Hurt Others

by Sam Pink

  Think hard, says Jeffrey. You can do this.

  Rows of little cartoon faces look back at you.

  Your head feels swollen, stretching slowly in different directions without any direction.

  Tomorrow when you move out, you’ll continue to stretch in different directions.

  You see yourself in a field with your hands on your head, eyes-closed, spinning around, saying, “I’m finished! I’m finished!”

  Your girlfriend is looking at her board.

  You decide to lie next time she asks something.

  Because you want to win.

  Want to make her feel bad.

  Want to win and piss on her spirit.

  Yes.

  You can do this.

  Believe in yourself.

  There’s nothing left to lose.

  Your peanut butter is gone.

  “Does your person have—a weird head,” you say. “No like, a falcon-head.”

  She looks at the board for a little bit.

  “I don’t know,” she says. “They all have weird heads. They’re drawings.” She grabs one of her breasts and says, “Hell-oh” shaking the breast to the syllables.

  She is very pale and her nipples are orange/pink.

  You keep playing the game.

  Neither of you tries to win.

  Because when someone wins, it’s over.

  Outside a plane passes.

  Nearing to land.

  You imagine the sound of the plane nearing to land as the falling of a bomb.

  Just, a huge bomb of no-fun.

  You’re standing in an empty field and a bomb that has “No-fun” painted on it lands on your head, detonating.

  It happens to the sound of the plane nearing to land.

  And it feels good to admit it.

  Always feels good to admit it.

  No close relationships of any kind.

  And no satisfying goals.

  Good to admit it.

  Like it all makes sense.

  Like everything always makes sense in some way, and you either see it or you don’t.

  Right now someone is guessing who you are, and you are the one who has guessed.

  And it makes sense no matter how you think about it.

  “It’s still your turn,” she says. Then she raises both her arms and says, “We playing or what.”

  You let the bomb of no-fun detonate over you.

  Asking questions that have already been asked.

  Asking unanswerable questions.

  “Is your person diabetic.”

  “Does your person look suicidal.”

  “Does your person wish he or she had a fucking dartboard.”

  “Does your person maybe have a falcon-head.”

  She adjusts her tepee, checking her person. “No, my person looks more like a Croatian hockey player with lung cancer.”

  “Ok, what about a shaved asshole, does your person have a shaved asshole,” you say.

  No one wins.

  Both boards go back in her purse.

  You start the shower.

  You stand naked in the bedroom waiting for the shower water to warm up.

  You lightly pinch her nipple and say, “Beep-beep.”

  She lightly pinches your dick and says, “Honk-honk.”

  She gets into the shower, then you do.

  Taking turns standing beneath the warm water.

  You think about how showering with someone else is another thing that’s no-fun.

  The bomb is falling on you.

  You think about how maybe you just need to get a dog.

  You see yourself hunched over the dog, to protect it from the bomb of no-fun.

  You exit the shower before her.

  In your room you dress in your work clothes.

  Because that’s all you have there still.

  And because it’s better to eventually fall asleep in your work clothes so you can wake up later the next day.

  Sitting in the bedroom, you feel acutely dispirited and tired.

  Listening to her shower.

  Youth.

  How have you lasted.

  The best days put together wouldn’t even amount to a week.

  Your girlfriend comes back into the room, drying her chest off with a t-shirt you keep in the bathroom when there’re no towels.

  The t-shirt is yellow and says “Antigua” on it and people always ask how you liked Antigua but you always have to say, “I haven’t been there.”

  “Are you hungry,” she says, pinching her nose clear of some water.

  “Yeah.”

  “Want to go and maybe get some food.”

  “Yeah fine.”

  “Are you all right.”

  “I’m fine,” you say.

  Then there’s silence for a while.

  Where it becomes clear the silence always says it better.

  She says, “Oh, you got your work clothes on again. Ha, nice.”

  You look at your shirt and touch your nametag. “Ha, yeah.”

  You leave the room together.

  You look back into the apartment for some reason while shutting and locking the door.

  Maybe it will be completely filled with bricks when we get back and we won’t be able to get back in—you think.

  In the back stairway to the alley, there’s a single piece of bread in an individual package.

  The bread is moldy.

  A single piece of moldy bread in a plastic package, lying on the staircase.

  “Is that just one piece of fucking bread,” your girlfriend says, jumping down the last few stairs.

  You say, “Yeah I think so. I’ve never seen that.”

  She says, “Jump the rest of the stairs. Let’s see that.”

  There are seven stairs left.

  “I’ll do four,” you say.

  “Five.”

  “I’ll do four.”

  “That one time you did seven, but then you’ve never tried seven again.”

  “I can’t do seven ever again.”

  “Is it because it was too amazing.”

  “Yes. No it’s because of the broken ankle I got later on, trying a different jump.”

  You walk down three steps and successfully jump the last four.

  Outside, it’s snowing a little.

