..:S...P...I...D...E...R...B...I...T...E...S:..

Saturday, August 04, 2007

"Once I was laying in the grass and a spider crawled in my ear."
"And?"
"What?"
"You said a spider crawled in your ear. Is it still in there?"
"No, it crawled out again. Nobody home."
-The Minus Man



FICTION:



spiderbites...a 79% true story



chapter I: change machine





Besides losing those quarters, I guess there were three things that started things rolling. First, there were those two pieces of gum stuck next to the alarm clock. One pink, one blue. Chewed and formed by two separate tongues into balls and pressed into the wood of the nightstand. The teeth marks and shine on them reminded me of tiny pink and blue brains, as if some child had cracked open the heads of two favorite dolls, one boy, one girl, and found the inside, except for the colors, to be frighteningly real.

I thought about those two wads of gum often. She kept wanting me to pry them loose and throw them away. Again. And I kept insisting they meant too much to me to do that. I couldn’t believe she didn’t even remember the night we both stuck our gum on there six months ago or at least realize the significance of it. The next day when I turned off the alarm, I noticed our gum, and, for some reason, was in a good mood the rest of the morning. However, when I came home later that night, she’d thrown them out. I spent half an hour digging them out of the trash, running them under the faucet, chewing them soft again, shaping them back into little brains, then putting them back into the stains they’d made on the nightstand, exactly where they’d been before. When she saw them stuck there again, she flipped out, but for the wrong reason.

-Whose gum is that?

-Ours.

-Bullshit, I threw those away.

-I know. I rescued them and put them back.

-What? Shut up. You did not.

-Yes, I did.

-Why? Nobody does that. Who does that?!

-I don’t know. Because it’s the most romantic thing I’ve ever fucking seen?

-You’re lying. Whose gum is that pink one?

-Yours, dumbass.

-Seriously. Whose fucking gum is that?!

-Yours.

Right then she reached down to scrape them off the wood again, and I guess I pushed her harder than I meant to. Thing is, I spent so much time getting those two pieces of gum back to exactly the same shape and spot that couldn’t understand what she was accusing me of. I was concentrating so hard on the gum that I don’t even remember what she looked like that day.

She stood back up and blinked at me in shock as I stepped in front of her to protect two pieces of chewed bubble gum as if they were wheelchair-bound children. Then she shook her head, grabbed one of her shoes that had flown off, and walked out that door and the next door, slamming both behind her. I still have that other shoe. I didn’t hide it or anything, she just never came back for it. It was behind the radio where it landed, tied tight to the corner by a spider long gone. She would have seen it if she’d looked around for a couple seconds. That’s how much of a hurry she was in to get out of there. She’d have left a foot behind if it had still been in that shoe.

I was disappointed that we hadn’t been arguing in the bathroom. When they start there, I’d get to hear her slam three door on the way out. That’s the record. You can’t slam any more doors on your way out than that no matter where you are. Every house or apartment only gets three slams maximum, a room in a room in a room. I didn’t follow her out to the car.

After she’d been gone awhile, I checked on the gum. I could have sworn they were closer together. It seemed impossible because there was a dust layer on that wood, and the two spots were clearly marked in the dust, and by the spit that dried under them. But when I looked close, it was as if they were not only closer together, but stretching out to touch. I snapped a picture and scratched a little line into the wood with my fingernail to mark where they were so I’d know for sure if they really were moving closer. There was about three inches of wood between them. I decided that I must have been wrong before. Two pieces of gum, one blue, one pink, reaching to touch each other? Now that was the most romantic thing I could think of. If she’d have waited just a second, I could have explained that I liked thinking about her pressing her gum on the nightstand next to mine before she reached over to kiss me. I could have told her that it was something I wanted to see every morning instead of the huge green letters of the alarm clock. I could have confessed to her that it really was her finest moment, that her gum next to mine was the closet we ever got. On second thought, I was glad she wasn’t there to argue with me about it.

My throat still hurt from yelling, and I checked the ‘fridge. Nothing but a jar of green fluid with a couple of floating pickle stems. Looked like something from a lab. Once when I stopped her from throwing out that jar, I said, "Hey, maybe if I left that jar alone for a year, those stems would grow more pickles!" She shook her head and asked when I was going to grow up enough to start buying groceries. Then she slammed the door, saying she hated seeing that green water, saying she expected to see a fetus floating in there. She reached to scrape a piece of bread crust into the trash and I jumped up, "Wait, I was saving that, too! Just kidding." She slammed the door that day, too, but came back soon after. She must have been practicing. And she came back with juice, milk, and eggs, all the stuff you’d see on a grocery list from a ‘50s sitcom. It seemed to make her happy though. But I still didn’t let her throw out that jar. I figured pickle juice never went bad, just like formaldehyde, and eventually it would be the last thing in there again, long after she left for good. And this way the refrigerator would never be empty.

