by Joey Goebel
And they’re looking at my friends and me and laughing.
“They’re still doing it,” I say. “I get so sick of this.”
“It is a sad occasion when laughter is not welcome. If this continues, I will confront their asses,” says Luster.
“No, Luster, please. Not again.” I change the subject. “So what did you learn in school today, Ember? And don’t say ‘nothing.’”
“I skipped school today.”
“Yes!” exclaims Ray. “I thought I saw you riding your dirt bike past tanning bed, but I had a customer and couldn’t greet you one.”
Even as he speaks, I notice Ray looking all around the restaurant, trying to find his man.
Then the well-dressed males with their Jason Priestley smiles and boy band facial hair share another loud giggle blatantly directed toward our table, and it is Ember, not Luster, who snaps.
“Shuts the hell up!” she roars, standing up on her chair, pointing her silverware at the men. “I have a knife, and I will cut you from your wooter to your tooter.” I think it’s a line she got from an audience member on Jenny Jones.
“Take it easy, kid,” one of them says. “I think somebody forgot to take her Ritalin.”
His idiot friends laugh at him, and Luster suddenly stands up.
“Please sit down, my rabid child,” says Luster. Ember pouts and reluctantly sits. She lays down her knife, and I take it from her, just in case. Then we listen to Luster, the spokesman of our group.
Customer
So this black guy with big, goofy hair is staring at me with a crazed look in his eyes, probably fucked up on something. I decide to play it cool for now.
“What’s up, man?” I say.
“I apologize for my rambunctious dining companion. She lives like a Punky Brewster deluxe. She felt that you males were staring and laughing at us. Were you?”
“Nah, dude. We were laughing at something else. Don’t worry about it.”
“But I am going to worry about it. You are lying to me. It worries me that you can so easily lie like that. It also worries me that you think I am so stupid. So to quiet my mind, could you tell me why you would lie to me like that?”
“Well…Because I can, bro.” My boys laugh. I rule.
“Is my dining party so grotesque that you would utterly disregard our feelings? Is that what you are saying to me?”
“Well, I don’t know about all that, man. Hey, you can’t bullshit a bullshitter.” That’s my slogan. That’s what I always wrote in yearbooks next to my name and jersey number. “Hey—let me buy you a drink. No hard feelings, huh?”
I’m trying to be cool to this guy, but I think I just pissed him off even more. He sits down next to me.
“Oh, have a seat, why don’t you?” I say.
“I want you to tell me exactly why you would stare and laugh at us,” he says. “Put it in syllables.”
“Dude, chill, man,” says Jeremy. “We didn’t mean anything—”
“Keep out of this, Hilfiger. I am talking to the man with no hard feelings.”
That’s me, apparently. I would like to defuse this situation before I have to kick some ass.
“Dude—”
“Do you think calling me dude first cushions what you are saying? Am I supposed to know that you are being sincere since you take the time to call me dude?”
“Dude, man—”
“Bite. I have come to expect people to laugh at our motley crew. That is a given, you jerk-wad almighty. But I would like for you to tell me exactly why you are laughing. Can you articulate your thoughts, or are they as empty as I think? Is there any brain in the gleams of your eyes? Does that tongue know how to whip it? Can you enlighten a man who has heard it all and has even written it all down on four-by-six index cards?”
What the fuck? I’m all about being different and all, but this dude is a trip. He’s freakin me out here. He just needs to chill and hear where I’m coming from.
“Hey, man, it’s nothing personal,” I say.
“Nothing personal? Nothing personal? What are you going to say next? No offense? These things happen?”
“I don’t know about all that.”
“So it is nothing personal? You just randomly pick out people and ruin their evenings?”
“Nah, dawg, but like you say, you expect people to laugh at you. Just seeing all of you together like that. It just—”
Before I can finish my sentence, he starts digging around in the back of his underwear. He pulls out some notecards and throws one on the table. It says MAKES NO SENSE.
“Exactly. You read my mind.”
“It takes no clairvoyance to predict a humanoid’s sentence.”
“Oh. So I’m a humanoid, now?”
“Yes. A humanoid is what you are. You are another pretty face in the ugly crowd. You are a cop in a doughnut shop. You are programmed to the end. You can be read from start to finish in one sitting.”
“Fuck you,” I say as he throws another notecard on the table. It says FUCK YOU.
“I knew you would say that. You are a stereotypical human being. You listen to typical stereo.”
“Okay. Tell me what I listen to then, smart-ass.”
He looks me over before answering.
“You listen to Eminem.”
“Yeah. So what? Everybody listens to Eminem.”
“I do not, nor do my dining companions. But I will not stop there. I can unfold your life story here before me.”
I’ve never been in a situation like this before. This is fucked up. I don’t know what to do but to listen.
