Enjoy Me

by Logan Ryan Smith

  I get sick and vomit onto the feet of Sanchez and Lowry and they both pretend not to notice.

  It’s my birthday. It’s my thirtieth. The train comes to a squealing halt.

  The engineer suddenly runs toward the back of the car and I feel nothing behind my ribcage but an emptiness that hurts somehow, like an empty tin can being kicked around, just a dull ache, a sensation I don’t like. For an instant, I wonder if the bridge we’re on has collapsed, but remember we’re not on a bridge. As always, I’m firmly rooted to the ground.

  Then my leg falls asleep and my neck feels like it might snap in half if I take another look at explosions and mushroom clouds.

  “Hey, Luke,” Kevin says, holding me by the back of the neck. “Snap out of it, man. Shit, what’s your problem? It’s just a minor delay. Here, have another beer. Jesus, try enjoying your birthday a little bit, man. Chill out!”

  He hands me another beer and I smile, pretend like nothing is happening, that the world outside isn’t blowing up, and that something out there or inside me isn’t trying to destroy me. I try to pretend that we didn’t just hit another person, that every train I’m on is not destined to kill somebody.

  A scorching bright light blossoms out the window and I flinch.

  Nothing happens. I’m a little disappointed.

  I open the beer and down half of it as quickly as possible. Sanchez and Lowry give me high-fives, tell me I know just the way to start off a new decade of my life.

  Yes, the future’s so bright, I gotta wear shades.

  The woman’s body lies outside, having been cut to shreds by the train’s iron wheels. Unfortunately, her head and a portion of her bisected torso are thirty yards in front of the train, while the other part of her torso lies thirty yards behind the train. One of her legs flew up the bordering embankment, where it’s found, but the other disappeared. The investigating team wonders if she even had a second leg or if she hobbled here, via crutch and will, to take the train’s full force—whether she worked even harder than most to meet the hard kiss of the train’s grill.

  On the stalled train, no one else seems to be taking notice of this tragedy, this sadness, this sickness that I’m witnessing. No one else seems to have a moment’s thought about it. Even when outside the window I see a man in a Hazmat suit place her head in a clear plastic bag and seal it. He hands it to another man in a HAZMAT suit that writes something on the bag that I can’t quite read. I’m just saddened seeing that her hair is red, knowing it’s not her natural color.

  Between conversations revolving around on-base percentage and strikeouts-to-walks ratios as well as the quality of women who shave their pussies versus those that don’t and the tragedy it is that no guy could ever actually tell a woman she has a big pussy and how the latest episode of Lost was complete bullshit, the train finally lurches forward with no explanation and no sign of the engineer having gone back to the train’s controls.

  My cell rings and the screen reads “Dad” and I let it ring until I hear the voicemail alert beep. Then I listen to my dad sing “Happy Birthday” while the train seems to be riding over a warped and bumpy track, the sky outside turning quickly to violent lightning storms then back to partly-clouded skies.

  Sanchez and Lowry keep chatting, downing their beers while laughing. Russ and Kevin bust a gut across the aisle from me, their innards spilling out into the aisle between us. Rats lick at their intestines and call in their friends.

  Like I said, Kevin makes everyone laugh.

  “Hey, Kevin,” I say, reaching across the aisle, smacking his forearm before grabbing another beer from his backpack and getting nipped by one of the rats.

  Russ and Kevin stop laughing. A large rat runs up the backs of their seats and disappears. I take a long pull on the beer and ask for a cigarette, which Kevin passes to me. I light it and drink the beer and keep looking at Russ and Kevin. I wait for the rat to come back. Then I see it, under their seats, waiting, scared and sickly but ready to bite me again, to take another piece of me with it. But I know now, more than anything, it’s just scared. Like me.

  “Hey! Kevin!” I yell again, feeling something nibble at my ankles. Lights outside flash and flicker. I smell burning flesh. It smells like tomato soup and beans.

  “Shit, Luke, I’m listening! What? What is it?” Kevin says, smiling.

  I take a drag from my cigarette and gesture toward Lowry who’s laughing away about something juvenile with Sanchez. “You know I fucked his girlfriend, right?” I say.

  Russ leans over Kevin, tries to play the diplomat, “Look, Luke, you’re drunk. Come on, man. Just be cool.”

