“Yeah, I’d love to — absolutely,” you say, hitting the table with your hand again.
“Alright, thank you sir,” he says. “It’s some guy with freckles.”
“Guy with freckles?” you say, pointing at the lower level manager.
He looks at you, a little confused. “Yeah.”
You hit the table with your hand and say, “Ok great, thanks.”
April 2011
This morning it takes a lot of effort to stay awake after waking up — which is becoming normal.
It’s around seven a.m.
You stay in bed, going in and out of sleep, body hurting.
People make noise at the bus stop outside.
People are always outside.
Always around.
You half-dream/half-imagine a large pile of shit you keep putting your head in then taking back out.
When you pull your head out of the shit, terrible strings of pulp are wrapped around your head and face.
But then, you have regular air.
And after one breath, you put your head back into the shit.
And do it slow enough to really feel it.
Because it could never be different — you think.
And your complaints diffuse to the renewed beginning of traffic sounds, ambulance sounds, airplane sounds, people sounds, and television sounds from another apartment.
Trying to wake up.
Somebody walks past your window, on Clark Street.
He screams/sings, “Everyone gonna die, gonna die, gonna die” —sustaining every third “die.”
His singing voice is a combination of singing/yelling/laughing, and he walks down the block gone.
Your neighbor.
Three million others too, surrounding.
You quietly sing, “Everyone gonna die, gonna die, gonna die.”
It’s a good song.
Yes.
A fine song, for the beginning of another fine day.
Yesterday at work one of the managers was helping you throw out garbage and she said, “Guess what, I think I met my future husband last night, on a date.”
She had her front teeth over her bottom lip, excited.
You said, “You met your husband from the future?”
Then you thought about how his time travelling would change your life, and how you’d never even notice, because this thought would be one of its results.
Fuck!
“We went out last night,” she said. Then she swung a bag of garbage into the compactor, leaning forward to avoid getting garbage juice on her shirt. She checked her breasts and said, “He’s from South Carolina. He’s an engineer and he’s six foot one”—opening her eyes wide then returning them to normal wideness.
You said, “So that’s already three facts you know about him. That’s good.”
In your Kiiidddzzzz bed, you think about her breasts shaking as she swung bags of garbage into the compactor.
And your dick gets very hard but you’re too tired to touch it — trying to wake up.
The room is lighter.
Same color as always.
You let your dick be hard, lying on your back on your sweet fucking Kiiidddzzzzz bed.
The front door to the apartment building slams shut, and then footsteps come up the stairway.
Someone knocks at your apartment door.
More knocking.
Key-sounds.
The door opens and someone walks into your apartment.
You hear, “Hallo? Hallo?” as someone stomps in.
There’s a knock at your bedroom door.
“Hallo? Hallo?”
The door opens.
It’s the “Building Manager.”
He puts his head into the room from behind the door.
The Building Manager is an old Serbian man the landlord exploits for manual labor.
He’s old and has bad knees and barely ever has the tools he needs.
You’re lying in bed.
Eyes half-closed.
Dick hard.
Looking at an old Serbian man sticking his head sideways into the room.
“Hallo? Hallo?” he says. “Hallo? You awake? Hallo hallo. I come to fix roof. There is problem with roof. I go up now, ok? Hallo? You awake buddy, hallo. Wass wrong? You alive buddy, hallo.”
You say, “There’s a new leak in the hallway. I think it’s because someone just painted over the leak last time.”
“Yes ok. I go see. Ok? Tank you buddy.”
You lie in bed letting your dick get soft while the old Serbian man looks at the same leaking spot in the hallway ceiling he’s seen many times now.
Then he leaves the apartment.
Thirty seconds later, he’s walking around on the roof.
It’s very loud.
You continue to fall in and out of sleep, halfway worried about the old Serbian man falling through the roof, crushing you — snapping your hard dick at a horrible angle.
How you’d lie there half-asleep looking at your angled dick, broken like a dandelion stem.
You get out of bed.
You see a bright yellow light in your eyes and put your hand against the wall so you don’t fall.
Die. Die. Die.
In the bathroom, you put your head beneath the showerhead, standing outside the shower.
The water is very hot and you have your finger in your left ear to keep water out.
You mouth, “In Chi-town, you in my town — it’s kill or die motherfucker, kill or die.”
You turn off the shower and take your finger out of your ear.
Liquid comes out.
You soak it out with a twisted piece of toilet paper.
The toilet paper is brown and red when you take it out.
This is painful — you think. But I deserve this.
And your self-esteem today is shaky.
Shaky but stabilizing into something even lower and unshakable.
*
After punching in at work, you walk through the store to the stockroom.
Passing the pharmacy area, there’s a group of gradeschool aged kids standing there, kicking each other.
One of the kids holds out his hand to you and says, “Ey, let me get it right here, my nigga.”
You high-five, shake, and snap with his hand.
The group of gradeschool kids yells and laughs.
Without turning around, you flex both arms, walking towards the stockroom.
*
Theodore is on break the same time as you.
He’s sitting next to you, wearing a Styrofoam visor with a dolphin on it, from the John G. Shedd Aquarium.
He’s using a fork to cut a still mostly frozen microwaveable dinner.
The food breaks with a brittle cracking sound.
“Theodore, how are you,” you say.
He says, “N’Hey. What’s up man, hm.”
He tells you about how a few weeks ago they had to have a plumber come out to fix all the clogs in the toilets and when they fixed the clogs they found a bunch of hypodermic needles people had flushed in the customer bathrooms.
“I like your dolphin visor, man,” you say.
“M’Yeah,” he says. “N’I saw the freakin dolphin show already, hm. Wow. N’Yeah I saw the dolphin show with my mom and the dolphins were absolutely wonderful, hm.”
His right leg is rapidly going up and down, on toe-point.
He scrapes icy pieces of food with the fork.
You say, “You liked the dolphin show.”
“N’Yeah,” he says. “To be cuppletely honest though, N’I went with my mom to the dolphin show and I think, hm, my mom is pretty, hm.”
Someone turns up the volume on the breakroom television.
The television is so loud the sound distorts.
An audience is laughing.
It hurts your infected ear.
Theodore says, “N’Yeah when I was little hm, and I’d get a loose tooth, n’my mom would help me take it out. N’I’d be in bed and she’d get on top of me and hold me down and m’have some freakin tissue paper in her fingers, hm, to be able to hold the tooth good and pull hard enough, hm. N’That’s how she helped me get my baby teeth out, hm. N’Yeah sometimes when she was pulling, m’there was — there was,” he pauses, then says, “pain” loudly.