Luster
You were born a mistake into a middle-class family that thought they were a high-class family. Your life was fine until your asshole parents divorced. Before that it was bike rides, baseball, swimming, and Nintendo. But after the divorce, your Nike Airs walked astray. You blamed yourself at first for your parents’ split, but then you learned to blame them instead, and on them you would blame everything forevermore. As a teenager, you felt your problems at home licensed you to rebel. You partied hard and lived for the weekends. You felt obligated to lose your virginity and you did as soon as someone would help you to do so. You did just well enough in school to get by, saying that you were smart but just didn’t “apply yourself.” You left home as soon as possible to go to college. You joined a frat. You let females control your destiny. You accidentally got a girl pregnant and felt obligated to marry her. You wanted a boy. You got a job that you hate but it “pays the bills” as you like to say. Your wife appears not as pretty as she was when you impregnated her, and your eyes are starting to wander. You and your wife consider yourselves better than your neighbors. You are depressed. You smoke weed to help you not be. You work out. You go to a tanning bed. You worry about your hair.
After a lengthy pause, alpha-male says, “Shut up. You don’t know me…I’m not depressed.”
You will be. It is bound to happen sometime between your divorce from your cheating wife and when your kids put you in a nursing home.
“That’s it, man. Are you done, or am I gonna have to kick your ass?”
I throw one more card on the table, the one that says EMPTY THREAT OF VIOLENCE—A FINAL RESORT. My cards never fail. I’ve got everything from TOO MUCH INFORMATION to I NEED CLOSURE to I ALREADY HAVE A BOYFRIEND to BAD HAIR DAY?
I am done. I am sorry for confronting you as I have in front of your peers, some of whom are secretly gay.
At this, the asshole’s friends look at one another nervously.
I know how much respect means to you, and I respectfully ask that you refrain from mistreating my friends and me.
“Whatever, dude.”
I return to my table. I don’t like doing things like I just did, but the humanoids make it so easy for me, and the fact that they make it so easy for me is why I do it in the first place. I can predict the prettyboy just like I can predict that the guy wearing a bowtie will be a smart-ass, that the traveling children’s storyteller will
be annoyingly eccentric, that the English teacher will love Garrison Keillor, that the bartender will be exceedingly confident.
“Why do you always have to make a scene like that?” asks Aurora.
You were the one complaining about them staring at us. Are they staring at us now?
The man’s friends are comforting him, patting him on the shoulder.
Then a contagiously funky reggae song comes on. My dining companions and I spontaneously arise and dance in the middle of the restaurant, except for Aurora who just rolls back and forth. We dance like protozoa, squirming unattached, our bodies moving like they don’t even know it. Music, music. Muse, sick muse. The sick muse we will follow to a timeshare on the moon.
I approach my victim, the professional humanoid.
Come on, dude! No hard feelings, right!? Would you like to dance?
“Oh, shut the fuck up.”
I smile, laugh, and proceed with the dancing. I dance as hard as I can since I know that any moment now, someone will tell us to stop and sit down, or more specifically, someone will tell us, “I’m going to have to ask you to stop and sit down.”
III. The Nightmare Day
Luster
Get up. Time to rock it like a honeysuckle meter maid. Time to face the nightmare day. A lot of assholes depend on you.
Here begins my nightmare day. I am a twenty-four-year-old commissary runner at the dog-racing track. It is my duty to make sure that all the concession stands have enough alcohol and cigarettes. It is not a gratifying job, and I do not get along well with my co-workers. I have been clinically diagnosed with a busted ass, and at the end of the day, when I punch the clock, I want to punch the clock.
Of course, I am just biding my time until I become big and famous. Some call what I am doing now “paying my dues.” Others call it “building character.” I call it “suffering.” My dream is to one day not suffer as much as I suffer now. I hope to be a rock star, a famous orator, a television personality on the Labor Day telethon, a poet, a philosopher king, a leader of men, and/or a rock star supreme. I want to rock it like Chuck Norris on the tilt-a-whirl.
Dressed in my personalized work shirt, I walk through our decrepit living room where a few of my brothers lie around naked on the floor. Despite my talking aloud to myself, they do not awaken. Jerome still seems to be passed out where I left him last night after he was done threatening to blow my brain into the hereafter.
Alone, I wait for the bus, trying not to notice that everything around me is dying the mildew death, the great cracked concrete standstill that is the case in the Midwest, a land that doesn’t know whether to stay or grow, a realm that calls it quits after a Wal-Mart, a Red Lobster, and a winning basketball team, an undecided, unambitious region that ultimately ends up a halfway house for humanity, full of pointless towns and hindered sons. A god needs to drop a bomb here to improve it.
Sometimes I awake to an awful noise, and I find myself hoping that I am hearing a nuclear bomb falling on my town, on this neighborhood. I either want all of the world or nothing. Until my future arrives, I have to settle for neither. And that awful noise always ends up being gangsta rap bursting from one of my brothers’ car speakers.
Passenger
That crazy black bastard with the hair is talking to himself again. He’s been doing this for years, so he don’t scare us no more. Used to, he’d have a whole big section of the bus to hisself ’cause we thought he was dangerous. But now, we’ll sit close to him and don’t even look at him when he’s talking like that. It just took some getting used to, and now I think the bus would seem empty without that big black voice of his. Every once in a while, he’ll say something real interesting, but most of the time, he don’t make sense, like now.
“William Blake wrote, ‘Without contraries is no progression.’ I hold this to be true, and it may offer some insight into the magnificent splendor that is me.”