  “Fuck you, Russ,” I say, spewing smoke out of all the holes that have formed in my body over the last few years. I take another drag from the cigarette and another pull on the can of beer. “You don’t even care that we just ran over someone, do you?” I plead. “That we, us, all of us, just ripped someone to shreds. You don’t even care that they put this poor woman’s head in a bag. All anyone can think about is the delay! How long it will take! When they will get there! Who gives a fuck! No one is going anywhere, anyway! Fuck!”

  “What?” Russ asks. “Um, dude, what are you talking about?”

  I lean over the aisle again and say, “Fuck you, Russ. Fuck you. That’s what I’m talking about. Go get fucked by your lesbian girlfriend.”

  “Jesus, Luke, what’s gotten into you?” Kevin asks.

  Finally Lowry says, “Luke, did you just say you fucked my girlfriend?”

  “Ex-girlfriend,” I say, blowing more smoke.

  “Whatever! Did you fuck Sherry? Is that who you’re talking about? When? When the fuck did this even happen, man?” he asks, now standing in front of me.

  “You’re an idiot, Lowry. You’ll never make it in the Bigs,” I say and toss my empty beer can at him. Almost simultaneously and with superhuman speed I grab another beer from Kevin’s backpack, trying not to get bitten again by the river of frightened rats. You can see it in all their eyes—we make them nervous, not the other way around.

  There’s protest all around me. The rats pile up at me feet, nibble at my toes, wrestle at my ankles, shins, and knees.

  I thought my chest ached, but it doesn’t. Not anymore.

  “Nobody cares that we just killed somebody because we just had to get somewhere! But we’re not going anywhere, and never were! We just keep rolling over body after body getting there, and…” I yell, feeling a sudden loss of energy and meaning.

  “Christ, Luke, you’re crazy! Just shut the fuck up and calm down already,” Kevin demands from across the aisle. Lowry still stands over me, threatening.

  “Why would you say that?” Lowry asks.

  “Because we did. We killed her. Just going nowhere, on our way to nothing. We killed her.”

  “Luke!” Lowry says, his dreads shimmering in the violently flashing lights pulsing in through the windows.

  The rats pile up and bite my stomach, try to burrow into my crotch. I grimace but do my best not to let on.

  “Listen, Lowry, I fucked your girlfriend. Russ is a fat, pathetic suck-up. Sanchez is a closet homo that won’t face it, and Kevin, well, Kevin just tries too damned hard.”

  The train comes to a sudden, abrupt halt again, and all my guts go flying out of my mouth toward the front of the train car in one flow of red and purple ribbon.

  Then, everything calms. It’s just daylight through the train’s windows. Pleasant autumn daylight. Soft. Inviting. Comforting. No rats. No bombs. No bodies vivisected. No one. No one at all.

  The conductor calls out the destination of Bay Meadows. I leave my friends behind, glued to their seats, and step off the train, put on my Wayfarers, and feel a slight pain in my leg, back, chest, and neck. I stretch, do some neck rolls, get some blood flowing, then light a cigarette and walk toward the horse track with a limp and sixty bucks in my pocket. When I get to the track, all the horses’ heads have fallen off and there’s no one around except the dozens of jockeys weeping into the
dirt and pounding their chests, inconsolable and covered in horse blood under a low, overcast sky.

  OLD MAN BILL

  or

  DOG!

  It’s just me and Old Man Bill. He sits next to me at Bourbon Bandits in his floppy hat and khaki windbreaker, mumbling, fingering his ear, inspecting the wax left on his fingertips, and popping his dentures in and out of place. It makes a wet suction sound and a hard clack each time. Each time he laughs and looks around, googly-eyed beneath the hat’s brim, to see if anyone enjoyed his little joke, then he goes back to fingering his ear and mumbling and watching the TV in the corner that plays a boxing match that sometimes turns into a camcorder video of my mother’s splitting vagina spewing blood in order to let my head and shoulders exit into this world. The doctor, nurses, and my father keep trying to push me back in, but I’m a rotten, determined bastard and manage to slip out and fall to the floor with the rest of the mucus and stringy grey filaments spilling out of my mother. Then it’s just two men dancing in a ring and punching each other again.

