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

Sunday, October 21, 2007

“Big gorilla at the L.A. Zoo snatched the glasses right off my face,
took the keys to my BMW, left me here to take his place.”
- Warren Zevon - “Gorilla You’re a Desperado”


FICTION:



spiderbites...a 79% true story



chapter VI: turn off the water!





My car is idling behind my mom at a red light. I’m waiting for her to go like I’m still hiding behind her leg at a crosswalk. She wants me to follow her and drop her car off at the mechanics then give her a ride back. The day before, someone hit her rear bumper parallel parking, putting a hairline crack in the fiberglass, but damaging her license plate more than anything. The crack in the bumper would be noticeable under even the least powerful microscope, I’m told, and she found it under her veteran, dust-seeking thumb in seconds. Being insured and particular about this shiny red vehicle of hers, a sporty, new whatever it was, she insists on taking it in as soon as possible. Me, I have nothing better to do. Soon I won’t even have a job to go to.

Knowing the crumpled license plate is less important to her than the crack, and since this traffic light is way longer than normal, I inch forward get a better look at the damage. Her numbers are unreadable now, and I’m surprised she’d risk getting pulled over and take her car in before she’d get the plate replaced. I creep up closer. Then a little closer. Closer. The red light is taking so long, I decide to harass her in a good-natured, mother vs. son kinda way.

Seesawing the gas and brake, I make my car lurch like an anxious animal. I see her eyes roll in her rearview mirror, so I lunge even closer. She shakes her head, so I start honking my horn and waving my arms around, acting like some crazy person impatient for her to run the light. I see her adjust her mirror so she doesn’t have to look at me. Quickly losing myself in my new role as a crazed motorist, I lay on the horn and rumble closer and closer and closer until I can gently tap our license plates together. At this point, I’m not sure of her reaction because the cars behind us, next to us, even across the intersection a hundred yards in front of us, suddenly erupt in a symphony of honking and yelling and obscene gestures as they all simultaneously stand up for a poor woman being brutalized. Realizing that shouting the words, “That’s my mom, yo!” would make me sound even crazier, or worse be mistaken for a complicated playground insult, I decide to stay in character and scream back at all the good Samaritans, let them know their help is appreciated but not needed at this time.

-Mind your fucking business!

That’s when the big dude on the other side of the intersection kisses his girlfriend (boyfriend? identical twin?) and climbs out of his tow truck clearly intent on kicking my ass over my shoulders. The horns suddenly stop as this sweaty, swaggering, stone-washed-denim covered beast lumbers across four lanes of highway, past my mom’s car, and pounds on my windshield like I forgot to pay for my fries. I roll it down. But just a crack.

-What up, my man?

-Get the fuck out of the car.

-Naw. I think I’ll stay right here. But, hey, listen, thanks for...

He starts rattling the door handle. Luckily, it locks automatically when it’s in gear, a feature probably created for situations and innocent jokes gone wrong just like this one. He spits on my window. He’s been eating something black. Probably a truck tire.

-I said get out. What the hell’s wrong with you attacking that woman, motherfucker?

-Whoa. What business is that of yours anyway? Don’t eat my car, dude.

Nothing, not even a smile. I switch gears and try some institutionalized babbling.

-Back off! I’m a crazy driver gone crazy! No telling what I’ll do next! Whoop!

He grabs the roof and shakes my car hard enough for me to quickly abandon the ruse.

-Okay! Joke! That’s my mom!

-What?!

-That’s my mom up there.

This seems to make him angrier. He shakes the car harder, and I grab the steering wheel thinking he might flip me over. Or maybe take me and the car home under his arm easy as a football. He screams at me through the window, back of his tongue bright green, the color in nature that says “stay away!” It’s likely from a sports drink to wash down that tire. The street light must be broken. Staring up, I have no doubt that this is exactly what happens at every broken street light. If one never changed, they’d be hundreds fucking dead.

-Then why the hell are you attacking your mom?!

-I wasn’t attacking her, chief. Her bumper’s already scratched. We’re on our way to...

The rest of the cars around us are honking again as the light finally changes. My mom’s head is out her window and peering back at us now but not showing any signs of intervening. I’m thinking he’ll never get off my car. Sorry, “the” car.

I count to three, unlock the door, and step out onto the road. Tow truck man steps back, momentarily surprised. I lean in close to talk to him over the noise. Quiet, intense conversations are supposed to diffuse situations like this, according to my stepdad. Up in his face, the tow truck man smells good to me for some reason. Dangerous and flammable, like gasoline or my real dad’s garage.

-Seriously, man, it was a joke. And I appreciate you sticking up for my mom here, but there’s really no reason for it. Just ask her.

Fists still balled and white-knuckled, he turns to her and shouts.

-Lady, is this your son?!

My mom seems to smile in slow motion as we both understand how important her answer will be. Don’t you do it, I’m thinking. Don’t you do it. But I can’t help smiling, too. Sighing, she gives in. Over the horns she admits it with a nod and a shrug. For some reason, I find this whole moment way too touching. I swear I’d hug her if I wasn’t knee-deep in angry, squawking traffic. Then she shocks me with the actual words.

-Yes, he’s my son.

Amazingly, this doesn’t convince the tow truck man of anything.

-Bullshit! Prove it!

Now we’re both as confused as he is. Defeated after all this debate, I finally take the low road and give him a shove. Why not, right?

-Don’t yell at her, asshole. She doesn’t have to prove anything to you.

-You ain’t her son!

-Fuck I ain’t!

I go to shove him again, and he catches my hand. Bastard’s strong. He’s twisting bone and muscle the wrong way and I’m losing my balance. Over his shoulder, I can see a car in the crowd sporting a pink license plate that reads IFAKE-IT. Then he’s hesitating, flinching at something he sees, too. He turns my fist over to see what’s wrong with it. He knows something’s off, but the realization that starts covering his face is painfully slow. He squints as he finally understands that my thumb is missing, and an idea lights his eyes up like a pinball bumper. He raises my arm high like a referee showing the crowd I won. Even though, in his mind, it’s just the opposite.

-Okay, lady, if he’s your son, how many fingers is he holding up?!

An hour later when we’re leaving the mechanics and she’s climbing into my stolen car, my mom hesitates before locking the seatbelt.

-One last stop. Take me to the license bureau, Jeeves.

-Does Uncle Chuck still work there?

-You know, I’m not sure if he...

Then she trails off looking around the interior, eyes narrow. Finally, she turns to stare at me a solid minute before she says:

-What’s different? You look different. What did you do? What’s changed?

Took her long enough. I don’t answer. She turns my face toward her.

-You’re really moving then?

This question I do answer.

-Yep.

-Again?

Back to not answering shit. I stare at the wrinkled license plate in her lap and remember something I need to do before I leave town. And from now on, until the end of my story, when I say or think the words “my car” I’ll be referring to this one I’ve stolen. That’s what has changed.

* * *

It’s not a real license plate, although you might not be able to tell while admiring such a masterpiece of deception. And it’s shockingly easy to make. Hey kids! What supplies do you need to create your own just like it? Side of a cereal box, magic marker, keen eye, unhealthy obsession with a neighbor...

Didn’t you ever wonder why the front and back of cereal boxes are exactly the same size as every vehicle’s name tag? This is why. Check out my handiwork. You’ll never know what car might be carrying one (or two, depending on the state) just like it. Look real close at what I made and you can even see the rust I drew on the tops of the screws. Hell, even the highway patrol would look at my little sketch of a faded, dog-eared registration sticker, frown over the top of their aviator glasses, and say, at the very worst, "Sir, I think these plates are expired."

So here's the history of it, and, as a bonus, some good reasons not to get too obsessed with someone who’s obsessed with someone who’s obsessed...with washing his car.

When I first moved into this apartment, I started to notice peculiar things right around summertime, right about the time I first started leaving the windows open. First, I noticed that the hot, high-pressure showers were getting weaker and weaker. This made me quite angry as that’s one of the deal-breakers when I’m looking to rent an apartment. Maybe because my dad would pound on the bathroom door every morning for me to get the fuck out and yell, “The only reason anyone should be in there is to wash their ass! How long does that take?!” Long, dad. Especially when you’re already late for school and the strong, hot water is a beautiful, deafening roar in your ears.

And then, one day, my shower started getting downright cold. Fighting the urge to scream, “Turn off the water!” at the shower walls like a mental patient trying to impress the face on the soap, I wrote it off as shitty plumbing and reminded myself to call the office, not thinking too much of it at all by the evening. Then I flung open the window the next day to soak in the morning warmth and sounds of the slowly awakening world. Sniff. Look at them birds. Look at that little butterfly. Why did it crash to the ground like that? Because my peaceful symphony of summer was quickly buried under the punishing beats of “Sports Jams: Volume Nine.” Remember the commercial? With the guys trading straws to drink from the beer cans attached to each other’s helmets? A very sexually suggestive promotion, I remember thinking at the time. And the collection seemed a bit overpriced, too, or I would have bought it for my brother. Guess it wasn’t too expensive for everyone else because every morning I’d open my window with a toothbrush in my mouth playing hide-and-seek with the corn flakes still in my teeth and...

"You ready for dis?!" Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom.

I’d be like, "No, dude. I ain’t ready for this," head shaking, toothbrush sagging miserably.

Now, don't get me wrong, I've got some shit music of my own that I wouldn't wish on anyone that didn’t lose a bet, but this was coming from the parking lot every morning (including weekends, sometimes at night, too) just like clockwork. Where was it coming from, you ask? A tail-gate party? Cheerleading practice? Warm-up for the dance-fighting competition at the Ohio State Fair? Two time travelers from the ‘80's buttfucking in a convertible? The lamest poltergeist in the history of hauntings? Nope. None of the above.

It was the Wild Pony.

The source of the my morning’s new pulsing soundtrack was some little dude in huge sunglasses with a brand new (at the time) 1999 Stallion XP, all shiny and chrome and baby blue. And he was out there, hose roped around his shoulder like ammunition, lovingly rubbing it with a rag so hard you kept waiting for a genie to pop out of the tailpipe. The mystery was solved. That’s where my water pressure and heat was going. Another minor mystery was solved much later when one of his sleeveless T-shirts depicting a cartoon of his car triumphantly breaking free of the Earth’s atmosphere explained to the world that the “XP” in his baby’s name meant, of course, “Xtra Pussy!” Oh yeah, one last thing, and this is the most important detail of all. He had a personalized license plate that read, I shit you not:

WLD-PNY!