He’s always quoting people I never heard of. Probably rappers or basketball players or something. Whatever it is, it’s stuff that has no place on a Monday morning on a southbound bus in a small Kentucky town like this here.
Luster
One half of me is a proud escapee from the science of life. I cut loose from the George Strait jacket. I am physically incapable of blushing. I am not subject to linear thought. I think in poetry. I prefer the backseat to shotgun. I apologize to insects before I kill their asses. I cannot swim, nor do I feel the need to learn.
The other half of me falls victim to the typical urges, hopes, and dreams of the humanoids. I want to be rich. I want to be big and famous. And above all, I want to love and be loved. In these ways, I am a slave like all the rest. I want to rock it like a slut with bad shoes. I want to be thigh-high in Ted Nugent nostalgia.
Like most men, I think about sex every six seconds. But unlike most men, every seventh second I think about how the girl would look wearing the burlap pantsuit that my show business money afforded her.
Without these pre-programmed urges combined with my weird-boy flair, I would stagnate. I would be condemned to living in the third world planet I call home forevermore. Without these contraries, Luster Johnson could not progress.
I believe that my funk-ass uniqueness is a virtue that will ultimately allow me to slip through some crack somewhere in order to achieve the fame, riches, and dream woman that elude so many others. I believe that my dreams will come true and everything will eventually fall into place for me. Once I have the fame and riches that allow a human to be taken seriously, then and only then will I be able to exert my inter-galactic clout in an effort to change the spin of the Earth on the axis that represses, a spin for the better, Lady Sajak. This is me being an idealist.
Robert Penn Warren wrote, “If you are an idealist, it does not matter what you do or what goes on around you because it isn’t real anyway.” I could not agree more.
I do not consider the humanoids to really be there. They are merely holographic projections of what they think they are supposed to be. You are what you pretend to be. And even though they are not really there, the humanoids manage to be the bane of my existence. And yet I do not like to see another human cry. And I want them to love me.
Off the bus and into work, my tightly tied shoes drag me through the petty wage days, starting me all over again at the end of a line of clock-punchers. One by one, we volunteer for another nightmare day.
Love me. Love me tenderly. I want to be loved. Perhaps my overwhelming need for love stems from growing up as the middle child in a house with 12 brothers (all named Jerome). Maybe I needed more attention and affection. Maybe I want to rock you like a mild thunderstorm.
No one has ever fallen in love with me. I think this is because I am so fucking weird. The truth is, I have nothing in common with anyone.
I now push a cart full of beer cases through the area underneath the grandstands while many of the spectators squeal above. This duty is somewhat difficult because so many idiot patrons get in my way. Most of these patrons are dirty men and look depressed because they are losing their money. When they do win here, they are losing. No matter how much money they get, it will never be enough. You simply cannot win betting on bitches. You simply cannot win, and there is always a camera on you.
“Hey, man, you can just put that beer in the back of my truck,” says a patron.
I hear this or a variation of this comment at least ten times a day. I stopped making any sort of response years ago. These men, along with their fathers and sons, mothers, wives, and daughters, are all hooked up to the same giant mechanical brain.
This brain hovers above the stratosphere in the big black sky and has nothing to do with God. It is man-made. From it hang billions of wires that are skinnier than rat hair. Most people (id est—the humanoids) cannot see these wires. But on a clear day, if I squint hard enough, I can see all the wires playing Dr. Tangle and entering the base of everyone’s brains at the back of their necks. I cut mine long ago, and it was a painless procedure, seriously
.
Nevertheless, I would like to think that I serve a worthwhile purpose at this racetrack. My beer will make some sad men happy, if only for the few fleeting moments of artificial happiness that a buzz provides. But in reality, the alcohol I supply to these patrons is not intended to make them happy so much as it is to impair their wagering sensibility. I help loosen their wallets by subtly drowning out their memory of how badly they suck.
When one of these sad men bets a twenty-dollar exacta on the two and five dogs, the mutuel clerk types it in the United Tote machine, which prints out a little ticket. If his bitches do not win (which will be the case), then this man just paid twenty dollars for a little white piece of paper, a two-minute scrap of hope. The money their own nightmare days afforded them is being spent on nothing. But everything makes perfect sense as long as I keep squinting.
“My truck’s parked right out front, buddy.”
Boss
Just how he looks is bad enough—a big, tall black guy with that big, Jheri-curled hair and those gay white dress shoes. But then he’s gotta be talking crazy talk to himself, talking one minute about how he hates everybody and can’t stand being around ’em and the next how he loves everybody and wants to save ’em all. He ain’t right. Here he goes again.
“I am a child in my romanticism. I am a flipper baby in my idealism. And admittedly, I cannot look an adult in the eye without laughing. But all things considered, I am fortunate. Studies show that considering my personal background, family history, and the habitat in which I grew up, I should be in jail or dead by now. Dead or in jail is the condition of most of my brothers, the normal ones of the family. I should be in jail or dead, but instead I get the beer to the dog-track patrons and look forward to my future. As I said, without contraries, there is no progression.”