  Overhead, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s “In This Home On Ice” plays. I put it on the internet jukebox because I just came from their show around the corner at Great American and I’m already feeling sentimental about the time I spent there dancing and throwing up into the nearby trashcan at the back of the dance floor and telling Kevin how much fun I was having anyway and how he would smirk and look away, embarrassed, and I would pretend not to notice and his girlfriend would lean into him as though she was scared of something. Then I would wipe the vomit from my grin and keep dancing and eye the bartender in the corner and feel even better because she had blonde hair and no monster tattooed on her arm and her breasts would glisten under the strobe lights and seem welcoming.

  Just now the ghost of Abigail walks in through the black rectangle of the open doorway into this black rectangle of a bar called Bourbon Bandits. Even though I know I left her bleeding out months ago in the green backstage rooms of the Great American, I also know I saw her dancing there tonight, lithe and sexy and fluid and better than that first breath after nearly drowning, but I was too embarrassed and drunk to approach her and apologize and ask how she’s been—to tell her I’ve missed her since she’d gone.

  But here she is, a ghost, gliding toward me, as stunning and shocking as ever, leaving me gobsmacked with bleary vision. Her red hair flips and flails behind her and she flickers in and out like a tired flame against a hard wind, the lights dimming and brightening along with her waning radiance, and when she reaches me she’s angelic, ensconced in a burning white light, and she touches my face, torching it so that it melts off and falls like scalding soup into my lap. I scream and fall from the stool onto my back, the last breath knocked from me before I can suck it back in.

  When my jarred and blackened vision clears, Old Man Bill’s stooped over me, laughing, haloed in the bar’s minimal overhead lighting, pulling his dentures in and out of his mouth and shoving them at my face, trying to fit them in my mouth. They smell like mustard and rotted cabbage and burnt coffee and shrimp left out in the sun. I feebly shove them away and try to stand but Old Man Bill’s standing right over me, his yellow spittle misting me with each cackle. Darkness consumes the edges of my vision again until I’m staring through pinholes at Old Man Bill’s flapping, wet lips. Then, absolute blackness.

  Next thing I know, I’m in Old Man Bill’s basement apartment on Ellis at Taylor in the Tenderloin district, just a few blocks from the bar, sitting beneath a dingy bare bulb illuminating only me, Old Man Bill, and the white Formica table baring a pattern of yellow daisies. In front of me a greasy plate of eggs and blackened potatoes quakes from Old Man Bill’s sporadic cackles. The yolks are like two pools of oily, thick piss and I see my reflection in them, which shows me repeatedly winking at myself for some reason. Across from me, Old Man Bill shovels strings of undercooked eggs into his mouth and slurps and licks at the corners of his mouth and throws his head back like a lizard swallowing a mouse whole. His adam’s apple vibrates left to right. Then up and down. I notice he has taken his dentures out. They sit beside his plate in two pieces, yellow, but a darker yellow than the yolks and the daisies.

  I push the plate away, stand up, and open the tiny, rectangular basement window to let in some of the night’s black air. It smells like asphalt, burnt rubber, and diseased bowel movements. Undeterred, Old Man Bill immediately grabs my plate, mumbles, and starts forking those eggs and burnt taters into his maw, gnawing and mashing the potatoes with his gums. His floppy hat hangs on a coat rack near the front door not too far away and I just now notice that he’s got a full head of hair. Last I remember, though, he only had a bit of white behind the ears and around the lower back of his skull.

  The place is mostly dark except for the yellow-brown dimness where we sit. The walls are concrete, white and cold. Painted white pipes snake along the tops of the walls and sometimes along the bottoms and disappear either into the walls, the floor, or ceiling. There’s a constant hum from them interrupted only by the occasional flush and trickle of all the toilets situated right above his apartment.

  The kitchen we sit in is just this table, an old red-brown refrigerator, and a folding table where there’s a toaster and a microwave caked in the guts of exploded Hot Pockets and eggs. Squished golden cans of Hamm’s litter the floor and table and glitter in the darkness like beach sand catching the last bit of moonlight.

