The Taste of Penny (13 page)

Yeah, but she cheated on you all the time.

Still, I say.

It's worth applying for, you know. It's free.

 

I walk in place in line to get my shoelaces vibrating and distract me from these tools. I'm in this habit of watching my shoelaces. They vibrate when my feet hit the sidewalk. It keeps my mind
off her. When it's my turn I keep going up the steps watching the shoelace vibrations until the top of my head hits her, just like it did the guy at the back of the line, letting me know I'm there. She looks not pleased to see me.

How many goddamn clipboards and pencils did you buy for this? I say without meaning to.

You've got to be prepared just as much for success in your endeavors, my love, she says, as you are for failure.

So what are your qualifications? She snatches the clipboard and looks over it. This is not the free lunch line.

I'm of average height, I say. I drink but don't smoke. My feet are soft due to daily cocoa butter application. I miss somebody.

It's smudgy, she says.

I'm better with spray paint, I say.

I have a couple weeder questions. What's the most interesting thing you could think of to do with this?

She produces a pork chop bone.

I fondle it, long since dried and sharp, like fish teeth. Slingshot, I say.

She jots something down on my application, in the space where it says
Do not write here. For office use only.
I broke up with you for a reason: You're only the fourth motherfucker to give such an obvious answer today.

I sense I am not doing well and ask to use the bathroom.

Step inside, she says. I'm only giving you fair shake because I believe in equal opportunity for all scumbags.

Which I appreciate about her. In there, I take a little extra time. I never really thought I'd make it back. Sure, it used to be when we were broken up, well, once at least, she called me up and said, Do you think you can get hard? But those were different times. I breathe deep the smell of Anti-Bacterial Country Apple Hand Gel, which is, for me, the smell of her.

When I come out I say, You love scumbags.

But I want the best scumbag, she says, and hands me a plastic slingshot, the kids' kind. And this? The most interesting thing? she says.

Pork chop bone, I say.

Okay, she says, nodding, holding eye contact now. Better.

She points me toward the couch. She stands and reexamines my application. You find a number of my queries don't apply to you.

This is some production, I say. What did James think to do with the pork chop?

All applicant information, she says, is strictly confidential. She's always been like this. Everything is official and efficient with her. And that kind of thing won't get you the position, already a staggering improbability.

I'm just saying, I say.

If you must know, he had a very right answer, she says. As for me, I've decided I want a scumbag who can do math.

Okay. Math.

So. Here. You get to come back in the morning.

What she puts in my hands now is a two-page, double-sided math test. It's a photocopy of the test that Subway gives its prospective sandwich artists. I think I have one of these at home. She's attempted to Sharpie out the Subway logo at the top but you can still see. It's stapled in the top right-hand corner. And a pink appointment slip for tomorrow.

I walk out thumbing through the Subway math test. It's mostly multiplication and division. There is some algebra on the back of the last page where your job is to tell what X is.

 

Me, James is saying to this one guy when I walk into the Laundromat Bar, and nodding his head a lot. He's at a table with
four other guys, all of them from the line. They're hunched over their Subway tests. There's a calculator in the middle of the table.

How long you been here? I ask to be polite.

Long, James says.

I walked for hours, I say, trying to seem not annoyed. I picked up my laundry. I came here to wash. But pretty soon I'm drinking and forgetting that my clothes are in the washer. We pass the calculator around the table. I do the multiplication on the calculator then work out the long division on bar napkins. It says to show your work, but I have to practice it a couple times before I'm ready to show it. James's tongue touches his nose when he writes. He shields his eyes whenever a woman falls into his line of sight. I see him peeking through the fingers though.

I don't say a word for a long time and James finally calls me out.

Why are you taking this so seriously? he asks.

I'm trying to get things right this time.

Maybe the gig isn't for you.

It's for you then? Or one of them tools? One of the tools blows up at this and James tells him he can sit the fuck back down. The tool listens to James. People tend to.

I'm looking out for my buddy, and you never make callbacks.

You leer, I say to James.

The new bartender gives last call.

And I'm doing something about that. No thanks to you, he says and makes for the Galaga machine. He always gets on Galaga at last call because he can play forever. The old bartender knew to cut it off before last call.

With his back to me, I switch out James's test with my own. Then I get up and leave.

In my pink home, I hunker down. All the lights off. I
lock the doors and try the old creaky futon. James shows up several hours later, ramming parts of himself at the door. Chunks of asphalt shatter the window and land on the futon beside me. He's screaming something but all I can make out is
wooden
and
ordinary
.

I take my pillow and the math test and crawl around the glass and back to the bathroom, shutting and bolting the bathroom door, then arranging myself on the floor around the toilet. With my elbow on the pillow it's actually nice. I may come here again. And the door muffles James just enough so that his ranting is background noise, like running water or a good ceiling fan or central air conditioning, which always comforts me at night.

I flip through his math test. There's ornate, intricate Xs through every question. Different designs and shapes make up the lines of the Xs, flowers, tribal, bubbles, little Galaga ships, and some horned demon Xs. It's the kind of doodling he does above the urinals at the Laundromat Bar. Things made up of other things. There's a bar napkin attached with a paperclip. I wonder where he got a paperclip. The napkin is blank except for the fragrance of Old Milwaukee and an equation:

James continues his tantrum in the street. I am curled up on the bathroom floor reading over this thing and having no idea what it means, an enormous feeling of inadequacy washing over me.