There was an exclamation point on it. I swear. Okay, maybe there wasn’t. But there could have been. There should have been. I watched him a while, scoffed, spit my toothpaste foam and cornflake bits out the window, and tried to forget. Until the next morning, of course. It was 8:00 a.m., a split-second before my alarm when I’m already awake and watching the numbers anyway, dreading any noise and flinching like I’m watching a cat playing with a balloon and...

“You ready for dis?!” Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom.

Then the next morning. Then the next. And the next. Wild Pony was waxing and stroking his car every goddamn day. Didn’t he have a job to go to? And whenever he finished, smug and satisfied there was nothing but that doughnut glaze on the perfect blue surface, he’d gently park it under the Joshua Tree, a lonely, gnarly Spruce, the only sign of vegetation and shade at the far end of the parking lot. And if someone dared to park too close to his baby, maybe confused enough to park under that single tree to, say, protect an actual baby from the harsh sunlight, he’d run out to move his car five seconds later.

I stared at him from my window, my cereal spoon deep in thought and bobbing like a diving board, watching him leaning on the Stallion with his goofy sleeveless shirt and not a muscle in sight. I was becoming enraptured. Friends and relatives would say I was in love. And I would patiently explain to them that, no, everything about him was just making me angry. Yep, that’s love, they’d say. But it was anger, I swear. And I could prove it. For example, the way he'd leave a towel hanging out of the trunk after each waxing? I'd stare at that white towel dangling there and think “For the love of Christ, why?!” Then I’d remember that one movie, what was it called? “Bruiser?” “Cruiser?” In the flick, this cop goes undercover in leather bars to find some killer who's stalking only gay men. The cop, noticing a certain fashion trend in these places, tucks a bandanna in his right pocket one night and quickly gets scolded by some leathery leather dude because right pocket means you like to “take it in the ass” and the left pocket means you like to “give it in the ass” and a yellow bandanna means you like "watersports" and a red, white, and blue bandanna means that, of course, you'll shout out "America, love it or leave it!" when you're getting railed. Okay, my gay coworker (some of my best friends, I swear) probably made the last one up when I tried to explain all this to him, and I might actually have this whole left pocket/right pocket thing backwards (so is it ever worth the risk carrying a bandanna ever again? I’d rather wear plaid into South Central) but I started to wonder about the significance of Wild Pony’s white towel hanging out of his trunk 24/7, and I couldn’t help but study his physical appearance even closer. His chronic lack of sleeves made this real easy.

He really was a miracle of evolution. Skinny arms but a bulbous gut, actually scrawny and fat at the same time. All he needed was glasses, one short leg, maybe a missing thumb, and he would be voted “Darwin’s Least Likely,” just one creature above those flies that last an hour.

So, besides imagining all sorts of signals this clown might be sending me with his towel-in-the-trunk thing, I started calling friends to describe the scene. And they kept insisting that I shouldn't get obsessed watching a neighbor (“again?!”) asking me, all serious, “What do you care if he waxes his car every day?” and, of course, ending the conversation with a confused, “What did you say his name was? “Wild Tony?” How do you know this?”

Then one morning as I was straining with my tongue to loosen a compacted bit of cereal from the center of a back molar and shaking the last of the cornflake gravel off the bottom of the empty box to dust my milk and squeeze out just one...more...bowl (saves money) the pulse of the dance music suddenly stopped. I ran to the window wanting to yell, “You still got three songs to go, asshole!” and watched him finish up waxing his bumper early, without the usual flourish of his scrawny arm and dramatic locker room horseplay snap of the towel at no one. Then he picked up his bucket of supplies and turned to wander across the parking lot to the corner where the dumpster sat. He walked up behind another car and cautiously looked around. Another car?! The empty cereal box collapsed in my grip. If I’d been drinking from a Styrofoam cup, it would have exploded. Not that impressive, I realize, but I have ripped a phone book in half before. It took three weeks and most of my summer vacation.

I watched Wild Pony lean down and pop the trunk of a slouching, beat-up, rusted-out 1972 Grenade. Over his shoulder, I could see the overflowing piles of cleaning supplies and rags burying a spare tire, and I realized that this dirty secret of a car was where he stored the milk for his baby. His blue baby always parked safely under the tree at the best end of the lot. For some reason, I was as shocked at this revelation as if he’d popped the truck to expose a pile of actual babies. Or worse, those spring-loaded snakes from the fake peanut can. Seriously, that is scarier. The fact that Wild Pony had another car that he hid next to the dumpster so scandalously, the fact that this noble, metal monster was ending its long, distinguished life on the road as a storage locker for someone to lovingly caress and fondle a new fiberglass toy...it saddened and angered me. I sat glaring at him from my window ledge, as usual making myself later and later for work for reasons impossible to explain to a boss (“he’s being unfaithful to his car!”) and I started to carefully tear the sides off the empty cornflake box in frustration. Then, in a moment of clear-eyed inspiration (you’re allowed exactly three in your lifetime) I sat down cross-legged on the floor and emptied the box of crayons I kept on top of the ‘fridge for when I babysat my nieces into the protective grade-school diamond of personal space between my knees. And it was there that I began to create a license plate for the WLD-PNY2.

I ended up having to use a sick day to get the heads of the screws just right. They were usually the hardest part since you have to use the strange, almost invisible gray crayon. My boss hung up before I could finish explaining all this to her.

That night, I snuck out and taped my perfect new vanity plate onto the ‘72 Grenade so that he'd finally be forced to give recognition, respect, maybe even a bit of love, to this ugly stepchild in his family, and maybe, someday, he'd crank “Sports Jams” out of an old 8-track, blown-speaker sound system in this sad, slumping, bumperless, rusted-out ride. Of course “Sports Jams” for an 8-track might sound different as I think they played football without helmets back then. But maybe one day he'd proudly drive that car slowly around the parking lot to the tree, ashamed no more, pale skinny arm hanging out the driver's side window, sunlight actually turning his skin red while I watch, sticky white towel resting on his swollen beer belly, sunglasses high on his pointy head, finally proud enough to show his eyes to the world. Alas, it wasn’t meant to be. The next morning, this new, painstakingly handcrafted license plate had been flung about fifty feet into the cornfield next to our building. I like to pretend that the car shrugged it off instead of him. And I think it makes some kind of sense, that plate ending up in a cornfield and all.

Eventually, I went back down to the low road for a solution to my shower water heat/pressure problem, so I just cut the hose Wild Pony had been using and threw the coil into that field, too. I noticed that the crows were scared shitless of it, thinking it was a snake. That made sense, too, as I remembered the family’s ducks from my childhood running for cover every time I tried to hose out their feather and shit-encrusted water bowls. I’ll tell you about our ducks later when there’s less chance of making a point and me getting depressed.

And, on the bright side, the experience did teach me how to make a fake license plate that could pass a cursory police officer’s drive-by or maybe even a second or third glance at a traffic light. On the down side, soon after, and to this day, I see vanity plates everywhere, but I can’t completely blame him for that. At first, I thought it was a welcome distraction from trying to find meaning in every street sign I passed. Too bad that didn’t last.

The thirteenth scariest letter I ever got in my life was from the state of Ohio reminding me that certain letter combinations of characters and digits on license plates were “unacceptable.” 90% of these are apparently anything that tries all sneaky to phonetically spell “fuck,” “shit,” “hell,” “tits,” or “ass.” I didn’t remember trying to get one of those lame gags, but to receive that letter, hell, I guess I must have way back when. I was still angry for being singled out because one look around and you can see they’ve been asleep at the switch for years with all the “ass” plates still slipping through. I still see them around daily. Sure, you’ll get the occasional “fuck you, too,” sorry, I mean, 4Q-YU2. And once I saw a backwards “fuck you, too,” sorry, I mean, “2U-KCUF,” on the front of an ambulance. Sorry, I mean “ecnalubma.” There’s no way it was an accident that you could read both this plate and the name of the ambulance in your rearview mirror when it pushes through traffic behind your car in an emergency. Where was the state of Ohio that day? But none of those are anywhere near as frequent as the ass plates. Hell, just the other day I saw someone declaring themselves an ANL-ETR in a church parking lot. The more restrictions, the more creative people will get when it comes to “ass” variations. And for some reason, it’s much easier to sneak these past than it is for any other forbidden word. It almost makes you think that there’s something else going on here. Something bigger than us? Something our cars are trying to tell us? Maybe not. Come on, what can you really say in seven letters or less? A lot, it seems, if you look around on the road. Of course, there’s always the chance that these messages I’ve deciphered for years are accidental, incidental, and that I simply bring the translation with me.

* * *

The next time I see her, I prepare to ask my mom about the last leg of her trip to get a new plate, but I don’t have to since she’s already complaining about it. She can’t believe they made her take an eye test. “An eye test?!” At almost the exact same time, we both suddenly exclaim, “How many fingers am I holding up?” and start laughing.

-Did you see the license plate?

She looks up to remember.

-What, was it trying to be cute, something like “under tow” or, wait, “camel tow?”

-No, that’s too many letters. I think it was “T-O-W-D-L-Y-N.”

-What’s that supposed to be?

-It said “tow the line,” you know, like “toe the line?”

-You’re reaching, son.

I ask if she ran into Uncle Chuck at the license bureau, and she scoffs and says she thinks he quit there as soon as he sold that idea to the phone companies. Ah, the “idea.” His legendary “one good idea.” I was so jealous of him when all that happened. Have been since I was little.

Then she asks where I’m off to in such a hurry and I finally get to say, for the first time in awhile (even though, technically, I still got a day or two left), “Not to work!”

Feels good. Free time and no money is a wonderful combination. Without looking for something to buy, a stop in a used videogame shop can be much more interesting. Out of habit from my (old) job at the bookstore, I can’t help but start alphabetizing some games on the wall and moving all their spines flush with the edge of the shelf while I listen to some homeless-looking guy talk the ear off one of the employees.

-...because most of these games from 2001 were my idea, and you can tell if you look real close when a character gets shot. You want to know how? Ask me how...
I stop in the “R’s” and decide to rescue the employee by interrupting with a simple question about store hours. The homeless-looking guy glares like I cut in on a wedding dance with his daughter, and while the employee’s pointing at the sign on the door, he leans in to whisper his thanks. Not for the rescue though.

-Seriously, dude, you don’t have to organize our games. Thanks anyway.