The second thing was all that shit that hit my car. I don’t know how far I’d gone before I realized what I was really driving through. I turned on the wipers, and they cleared a streak through the thick red glaze of dead insects so I could see the road again. I left them on for a mile, watching amazed as the windshield quickly filled up with tiny, exploding bugs all over again. I used the last of the wiper fluid to clear another crescent moon through them. Another mile and the glass was filling back up, and I was leaning forward and squinting to find a white line to follow. I hit the wipers and watched the dry blades pop and smear a hundred more wings and legs and eyes into a thick layer of crimson. Driving blind, I took my foot off the gas and slowed back down to the speed limit. I wiped the inside of the glass with the heel of my hand for no good reason. The wiper blade creaked and painted another street of red, and I imagined a child who’d just gotten tired of dotting my windshield with the tip of his crayon and peeled its wrapping like candy in order to quickly color in his drawing with a swipe of the side of it instead. I drifted over onto the shoulder of the highway, stopped, stepped out, and walked around to scrape off the cracked kernel of one insect with my fingernail. Crouching down by the headlight to examine it, I saw it resembled a dragonfly, only smaller. Way too small, actually, like nothing I’d seen before, and I’d had the requisite childhood of adolescent bug killing to document thousands of species. And since when do dragonflies, or any insect that doesn’t fill itself up with your blood, bleed anything but white? I flicked it away, wiped my hands and looked around me. I couldn’t see a single insect buzzing around in the headlights and heard nothing chirping in the fields. I figured it must be a random cloud of bugs I’d run through, things that had just hatched, maybe one of those species that lasts only an hour. Wincing, I rubbed a clear spot on the glass with the corner of my shirt then got back in the car to drive on. Another mile and the glass loaded up again. Now I noticed every collision, even heard the impacts. I imagined a breed of insect that only existed on the highway, that only hovered above the white line and appeared when your car was at a certain speed. I went faster, thinking this could help . I watched the sluggish wiper blade smear an even thicker coat of red, thinking back to the boxes of crayons our class shared in third grade. I secretly went through all ten boxes in the storage closet and changed the names of the crayons labeled "violet red" to "violent dread" because I could add the letters quick with a ragged fingernail. I giggled when the teacher took one from a crying girl, read the wrapper, and collected the rest to throw them away. It wasn’t funny now because that was exactly what color my windshield was.

That’s when the idea hit me, the best idea until I stole that car later that day.
I punched the windshield with a straight right hand and smiled when the spiderweb of cracks appeared. I watched the bugs that landed on the lines in my cracks, quickly filling up my spiderweb to capacity. I laughed and punched another spiderweb above it. Then another. Then another. My knuckles were bleeding, and the webs were overloaded, and when I looked into the rearview mirror and saw the red flashes of light from the police car, I thought, "Holy shit, the moon’s red, too?"

My brother once told me that someone who is missing a thumb on his right hand can actually punch harder than someone with all ten fingers. You’d think any fist that you could make without a thumb would be smaller, looser, weaker, but he swore that wasn’t the case. Without a thumb to get in the way, he said that my fist would kind of vanish and become more of an extension of my arm. Any punch thrown would start at my elbow. It would be as if someone took the boxing glove off that spring-loaded cartoon gag and just left the blunt end of the metal instead. He was convinced that it would do more damage than anyone would expect. I told him to go cut off his thumb if he wanted to test his theory so bad. I wished he’d been around ten years later when I put my fist through a television so fast that the girl I was with expected me to pull the annoying host of that game show out by his throat.

My last punch into the windshield brought wind into the car and knocked the rearview mirror loose. When I reached up to straighten it, I saw the cop pulling me over.

-What up, officer? Was I speeding?

The cop walked right past my window to look in horror at the cracked, red streaked windshield. Then he came back to squint down at my bloody knuckles drumming the steering wheel. He blinked, at first not sure what was wrong with what he was seeing. It usually took about three more blinks for someone to get it. I counted five. You know, when they pull you over, cops always ask you where you’re coming from, not because they want to solve a crime, but because they’re just as curious as anyone, and happen to have the authority to force you to answer. I always wonder just how much information they really want from me. I’d love to sit them down and tell them everything about my day. I thought about telling this one about the gum next to my alarm clock and how that’s probably my motive. I imagine that gum with tiny chalk lines around them like a figure-eight, a tiny crime scene that my girlfriend stands over, trying to prove it was always some other girl’s gum. And I try to convince everyone it was both of ours. And the cops and someone in a white lab coat proves, of course, that they were mine the entire time, as the evidence would prove I was the last one to chew both of them.