  And farther away, there’s thunder and lightning.

  About once a year Chicago gets a lightning/snow-storm.

  You like it.

  It reminds you you’re young and still have a lot of time to waste.

  A few blocks away you get chicken from a fastfood place.

  After the fastfood employee gives you the order, she follows you and your girlfriend outside, lighting a cigarette on the way out.

  You watch the weather with each other, just outside the restaurant.

  Thunder and fog-dulled lightning.

  After some thunder, the fastfood employee exhales smoke and says, “The fuck kind of crazy-ass weather is this we be having.”

  “It’s crazy,” you say. “It’s fucking crazy is what it is.”

  The fastfood employee laughs. “Ok?”

  Your girlfriend is looking in the bag.

  “Really hope there’s napkins in here,” she says. “Oh what—no napkins? Wait, oh, here we go.” She looks up. “There’s napkins.”

  The fastfood employee nods and says, “Mmm hmm” as she takes a pull of the cigarette. She breathes in and exhales slowly. “I put plenty of napkins in there now,” she says. “People always ‘bout them napkins. S’all I hear in this motherfucker, napkins, napkins. More napkins.”

  “Thanks for the napkins,” you say.

  “Yeah thanks, it’s good,” says your girlfriend.

  The fastfood employee nods, taking a pull on her cigarette and looking at the sky.

  You and your girlfriend walk to another fastfood place nearby and sit on a yellow parking brick, eating the chicken.

  Food from one fastfood restaurant, in the parking lot of a di
fferent fastfood place.

  Your girlfriend says, “What if they hire someone to check the parking lot to make sure this isn’t happening. Are we going to get in trouble. Are you ready to die for me.”

  “Can I have like two or three napkins, please.”

  Sitting on the yellow parking brick, you think about accidentally discovering a secret society of people who buy fastfood from one place and eat it at another place.

  The snow is stopping a little, and the thunder and lightning are low.

  And guess what, you hate your life but not yourself.

  Later at the apartment your girlfriend looks at her laptop computer while you lie in bed.

  You’re sweating for some reason.

  When your girlfriend is done with the computer you check your email.

  There is one email.

  It’s from a magazine you sent some writing to.

  “Hi,

  Thank you for your submission. Unfortunately I’ve decided to pass on your story. The first line was very intriguing, but the piece ultimately turned into a very confusing, unsettling mix of adult content, violence, childishness, and innocence. I found it a little difficult to read.

  Best wishes,

  (xxxxxxxxxx)”

  You close the computer and put it on the floor.

  Your girlfriend takes off her clothes.

  In her bra and underwear, she starts to handle your dick then she puts it in her mouth and after a little while you orgasm on her chest in three big shots.

  You feel better.

  You put your hand on her shoulder and say, “Wouldn’t it be funny if I started laughing now and said, ‘Finally, the evil is gone!’”

  She laughs and gets on the bed with you.

  Your dick drips, getting soft.

  The hair around her ears is curly and you feel ugly.

  And you experience a strong desire to be sitting at a desk in an empty schoolroom in the middle of the night.

  And an equally strong desire to be on top of Mount Everest throwing rocks down at people climbing up.

  Your girlfriend is rubbing some of the stubble on her crotch.

  “Hey, do you think you’d want to kiss it, like just for a while,” she says. She makes a punching motion at your face and a clicking sound with her teeth. “Eh?”

  “You know I do,” you say, and smile insanely, raising your eyebrows, unblinking.

  She leans back on her elbows and opens her legs a little.

  She takes her underwear off, and there’s a small cord of wetness that expands and snaps, connecting her skin to the underwear.

  It finishes off what’s left of your weak, emotionless self.

  It slashes the throat of that self, with the edge of the same shovel it uses to bury it before it has fully died.

  She spreads her shaved crotch open a little.

  You put your hands on the back of her thighs and push them back.

  There are pieces of toilet paper stuck to her asshole.

  You lick and kiss between her legs.

  She makes a lot of noise and clenches up and gets red in the face.

  But no, there’s no romance.

  You’ve never romanced anything.

  It ends like it always ends.

  Where you’re both asleep.

  Where you dream about not being able to walk well, yet still having to walk across a large field filled with hills.

  Alone and lame, trying to walk across a large hilly field for some unknown reason.

  It’s very hard to balance and each step feels endless.

  You only have dreams now that make you feel shitty and wasted when waking up.

  The kind that seem to change who you are for a few hours.

  The next morning you wake up alone.

  Your girlfriend is in the bathroom.

  You go down the hall and find your boots.

  Putting on your boots by the doorway, you imagine Michael Jordan—but a Michael Jordan that has like, neon-blue skin and no eyes.

  The blue, eyeless Michael Jordan has your girlfriend’s voice, and says, “You’re my best friend, I hope you know that.”

  I used to work at a bar/liquor store called The Carousel.