Losing track of the homeless-looking guy, I quickly leave the shop. A fried blonde in a tiny red car zips past with a plate that reads CHEAT-ER. I swear she’s the one that said “IFAKE-IT” earlier. I wish I could make it say NOZ-BLEED instead. A block down, I find my homeless talking another ear off a hot dog vendor.

-...originally, I designed them pointed on both ends so that there was no danger of your mouth slamming shut and biting your tongue while you ate...

I walk up around him and buy a hot dog I don’t even want and, because of recent developments, can no longer afford. The vendor seems to be thanking me for rescuing him by hooking me up with so much chili it buries the bun, but I can’t be sure behind his sunglasses. Then, a block up, I see the homeless-looking guy waiting in line for the bus. When it pulls up, I notice the license plate on the back is scorched black from the diesel pipe exhaust and air conditioning leakage running up and down its ass end eight hours a day. I hesitate, realizing that all bets are off if I set foot on a vehicle without a name or number. It could take me anywhere. Something like that has no accountability. Then I remember all the movies where views from a police helicopter show that, unknown to the passengers inside, a bus’s identification number is actually screaming at the sky at all times in huge, man-sized script painted across its roof. So I get on and wait to see who he bothers this time. But, of course, after following him around so much all day, the first person he locks onto is me. Trying to figure out why I look familiar, he spins around, trots back, and plops down in the neighboring seat with a smile and a sigh. He smells like old burgers.

-Do I know you, man?

-Don’t think so.

-Do you like my bus?

Then he proceeds to talk my ears off. And, of course, there’s no one to rescue me.

Outside the window, I see a vanity plate on a lobster delivery truck that reads BIG-BUGZ. I think about this a minute and realize that, yeah, if you put one on someone’s foot when they’re not paying attention, that’s exactly what they are. He sees me looking and nods towards the truck.

-You see that? I invented those. I was the first one with a vanity plate on my car. Ever.

-Really.

Notice the lack of question mark. When I use that word, it never sounds like a question.

-You don’t believe me?

-What’s your name?

Being a smart ass, I don’t let him answer. I think of the most random combination of numbers and letters that I can.

-Wait, let me guess. Is it QTX-739?

His eyes widen.

-Close.

Eventually, I’m so unresponsive to him that he moves to sit next to a man in a suit with so many sharp corners he looks dangerous to bump into. To my surprise, this businessman talks to him freely. The homeless-looking guy stops the conversation for a second to cock a thumb in my direction and whisper “thanks” to the man in the sharp suit for letting him sit next to him. I hear him tell this man that he sees vanity plates everywhere now. Just like me. Chicken or the egg? Who can tell. That wasn’t a question either.

When I get off at the next stop, I see a green convertible slumped on the side of the road surrounded by gray ash stains and the charred husks of dead road flares. It seems to be sagging closer to the even ground as I stare at it. Its front tire is missing, and the plate doesn’t read THUM-LSS even though it should.

I really need to find a nemesis. Bad. Or maybe just a job.

Back in my car, my shoulders hunch when the truck in front of me explosively loses a layer of tire tread. None of the cars around me flinch. On the radio, the DJ is talking about people who call in having “metal” disorders because of the hard rock ‘80s music they request all day. I’m kind of sick of his voice, but it’s the strongest station I get in this car. I didn’t have reception problems before. I think it’s because my antenna got bent in one of those car washes. At the next gas station, I get out and bend it around my wrist so it look more like it should, like it used to. And for a second, it won’t let me go.

I see some kids in their mom’s minivan with a plate that says RUN-AMOK, then a mile later, a plate on a brown ‘70s van that says X-CHNGD. It reminds me again what I need to do with my plates before I leave town. Of course, now I’m thinking there’s a good chance that license plate actually said EN-GAGD instead. The van was moving to fast to be sure. I think I’m figuring out why I’m always studying these plates, and it’s not because I want to be a cop when I grow up (I want to be an astronaut!) It’s because it’s where your eyes go naturally when something drives by, the exact same place your eyes will go when a girl walks past you. Just ask any designer jeans company where they put their name and why.

When I see someone on a bicycle with a license plate attached to their back, I’m tempted to upend them with a carefully placed shoe in the spokes so that I can stick that tag to the ass of his tight track suit where it belongs. Sorry, I meant “her” ass. Right next to the white towel.

There’s a spider on the gas pump I’m using, its web spun just high enough to avoid the movement of the hose. It’s plump and healthy, apparently unaffected by the fumes or the meals it snatches saturated in oil and ash. I walk around my car and check the cereal box taped over my license plate. A corner is curled out, so I bend it back down. It’s not quite dirty enough to look real. But it’s getting there.

* * *

Back in grade school, I was good friends with a girl whose dad had a hay ride around his property every year. He would fill a topless trailer with straw and grass and hook it to his tractor. Then he’d sniff a flask of mystery fluid, hold it up to the tractor’s headlight, tuck it away in his coat, and start weaving a group of about twenty of us as close to the roadside ditches as he dared. It was fun but scary as shit, and I doubt parents would have let their kids attend if they saw him sneak those swigs from the flask, snickering while he tried to tip the trailer as far as he could without spilling. And one thing about hay people don’t realize...it hurts. It’s like sitting in a pile of half-sharpened pencils, if the pencils were also flexible enough to work their way up your shirt and down your pants. I’d watch the girls scratching and shaking the hay loose and wonder how it managed to worm its way down the backs of their belts into places us boys weren’t allowed yet. And once that flask was empty and the tractor stopped weaving so hard and settled on its long trek around the six-acre property line, most of the kids stopped squealing and reflexively formed the impenetrable groups they always had. One year, however, I had a plan.

There was a kid from another town who’d just moved here who was still working that otherworldly hint of seductive “stranger danger,” as the girls called it, with the rest of our class. We called him “Crazy Mark” even though I’m pretty sure he gave himself the nickname. I noticed he seemed bored in the corner of the hay ride, not gasping at any of our close calls with the ditches. And, in spite of an unremarkable face, clothing, or build, I noticed all the girls couldn’t take their eyes off him for more than a few minutes at a time. I brooded over this for about half the ride, then moved to sit down next to him and talk some shit on the rest of the passengers. Jay wanted nothing to do with these hay rides and was off on some random vandalism or I’m sure I wouldn’t have needed this new kid as a substitute. But I kind of liked him. We were about as close as friends could be after a wobbly. eight-minute lap around a dead bean field. So I finally popped the big question in his ear.

-Hey, let’s stage a fight to freak everyone out.

I’d never been in a fight before, so this plan worked for me on several levels. He started giggling and agreed that this would be a good way to shake up the trailer since at least two girls were now sleeping. So, the next time the trailer straightened out and its wheels found the rows tilled into the field so we could keep our balance, we both stood up. I made sure most of the eyes were on us and gave Crazy Mark a hard shove in the chest, yelling:

-What did you say?!

I must have shoved him a little harder than I intended because he wobbled and pinwheeled his arms a moment and looked kind of stupid. Then he must have totally forgotten our plan from a whole nine fucking seconds ago because hauled back and punched me in the face hard enough to dump me over the side like a bowel movement. I don’t even remember the tractor stopping, but I do remember alcohol on someone’s breath while they were carrying me. My dad’s still convinced it was a drunken nurse in the emergency room. And, somehow, I ended up a dislocated jaw and a reluctant friendship with Crazy Mark as some sort of unspoken apology. After graduation, I even sold him my car, a piss-yellow ‘88 Sundog. Signed over the title to him the day after I made the last payment. And as anyone who makes a last car payment can tell you, that’s precisely when it starts to fall apart.

He called me complaining about a wheel that actually flew off (!) when he took a sharp turn. I sighed and intoned into the phone all calm and fatherly, “Son, that’s your car now. Do I call you and tell you about my car?” Then hung up. But he’s got more reasons than that to be angry. Over a girl, of course. What else? More flashing back in a second. Right now, I’m in a hurry. Got to get two birds with one stone and all that jazz.

* * *

It’s sleeping in the exact same spot I saw it five years ago. A yellow dog curled up in the corner of the employee end of the parking lot at Ike’s Truck Stop off I-75. A garage-sized dive where Crazy Mark’s been working his whole life at a dead-end job I got for his ungrateful ass. I run over towards the dog, low to the ground with a screwdriver in my teeth like I’m in the trenches of World War II. If they fought with screwdrivers on D-Day. Careful not to wake it, I quickly removed the license plate from the Sundog, then replace it with my own. My heart’s pounding. This is fun. I feel like I’m swapping collars on sleeping dinosaurs. I wipe the dirt from his plate with my thumb. RPX-732 was his number, my old number. His plate is rusted and oil-flecked to perfection. And this might be hard to believe without a picture, but even in the harsh sunlight, my cornflakes box replicas look completely identical. I put the metal plates from my stolen Cavalry onto his Sundog, then put the new cardboard impostors over top of them. I’m not sure what exactly the plan is, except maybe to create maximum confusion for the police and the reader. However, I am hoping that when he eventually discovers the cardboard plates are fake, he’ll assume that I sold him the car this way all those years ago. Maybe it will buy a little more time when I need it the most, I don’t know. That’s called “foreshadowing.” I know it seems like a big leap to hope he will make this assumption, but, hey, he didn’t name himself Crazy Mark for nothing!

I hesitate, wondering if I should have given him a vanity EATS-AZZ plate instead, as apparently tags advertising anal action are actually less conspicuous than random numbers these days. No, RPX-732 is it, always has been. My old number that I chose all those years ago simply because a computer program told me that it was the number and letter combination least likely to be noticed. And it’s true. Even in staged scenes of heightened drama or violence, laboratory test subjects could not remember seeing this license plate at all. Not even a car. Try it some time.

Once his plates are secured to my green Cavalry, I turn to stare at my old ride. Crazy fuckin’ Mark. What the hell happened to you? I heard you were engaged to that girl we both dated (sometimes at the same time) and I also heard that you smacked her in the face when she broke up with you. I step closer and check the rubber seal around the driver’s-side window. It’s still crusted with white, oil-based paint. I smile, remembering the time when it was my turn to date that girl and I came out of a record store to find the words “Fuck You!” painted angrily across the glass.

I could never prove that you did it, but I’m happy to see that you were never able to get all that paint off either, motherfucker.