I remember then leaving my clothes in the washer at the Laundromat Bar. By the time I show up tomorrow there will have been ashtrays and pints of beer poured over them, and, not having enough quarters to rewash, I'll simply dry them. Instead
of appearing at my appointment for the boyfriend position, I'll be sitting there watching flecks of cigarette ash appear in the fog of the dryer glass.

James was right. I never make callbacks. Whenever I apply for a position, for any position, it's not enough that I
showed up
, that I filled out their application, that I talk to them face-to-face. They always want something more of me. No. I have to go do something, and it's either a math test or a reference or piss in a cup or some other meaningless thing I'll fuck up. It's always I never had a chance.

JAMES LAY ON THE CHEESE MOLDY CARPET IN HIS new basement apartment watching the centipedes drop out of the cinderblock north and west walls. Drawers were built into the panel board east wall, and a bat squirmed out of the built-in drawer he was using for his underwear. He watched the bat dive-bomb moths at the light bulb.

He stood up and went to the bathroom where he discovered an eau de toilette in the medicine cabinet called One Man Show, which smelled like noodles. He sprayed the centipedes on the carpet, and it seemed to kill them. They curled when they died. He picked up the dead centipedes, and their legs caught in the cheese moldy carpet. He dropped them in the toilet. He sprayed the One Man Show on the holes in the cinder block and then he bathed himself in it.

He opened the blinds. The bat smacked into his underwear drawer trying to get away from the light. It
surprised James that the thing didn't knock itself out. Outside his window, just a few feet from him, there were about fifteen small, old grave markers. It looked like a little family cemetery plot.

James decided to smoke some weed, which he didn't do often because it made him paranoid, but he figured he couldn't be more paranoid than he already was with bats and centipedes and dead bodies a few feet away.

James safety-pinned holes into an old Mountain Dew can and shaped it into a bowl. When the bat hooked its wing-hands in the drawer crevice and wormed in, grunting and peeping in a way James didn't know bats grunted and peeped, he rightfully understood wing-hands for the first time. Then it disappeared, wriggling into a space he doubted would fit mail. He could hear it shuffling around in his underwear, a sound like long blows on cardboard.

This was Sayonara weed, the last present from his ex-girlfriend, who he'd been living with the past three months. It was her parents' house and it felt like a parents' house, a proper home with atmospheric controls, tight sealants on every portal so creatures like centipedes and bats couldn't get in, windows looking out on a yard without a half-ass cemetery. He'd be there right now, breathing the fabric softener in the non-damp sheets and pillowcases rather than cheese mold. He'd be next to her.

The night prior to his eviction a man had entered the parental bedroom, stopped in front of James's girlfriend's mother, opened his fly, and urinated on her head. The parents were awake but claimed they were too mortified to move. The man zipped up and calmly left the bedroom, shutting the door behind him. The parents called the police quietly from the
bedside phone. The father dabbed the mother's head with his pillow but she made him stop to preserve DNA. The Rottweilers went ballistic when the police arrived. His girlfriend was woken up too then, but James slept.

The police found no signs of forced entry. They said, Folks, weren't the dogs barking when the intruder came in?

Huh, the parents said, now that you mention that, it's kind of funny. No.

The police asked, Are you certain there's no one else in the house?

James had problems in sleep before, had been found one night sitting up in bed, eyes open, picking at flowers on the sheets and requesting that his girlfriend help him get all these bugs, which caused her to be extremely weirded-out.

The parents looked at their daughter. She pushed open the door and the police flashlights fell on James's face as he slept. Now that they mentioned it, she remembered him going to the bathroom not long before they arrived.

James presented himself at breakfast the next morning, and the mother was there to greet him wearing a nightgown he hadn't seen before.

Good morning, James, she said, over-chipper. Do you recall urinating on my head last night?

He paused to make sure he'd heard correctly. Negatory, he said and reached for a waffle.

Sure was a hoot, she said.

His things, his girlfriend said, were already packed in large Heftys by the curb, but unfortunately it had been Yard Trash Day and the men had picked up. His girlfriend walked with him and explained the fallout.

Out of the kindness of their souls they decided not to press charges, she said, on the contingency that you leave.

Can you claim kindness of the soul when there's a contingency? he asked.

She was calm about the whole thing. Actually, she said, they've been looking for an excuse to bon voyage you for a while.

And you? You're looking for an excuse to bon voyage me?

Here's some weed, she said.

Then she pointed to the depressions in the plush grass where the Heftys containing his things were before the men picked them up.

James didn't think these things were right: kindness of souls, contingencies, excuses, all his worldly possessions mistaken for leaves. Shouldn't there be circumstantial proof
other
than the absence of dogs barking? James had spent time with those dogs, and they'd been known not to bark for reasons other than the person who peed on his girlfriend's mother was him.

 

James hadn't anticipated what high-quality shit this was. He lay on the floor again. When he lay on the floor of his basement apartment, he realized, he was about exactly six feet under. If he could look through the cinder block with X-ray vision, he would see the bodies or the coffins if the people in the little family cemetery were buried in coffins. They'd be right there.