-What? I asked him all innocent. I wiggle my fingers to show him my hands are at ten and two o’clock, just like they’re supposed to be. This only makes him take a step back.

-You drive through a fucking slaughterhouse, son?

-Huh? No, those are bugs.

-Bugs don’t bleed.

-Sure they do. What do you think they’re made of?

-Bugs bleed white. Like bird shit. This looks like blood.

-You ain’t ever smacked a mosquito, officer?

-When you smack a mosquito, that’s your blood you see.

-Exactly! The cop scratches his head at that.

-So...what happened to your hand?

-Huh? Oh. No, I was born like that. It’s a long story. You want to hear it? I’d love to tell you all about it.

-No. License and registration, please.

The third reason I did everything was that pregnant girl I used to know that I almost bumped into. Well, maybe it was stealing that car. No, if I had to narrow it down, I would say it was neither. It was putting my key in the wrong ignition. I never, even for a second, thought it would work. I’d love to look someone in the eye and declare that I did something as dangerous as stealing a car. But the truth is, I only drove off in it because I didn’t want to look stupid in front of her. I’ll get to all that in a second.

So, I was in the grocery store looking for some pickles, and I saw this girl I used to know. She was turning around right when my mouth was forming a "hello," and that’s when I noticed that she was about eight-months pregnant. Pointing to her stomach and my jar she’s like, "Pickles, huh? how funny is that? Where’s the ice cream?" Then we walked around together for awhile, and I helped her grab stuff off the high shelves. After a few more lanes, I got comfortable walking around with a her and her giant stomach, so I dropped my juice in her shopping cart and started pushing it around for both of us. We talked. She was married and happy, and I was happy for her. I saw she had all four food groups in her cart and told her I hadn’t seen that since I rode under the cart with my grandma pushing it. I told her that I’d chew on the ends on the onion stalks that hung down through the cart, and my grandma used to yell out, "Is that a rabbit? Why are there rabbits in this place?" After a third lap around aisles we’d already been in, I started to notice that when other shoppers looked at us, they were just assuming that we were together. And they seemed happy that we still had so much to talk to at this stage in our relationship. That’s why I kept walking around the store with her, to pretend I had a pregnant, happy wife, just for the afternoon. We did it for about an hour and a half, putting checkmarks down her entire grocery list, and even penciling in some extra stuff at the bottom. Even though there was a spot in the margin on that list where her husband has scrawled a note ("don’t forget the lightbulb!") the illusion wasn’t broken, and she seemed to be letting me enjoy every second of it.

When we came outside, I was so distracted watching her walk to her van that I walked up to the wrong car and put my key into the door. My key unlocked it, and I sat in the driver’s seat for at least five minutes before I even realized where I was.

Outside, the car had looked exactly like mine: green, squat, orange brake dust on the rims, antenna crooked from being bent, then bent back. Inside the car, however, it was like waking up in a strange bed. It reminded me of my roommate in college, who contracted a hilarious combination of drunkenness and sleepwalking our first night in our new dorm. He wandered off in the dark and woke up down the hall next to a fish tank half full of water, dead fish, and dirty silverware. Then he just sat in the middle of the floor waiting for me to wake up and tell him where we got the tank. He’d just met me the day before, and had only one day to memorize his roommate and our room number. With nine floors of identical bunks and pastel-colored waiting-room furniture, that wasn’t really enough time. He stayed down in that other room for half the day before the guys that actually lived there finally came back from exploring the campus, explained to him his mistake, and came stumbling back to our room, exclaiming, "I just puked in a fish tank, dude! Has the world gone crazy?" Later, he told me he’d never been more confused in his life and kept waiting, weeks later, for me to tell him I wasn’t his new roommate either.
So, yeah, except for puzzling over a fish tank full of vomit and dirty dishes, that’s exactly how I felt in this car when I looked around. It was the windshield that finally convinced me I was lost. This windshield was so clean it was almost invisible, not a crack or spiderweb to be found anywhere. For a split second, I was sure that those tiny, bloody dragonflies had shaken off some concussions, sobered up, cleaned the spiderwebs off the glass, and went buzzing on their way. Then I thought maybe some bigger bugs or birds had come to eat them off my car while I was in there. Then I saw an 8-ball air freshener hanging off an undamaged rearview mirror and knew I was lost.

I was getting ready to get out and find my own car when the pregnant girl pulled up next to me to wave goodbye one last time.