I pull a random key from my pocket and try the lock. It opens without a sound, like I never even sold it to him years ago. I feel bad, like I should have hung onto this car after I paid it off, like I’d worked and earned the right to own this car only to decide in that exact same instant that I never wanted to see it again. How many times does that happy on someone’s wedding night? Yeah, I’m looking at you, dude.

I climb behind the wheel. I don’t even have time to look around before I know that I do not like it back in this car after all. I feel like I’m sitting in a cold puddle of something bad, and it’s slowly seeping through my jeans and crawling up the crack of my ass. It’s almost as uncomfortable as the memory of that itchy hay ride. Finally glancing around, I see the most random, pointless collection of compact disc and cassettes cracked and scratched and littering the floor. I need to get out now. This is what would have happened if I had stayed in this car, stayed in this town, stopped treating my music with respect and started smacking them around.

* * *

I think about her often because I know, and I’m sure she knows, she’d have been better off never crossing paths with any of us. The girl in question, we’ll call her “Gee,” as in the letter “G,” because she had a license plate that me, Jay, and Crazy Mark all got excited about when we thought it said GOD-LESS, almost killed at least one of us. With only a clever license plate, a pretty face, and a nice ass to go on (a “black girl’s ass” according to Jay) we thought this particular girl that stopped to rent movies every Thursday from the video store we all worked at was the most utterly fascinating creature none of us knew. The better-looking, the more “complicated,” right? And even after a closer inspection revealed that her license actually said GODD-ESS instead, we just chalked that up to her being cheeky and ironic instead of just a shallow idiot. I dated her first. Then Crazy Mark about a year later. She didn’t want anything to do with Jay, and he’s been in love with her ever since. However, her and Mark didn’t last too long, and when it was over she stopped in the video store that he’d long since quit (but I couldn’t seem to break up with) and showed me some disturbing poetry she said Mark had been leaving in her bird bath and bathtub when no one was home. I assured her that he was “harmless and only a bad poet” and to “just forgot about the whole thing” and to “thank that God of yours that Jay wasn’t the one writing you poetry instead” and “why the fuck has a ‘bird bath?” She muttered something about there being nothing harmless about bad poetry and wandered out the in door. So then, after hearing all this, I remembered back a couple weeks earlier when Jay told me, “Hey, we had a friend in common!”

He was working at a restaurant near his new apartment in the city, a high-end spot named “Jay’s” which he claimed was completely incidental and swore he was not pretending it was actually his place when he parked his car every morning and gazed lovingly up at the sign while doing leg stretches. Yeah, right. Anyway, he said another guy in the kitchen, the head chef (this was Jay’s cooking phase, right before his park-ranger phase) was living with this girl, Gee, and guess what his boss had been up to? Jay explained it all complete with at least one sound effect:

-He’s fucking at least three chicks on a regular basis. He comes back from the parking lot on his 15-minute and brags about it, shaking my hands all proud, sometimes shaking my head, then wiping who knows what sticky shit all over my shoulders. Sure, he might be lying. But he’s elbow-deep in something out there. His face comes back in grinning like a glazed doughnut and his fingers look like he just waxed a car or delivered a newborn calf. Once he playfully backhanded me in the face. Splotch! It was like that time the giraffe woke me up with its tongue when we passed out in the zoo.

-You passed out in the zoo. And how does anyone “playfully” backhand someone?

-That’s what I’m saying, dude!

So I filed this information away, along with Jay telling me about Head Chef trying to sell him a bunch of guns (!) Apparently, he was also this survival nut, and me and Jay were on the cusp of our gun phase (right before his military phase), something that lasted one whole trip to a shooting range and is a story for another time when it guarantees to be very symbolic. Here’s a sneak preview. I get away with pointing a gun at a cop, which makes it the fucking feel-good movie of the year.

Fast forward back (can you do that with an 8-track?) to when I start seeing Gee regularly again at the video store for the first time in couple years. Her plate still doesn’t say GOD-LESS no matter how hard I prayed, but now, after I watched her put her movies in the return slot and try not to make any noise doing it, I started liking her all over again. I think it was just from thinking about all the conversations and drama going on around her that she was unaware of, maybe my knowledge of her Chef’s secret recipes, or maybe just the way she was being wronged, I don’t know. But I wanted her just like the old days so I decided to strike up conversations every chance I got. It was fun for a couple of weeks, even though she had no mysterious poetry bombs to report. Then one day it was all awkward and she said she’d seen me “driving behind her the other day,” then nervously asked if I knew anyone else that lived on her street because she thought she saw my car there, too. I immediately understood that this was Crazy Mark driving the car I’d sold to him, the car I’d owned when me and Gee were together. I tried to explain all this to her, and she seemed unconvinced and wary. Then, the next time she came in, she told me that, yes, Mark had been around recently. He’d walked straight into her house a couple weeks ago, and Head Chef had to “gently” restrain him until the cops showed up. No shit, I said. I asked her if she saw my car. Then I asked if she thought Mark was mistreating it. She blinked, frowned, sighed and left, either thinking my concerns were misplaced or clearly just tired as fuck of us crazy bastards. And right then, I made a decision that I knew I’d probably be punished for some day. Hasn’t happened yet though.

I called up Crazy Mark and got the scoop on that incident. Of course, his version of events was radically different. He claimed that he’d only stopped by as an afterthought to give her another small, 42-page poem, and that Head Chef attacked him for no reason and held him on the ground at gunpoint with a knee on his throat. No “gently.” He went on to say that when the cops showed up, that gun had mysteriously vanished, and that he was going to be charged with trespassing, assault, and attempted kidnapping. If he could “just prove there was a gun involved,” he was sure he could get all those charges thrown out. I said, “Holy shit, dude, Jay works with this asshole, and he’s trying to sell him guns all the time.” I actually heard Mark’s brain shifting gears on the other end of the phone. So I threw a little more sugar into his gas tank, I mean, a little more seasoning into his pot.

-Hey, did you know that this cocksucker is fucking around on her, too? Nails everything in town on his smoke breaks? Laughs about it to everyone in the kitchen where he works, all the while twirling six-shooters on his hips? Someone should do something. None of my business though. Anyway, how about those Red Wings?

Mark cleared his throat and calmly said, “No, I didn’t know that,” then got off the phone.

About a week later, Jay told me he was being summoned to testify in court about Mark’s case and “thanks for involving me, fuckface,” and I went on with my life for awhile. Then Gee came back into the video store right on cue and told me she was single again. She caught the Head cheating. I asked her for details but get none. So we dated for a couple more months while I avoided Mark’s calls, and, of course, the same things that had made us incompatible back then made us incompatible all over again. After our second (third? fourth?) break-up, we went our separate ways. Then one day, I was finally bored enough to rekindle my friendship with Crazy Mark, curious what he knew.

First thing he asked me was, “Where you been?” I said, “Nowhere. Where you been?” He said, “Jail.”

He told me that he sorta lost his mind after I told him about the Head cheating on Gee. After that, compounded with the trespassing, assault, and attempted kidnapping charges (most of them dismissed, however, when Jay testified about the gun), he decided to get some righteous revenge. Just as I’d hoped he would. Apparently, he popped out of the bushes and bashed the Head within an inch of its life with a convenient block of nearby firewood, breaking its collarbone so that it was unable to “make a proper omelet ever again” (Jay’s words) and sent it crawling down the street convinced it was mugged (Chef’s words). Some “strange” (Mark’s words) that the Head had been banging came running out of a parked car all blustering, and the commotion woke up Gee who finally caught him red-handed. And red-headed. Red fucking everything.

Covered in blood and spouting sonnets, Crazy Mark was quickly arrested and did a couple months in jail. And Gee came back to me right on schedule so I could effectively get her out of my system. Everybody wins! I call that a happy ending because the fucker shouldn’t be stalking people in my car and, more importantly, making me look bad on hay rides. And even though I finally seemed to convince her that it wasn’t me following her around in the Sundog, I know all that time that she thought it was me made a lasting impression that the truth could never erase. It’s like starting off a conversation with bad news, an insult, or a horrible lie and then quickly adding, “just kidding.” Sure, you might get the laugh, but that split-second that they thought you were serious stays with them forever, even if they never recognize why their feelings for you have changed just that teeny tiny bit (fingers about an inch apart).

So that’s why I’m leaving the state wearing his plates, officer. Sort of. Make any sense? I hope not. Doesn’t matter anyway, see you at the shooting range! Who cares. At the least, I’m just trying to stack up enough confusion for authorities to wander away with their eyes-crossed if I’m ever pulled over. And what are the chances of that? Suspenseful music playing in the background.

* * *

I see a small white car with POEM-4VR written on its ass. I almost get mad until I decide that one saying POET-4VR would be much more pretentious. I remember a girl who had “poem” tattooed across her lower back and I laughed and asked her why she didn’t get one that just said “picture” instead. At that, she turned over, locked her legs at the ankles, and never did give me the combination.

Hey, speaking of ass! Weren’t we? I’m driving to work again. I know I said I quit. I’m almost done. It’s my third or second-to-last day, and I nudge the drunken, invisible rabbit that’s not in the passenger seat next to me to point out a plate on a honking, irate ‘70s sedan that reads URNZ-WAY. Even though that’s impossible since I’m behind it, that shit’s so true.

At the bookstore, we’re in the eye of the hurricane these days with the Thanksgiving frenzy finally dying down before the Christmas assault begins. For most of the workday, I manage to stay out of trouble, for seven of the eight hours anyway. Then I’m out on my last 15-minute (27-minute) break before we have to start rolling out the carts for the shelvers tomorrow. I’m having a loud conversation with Jay behind the building, our backs against the propped-open receiving room door, something that our employee handbook frowned upon. Literally. And I’m not misusing “literally” like most of my coworkers do daily. Page 87 of the handbook really does have a frowny face right next to two cartoon hooligans smoking and jackassing around by a dumpster. Did I mention that Jay worked here with me for a whole week during the holiday season? He actually got fired on retail’s legendary “Black Friday” last year, the same night a tuneless woman was belting out Christmas carols in the music section and a wonderfully angry, stinky, maliciously defecating penguin on loan from the zoo was tracking shit everywhere and running amok in the kids section knocking down the displays it didn’t like, which was all of them. This might sound like the kind of day when every extra employee could be helpful no matter how incompetent. Hell, even a quadriplegic could lend a hand. But not Jay. He was done by lunch. Someone must have had a good reason for his dismissal. But, apparently, whoever rehired him must have forgotten his crimes because here he is again back on the payroll, name tag hiding in his shirt so customers won’t ask him questions, currently stashing music, movies, and chocolate deep in the dumpster to sneak back and pick up later.

