Fingerless Gloves (16 page)

On my way home from Beth’s, there was a car accident on Paulson Avenue, just a few minutes away from my house. It was an accident involving the second-to-last car on the road. The vehicle had smashed head-on into a telephone pole. There was splintered wood and downed wires. Judging by the extensive damage to the car, I’d say the 25 MPH speed limit was an afterthought. Two policemen were there, lights flashing on their cars, watching the driver, who had been sitting on the ground holding his arm, get to his feet to begin a series of sobriety tests. At 4:41am, what’s there to test anyway? There was no ambulance, public works pickup, or fire truck, even though the car was wrecked and the telephone pole was given a brand new alignment. The strange thing was the quiet…just the lights, the crackle of radios, and the muffled, spoken instructions to the man. There was no traffic, and I was the only unfortunate rubbernecking bystander. All things considered, wearing a mangled, bruised face and sloshing around with half of half a bottle of vodka in my system, I had no business making my presence known to any type of law enforcement. I was drunk, but not too drunk to drive. I was never too drunk to drive or too high to function.

I didn’t quite bring the car to a stop, but I was crawling by the scene. The man, maybe 50 years old, didn’t look like any sort of deadbeat. He looked like everyone else in my town. He was clean cut, with a decent, pressed button down shirt half tucked in to black dress pants. His hair was gelled but falling out of place piece by piece. Sometime earlier that evening, he had been well-dressed…now, out much later than he should be, the man was rumpled and failing to walk in a straight line. I had been staring too long or driving too slow, because one of the two officers on the scene looked up and right at me…cold eyes peering right through the front windshield. Fearing that I would betray my lack of sobriety, I moved along at a steady, even pace. My phone jingled in my pocket and, as I passed the accident, I read a text message from Streets that said, “Bro, scored one.” I wasn’t sure what he was getting at and I’m almost sure he meant to send it to someone else.

My modest apartment was above a hardware store just off Rampling Street, smack in the center of town. The building constantly smelled like lumber, metal, and the grinding of power tools. While I didn’t have to contend with Main Street’s foot traffic, I still wouldn’t chance stripping down with the windows open. Rampling was a busy cross street… busy with people looking to get somewhere else. It was right in the intersection between Main Street and Highway 9, which took you into the city. If you stayed straight on Rampling westbound for about ten miles, you could get to the mall and the movie theater. The owner of the hardware store was not my landlord, rather, a tenant for the past 25 years. We both rented from a 100-year-old relic of a man who I’d only seen once. He lived in a retirement village a few towns away. To be honest, I barely made enough money to afford the rent…which was, more often than not, paid late. My landlord, perhaps enjoying the twilight of his life, never questioned my week-late rent payments.

My one-bedroom was, during the week, filled with the sounds of customers testing drills and saws, conversing about snow blowers and adjustable wrenches. There were general contractors, plumbers, masons… every type of laborer hitting the bell on their way in and out. I had moved out of my parent’s house hastily, without ever really apartment hunting. I found the place listed in the local paper my parents still get every Friday. There were only three lines in the listing: “1BR w/ EI kitchen and HW floor. H/HW included. Call Fletcher” followed by some out-of-area cell phone number. Seeing it as my ticket to growing up, I called that number and I’ve been paying Fletcher ever since.

My parents helped me move in. My dad and me carried my bed up the stairs. My dad, handier than I will ever be, built the cheap store-bought desk so well that it will probably outlast the desks made for chief executives at top companies. My one-bedroom was: a 32-inch tube-TV and a couch… a card table with an old, rose-patterned placemat unevenly draped over it, some small appliances and an undersized refrigerator. The bathroom was tight, just enough room for one person to shower and brush their teeth. You had to take your time finding footing in the bathroom, often propping feet on the shower ledge while sitting on the toilet. The bedroom was littered with posters and clothes and sneakers… with another tiny TV sitting on top of a broken dresser. My heat only came on when the temperature in the apartment dropped below 52 degrees. My water was rarely hot, despite the straining efforts of my faucet and my shower. My oven made a weird clicking noise whenever I tried to bake French fries, or anything else for that matter. I had an oscillating fan in the living room for when I felt like smoking a bowl on my couch. My television only got 18 of the most basic channels. My tenant parking space was so disrespected that I think other cars were parked there more than my own… completely ignoring the tag hanging from my mirror. My apartment was a place of my own that I paid for… cold water and all.

That night, my place was freezing as I had left every window open. I had a rickety space heater that succeeded only in raising my electric bill. The heater, even on low output, was straining to maintain a normal temperature. It had been so long that I couldn’t remember the temperature outside. I knew that it had obviously dropped since I left all those hours ago. As I pulled each window closed, my reflection told me that I had thinned out, seeing as I could barely afford food. My clock in the kitchen, illuminated once I reached for and turned on a lamp, read 4:50am. I opened the refrigerator and drank half a bottle of water… judging by how crunched the bottle was, it had been refilled quite a few times. There wasn’t a sound to be heard on the street below. My apartment smelled odd, like a Subway sandwich or the frozen food section of a supermarket. I found my way to the bathroom and gave my teeth a half-assed brushing. I forgot to floss.