  Through the tiny basement window, I realize it’s not all black night. In fact, it’s a full moon and there’s blue-white light pressing into the room, but it’s swallowed quickly by the dingy bare bulb and the black hole Old Man Bill calls home. Old Man Bill, in between bites of oozing eggs, keeps looking up and out to where the moon would be, but the window’s too small and the apartment’s below ground. He sniffs at the moonlight in the air and scratches behind his left ear.

  “What are we doing here, Bill?” I ask, sitting back down after pulling a Hamm’s from a nearly empty twenty-four pack in his fridge.

  Old Man Bill stops eating and slams his hands down onto the Formica table, causing the plates to clatter and me to flinch.

  “How do you get a one-armed Polack out of a tree?” he asks, staring at me with his big, wet, blue eyes surrounded by pockets of sagging grey flesh.

  “How’d I even get here, Bill?”

  “Wave at him!” he says, losing his shit, tearing up from laughing so hard. Then he looks up at the window where the moonlight attempts to break in and howls and then looks back at me, wide-eyed, and laughs more toothless laughs. Silence follows until the silence is followed by scurrying sounds of small, many-legged creatures on the floor in the dark. Those sounds are obscured by the sounds of Old Man Bill getting up from the table and grabbing the plates. He tosses them into a large white tub that’s clearly a utility sink and stained with lines and splatters of copper deposits and mildew.

  “What are you doing here? What are you doing here?” he asks, his New Jersey accent thickening with the thickening hours of the night. “You dumb piece of shit.”

  Sipping from the warming Hamm’s, I swallow back hard to keep from vomiting and say, “Yeah, what am I doing here?”

  He shuffles over to me like Quasimodo, a dirty grey dishrag in his hand. He palms my skull with one fat, callused hand and pushes it back, spits on the rag and wipes at my forehead with rough jabbing and dragging motions. Turning the rag over and placing it in front of my face, he shows me the blood I guess I’d been bleeding. I must have hit my head pretty hard when Abigail burnt my face off.

  In the dirty yellow light, Old Man Bill guffaws and slumps back down into his seat across from me and slams the dirty rag full of my blood down onto the Formica table sprouting daisies, real daisies now that quiver from the wind through the window and Old Man Bill’s rotten breath.

  Something grabs my thigh and bites and I jump and push away from the table and slam hard against the red-brown fridge, causing a picture frame to slip from its top and crash down at my
feet. Before I can stoop, he’s already there, picking the frame up and brushing bits of glass from the now dented, dinged, and ripped picture it holds. As he turns away I catch a glimpse of the child in it. It looks like a grade school class picture with a cheesy seventies backdrop replete with disco ball and laser lights. The kid’s in a uniform of green pants and a white polo. His smile’s gigantic and stupid and full of idiotic kid happiness that gets extinguished pretty soon after pictures like those are taken.

  I realize the thing that clawed my leg was actually my phone vibrating and I pull it out and see a text from Sanchez saying he’s at Aberdeen Tower and that I should pop by for a beer.

  “It was bullshit, man,” Sanchez says, putting his gin and tonic down on the bar so he can search frantically for his inhaler, bug-eyed and patting all over, frisking himself like an eager TSA agent. When he doesn’t find it tucked away anywhere in his grey three-piece, he gets off his stool, lifts his grey metal suitcase onto it, and pushes all his poetry papers and books around until he finds it. This is a pretty typical routine as he can never find anything like his inhaler or keys whenever he really needs them, and I’m growing pretty impatient, even while he’s puffing medicine down into his clenching lungs and beginning to look a little more at ease. All I can think is: Oxygen hates you, man. Just give up.

  “What? For fuck’s sake, what’s bullshit?” I ask, taking a long pull on my Lagunitas IPA and staring him down.

  “Anita. That fucking clown,” he says, catching his breath and retaking his seat.

  The angry Scottish bartender stalks past us behind the bar. He fills me with dread and reminds me of Michael Myers from Halloween, except he’s not wearing a mask, he’s just broad-shouldered and pale. Only difference is the chin-length brown hair he likes to let drop like drapes before his pale face, hiding himself in his own shadow. He passes by the TV replaying the Giants game from earlier tonight that I missed because of the Clap Your Hands Say Yeah show. He looks at me, grimaces, reaches up, and turns it off. I guess I should feel grateful for the half-inning I was able to watch.