Me and Jay are talking loud about a particular topic close to my heart when a café girl I dated at least twice comes rolling out the open door with a dolly full of empty boxes. She’s tossing them in the recycle bin without breaking them down, just like she always does, so I say something about how it’s going to be too full tomorrow for the boxes from the morning shipment, and they’re not coming to empty the dumpster until next Wednesday. She keeps loading the unbroken boxes without a word, so I turn back to Jay and get back into our conversation. And before long she’s rolling the dolly over my feet in a huff, having apparently gotten an earful of colorful images to the fucking brim.

Someone gets offended. Then another someone must have squealed to the management on me. I know this because someone else comes back to tell me I’ve been told on. If this sounds like a lot of “someones” and “telling,” it is. And the someone at the top of the food chain that’s saying I need to come to their office is someone that wasn't even present for my short yet informative lecture that I’m still not quite finished with. Come on, isn't that circumstantial evidence or hearsay or something? And now it’s screwing up my plans for walking out before my last day because I don’t want anyone to think this is the reason why. Especially that girl from the café. I sigh at my boss without looking at her. I’ve gone all five years without ever making eye contact with her, even when I was reporting a fire.

-Sorry if anyone’s offended. But, in war time, this is known as “collateral damage.” Now, I’m pretty sure I got 3 minutes 26 seconds left on this break.

Successful in getting another pair of feet to stomp away, I kick the side of the dumpster to get Jay’s attention again, trying to get back on my train of thought, but still distracted by what people seem to think is inappropriate to talk about. Jay’s head pops up from under a pile of bags sagging like dirty diapers with loads of coffee grounds. I’m ready to make fun of him, but I can’t stop thinking about how I say things in front of someone I know wouldn't care (at least didn’t used to care) and how it’s out of my hands if she decides to give a play-by-play to someone else, someone I would never have included in my five-part, ongoing, receiving room lecture series on...

"The Men Who Eat Ass And The Girls Who Love Them."

What’s so offensive about that? Nothing. It’s not like this activity is not being advertised on at least a third of the license plates in town right this second. And I swear a car drives by to prove my point at exactly this instant.

-Look, Jay, there goes one right now!

-No, that one just said FREUDYN.

-Oh. Remind me to look that word up.

Okay, so she walked in right as I was saying “...so, I’m furiously eating this chick’s ass, right...” but the thing is, and this is something my coworkers never understand, you’re not really eating anything. You could, but you don’t really need to. Your nose is deep in there, and that’s enough. If you would have been one of the three people listening to me explain my high school science project in 1988, you would have understood that the reason you can’t taste anything when you hold your nose is that eating and smelling are pretty much the same thing (grade: D+) and to prove this, all you need are clothes pins and soft drinks. I also tried to prove sight and smell were connected by using firecrackers and barbecue sauce, to no avail. Grade incomplete.

Doesn’t matter what you’re really doing though or what you call it. It’s right there at eye level anyway if you just back up and take a breather and a long, good look. Everything the kids are calling it...a twitching, pink rabbit nostril, an Asian cartoon squint, a red balloon knot. And, sure, you might get carried away, get lost, take a wrong turn up in there. But you’ll know when this happens because the zap on your tongue like you’re testing a 9-volt battery will steer you right back on course. What I’m trying to explain is that talking about these things at work, or even in class, is like talking about a first kiss. This is not casual vulgarity. This is not dirty limericks or knock-knock jokes. I am describing an intense act of commitment. This is true love, and only the serious should apply. And it doesn’t matter what she is like out in the world, how she presents herself or what she wants you to see.

One girl washed her feet first every time, but never brushed her teeth. One girl always turned the alarm clock over, even the green glow was too much light in the room for her. One girl defiantly turned on the lights I’d just turned off, got on her hands and knees, crossed her feet at her ankles, and invited me onto her back into the “winner’s circle.” And even when she got tired, she still kept everything up high, her upper body collapsing on a pile of pillows. Bold as hell, she’d even fall asleep like that sometimes, hugging the pillows too hard to give up even one. And one girl needed noise in the room, ceiling fan on high, static between stations. Once she even got up and ran over to turn on the shower, comforted that roar on the other side of the wall covered up the sounds of whatever we were doing. I would leave it on after we were done, expecting the voice to demand I turn off the water and go to class, ready to tell him it was raining.

But no matter what any of them did to remove these senses from the room, I still got the best of what remained by punching that time clock and going to work. Taste. Amplified so high I felt like I might overdose before I got a chance to fuck.

I say none of these things today to try to shock those employees, even one that was in that position (she never brushed her teeth). I swear I was just reaching out to a friend in a dumpster, honestly sharing something beautiful. Listen to me, do you have a pencil and paper nearby? It’s a scene you can draw with only four lines and a circle. Draw the circle and four lines coming down out of it. At first, you might think you’re seeing a baseball or maybe a four-legged spider with its legs down, like it got tossed in the air, but then your brother will explain that he’s tricked you into drawing on the first page of they hymnal the back of a girl’s thighs with someone’s head buried in the middle.

Don’t have a pencil and paper? Don’t worry. You’ll recognize it when you’re there, trust me. If you’ve got two handfuls of ass and she’s comfortable on her elbows with whatever you’re going to do back there, let go with one hand for a second and pat yourself on the back because, son, you are finally in a real relationship. She’ll always remember you behind her like that, and you’ll always think about it, even after the inevitable break-up, even if one day you see her in the grocery store buying those pickles and you pretend like you’re just shooting the shit about who saw who and who said what and who did who back in the day. And the whole time, you’ll both be thinking about you behind her on your hands and knees, too, your tongue painting the perfect line that divides her body in half, the line that makes humans geometrically perfect, the line that makes two of every part of you, the line that held her up all her life, just like when you saw her straddling that swing on the playground, turning that block of wood on its side when she
thought no one was looking.

Do you finally hear what I’m saying? How many times do I have to fucking say this? I’m not trying to disgust you with details like the pain in my neck the next day, the dime stuck to her left cheek, the red hand prints on the backs of her thighs, a half-moon scratch from a fingernail when my tongue lost track of that line and my body slipped fast to one side.

I am simply trying to tell you that the last time I did this, it was the only real thing I had. And no one else will be real to me until I can do it again.

-And another thing, Jay, then I’ll drop it, I promise. At work, I should not be held responsible for the exaggerated end of a telephone game that probably didn't give my speech the justice or hand and face gestures that it deserves. They don’t have had the technology available for an accurate reenactment unless they’re back here with us. Shit, unless they recount these crimes at a bowling alley, it’s a safe guess that they didn't have access to the same overhead projectors that we do in this here receiving room.

Jay’s eyes suddenly light up, and he stops stirring bags around in the dumpster.

-Good idea, dude!

-What?

-Bowling! Let’s go bowling to celebrate the “last days.”

-Why?

-Isn’t that how we celebrated our “first day?” Wasn’t it me, you, and that girl that was just back here throwing that shit away?

-I don’t remember.

After our shift, we walk down to the bowling alley at the end of the shopping plaza. And here’s a quick bowling tip I pick up that night. Throwing it harder doesn’t help. It just bounces more and makes the locals (sorry, I mean, “locas”) frown even more. Another thing that makes them frown? Drawing four-legged spiders, otherwise known as the official “man eats ass” logo, on the overhead scorecards. Strangely enough, this gets misinterpreted as a drawing of a bowling ball making a field goal through the infamous 7-10 split. And this somehow comes across as taunting the bikers in the next lane.

You’re probably thinking Jay wants to bowl just to fuck with me. I mean, where else can you find a sport that more clearly requires a thumb? Sure, I could just bowl with my other hand, but trust me when I say it doesn’t matter. You actually only need one hole in that ball to throw it any kind of distance. But even if you take away the hole where you’re thumb goes, those other two holes side by side make all the sense in the world. Remind you of anything?

I’m bowling for the first, probably last, time in twenty years because I want to say goodbye to everything around here. And it has changed, of course. And it didn’t even wait for me to come back and realize this in a suitably dramatic fashion. It changed before I even left town. The sad, hilarious snack bar at this bowling alley was always pretty bad, but now it’s even worse. It’s just gumballs, snack cakes, and jawbreakers in a bucket next to the rental shoes for like a quarter each. The variety is half-unwrapped and look like a handful of stuff that someone found stuck to the bottom of their kitchen junk drawer. I watch two people touch the shoes, then their noses, then the jawbreakers, and I quickly put my quarter back in my pocket. We don’t even finish our frame.

When I’m leaving, I see a license plate sparkling in the parking lot that reads RU-486. Right next to it is a right-to-life bumper sticker. On the same car. Come on, that can’t be accidental. Someone at the license bureau counter was being funny, I’m thinking. Maybe the owner of this car walked in with one of those grotesque partial birth abortion buttons, like a proud parent with a son posing in his filthy football uniform, and maybe the clerk just couldn’t resist assigning them this particular plate. I’m relieved when a car finally goes by with a plate that says nothing at all. It’s a concept car, futuristic-looking, something I don’t recognize. The color is even unidentifiable, even if I had my biggest box of crayons for reference. The plate reads LV-426. One letter shorter than usual, but that’s all. Other than that, it doesn’t mean shit.

As we head to my car, I overhear two men leaning against the building and talking about asses. Go figure. I’m hoping maybe it’s the end of the telephone game I started at work, and maybe my lecture had already crossed the globe to end up back here in this strip mall, containing unrecognizable slivers of my original back room confessions. It may very well have been, but hearing these guys talk, things seem to be less about “ass” than they are about each other. This should have been my first clue. I’d like to have argued with them, but I not worldly enough to be part of the debate when one of them confidently declares to everyone in earshot:

-I’ll tell you why it’s better. It’s better because the ass has more muscles than the pussy.

Jay hesitates with the car door half open, mouthing the words “what’s better?” at me in shocked, horrified silence. Myself, I take an extra long blink. But I still think about what that meant.