I smiled, waved, and put the key in the ignition, expecting it to jam about halfway. I couldn’t believe it when it slipped in easily and the car started up. I sat there idling, getting ready to shut it down and jump out, but the long line of cars leaving the parking lot kept her van creeping along within sight for so long that there was no way I was going to let her see me getting back out to unlock another car. No way I was gonna stand there shrugging and waving to her like some mental patient. So I thought I’d drive around the block once or twice. Then, once she was gone, I’d bring it back and hope nobody saw me. Instead I followed her out on the highway and ended up so far away from the store, I just kept on driving.

When she finally disappeared down an exit ramp, I shook my head and checked to see what radio stations were programmed, amazed that I’d just stolen a car simply so I wouldn’t have to embarrass myself in front of some girl I would never see again.

* * *

Now I’m driving around thinking that stealing a car for such a ridiculous reason is exactly the kind of thing that makes you assign crazy shit all sorts of significance. Of course, people I’ve known would sigh and say that I’ve been doing that kind of thing all my life.

Example, my car approaches a jogger on my right, a young girl with her arms pumping hard, coming up the hill towards me, feet slapping the sidewalk like she’s been running awhile and just starting to get tired. Now, every time I see someone jogging, I get alarmed because who’s to say it’s not just someone running from something? If some girl ever got attacked while wearing a track suit, she’d have a hard time looking like she was in danger, even if she was running as fast as she could down ten lanes of traffic. So I slow down to see this girl’s face, to make sure she’s not screaming or crying, but her chin’s too high and her baseball cap’s too low and we’re both moving too fast for me to focus. As I pass, I glance up to the rearview mirror, and I’m startled to still see the back of her now, the back of her head and the muscles working in her ass. I’m confused and take my foot off the gas and turn around to look. There she is, and now she’s heading towards me, ball cap low and covering her eyes like a cowboy. I drive on, confused as hell.

This girl must have turned around twice real fast (she forgot something then forgot what she forgot?) and I must have been looking up to the mirror, then back behind me the instant she did that. I guess that could make sense, but I’ll still wonder for days whether this rearview mirror is broken. Not cracked from a punch, but broken somewhere on the inside so it won’t ever let you see someone’s face.

The gas tank is low, so I stop to fill it up. It feels good, like an investment, like I’m planting a flag, proving my right to drive, like I’m feeding the horse I stole instead of just riding it to death. Can’t hang me for that, right?

At the gas station, I wander away from the nozzle to try to bend the antennae to better resemble my own, a sagging, backwards lightning bolt. The twisted antenna on my own car was the result of some anonymous enemy in college fucking with me and then me trying to bend it back, deciding that I’d make it look like something done on purpose instead of vandalism. Years later, my roommate Gray told me that he saw antennas for sale in an auto shop that were already bent into a smiley face, crazy straw, and lightning bolt design. I was depressed, sure that my idea had been stolen. So I was understandably worried that someone had cashed in on my best college brainstorm, the "Cheese-us," a perfect likeness of Jesus Christ I had chewed out of a block of mozzarella that never made it to our pizza. My old roommate convinced me that the "Cheese-us" was still an untapped goldmine and would likely remain this way. I also invented the compact discs you can store in a visor. I swear it’s true. There was a hole in one of mine and it turned out to be the perfect place to stash music I would consider guilty pleasures. I also invented the wheel, seriously. Well, wheels on pumpkins anyway. That’s a whole other story.
As I reholster the nozzle, I notice a sign on the gas pump that reads:

"Stealing fuel could cost you your license!"

I stare a minute, then get so disgusted by this threat that I try to get the attention of the teenager on the other side of the pump.

-Hey, you see that?

-What?

For some reason he steps back and looks at the bottom of his shoe, making me wonder what was happening to his foot the last time someone said those words to him. I rap the pump with a knuckle.

-No, that right there.

He reads the sign.

-So?

-So? Doesn’t that make you mad?

-Why?

-Because it doesn’t make any sense. That’s like saying, "Stealing a car could cost you your fingers."

He puts away his gas nozzle and opens his car door, lost in thought. He turns to me before he climbs in.

-No, it’s not like that.

-Why not?

-It’s more like saying, "Stealing a television could cost you your glasses."
Then he closes his door, fires up his car, and is gone before I can tell the kid that he was exactly right.

I’m thinking maybe I should wash this car before I bring it back. Worst case scenario, that might confuse anyone enough to not press charges. I could tell the judge, "Hey, would I have washed the car, filled it up with gas, and bent the antenna into a lightning bolt if I didn’t think it was mine?" Looking around at the neighborhoods, I see that my path has been a widening spiral from that grocery store parking lot. I tell myself that if I can find a car wash on one of these side streets in this circle, I’ll hose down the car, then maybe head back to get my own. If not, I’ll keep going.

