everything. Nothing sang to us. A tramp or two may have, but they only fed our hunger.
Truthfully, I believe neither of us knew exactly where we would end up nor into what trouble we would be getting. We just kept a nondiscriminatory, open invitation.
We hopped a down escalator.
My brain was reeling, just anticipating. I grabbed the rail, steadied and remembered a seemingly relevant fact.
“Mongoose says these trips got tamer over the years,” I ventured.
“Tamer,” said Surname. “Calmer?”
“Tamer,” I shrugged.
“To a certain extent—” Surname began, but
RED ALERT. RED ALERT. RED ALERT…
You could hear the electricity snapping behind those eyes, breeding reparations. That’s when this sign appeared:
$2 TECATE BEER
Oh it nailed us. Had Surname at “Hello.” We suckered through Bill’s Gamblin’ Hall & Saloon, wheeling past whores and slot machines and whores on slots en route to the bar proclaiming the beers. My eyes couldn’t adjust. This casino was a cave. I felt like a rookie bat pushing painfully into darkness. My eyes kept squinting for Big Elvis.
We surfaced at the bar, me disheveled. Surname slapped a ten on the counter. Four TECATE appeared, clinking in front of us like a good idea. Then the bartender slipped a lime in each and we were off.
Four. I mused. That’s 13 short.
Surname and I skidattled through the casino, high-pace before stopping suddenly.
“You want lime?” he said.
“Yes!” said I, unsure of everything happening except want of lime.
He squished two into my bottles, then his.
I swigged big from each hand, at his behest. Would we be adding more lime? I wondered. Irish-car-bombs? Red-eye? Liquor? Midgets? What maketh one from $2-TECATE?
“That’s your head start,” he clarified.
‘snot.
“You ready?” he said.
No.
“Yes.”
Fuck you, mouth. You’ll pay.
No one said, “GO!” the way I remember. The way I remember, TECATE fizzled down my cheeks almost immediately. I remember carbonation and pain and more carbonation. I remember TECATE creeping into my brain near second-bottle finish. I remember an indefinable ambience of normalcy and total toleration of these two drunkards. I remember looking over at Surname and feeling part of a species that knew how to live.
Maybe we drew because he’d raced tipsy and I sober. Perhaps those handicaps he’d lent me really had worked. Loosing sobriety on the millisecond, squinting, we destroyed the evidence. The good ideas clinked into the garbage, and we returned to Serendipity to announce a new pastime.
Surname recruited three daredevils — JP, Patti the Mayor and Mongoose
— via rhetoric, while I helped by trying not to appear in pain.
*** For Al Surname’s take, click here or there.
Does Junior have the Right To Bear Arms?
Wouldn’t this result chthonically…
Alaska's Semipro Football Team? -
Practices indoors if it exists. With an “unkown” number of players and neither coach nor owner.