When they find out I’m moving out of town, they move up my last day so I won’t be there one extra morning by myself. Another day at a job I already quit? I know, I know. It’s like taking your ex to prom a week after you dumped her because she already bought the dress. Something I did twice. This will make my last day officially the third longest night of my life. And I think I told too many people that I was going to take a shit in the bubblegum machine because this last day seems very carefully monitored. The key to that machine isn’t where it’s normally kept, jangling on the back of the door to the supply closet, a spot that was also a great hiding place, by the way, when the bookstore got too busy to face. If you get in that closet, crouch down and turn off the light, keeping your hand resting on the doorknob, you can get real comfortable with that added tickle of fear in your stomach like you got when you were a kid and getting away with something. And if you feel that doorknob start to turn, you can quickly stand up, hit the light, and act like you were looking for paper towels to fill up the bathrooms and causally walk on out. Sometimes you’d get just five minutes hiding in there like that. But sometimes you’d get thirty. Makes you believe in fucking heaven.

It turns out I’m required to turn all my keys in early. Telling enough people that you’re going to drop a log in the bubblegum machine will turn a management staff to all-business just like that (snaps fingers). Problem is, now I feel like I have to shit in there or else it means I was all talk, no action. Unacceptable. What kind of legacy would that be? At least I already made a sign for my prank, out of a cornflakes box, of course:

“Hey, kids! The winning color today is brown! This is, however, dependent on what I ate after I made this sign and my current level of nutrition! Stay in school, kids!”

Obviously, the sign took three boxes. I stick it to the machine and look around. I won’t miss any of them. The two or three people I actually want to say goodbye to aren’t even working. Okay, there’s one good memory I have. There was this poor mouse that got stuck trying to force its head and paw out of a cracked light socket and must have gotten electrocuted a long time ago, unseen behind some shelves in the back room. I found him when we were rearranging to make room for the release of the kids’ newest “Larry Nutter” novel. I assume that if the name goes unrecognized when an alien unearths this memoir, that’s its own punishment, so I won’t bother to explain the plot. But the scene uncovered behind those shelves was so strange, this little skeletal mouse head sticking out of a crack in the plate over the prong holes, that it was a sight that made no sense to me at first glance. I actually stared at it for at least fifteen minutes before I even realized what I was seeing. Poor little bastard must have touched the blue wire. Apparently, it didn’t watch enough movies to know that you’re always supposed to cut the red wire instead. Or is it the other way around? I took a picture of this discovery with the camera the manager had bought and designated "Larry Nutter Pictures Only!" for the upcoming release party. And I got in a little bit of trouble when they developed them since apparently there is a magic mouse featured as a main character throughout half the books.

So, I pushed my luck by swiping the picture and sticking it next to the information desk with a note that said "Larry: The Final Chapter" and got sent home early for my troubles. The suspension felt like a vacation, but the punishment must have taken some wind out of my sails for pranks because the next one (turned out it was my last) was only a half-hearted rearrangement of all the little monogrammed notebooks at the cash registers so they’d read “BALLSACK.” No one even noticed. Or worse, they never said a word if they did. And you’d think people that worked at a bookstore would take the time to read. Eight letters. That was the problem. Too long to put on a car. Told you it was time to quit.

But being unemployed again feels friggin’ great. My sleep schedule instantly flips back to what it should be. Dreaming by 5:00ish. Up by the crack of 1:00ish. If this sleep routine always happens to humans naturally without alarm clocks then this must be how the body wants it to be. Why do we fight it? It’s not like I’m trying to stay awake all night and then sleeping in. It just happens. There must be thousands of years of evolution behind this biological clock, and who are we to monkey around with evolution?

Speaking of evolution (weren’t we?) when I drive by the bookstore the next night after they’ve closed, the lights are out inside, but I can see a row of shadows stacking all the chairs on the tables in the café. I pull a quick U-turn so my car won’t be mistaken for my car, and I see my headlights reflect off a long constellation of eyes. Do human eyeballs do that now? I knew it was only a matter of time before our eyes reacted like the animals I see watching me from the sides of the highways. I once read in a fifth grade science book that animals’ retinas only started to reflect when cars’ headlights first started sharing the roads with them. I wish I still had a copy of that textbook to prove this right now, but I heard it was pulled from schools for having an illustration of a caveman taming a dinosaur like a bucking bronco.

A large truck circles the lot behind me, and the glint of extra lights on the roof makes my heart jump. Then I realize that the extra lights are yellow, not red and blue. And the license plate reads, of course, IFYT-FYR. I grind my teeth and wish for a button on my dash marked “flamethrower,” maybe right under the one marked “oil slick,” for just these kinds of emergencies, when there’s no time to follow them to where the fires aren’t burning and shame them from a safe distance. I fumble with the switches and knobs on the dashboard anyway, satisfied with the clicks and hums of heaters and fan blades instead of weapons, closing my eyes to imagine the truck silently explode, an early sunrise in my rearview mirrors, something I hope to never see again. Mornings, I mean, like getting up early for work. Not exploding firefighters.

At the end of another burned-out strip mall, I find a car exactly the same as the one I’m driving, same color, make, model, and year. I creep closer with my headlights off so I don’t scare it. Is it mine? I can’t tell. These little green cars are everywhere. If I’d have known they were this popular I would never have bought mine or stolen this one. As I roll around behind it, I see a vanity plate that reads ICU-LOKG. This makes me angry and ashamed for a ridiculous second, reminding me of those girls’ T-shirts that read, “Hey, my eyes are up here!” all tight and stretched across swollen chests. Then the headlights flash on and it drives away fast even though I could have sworn the driver’s seat was empty.

And I see another car just like mine, exactly like this one. It’s parked across the street, in the middle of a vast, empty parking lot, directly under a fluttering insect-covered light like a star on stage for his curtain call. I drive close, get out, and approach cautiously, trying not to wake it up this time. I walk up to it from the back so that it can’t see me. Its license plate reads MAY-FLYS and I stop. This feels like a trap. I pull a loose key from my pocket and slide it into the slot. I know it will turn easily in the lock, but I can’t bring myself to do it. Doesn’t feel right. Too many coincidences with the mayflies and all. Even if it would have read STO-LEN, or screamed LOOKBEHINDYOU, I couldn’t be more suspicious than I am right now. I turn around quickly to leave, thinking maybe that should be the last key I try. I think that’s a good idea.

And no more bookstore jobs. Yeah. And no more video store jobs. Yeah! And no more music store jobs. Okay, maybe, like an exchange student once told me, “movies, books, and music is all America’s good for,” but I think I’ve done all I can for our nation, shitting in bubble gum machines and all. Or at least wanting to. And too many favorite things eventually make you irritated at something you love, like a hateful, childless third-grade teacher nearing retirement. Handle movies all day, and you’re less likely to watch one when you get home. And without movies, I always end up falling back on my shitty taste in music. And you don’t want to know what happens when I get desperate enough to slide back into books. You ever heard the phrase “Judge a book by its cover?” That’s all I know how to do. They say that a book cover with a monkey or anything purple is the most popular for a young, uneducated boy to purchase. Purple because that color was supposedly very hard to find in nature, the octopus ink that the wealthy used to stain their clothes was at one time considered a status symbol. No one’s sure about the monkey factor though, but God help me if I see a book with a monkey writing a letter with an octopus. I’d buy a hundred goddamn copies.

Driving again, I think back to the only job I ever really enjoyed. It was when I was around 9 and worked alongside a handful of other cousins for my grandpa’s excavating company. The job lasted an entire afternoon, three whole hours, and it was the most satisfying employment I’ve ever had in my life. Our mission was to scramble around high piles of dirt and mulch and pick out all the rocks. Eventually it regressed into a rockfight (or was it a cockfight?) with moments of “king of the hill” declarations and noogies and painful tickling assaults, but it was still sweaty and satisfying in a way I’ve never found since. That dirt smelled so good I almost wanted to eat it. And as crazy as that sounds, this condition is actually more common that you’d think, possibly even hereditary. Not long after that grandpa died, my grandma and I were sitting in her breezeway cracking the ends off green beans while cats did figure-eights around our ankles, and she told me a strange story.

It seems one day she got the urge to eat potatoes raw with the skins still on. Then she wanted to eat them before they were even washed. Then she wanted them as soon as they came out of the ground. Then with the dirt still on them and not even a casual wipe on the pant leg to knock the big chunks of soil off. Then, one day, she ate a handful of earth as casually as you’d eat an apple. After that, she said, she went to the doctor and he gave her some iron supplements and the cravings stopped. But when I think about that day on the hill, I honestly don’t think it had much to do with a lack of vitamins. Standing on a mountain of dank, black dirt, the thick, heavy smell of it filling your nose like the dark hair of a drunken smoker leaning in close to talk to you in a crowded bar, I was this close to diving into the pile headfirst and trying to chew my way to China. Fingers a half-inch apart.

The day after me and my cousins gathered those rocks, my grandpa fired all of us. Not because we were just about worthless and way too easily distracted, but because he’d just gotten himself a new piece of equipment. It was trackhoe (or maybe it’s called a backhoe), a huge, snorting yellow dinosaur with a long arm and a bucket with a huge opposable thumb. My cousins ran home scared when he first fired it up, but I watched that bucket bite holes into the ground all day, sometimes glancing at my hand, knowing the real reason I’d been replaced.

I decide to make a list of all my old cars.

Where they were, who I sold them to, where they crashed, why they crashed, who slept in the back seats with me, who slept in the front seats, and, most important, what color they were. You know, just in case my new car needs to know. I look for a car wash to hide in and do some thinking for this list. How long does an automatic car wash last? And do you really have to leave when the flashing sign tells you to? I try to think of one that’s nearby, since idling and contemplating your life in a roaring cocoon of water and suds sounds friggin’ phenomenal at this moment. It would be the ultimate dramatic shower for the hero in a movie. How often do you ever see a car lean up against the nozzle and let hot water run down its headlights while it stares dramatically at its front tires and wonders what it has become? Not enough.

I find a car wash, another old, do-it-yourself one. Out of order. I immediately forget about the list while I’m circling the bays and see an abandoned car rusting away inside one of them. I’m shocked to a windshield broken in the exact same place I last punched one, and I get a nervous squirt of acid reflux on the back of my tongue as a reward. I drive closer and see it’s covered in bird shit, missing a door, and filled with leaves, sticks, and the audible rustling of countless rodents. It’s an ‘88 Stallion and has the obligatory vanity plate to advertise this particular model. I wish I had the time or the cereal boxes to make a quick WLD-PNY3 plate to attach to it on the off chance that the Wild Pony himself rides by with his skinny arm out his window to see it. But I’m not as interested in the WO-HORSY on this tag as I am in the fact that it’s covered head to toe with bumper stickers advertising a sports team of some kind. This beloved team must have been the “Polar Bears” judging by the faded white monster giving the grinning thumb’s-up. But I have no idea what sport is it since the edge of the sticker that would have shown what kind of ball it had in its paws has long since worn away.