As you get older, there’s a gap between your relationships that gets longer and longer and longer. And the gap between your cars gets shorter. I believe that one becomes less important while one become more important. It’s like the scales tipping, "only so much love in the world," the butterfly in Japan, all that stuff. As I drive around in circles big enough to pretend I’m not just driving in circles, I remember the one time in my life when I didn’t have a car or a relationship. It lasted for an entire year, and it’s almost like that year didn’t even exist.

I was working third shift at a copy place, cranking out syllabi and fall packets for the professors. The job was near campus, and I think it was because it was so close that I blew the engine on my car, an old stick-shift ‘85 Stallion, by stopping and starting and grinding the gears three times a day. Of course, it probably had something to do with the lack of engine oil, too, but I’m no doctor. Since this job was within walking distance, I put off getting another car thinking I could save some money hoofing it to work for awhile. And it seemed like a year passed the instant I made that decision.

The walk was a straight shot down some railroad tracks, and holy shit can you feel alternately contemplative, superior, profound, and sorry for yourself when you’re walking down tracks at 4 :00 in the morning. The self pity was intoxicating, especially when I had to sigh and step aside for a train, hoping that someone saw how dramatically I faced the wind when I did it. Of course, no one did, because 4:00 a.m. is the time when the fewest people are still awake or gotten up, a great after-the-bomb kind of scene. Inside a car, though, you don’t notice these things, and driving from campus to work wasn’t a long enough distance to hear half a song or even shift into 3rd gear. But the walk was at least seven songs long. So I decided I needed some headphones before I’d set out on this long walk to clock in. I dug through my old stuff (and not just the stuff I never unpacked last time, but the stuff that didn’t get unpacked three moves ago) and I found a crusty old radio shaped like a hamburger that my sister had given me as a joke. It had only one ear plug, only picked up AM radio (more appropriate), and the dial to tune in a station was a ridged tomato slice sticking out of the side like a bloody quarter. And, true story, the dial for the volume was the pickle. It had a string a little kid could wear it around its skinny neck, so that’s exactly what I did. Walked down the railroad tracks in the middle of the night listening to ‘70s easy-listening with a plastic hamburger bouncing off my chest with each step. Thinking back, if any one was up at that hour, I must have looked like an escaped mental patient. Gee, I wonder why I didn’t have a girlfriend back then? I thought it was, of course, because no girl is ever with someone without a car. But now I’m thinking that logic is flawed. Judging by the looks from the odd female bar straggler, I’m thinking it might have more to do with having a giant plastic hamburger plugged into your ear.

Paranoid that a train would sneak up on me while I rocked out to "Summers in the Sun" at top volume, I bought some oversized mirrored sunglasses that allowed me to see directly behind me. It’s not kids’ secret-agent stuff or anything. Anyone can look behind them if they just get sunglasses that are too big since the edges that stick out on each side of your head are like tiny rearview mirrors. And every so often a bass heavy song (‘70s AM radio has plenty) would vibrate my ear hard enough to shake those huge glasses, and I’d be reminded of the fuzzy images of cars behind me in a real rearview mirror when the car stereo speakers almost shook it off the windshield. At work, I excitedly told Jay, a guy I’d known since 6th grade, that I didn’t need a car anymore because I was halfway to becoming one, with my radio and tiny rearview mirrors and all. I asked him if he still had his dog’s favorite toy, a slobbery, ragged Post Office truck that honked every time his dog squeezed it in his mouth. Back when we were little, we’d sit and watch that dog squeeze the rubber truck like a pacifier, the squeaking like a muffled car horn, somehow soothing him to sleep with each pulse of his jaws. I said with a toy that squeaked like a horn, the transformation would be complete. "What’s next?" I asked him. "Wheels on my feet? And if I start making those lip-flapping engine noises that three generations of little boys have perfected, who’s gonna know the difference?"

Jay finally looked up from his stack of papers and stopped photocopying his middle finger to mutter sarcastically, "Yeah, dude. Sunglasses? Chew toy? Plastic hamburger? You look exactly like a car. You are truly the next step in evolution." Then he shouted over his shoulder, "Hey, how the fuck did a car get in here?!"

Soon after that conversation, Jay got me high behind the dumpster with a one-hitter painted to look like a cigarette and I stood there telling him that it had no effect on my because I "weigh at least 200 pounds." Then I proceed to walk down the tracks for three hours, high as hell, to see how far they would go. I woke up with rust from the rail on my cheek and the sun coming up in my face. I told a horrified Jay the next night that I remembered walking too far and getting too tired to come back, then deciding that by sleeping with my head against the rail, I would have been awakened by the vibrations of any train approaching.