James Squire was always supposed to be my roommate. After college, it went without saying that we were going to find a place together. I found a job first. It was five months before James even got called for a second interview, then another 2 months after that before he landed a job. Commuting to college left me with this burning desire to leave my house, a desire exacerbated by my grandfather’s passing and the subsequent affect it had on my parents. We were, for the first time as a family, miserable… and I wanted out.

James, on the other hand, was looking forward to some time spent back at home to unwind from dorm-life insanity. He rarely came back home to visit while he was at school, just for major holidays and a very rare weekend or two. For some reason, I didn’t go to visit him as much as I should have. I guess that, while you might have all the friends in the world, they all have these lives to live…lives that don’t get put on hold for 6-hour car rides to foreign college campuses. That’s how I justified it anyway. I was either too busy or, admittedly, too lazy. The few times I did go visit, it was a haze of smoke and of James trying to score with girls, introducing me to friends of girls he was trying to score with, watery beer, stinging cigarettes, sticky tables, and couches that left pins and needles in both my hands and feet simultaneously. Every weekend I spent there felt like one long day.

When I tried to go to bed, I ended up tossing and turning and burrito-ing my sheets. I brought the television to life with a crack and a spark, and was met with an infomercial for some super food processor. I watched as countless food items, from potatoes and celery to chicken and salmon, were tossed into the processor and pulverized. The eccentric men demonstrating the process kept yelling with joy as each piece of food was shredded and destroyed…ground up into a fine paste. I decided that late-night television was beamed in from another planet. At 12am, or later on some networks, when all the regularly-scheduled programming had run its course, a band of freaks sporting sod-on-the-green hair plugs and clothes way off the spectrum took to the airwaves to demand you buy useless kitchen appliances, some gimmicky workout apparatus, or a weird blend of cleaning solution that waxed cars shiny new and also killed mold.

Needless to say, the super food processor, with some beastly name like “The Demonstrator” or “The Chopper Blade Ripper,” looked promising. It was a sleek gunmetal with black and chrome accents…like a weapon for your kitchen. The food in the demo never stood a chance.

As the blue light from the television bounced off my white walls and posters…briefly lighting the letters and calendars hanging by the skin of thumbtacks, the noise of food processing droned on in the background. James Squire, bedded up somewhere, behind an army of steel-cold nurses on 24-hour shifts, was probably watching the same infomercial and laughing at the maniacs trying to peddle something no one really needs. I imagined him awake at this hour, his internal clock irreversibly damaged and thrown off kilter by his stay in the hospital.

A love of infomercials started in my senior year college, when I’d smoke a joint in my parent’s backyard and wait around until 1:30am, when my favorite preacher, Rev. Anthony Rizzolini, took to the airwaves. Rev. Rizzolini was very much Italian, down to the perpetual black five o’clock shadow, gigantic unkempt eyebrows, and the swatch of limp, black hair that hung questionably on his head. He sold the Lord’s salvation, one tape series and bottle of holy water at a time, to his loyal viewing audience. In the middle of the night, on that channel, the reverend was king. His promo also featured a cast of characters who reviewed not only current events, but also current films and books, from a fundamentalist Christian perspective. Needless to say, Rev. Rizzolini and his family band was my preferred form of stoned entertainment.

On occasion, the reverend’s wife, a perfectly preserved, leftover model from decades before, would make an appearance. She filled up the entire frame of the television. Her liquid-blonde hair was always sprayed up and teased out, each highlight in blistering close-up. Her blouses hinted at something just a bit secular. Her jeans when she was reporting from “the battlefield” (a random plot of sidewalk in the middle of some suburb) were just tight enough to leave something to my imagination. I looked forward to her small, cute front belly and twangy, unfamiliar accent. Rev. Rizzolini sold not only tapes and CDs, but small vials of holy water, coupon packets for free meals at Big Bun Burger, and a Christian cookbook with fresh kitchen ideas for your next bible study group. The production value of the infomercial was shoddy at best, and all-too-often behind-the-scenes crewmembers were caught on-camera uncoiling cables, powdering Rizzolini’s face, or adjusting a lighting rig. Boom mics were scarcely kept out of the shot.

From 1:30-2:30am, my attention belonged to this preacher. I laughed at the on-site interviews, the fake call-ins, the covers of popular rap album tastefully exploding into flames.

I was well into the early hours of Saturday morning. My apartment smelled funky, probably a result of the garbage situation or my dirty clothes. When you live on your own, you rarely fill up the garbage. Figuring out when to take it out becomes one of life’s mysteries. Do you take it out after you order Chinese food and discard the greasy cardboard containers and bits of fortune cookie? Or, do you wait for it to be full to save money on garbage bags (which, I’ll have you know, are rather expensive)? In a place this small, the kitchen smells have a way of working themselves into your sheets and residing in your sleeping space for days. I lay there in my sweatpants, drawstring undone as always. My t-shirt was from an uncle’s 60
th
birthday party. That uncle, sadly, never saw 70. I guess, if you’re going to live on forever, a t-shirt isn’t such a bad deal.

I began to wonder about
Salo
and Streets Anderson and Weedman Tim and, as I channel surfed, keeping my finger on the down arrow, I longed for some cartoons…anything to take my mind out of where it was. Sadly, there were none to be found…just bad action movies, the news, and re-runs of sitcoms long-since canceled. I clicked the television off with a crackle and an instantly fading light. I put my head down on my pillow - not too fluffy, but just a little bit flat. My last thought on that night was of my parents.