Last summer, all in the same afternoon, I saw a CAT-LUVR, DOG-LUVR, RAT-LUVR, and a RAT-EATR. Guess which one made me turn to the stranger next to me on the bus and ask, “Why? Seriously. Why?”

I think back to my short-lived, ill-conceived campaign of animal rights activism when me and Jay ran around crossing out any “S” or “the” on flags and windsocks and bumper stickers so that cars were actually declaring “I love Rottwiellers!” or “Shark Fan On Board!” instead of just rooting for a team. I laugh and hope a real polar bear tore up that upholstery and made a nest of that back seat, however unlikely, and maybe it’ll surprise the owners if they ever return.

I’ve always been annoyed by people who exaggerate the importance of their mailbox by saying with a sniffle, "it's a federal offense!" to mess with it. I'm so sick of hearing this, and not just because I was involved in some random mailbox destruction in my youth (Wednesday) but because people seem to think they're suddenly in the FBI when they heard that "federal offense" phrase about the mail one too many times and, holy shit, they just realized there’s a box on a pole by their driveway that might be protected by some strange government forcefield. It’s as if their mailbox is suddenly going to have a circle of men in black suits with earpieces trying to figure out exactly how I (I mean, “some kid”) climbed up the pole to shit inside and managed (just barely) to put up the flag with their foot at the same time. So, that being said, you can imagine how surprised I was at the guilt I felt for ripping the mailboxes for my apartment building off the wall this morning.

I go down to get my check, sighing because I’m running out of money fast and need to move out of this place by the end of the week. I open my mailbox (not a box, just a slot really) and reach inside hoping for my last paycheck, fully expecting a mousetrap. Instead, I find a check for 50 cents. Seriously. 50 cents. Someone from the post office actually took the time to write out a check for “50 cents and 0/100ths” and mailed it off with a 40 cent “America: Love it or Leave it!” stamp. Flashing back to all that arguing with the postal clerk that day makes this victory seem a little more like an insult. But I proudly endorse and display my check on the 'fridge with a note for my landlord to discover after I’ve left. It says “for damages” even though I probably could use that 50 cents as I regularly take my checking account right down to the fucking nub. It’s sad, but sometimes 50 cents is all that stands between a comfortable life with my movies, music, and books and having to eat them to stay alive.

So I go back down to the mailboxes, embrace them like I’m hugging my biggest grandma (my dad’s side of the family), and wrestle the entire thing off the wall. They come down easily, leaving behind baseball-sized holes in the plaster from the bolts. I set them down next to the radiator and tiptoe back to my apartment. I wish I had my own house, my own mailbox, so that I could kick it over or shit in it all I want, depending on what it gave me each morning, never having to worry about other people letters or dubious laws.

It turns out there’s another letter in my box, pushed up high where I couldn’t see it. No return address, but it’s from the girl me and Crazy Mark used to be with. It’s about my old car, of course. I’m disappointed the letter isn’t from my old car, but I read it anyway. It’s old, but the envelope had gotten wet, so there’s no telling when she sent it. According to the letter, Mark is still stalking her, still driving my old car. And she “just doesn’t know who it is anymore.” In the letter, she explains that the only thing she’s sure of is the car. That part of the letter actually makes a lot of sense. And it’s been so long since I’ve seen him, I wonder how much he looks like me these days, probably a lot like me if he hugs the steering too close, drives too slow, weaves and looks around too much, or parks behind those pine trees near her bedroom window like I used to. In the letter, she’s threatening me with a restraining order if I don’t quit cruising her job, her school, her bird bath. And she says I’ll have to pay for what my tires did to the yard. If I had time, if I wasn’t moving so soon, I’d explain to her that, to clear this up, she doesn’t need to talk to me, or Mark, but obviously to the car in question. I could call him up and shame him into stopping his stalking, but I won’t. And for all I know, this letter was sent before we got back together that last time. I deserve this letter. I always have. Here’s why. Wait, I already told about that.

* * *

Besides when I had to walk to work every day down those railroad tracks with that hamburger radio, there was one other time I was without a car. This was a strange summer, and I almost didn’t get through it with my identity intact.

It was the summer of the dragon by the dumpster.

Remember when I said back at the beginning of this story that I resisted the urge to scream, “Turn off the water!” like, quote, “a mental patient?” Well, as fond as I am of that phrase, this time I was talking about an actual mental patient.

I thought I’d gotten used to a life of temperature changes in the shower by the time I hit college. It was simply an unpleasant, mildly annoying fact of life. Someone could be brushing their teeth six blocks away and it might affect you, but you couldn’t really blame anyone. It’s kind of like the weather. You can’t get too angry when the temperature outside drops, right? If the rain gets warm or cold? I always try to keep this in mind when the water in the shower changes. I try so hard.

I was living in a tiny, converted-office apartment with a girlfriend. Can’t remember her name, almost remember her car. Barely her color. And next door was another Crazy Mark. Even though his real name was Mike Miller, I called him “Crazy Mark II” because they’re everywhere. And “Crazy Mark II” sounded better, “Crazy Mark Too” even better, and I was too used to the way my friend’s name sounded to stop. I’d recently gotten fired from some bush-league carpet cleaning business/chop shop garage and couldn’t afford to get my car fixed anytime soon. Then I dropped out of college. I remember nothing about that college except seeing a man eat a phone, and very little about that car except it was stick-shift. And it was orange. And without a job or transportation, me and the apartment began to merge. I didn’t do anything for days at a time, barely grunting hello and goodbye to the girl I was sharing those days with. All I could tell you about her is she was white and didn’t have any favorite things.

So, I was in the shower one morning and could hear my neighbor through our ridiculously thin walls fumbling around in his tub, chasing the soap or a toy boat or a girl scout or something. Then he bellowed so loud I thought he was standing there under the spray with me.

-Turn off the water!

I must have been in shock because I did exactly what I was told before I could stop myself. Then I toweled off and spent the rest of the day with my ear to the wall, listening for any more instructions. I didn’t tell my roommate, but confused her when I got up early the next morning to see her off. Suddenly, I had a mission. I waited until I heard my neighbor’s shower running and quickly turned on my own hot water. Right on cue:

-Turn off the water!

I turned it off. Then turned it on again.

-Turn off the water!

Turned it on...

-Turn off...

...then off again real quick.

-...the water!

Then on again. Then I experimented with different ratios of hot and cold. It didn’t matter. It all made him furious. I smiled and listened while this monster crashed and banged his way through the most frustrating shower of his life, then went on with my day of doing nothing. The next morning I was up before the crack of noon. “Have a good day at work, hon!” Smooch.

-Turn off the water!

I was having fun with this new routine until I noticed something that was happening on my girlfriend’s way out the door. Whenever she would leave, I would hear the neighbor stumble across his apartment, open his door, then quickly close it. When she got home, I asked her if someone was walking out with her every morning, maybe leaving for work when she did? She sighed and looked down at the ground.

-Well, I didn’t want to get you all upset, but the neighbor peeks his head out and watches me walk down the hall.

I dropped whatever I was holding. I wish it had been a drink for dramatic effect. Or maybe a basketball so I could keep dropping it over and over.

-Are you fucking kidding me?! Wait, what does he look like?

I was protective of her, but understandably curious about this voice I’d been tormenting.

-I don’t know. I just saw this big mop of curly hair, then he was gone.

-No shit. No. Shit.

The next morning. “Good day, baby.” Big smooch. Then I was peeking out the door watching her walk down the hall, ass shaking like she’s all business, headed out to bring home the bacon to her deadbeat boyfriend. And after she was about halfway to the stairs, I heard bumbling footsteps and saw that mop of curls framing the back of some large man’s cranium, peering out to watch her with me. I shouted:

-Hey!

Both of them turned around, but his door slammed before I could see his eyes. I smiled and yelled to her surprised face.

-Hey, baby, could you grab some more soap on the way home?

That night, we shared theories about him and wondered how he could afford to stay home all day without a job or school or anything. We got so excited that we were happy for about 48 hours before I started sulking again about my employment situation and ruined both our moods. And the next morning in the shower, the booming voice confused me with a question instead:

-Why aren’t you in class?!

I yelled back through the wall:

-Fuck do you care?! Then:

-If I was in class, who would turn off the water, you fuckin’ freak!

I heard him mumbling to himself and stomping around, and eventually I pounded on the wall to stop his tantrum.

I eagerly told my girlfriend all about it when she got home. And we were up all night with brand-new theories, so late, in fact, that she had no time to take a shower before work the next day. Her sudden change of schedule right after mine must have thrown my neighbor way off because his head was nowhere to be seen when I watched her walk down the hall. However, I did notice an envelope peeking out from under his door. My curiosity overwhelmed me and shirtless and shoeless, I tip-toed down to peek at it. It wasn’t sealed, and inside was a note from his caseworker (!) saying that she’d be around next week to make sure he “got his groceries okay.” The letterhead on top read “Maumee Mental Health Board.” And this is where I discovered his name, Mike M. Miller.

This new information I didn’t tell my girlfriend since I didn’t want to scare her with all those alarming “M’s” in the same letter, and, even more important, I didn’t want her to insist that we move. She just assumed I started calling him Crazy Mark because of that other guy I used to know.

Again, I’m in the shower, and now we were having almost entire conversations.

-Turn off the water!

-It is off!

-Why aren’t you in class?!

-I am in class!

-Why aren’t you at work?!

-This is where I work.

-Leave me alone!

-You started it.

-Turn off the water!

-Turn off the weather!

That night, the landlord called. Before he could speak, I was all over him.

-What’s going on with you housing mental patients here? Do you get a discount? You realize that crazy fucker stares at my girlfriend every day, right? How would you like me to bring him over to live in your goddamn garage instead?

The landlord waited for me to finish, then explained that he’d been receiving complaints about me, not Mr. Miller, “Mr. M. M. Miller,” I corrected him, and no amount of explaining could convince him that I wasn’t the one yelling about water, weather, and class schedules every morning. “In fact,” he told me, “Your neighbors have started a petition to get you evicted.”