  It was in Romeoville, Illinois—a Chicago suburb.

  I worked in the back area, stocking the coolers.

  Sometimes I’d have to go out into the bar to hook up kegs or clean the bathrooms too.

  There was a bartender there named Robin.

  She was in her fifties.

  The guy who got me the job at the bar—Carmen—he told me Robin was in some porno movies.

  He wanted to prove it to me even though I didn’t say I doubted him.

  So one day after work, me and him went across the street to a small supermarket.

  There was a bagger who worked there and he collected porn.

  He was the one who told Carmen about the porno.

  A few days later the grocery bagger guy brought the movie over to the bar and gave it to me and Carmen in the back area, where trucks delivered alcohol.

  Carmen said thanks and took a small bag of cocaine out of his pocket, smashed a little rock on the top of a broken down refrigerator in the back area.

  The guy sniffed the cocaine and left through the backdoor.

  After work, I went to Carmen’s house in town to watch the movie.

  The movie opened with a young Robin lying in bed.

  She was wearing a red “sexy” lingerie thing and the bed was in a large, open, unfurnitured room.

  It panned away from her in bed, to the window.

  In the window, there were two guys looking in.

  They were dressed like trainrobbers from an old movie.

  They had robber-masks on and were talking in secret.

  They crept into the room and walked up to where Robin was pretending to sleep.

  She woke up and looked at them.

  She put her hand to her mouth and said, “Oh no, am I being robbed.”

  Carmen said, “She looks really young.”

  “She looks good,” I said.

  Then the movie cut to a shot of her on her knees with both the robbers’ dicks in her face.

  She started jerking both the dicks off—fingernails on her hands, red and long.

  When the dicks were hard she put them both in her mouth.

  Then she took one out and kept one in, pushing her mouth all the way up against the guy’s pubes.

  “Yeah she looks really young,” I said. “Her butt looks the same.”

  “Yeah it looks weird,” he said.

  “No I meant I like how it looks. Big hips.”

  Carmen cleared his throat and said, “Oh.”

  Something else was happening in the porno, but I was thinking about gnawing on Robin’s hips.

  Only, in the thought, I didn’t have any teeth, I was gnawing with my gums.

  Carmen said, “That guy at the supermarket said her husband made her do pornos. He said he knew her husband and he’d make her do it because he didn’t work. I guess if you mention it to her, she gets pissed.”

  “Robin’s nice,” I said. “She always tips me more than the other bartenders.”

  He cleared his throat. “Yeah.”

  I watched Robin getting fucked in the ass and mouth at the same time.

  I said, “Hey I pissed in the Bloody Mary Mix a couple days ago.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Ha, yeah. This one guy at the bar called me a faggot because I had a pink shirt on I think. So I took my plastic thing of juice into the bathroom and emptied it then pissed in it and when I made the Bloody Mary Mix I dumped it in, because the guy who called me a faggot, I know that’s his drink.”

  “Cool,” he said. “I think I’m going to make a porno too, man.”

  I watched Robin have sex with two guys and I thought about the guy who called me a faggot, drinking my piss.

  Working at the bar wasn’t that bad.

  They paid me in cash and I found what beca
me one of my favorite shirts in a garbage bag in the backroom, for some clothing charity.

  It was blue (the shirt).

  Not too long after that, I had nowhere to live so Carmen let me move in.

  I lived in the basement.

  The other people who lived in the house were rarely there.

  One was a masseuse.

  One was studying to be a pilot at the college the next town over.

  And random other people on and off for a few weeks at a time, who I really didn’t know.

  Carmen and I didn’t get along.

  As people, we were not amazing.

  He was someone who always had to have someone else around to whine to, and I was someone who was whined to because as a person, I was someone who didn’t care what was happening.

  Carmen didn’t like me because a few years earlier, he was going to a college close by (the same college as the pilot guy, Lewis University) and I went to visit one night and got him expelled from the school.

  After he got expelled he started working full-time at the bar.

  Then he got me a job too, not because he liked me but because he knew then I could move in and listen to him whine.

  To pay rent, we worked at the bar, sold cocaine and stole a lot of alcohol from the bar and sold it to people around the town, mostly kids Carmen knew from the college.

  We made seven thousand dollars the first two months, not including our paychecks.

  We just lived and didn’t really do anything, didn’t try either.

  Carmen had a nine millimeter pistol at the house.

  He bought it off someone at the bar.

  He said he was going to sell it for more.

  It was shitty.

  It was heavy and black with the serial number filed off and the front of it was all chipped and damaged.

  He kept it in a sock in his closet.

  One day when neither of us had work, we took the gun and drove out to a quarry nearby.

  We only had one clip.

  I shot it three times fast into the quarry then handed it to Carmen.

  Carmen shot the rest of the clip, single shots with long pauses.

  Then we got back into his car and returned to the house and ignored each other the rest of the day.