Jay said, "You know, you wouldn’t need your giant sunglasses or to sleep on the rail or to constantly look over your shoulder if you weren’t walking on the goddamn tracks to begin with. Notice how the only people that worry about trains hitting them are walking down the tracks? I think there’s a connection." I wanted to tell him that I had to walk down the tracks. I wanted to explain that walking down the road would be admitting that I didn’t have a car, admitting I was missing something in my life, while walking down the tracks was more like exploring or pretending to. But we never talked about any serious shit. "On the road, I’d just be walking to work" was all I said. Until I added, "You know, it’s not gonna be too hard to figure out it’s you who’s been photocopying your middle finger into those booklets. Your class ring is the only one without any sports on it. And it’s the only one missing a stone I’ve ever seen someone wear this long out of high school. Why don’t you just copy your driver’s license instead and save them a step?"

The only time I ever walked down railroad tracks when I had a car was when I was looking for a party and a train was the only landmark I remembered from a cartoon on the directions. And when I couldn’t find the place, I started listening for any party so I could run in to drink a beer and quickly leave because I already had lied and told my girlfriend I was drinking when she called. So I wouldn’t be a liar, I ended up buying a warm six-pack, throwing five out, and sipping a can on a rail, waiting for trains that never came. Later as a more radical cure, I would announce things to force myself to do them. For example, I’d call my dad and tell him I just ran a mile, then start running as soon as I got off the phone. Or I’d tell an elaborate story about giving five bucks to some homeless dude, then waste eight hours trying to find one close to my description. Or I’d tell my brother I stole a car, only I never had the balls to actually do that.

Now that I think about it, there was one other time I went without a car. And there was so much crazy shit surrounding that time of my life that I almost forgot about it. More on that later.

I’ll say this though. When you’re walking on the road, for the first time you can see all the spots of gum pressed down into the pavement. Thousands, maybe millions of splashes of every color, pressed by tires and shoes into perfects circles. Is there really that much gum in the world? Does everyone have that shit in their mouths? Maybe they just don’t chew.

I open my vent and can smell a driver hidden in the pack of traffic ahead eating an orange. An orange has that kind of power. You could probably smell someone eating an orange on a plane flying over your head.

Without realizing it, I’m matching the speeds of other cars on the highway, and some of the drivers are getting annoyed, speeding up and slowing down. The car next to me has a bike strapped to the back. After ten miles of sideways glances, I’m sick of the driver and his bike. I hope for a red light so I can tell him, "You know, when I accidentally back into a biker, I usually scrape it off my car."

Then there’s a truck dragging ass in front of me, and the car with the bike is gone. I tap my brake, then tap it again. A slow vehicle in the passing lane is such a violation. It should cost him his hands. I feel momentarily guilty when I see the handicapped sticker. And even guiltier when I think, "Speed up. You’re disabled, not your truck."

I break my spiral path when I see the next exit towards my job approaching. I’m running late. I won’t have time to get my car first. I see a car next to me, and the girl driving seems irritated that I’ve matched her speed. I’d like to explain that I’m not doing it on purpose, but I’d have to follow her home to do that. As hilarious as that would be, my point would be lost.

It reminds me of when I first started college and most of the guy in the dorms were getting jobs in the kitchen hauling bags of fruits and vegetables, and next door there was this little ice cream shop that had nothing but girls working there. While hauling my tenth bag of potatoes, I had to ask:

-Why doesn’t anyone want to work in the ice cream shop? And who the fuck eats this many potatoes and oranges?

-Because there’s nothing but girls working there. And how do you think they make french fries and orange juice, dummy?

-Wait, because there’s nothing but girls working there?

-Yeah.

-And?

Since he’d just sold it, I went straight there, put in an application, and, of course, they hired me. They weren’t sure why they never had a guy working there before either. It was like in Jr. High when all the guys were taking Shop, and me and Jay took Home Economics instead. Everyone was like, "It’s full of girls, fag." And me and Jay said, "Exactly." And while those dumb shits made some sort of lopsided bubblegum machine that was really just a jar with a block of wood glued on the bottom, me and Jay ate cookies and cake every morning, leaning back in a chair with our arms crossed behind our heads like Caligula. And when we were supposed to be sewing, we’d outline a racetrack maze on a piece of paper and see who could navigate the needle the quickest inside the line. This, of course, sometimes ended in bloodshed, especially when we tried to race toward the center of a spiral pattern. We probably had more puncture wounds than all the idiots in Shop put together. But sewing-needle injuries healed quickly. And the idea of the two of us casually looking at sewing patterns for stuffed animals made our friends stuck in Shop more than a little angry. Not just because we were eating chocolate-chip cookie dough with all their girlfriends either. So, yeah, remembering this as an example, I took a job at the mysterious little ice cream shop, and it was a blast. Free ice cream, sitting on the counter not doing jack shit, making fun of the girls’ crappy pop music, competing to see who could spiral the ice cream highest on the cone. The was only one problem, which was explained to me by the three-year veteran when I complained about too many girls calling in sick at the same time:

-Because we work together, all of us have our menstrual cycles synchronized.

