“No. Tomorrow me and you are going out. We’re going to get rowdy. We’re going to pack it in.”
“Do you mean we’re going to do a lot of fun stuff, or kill ourselves?”
“If you try to back out, or do that thing where you let me out-drink you and then ditch me, then at the very least I’ll kill you.”
“I won’t ditch you,” I said. “I would never ditch you.”
“Well, good. So we’ll go out, have a good time, and then it will be over,” she said, pulling into a parking spot on our street.
“What do you mean, over?” I asked.
She didn’t answer. I looked up.
We were back in our parents’ driveway.
FUCK & RUN
March 25, 2015
I was feeling vulnerable in a corner booth at a bar after several beers and a plate of nachos I had ordered “for the table,” even though I was alone. I held my phone to my nose and sniffed it like you might a love letter delivered by horseback to a windswept cattle ranch in the 1800s.
I got a text from Laurie. She was back in the States, broke, and living above her aunt’s garage outside Traverse City, working on some poems about dead timber barons, which centered around baron/barren wordplay:
‘ie not going well but i get to stay in bed or the woods all day. and aunt lucille has a rose-pink cadillac she lets me take to town where i sometimes try to scope a paul newman hudtype though most men here are over sixty-five or wearing camo overalls. thinking i might pack it in and buy a pick-up, take it down to LA, but then that’s a neil young song and i already did that.’
And so on. I pinched the last nacho crumbs and dropped them into my mouth. It was Friday night. The place milled with limbs, heads, and torsos, none of which were connected to each other. Too many kids in this tub. I tried to look like I was waiting for someone.
A moan at the bar.
Two guys with big tummies and shaggy mustaches, one helping the other, shuffled their way to my booth.
“Do you mind?” they asked.
“Not at all,” I said.
They sat down with an exhale. The one on the right was sweating. He lifted his leg under the table and propped it next to me.
“Gout,” he said.
“Would you mind untying his shoelace to relieve the pressure?” the other asked.
He winced and smacked the table like I was ripping out stitches. We ordered more beers. They were middle-aged brothers from Milwaukee but didn’t give any reason for being in Chicago, and as the hours passed, my sense of place beyond the booth grew unsteady. I had a vision of being bound and gagged along with Laurie in the back of Neil Young’s truck, barreling west through Utah.
“Milwaukee is easy living, up until the end,” they said. “By that we mean our mother owned a roadside bar for thirty years and only at the end did she get sent away for false tax returns. That’s not so bad. They’ve got her in that correctional center downtown for a little while, so we’re on a visit.”
“I have a cousin who works in the Sears Tower,” I said. “Sixty-seventh floor. She can see the inmates playing volleyball from her office.”
“That really true?” This was upsetting to them. Nobody forces their mother to play sports. They started talking about tying bedsheets together.
I said if I had known they were coming I would have saved some nachos. “Or, are nachos bad for gout?”
He wiped his eyes. “If you’re making them right.”
A tap on the shoulder. Kevin With Security wanted to let me know my friend had fallen over on the sidewalk and they weren’t going to let her in. I had come alone but said okay and gathered my things.
“You two know what a vow of poverty is?”
They nodded knowingly.
“It’ll be a big tab. I had two jugs of margaritas before you showed up.”
“We have places we can charge it.”
*
Kim was out front doing ballet for the bouncers to prove she was all right. She stumbled and fell backwards against a tree, then curtsied. I had ditched her five blocks away but somehow she found me.
We walked toward the L stop, then kept walking.
“You’re my own, personal…”
“…Jesus?”
“Zombie. I can’t get away,” I said. “Slowly but surely you’ll eat me alive.”
“I knew it. It’s happening.” Earlier we had fought because, in anticipation of Alec and Jeannette visiting from LA in a few weeks, she had warned me I might get confused and want to move back. Way off-base. It was draining to walk around a city thinking vaguely about how you should go on some auditions, see what happens. The ocean and mountains were nice but made me suspicious that I was being distracted. But then, that was my problem. Truly, I didn’t have a stake in the argument one way or another, but sometimes you have to fight. Anyway, I liked it here, where the weirdos didn’t try so hard.
“Someone got famous in this neighborhood,” Kim said. “I can’t remember. Either Liz Phair or Gacy.” She bumped her shoulder off a brick wall and the conversation took a leap. “What I need is, give me a swan song.”
“Me, personally? Like you want me to kill you?”
“If somebody has to.” It gave me a sick empty feeling. I was eighty years old alone in a studio apartment looking down at the street on a Saturday night. I hadn’t seen her in years and that would be true forever. Then she belched and laughed and said she’d cleared some room. We circled the neighborhood back to where we started and Kevin With Security decided to be forgiving and let us inside. A big mistake. I felt a little better. We could trick at least one person into thinking we weren’t a total disaster. Kim and I looked at each other, smugly. No one had any idea what was coming.
T. SEAN STEELE
T. Sean Steele lives in Chicago. This is his first book. Find him at tseansteele.com.
Tacky Goblin is the winner of the 2015
Wild Onion Novella Contest.
Tacky Goblin Page 8
