At the bus stop, I lean against the shelter and read every billboard lined up along the highway. We don’t have advertisements here, we have warnings.
500 CHILDREN ARE SEX TRAFFICKED EACH YEAR!
WHAT’S IN YOUR DRUGS? It could be fentanyl.
And one that just reads: SYPHILIS?
I turn away from the signs and toward the guy with face tattoos who’s standing in front of me, holding a big can of iced tea and asking when the next bus is coming.
“Dunno,” I tell him. “When it gets here.”
“Oh, alright. Thank you, ma’am. Sorry for bothering you.”
He takes a couple steps to the side, takes off his tank-top, and yells, “FUCK!” Then he starts shaking the bus pole, whipping his shirt around and around and pointing at the cars as they pass.
“You see me in the fight last night!? Did you see me in the fight last night!?”
He takes a sip from the Four Loko that I’d mistaken for tea.
“Shiiiitttttt. I’ll blow your head off! Imma talk my talk every day until you shoot me. EVERY. FUCKING. DAY.”
I stare down the road and watch the bus approach.
“You people sleep on the sidewalk? I sleep in the trees! Cuz I ain’t rich, but I ain’t no bum!”
After boarding, a different guy turns around and starts shaking his finger at me without a word, just dragging the pointer up and down like, I know what you did.
I look away. I look across the aisle. I look back and he’s still wagging. I stare out the window the whole rest of the way to work. When I get there, I discover our projector has stopped working completely.
We cancel the scheduled screenings and email everyone who bought tickets, but someone didn’t get the memo for the matinée.
I duck under the concessions booth and listen to them rap on the door while I try to figure out what to say. What was there to say?
I’m sorry sir, you must have us mistaken for another theater. We can’t show movies here. Yes, that’s right. Our movie theater doesn’t show movies, I’m afraid.
In lieu of having a job, I hangout with The Chad.
I put my laundry in the shared washer upstairs and then he puts me in the bedroom while he takes his phone calls. He is a salesman. He sells jobs to retards. He corrects himself. Jobs for retards.
“Not really rocket science,” he adds, which is why he plays FIFA the other half of the day. When he’s done with his calls, I put my head in his lap and listen to him yell at the TV until the laundry’s done.
Upstairs they have a dog, so everything, including my clothes after washing, smells like dog.
What’s the point of doing laundry if you have a dog? I wonder.
Honestly, honest question: What could possibly be the point of doing laundry if you have a dog?
When I come back downstairs, The Chad’s taken another call. He’s asking the other end if they’ve dealt with a moral or ethical issue at work, and how they handled it.
I turn to him after he hangs up.
“Why do you ask that?”
“These are kids we’re talking about. People could rape these kids. I need to know that the person I hire’ll stop something if they see it.”
I am illuminated. The job is coming together. He’s selling jobs to kids. Jobs for kids.
When he’s done with that, we go gambling.
At first, it’s how I imagined: Blurry lights and red carpets and cards and chips and swift-handed dealers in dark shirts. A cover band singing “Hotel California.” An old Asian man with his sugar baby. Etcetera, etcetera.
What I didn’t imagine was sitting on a stool at the Blackjack table, watching The Chad lose $200, then $300, and then $100 more in $20 increments that I pick from my wallet1 and hand over, which he seems absolutely certain he will make back even though the dealer just pulled a fifth Queen from the deck, and the guy next to us has lost $3,000 in the same amount of time we’d been there.
I read a tweet later that says, “a gambling addiction is just an addiction to hope <3.” I DM it to The Chad and we have a little laugh. It’s alright. It won’t happen again. We’ll do something nice tomorrow. Tomorrow, we’ll go golfing.
He rents a cart and drunk-drives it across the green, sailing over weeds, diving down the dirt paths.
“You’ve got a little Jesus bar up here if you need,” he says, and taps at the ceiling handle.
He swings pars, birdies, the occasional bogie. The ball pops loud and low on good hits, muffled on bad ones. At each hole, I learn new expressions. I feel my vernacular expanding in real time.
“I’m saving par here,” he says.
“I’m getting up and down.”
“I’m trying out a new swing thought.”
He pulls out his rangefinder, looks at the field, and hands it to me.
“What do we think, 5 Iron?” he asks.
I hold the scope to my eyes like binoculars.
“Other way, like a film camera.”
I turn the lens vertical, look again, and nod.
“Uh-huh,” I say. “You’re definitely gonna want the 5.”
We stay until it gets dark and then he drops me off at my apartment, where I engage in elaborate forms of sleep procrastination: Refolding my pants and t-shirts. Re-color-coordinating my closet. Re-alphabetizing my books. Rereading PDFs online of short stories I own as books so I don’t have to re-re-alphabetize.
At 1 a.m., I wash the dishes. At 2 a.m., I follow a hundred people on Instagram. At 3 a.m., I unfollow fifty.
I let the hours run high and lethal. I lose game after game on Chess.com. I play ten, twenty, thirty-minute rapid rounds. Rounds of fifteen minutes with ten seconds added for every move, and rounds in sixty-seconds flat which I play just to watch my score plummet—just to get it finished with faster so I can start the next one.
I stay up so late it starts to feel like I’m wearing one of those headbands with the hard plastic teeth that I used to wear all the time in elementary school, only I’m not wearing a headband, it’s just another phantom of my youth.
It seems no matter what I do, how hard I try, the next day always comes, and I’m standing at the bus stop again, squinting at the billboards across the street.
ADDICTED? YOU CAN RECOVER! Recovery from addiction doesn’t look the same for everyone.
Can I? Doesn’t it?
I tilt my shoulder into the street sign, close my eyes, and relapse on hope—that it will stop raining, that my head will stop hurting, and that the bus will arrive soon, so I might finally get some sleep.
he paid me back btw, he just didn’t have cash. my portrayal of john, who is actually very kind and generous, is, like most things, edited for humor and effect.
its like I see a lot of myself in your characters
The captcha that I was given to prove I'm a human to sign in a tell you I love this was a bus (well, the first one was, the second one doesn't matter because it wasn't a bus).