At 3:05 p.m., around the time I’d be running in late to work or my last class of the day, my neighbor left to apparently try to go “get those groceries okay.” I’d never seen him out in the wild, so I was dressed and running out my door right behind him. I almost wore a suit and tie I was so goddamn excited. But it was an unremarkable trip, and for some reason his appearance was even harder to remember in the sunlight. Except for the curly rats nest of hair, I wouldn’t be able to pick him out of a crowd of showering, babbling mental patients. However, things got real interesting at the end of our walk. When we turned the corner around our apartment building, he yelped in fear, dumped half his food, and bolted up the stairs. Half hour later, his caseworker stopped by, and I listened with a glass to the wall. Her voice was so smooth and soothing, I wanted her to work on me next. Told you it was a “she.”

-Shhh. There is no dragon, Mike.

-There’s a dragon by the dumpster. I saw it.

His voice was high and girlish when he talked to her, not the guttural trumpeting I got through my shower wall every day. He sounded small.

-There’s nothing out there, remember?

-There’s a dragon there right now, I swear!

What the hell was he talking about? I went back out to take a look. Next to the dumpster was a rolled-up mattress wrapped in black garbage bags and rope. Next to it was a wet pile of moldy pickles and the shattered remains of a jar. This must be the dragon, I decided. Was the nutjob trying to feed it pickles? Once I really looked around, it was clear it wasn’t the first time he’d dumped his groceries. He’d been scared so many times that there was enough combinations of meats and vegetables out there to make a week’s worth of tacos, the healthiest of fast foods, because, according to the sombrero-wearing lizard in its popular commercial, “Tacos gots all five food groups!” I told my girlfriend about all of this, and she finally started getting scared, but for all the wrong reasons.

-You followed him?

-Yeah.

-Why?

-I was looking for a job anyway.

That was the last time I got to lie to her.

The next day, my neighbor went to get more groceries to feed his monster, so I followed him again. When we got to the dumpster, I screamed:

-Look out, Mark! Mattress dragons!

He dumped his milk and orange juice and pickles again and ran up the steps to his room, slipping to his knees twice on the way, screeching over his shoulder in his little voice:

-My name’s not Mark!

Crazy fucker, I thought. How does he even know what his name is?

The next day, I followed him again. My family would say we were in love, say me and Wild Pony broke up. He didn’t get groceries anymore though. The caseworker would leave them in front of his door, either sick of the argument or finally acknowledging the very real dangers of dragons by dumpsters. His walk was all straight lines, purposeful, like he was working up the courage to go to a grocery store. But mostly we just walked around the block three or four times. He never noticed me following him either, and any classmates that recognized me and said “hello” never seemed to see him.

The next day he didn’t walk toward the center of town. Instead we wove our way around miles of residential houses, sometimes taking short cuts through back yards and bushes. The only time I saw him show any emotion is when he flinched and started running when a delivery truck passed by with a TACO-HELL license plate. His wandering went on for weeks. Then, one Sunday afternoon, my girlfriend showed me the newspaper and announced she was moving out. There was a sketch on the front page that she was convinced was me. Under the drawing was a fear-mongering, poorly-written article about a man peeping in windows all around campus. I told her that I was only following our neighbor, and maybe they did see him in their yards, but only remembered me instead. Or a combination of the two of us? Maybe this is why the sketch resembled me so closely?

She didn’t buy anything I was selling.

Years and years later, I moved into an efficiency apartment by myself and, maybe because of my mental patient neighbor’s constant pep talks and reassurance, I set about finishing that last class I’d dropped. It was an art class, the female body, and the teacher kept trying in vain to convince me to start my sketches with the line down a woman’s back, even if she was facing forward. I, however, always started at the eyes, and my proportions suffered, my creatures ending up confused, sad mutations that clearly grew up near reactors and power lines. Like a child’s drawing of a five-pointed star when they’re afraid to cross over their own lines with that simple unbroken trail, all five points hung and curled like limp swastikas. I ended up passing and graduating, barely, and felt with one more class, I might have finally understood what that line down the back meant.

During this time, I noticed a classmate opening and closing the trunk of his car every day, caught in some helpless, hopeless, obsessive compulsive loop. I started to imitate him, parking right next to him whenever I can and slamming my trunk, too, hoping he’d notice and resist doing it so much. Instead, the other classmates started looking at me more and more suspiciously until the teacher cautiously approached me one night to finally ask what I was doing. Halfway through my explanation, she stopped me and said:

-Why are you talking about yourself?

I was never able to sell her any of it either.

Here in my hometown, my uncle came up with the idea of dialing license numbers so that you could talk to any car in front, behind, or alongside you on the highway. As long as you could see the plate, you could punch in the combination of letters or numbers and be instantly connected to another driver’s cellular phone, more like calling the car than the driver, actually. It seemed like a match made in heaven as most phone numbers and most plates have seven characters or digits. My uncle told my mom he got the idea from an orientation video they showed him at his new job for the license bureau. It was a quick history of license plates and how, before there were so many cars on the road, the identification tag was just a short series of letters, almost always a word that could be easily remembered.

Sort of like the first phone numbers, he exclaimed, light bulb flashing over his head. Some cars even had a name, like a pet, and my uncle decided that was probably why old cars in movies were in such good condition, as you were more likely to take care of a machine if you thought of it as something with a name instead of a number. You might even be inclined to give a neighbor’s car an affectionate pat on the hood on the way by, maybe tell them damn kids to stop throwing that football over it, maybe even stop to wipe of a patch of bird shit if you had a handy white towel dangling from your back pocket. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I believed the only reason old cars were so shiny in the movies was because those were actually toys lining those streets. One day, all cars would end up rusting out in garages or abandoned car washes in spite of cute names or easy-to-remember numbers.

However, my uncle thought it would be a great idea and catch on fast, just like that nutty text messaging, and several of the cellular companies agreed with him. But similar to texting, it turned out to be the absolute worst of all worlds and not only caused a driver’s least healthy instincts to surface, it also gave them a convenient voice. Everyone discovered that the reason highways aren’t piled high with random murder and wreckage is because our hatred for every perceived insult (cutting you off, driving too slow, driving too fast, driving too wrong, etc.) was usually handled harmlessly with a quick glare or obscene gesture. Except for the off chance that two deaf people would have a clash of complex ideas and heated debate on the turnpike, throwing page after page of angry sign language out their windows, drivers had no actual voice expect for a fast “Fuck you” then “Fuck you, too!” Dialing the license plate in front of you and instantly getting that car on the line changed all of that.

In the first week my uncle’s brainstorm was activated, road rage incidents multiplied by a thousand. A law was passed that said you couldn’t even talk on your phone anymore while driving, let alone call another car. This law was quickly passed in other states, too, under the assumption that phones had always been a dangerous distraction in a car, like listening to headphones or doing a crossword puzzle or thumb wrestling, but few people know the real reason for that law. It is because a phone was seen as more like a weapon during that particular Spring in our town.

Even now, if a cop around here sees someone answer a phone too fast, even standing next to a parked vehicle, they might find themselves in a quick draw situation with a state trooper. Or, if you brought the phone up to your head too quickly, you could be tackled to thwart a possible suicide attempt.

To this day, some people are still suggesting more restrictions. There’s talk of the law against tinted windows being repealed, and people are encouraged to have as many suction-cup teddy bears clinging to their back windshields as possible to distract any eyes from locking on to each other at dangerous speeds, to encourage fuzzy, happy thoughts on the road. Only half-jokingly, a documentary on prostitution was shown at a town hall meeting where college students suggested we adopt a pimp’s blanket policy of “no reckless eyeballing” for his stable of women. And while a citizen’s arrest might never be serious as a young girl being put under the notorious “pimp arrest,” both punishments turned out to be surprisingly similar when pranksters posted them side-by-side on the door of the town hall. The rules were just listed in a slightly different order:

“Look down at your feet, your hands, or the road at all times. And do not make eye contact unless there is a car coming right at you.”

* * *

I go back to the grocery store to look for my car again, and I find a yellow Cavalry instead. It’s definitely not mine, old and dying, maybe dead already, hopelessly parked next to row of abandoned gas pumps with their hoses rattling loose in the hot breeze. The license plate reads TOP-FULE. Never mind the shit state of this vehicle, I just can’t understand why they didn’t spell it right. It would require the same letters to spell this boast correctly. I wish I had enough cereal boxes to attach to its bumper to spell out, “Stealing fuel could cost you your grammar. Or your thumb.” Yeah, that’s a lot of cereal this week. A second glance reveals that the plate actually read TOP-FOOL instead.

I keep looking for my car, and it’s nowhere to be found. If someone took it, it would make perfect sense, as clearly keys really don’t mean shit. Any key works anywhere. I’ve already proven that. Maybe I should take my theory a step further and see if any car key will open any house, or any house key will actually start a helicopter or any key to a diary will bring roadkill back to life. It reminds me of another time I was without a car (okay, busted, that’s more than three times, but I swear it’s less that a hundred) and I went shopping for a new vehicle with my stepdad. Everything I looked at, he would frown, exhale deeply, and say, “Aren’t you too old for that? Don’t you want a car that is big enough for a man?” By the time he was done with me, I was ready to ask the salesman if they had a goddamn bulldozer I could lease. Maybe a backhoe instead? Or was it called a trackhoe? One with big robot thumb on the bucket? Hey, where’s that salesman going? Can I please lease a fucking blimp? Where’s the goddamn submarines parked, sir?

Then I think I see another car I used to own at the far end of the lot. A brown ‘99 Skyline convertible. Can’t be sure though. I run over with a random key, but it doesn’t work at all, won’t go in even three teeth deep. I throw it over my shoulder and smash the driver’s side window with my elbow. I start to reach in to open the door when an old couple suddenly runs towards me, dropping armloads of groceries to the asphalt. I forget about the window, excited and wanting to talk about my car and what they think of it. But judging by the way they fumble with their phones and all the screaming, I quickly deduce they’re scared of something. I don’t understand it. My elbow’s barely bleeding. And you’d think they’d remember me from when I sold them that car three winters ago, or maybe that time two summers ago when I ran up at a red light and knocked on their door to remind them that they were sitting inside something that I once loved. Come to think of it, they had the same strange looks on their faces back then. I thought I was knocking on someone’s front door just to say “hello,” but the way they fumbled with the locks and ducked down, down, down that day, you’d have thought I was knocking on their heads instead.

I reach into my pocket for a key, feeling the teeth with my thumb, suddenly understanding how perfect it could fit into someone’s ear.

::: david - 5:58 PM [+] :::
...