-Huh?

I was all confused. She elaborated.

-And everyone wanting the same days off is the least of my problems.

-Why?

-Because all of theirs changed to match mine. And that makes them angry.

I had no clue what she was talking about. That is, until I wanted a weekend off to go to Columbus with my roommate, Gray, but the three-year veteran decided she wanted those same days off, too. Guess who didn’t get his days off? That’s when I understood.

-Understood what?

My roommate asked me this all irritated, talking around a mouthful of jerky from some animal he’d killed personally the weekend before.

-Understood that I’m getting my first period. It’s an awkward time for me. Give me some space, brother.

-Shut the fuck up, dude.

He spit out some fur on his way out the door.

And I kept that job way longer than I should have. Every time I was going to quit, I couldn’t bear the thought of slamming my apron down on the counter since it would ruin any dramatic exit.

What’s my point? Oh, yeah, the cars. On the road, the cars are still matching speed, synchronized with me whether they want to be or not. Lurching forward and slowing down with angry peripheral glares as if I’m really trying to drive next to them. They don’t understand that my speed is the same, always has been. They’re just not taking these hills into account. It’s not my fault that, no matter what they try to do to shake me, this car always ends up on a perfect angle where I can see them and they can’t really see my face without turning their heads.

In front of me, the trailer of an 18-wheeler has an arrow on the left marked "pass" and an arrow on the right marked "suicide." It makes me smile and glance at the trees to the right to see if someone’s swinging from a noose. I open the vent and smell someone in the pack of cars ahead chewing gum. It’s the same gum she’d left near my clock. It was pink, but it tasted like oranges when I kissed her. I remember because I was confused then, too.

I find a car wash and try to feed the machine five bucks. It’s telling me to "insert coins only," so I go over to vacuum and air pump and see and big green box marked simply "Change."

I put the five bucks in the horizontal slot and it spits it back out. Without thinking, I drop a quarter in the vertical slot and stand there staring. I walk over to the air pump and hear nothing happening, so I give it another quarter and put my ear close to the box. Nothing. It apparently doesn’t make change, it just takes it from you. I start laughing and give it another quarter then yell to a passing car:

-Hey, notice anything different?!

I kept a key from every car I had. Whether I sold one or wrecked one or got one repossessed, I left the extra key on a lonely ring on my keychain, on towards the back that I never used. Eventually, I hooked them all together and buried them somewhere, never anticipating using them again. It was just a collection for the sake of a collection. But after the grocery store, if I ever saw one of my old cars again, I’d be tempted to put an old key in the lock, maybe to sit in it awhile, do some flashing back. However, now I’m not sure how important those old keys are. After I opened up a strange vehicle so easily, I’ve started thinking that maybe the keys are just an illusion of security, and that maybe any key opens any car at all.

I stop at the far end of a parking lot, blacktop and yellow lines that stretches to the horizon. The lot is so huge I can’t even see a reason for cars to gather there. No baseball diamond, grocery store, rock concert, garbage dump, roller coaster, nothing. I even check the sky for fireworks. Then I quickly walk up to a random car, put a key in the door without looking to see which one it is, and pull up on the handle. The door swings open, and I’m too shocked to move. Then I see that all four doors are unlocked and I quickly slam the door. I turn to see a woman leaning against her car, sunglasses on, one eyebrow up, arms crossed. I can’t tell if she’s staring at me or not. I walk away from the car, and in about three seconds I’m back on the road and finally heading toward my job, hoping someone asks me why I’m so late.

After work, I walk in the door and the alarm is going off because I accidentally set it for night instead of morning. The pulsing shriek of the alarm reminds me of sluggish mornings and makes me instantly tired. I decided I’m not going back out and maybe take the car back tomorrow. Maybe I can explain that it took the light of day for me to realize I’ve been driving around in someone else’s vehicle for 24 hours. Yeah, I’ll do this right after I get it washed.

I drop a pocketful of change onto the nightstand where the gum stained the dust and separate the quarters to one side. Enough money for two loads of laundry or five minutes at one of those do-it-yourself car washes tomorrow. I start wondering whether my car will get towed away by then.

Laying on my bed under the ceiling fan, shoes still on, I’m thinking about my workday and all the things I didn’t have the guts to do so I could dwell on them later. There’s one big one. This mom and her kid came in the bookstore, and the kid has some sort of mental disorder that made him bark out noises and cough and talk to strangers, and people were getting nervous and starting to sneak looks at them. You'd think that everyone would realize that the kid is obviously autistic or something and not just unruly but no, some cocksucker with an unlit cigar had to make his righteous disapproval known to all. This man came up to me to ask where a book is right when the kid barks out a "No!" to no one, and the man said to me (chewing on his unlit cigar and grinning like I'm his poker buddy) "Little bastard needs his ass whooped." I looked at him in disbelief, frowning, but I didn’t respond. And he snapped at me, "I guess no one around here has got a sense of humor." I mumbled, "Well, I think there's something wrong with him and..." But the asshole’s having none of it. Slobbery cigar bobbing, he snapped, "So what? No excuse, his whole body ain’t handicapped."

I wandered away gritting my teeth, found a of couple co-workers to tell the story to, then got mad enough to look for the guy to finally say something to him. He was long gone, of course. So I finished out the rest of the day with a sickly bubbling where my guts use to be. I didn't say shit when I had the chance. I’d probably give up one of my fingers (maybe not, maybe just a toe) in order to say this to that man:"You know what? You're right! They've been tying to understand that affliction for decades but you stumbled onto the cure. They used to think it was a mosquito bite that caused it, then science came snooping around with their misguided ideas, but you figured it all out. A smack upside the head by you and POW! The kid is cured! You're a fucking genius. All this time and the cure was right there in front of us. A quick backhand from you and the kid stops writing numbers in his shit, blinks twice, then looks around the room to say, ‘I'm sorry for embarrassing everyone, Mom!’ At first I didn't believe you knew what your were doing, but now it's clear that you knew how to handle the situation. My mistake, your work here is done, doctor! And here I just though he was born that way..." That's what I should have said. But I didn't. And worst of all, it fucked up my plans to quit. Now I have to wait until tomorrow to quit because I don’t want anyone to think I walked out because of that.

I feel like checking on my car right now, worried it’s gone. I sit up and decide to flip a coin. Heads, I switch the cars back. Tails, I kick off my shoes and go to sleep. If it lands on its side, I go looking for her. Once my brother told me it was impossible to flip a coin without a thumb. I try it and the quarter flies off my middle finger, ricochets off the ceiling fan, and disappears.

There’s a parking garage in the middle of an overgrown field of weeds, the last thing to be torn down on in a dead stretch of city too far from the heart to stay alive. When I was little I would ride my bike out there, watching the trees and building along the streets get darker and older and slump to the side. It reminded me of when I was real young and I’d put rubber bands tight on the tips of all my fingers to watch them turn red, and the kindergarten teacher who ripped them loose so hard her fingernail cut a half-moon along my pinkie. He screamed something about all my fingers falling off if I cut off the circulation, stressing the word "all" enough to make me think about once a year, three decades later. When I’d finally ride to that parking garage in the deadest part of deadest road, I’d try to get enough momentum make it up that snaking ramp. But I never had the strength, or the guts, to go all the way to the top. My legs would run out of gas about a third of the way up, and sometimes I was relieved.

Now I’m driving to the top, discovering that it’s the only thing I’ve ever revisited from my youth that is actually taller, bigger, or longer than I remembered. I check my gas gauge nervously, wondering how far I’ve gone, how much ramp you could squeeze into a building this size. Maybe it’s like the lines at an amusement park, where they corral everyone through a zigzag of rails and let you walk by the same ugly kids 90 times so that there aren’t angry families stretched over the horizon. And I start to wonder if I’m going up or really just driving in a circle. There’s no parked cars to use for bread crumbs to find my way back. It’s just up and up and up and no sunlight in sight. If anything, it seems to be getting darker. Even my car gets confused and the headlights come on by themselves. One time my brother wouldn’t come out of the bathroom and give up the toilet, and he told me through the door that the human intestine is curled up so tight that it’s three miles long when you unwrap it, so I was "gonna to have to wait awhile." The ramp in this garage is just like that. Stretched out it must extend to either ocean. Then the sun is suddenly blinding me and I’m on the roof.

The headlights blink off and I step out of my car, tracing a scratch along the hood and feeling an engine running hot enough to melt through the metal. Looking down, the trees have shrugged off their leaves and I can see more roads than I ever have before. And on these roads are hundreds of round splashes of color dotting the pavement in every direction. Is there really that much roadkill in the world? You’d think they’d figure out the road was killing them after the first fifty or so. And should they all be red? I could see every crayon you’d find in the box. I’d like to say I rubbed my eyes and the colors went away.

::: david - 3:49 AM [+] :::
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