Thomas Prescott Superpack (104 page)
Read Thomas Prescott Superpack Online
Authors: Nick Pirog
Tags: #Fiction, #Retail, #Suspense, #Thrillers
There were billions of hits. The most popular was a site called, “YouVid.”
Since I didn’t own a computer, I didn’t spend hours watching asinine videos—as many of my classmates did and many doing so while in class—but I had spent my fair share of time on YouTube. Usually when I needed a break from writing a paper, researching an old case file, or because my friend Lauren wouldn’t stop sending me videos of a kitten sticking its head under the faucet. Yes, it’s cute, I get it. My favorites, the ones that made my cheeks cramp up from smiling so hard, usually had to do with little kids saying funny stuff or simply laughing their asses off. When Michael Jackson died, I watched the Thriller video twenty times. But I suppose that was in the past.
I couldn’t help myself and I typed, “Guy Appears with Boner.”
It took a bit of searching but I finally found it. It was called, “New Arrival has Stiffy.”
It had over three million hits.
I watched it a couple times to make sure it was me. It was. Underneath the video was a button that said, “Share with your friends on Deadbook.”
I clicked on the link. Deadbook was Two’s answer to Facebook. I hadn’t been the biggest advocate of Facebook in the past, but it was the best way to communicate with classmates. Within ten minutes, I had taken a picture of myself with the webcam that came standard on the laptop and loaded my profile.
Next, I began searching for friends.
There was only one name that came to mind.
Perry.
Perry Whitcomb had attended the same elite middle school as me. You were forced to play a sport at Lassiter Middle School and I picked soccer. Perry and I were both on the “C” team. I had always been a head taller than most of my peers and I was especially uncoordinated in my youth. I found it easier to mask my flailing limbs and awkward gait on the soccer field than say the basketball or tennis court. The only player who was worse than me was Perry, which was sad considering Perry’s life revolved around soccer. He would wear a different soccer jersey every day and he would drone on about English Premier League for hours. He was fat, slow, uncoordinated, and for as much soccer as he watched, I’m not sure he understood the objective was to get the ball in the other team’s goal.
The second game of our eighth grade season, Perry was substituted at goalie for his compulsory twenty-five minutes. Twenty-five minutes all the parents would spend holding their breath and hoping the three-goal lead we'd built up would withstand Perry’s dreaded play.
It happened with eight minutes left in the game. The score was tied, 4-4. Perry had already allowed three goals, two of which had gone through his legs. The other team had just missed a shot and Perry was getting ready to take the free kick. I could still replay it in slow motion. Perry running towards the ball, his face smashed together in concentration. His big lurching steps as he approached the ball. His knees buckling. His body crumbling to the ground.
The coach never told us how Perry died. I always figured he had a heart attack.
I typed his name in the search box and clicked search.
Perry Whitcomb had come to
Two. And from the looks of things Perry still loved soccer and still loved his food. (He was wearing a soccer jersey in his profile picture and he was still fat.)
I clicked on his picture, but it wouldn’t let me look at his profile until we were friends. So I sent him a friend request. I wasn’t sure if he would recognize my picture, so I wrote him a quick message:
Perry, I don’t know if you remember me, we went to middle school together in Florida. Saw you were “here” and wanted to drop you a line. Maddy Young.
I sent the message.
I went to the bathroom and as I passed the couch, I looked at the two books. What was I doing? Why wasn’t I studying? I had just spent three months studying my ass off for this test. I knew all the material. If I crammed for the next twelve hours on the new stuff—according the JeAnn the stuff that was different from the past was highlighted in red, so basically I would just have to flip through the textbook and read all the highlighted parts—there was a good chance I could pass the Bar tomorrow.
I picked up both books and made my way back to the table. I placed my hand on the top of the laptop and was getting ready to close it when I noticed I had a message. I clicked on it. It was from Perry. It was titled, “No Fucking Way.”
I forgot to mention Perry had the dirtiest mouth and was the most sexually perverted individual I’d ever met. And he’d been twelve.
I opened the message:
No Fucking Way! Maddy Fucking Young! When did you get here? How did you die? What the fuck is up? You still playing soccer? Hit me back.
I hit him back.
I got here a couple weeks ago. You’re going to think I’m kidding, but I died jerking off in the shower. What is soccer?
Perry:
JERKING OFF IN THE SHOWER! Yeah right. How did you die? What do you think so far? Crazy huh? You know what soccer is asshole.
Me:
I’m serious. I died jerking off in the shower. Check, YouVid. (New Arrival with Stiffy.) I think crazy is an understatement. You still playing soccer?
Perry:
HA! I saw that video last week. Holy shit. Nice dick. Of course I’m still playing soccer. I play in three leagues. What Adjustment House you in? Miami? Tampa?
Maddy:
Denver.
Perry:
NO FUCKING WAY. I’m in DENVER!
Me:
Serious?
Perry:
Yeah, I moved here three years ago. I work for the Denver Chronicle. Let’s meet up. I’m going to a bar downtown in about an hour. It’s called Pubbar. It's on the corner of J and 23. Lot’s of girlies.
I looked at the books. Looked at the computer.
Me:
Okay. See you there.
Since I didn’t own a computer, I didn’t spend hours watching asinine videos—as many of my classmates did and many doing so while in class—but I had spent my fair share of time on YouTube. Usually when I needed a break from writing a paper, researching an old case file, or because my friend Lauren wouldn’t stop sending me videos of a kitten sticking its head under the faucet. Yes, it’s cute, I get it. My favorites, the ones that made my cheeks cramp up from smiling so hard, usually had to do with little kids saying funny stuff or simply laughing their asses off. When Michael Jackson died, I watched the Thriller video twenty times. But I suppose that was in the past.
I couldn’t help myself and I typed, “Guy Appears with Boner.”
It took a bit of searching but I finally found it. It was called, “New Arrival has Stiffy.”
It had over three million hits.
I watched it a couple times to make sure it was me. It was. Underneath the video was a button that said, “Share with your friends on Deadbook.”
I clicked on the link. Deadbook was Two’s answer to Facebook. I hadn’t been the biggest advocate of Facebook in the past, but it was the best way to communicate with classmates. Within ten minutes, I had taken a picture of myself with the webcam that came standard on the laptop and loaded my profile.
Next, I began searching for friends.
There was only one name that came to mind.
Perry.
Perry Whitcomb had attended the same elite middle school as me. You were forced to play a sport at Lassiter Middle School and I picked soccer. Perry and I were both on the “C” team. I had always been a head taller than most of my peers and I was especially uncoordinated in my youth. I found it easier to mask my flailing limbs and awkward gait on the soccer field than say the basketball or tennis court. The only player who was worse than me was Perry, which was sad considering Perry’s life revolved around soccer. He would wear a different soccer jersey every day and he would drone on about English Premier League for hours. He was fat, slow, uncoordinated, and for as much soccer as he watched, I’m not sure he understood the objective was to get the ball in the other team’s goal.
The second game of our eighth grade season, Perry was substituted at goalie for his compulsory twenty-five minutes. Twenty-five minutes all the parents would spend holding their breath and hoping the three-goal lead we'd built up would withstand Perry’s dreaded play.
It happened with eight minutes left in the game. The score was tied, 4-4. Perry had already allowed three goals, two of which had gone through his legs. The other team had just missed a shot and Perry was getting ready to take the free kick. I could still replay it in slow motion. Perry running towards the ball, his face smashed together in concentration. His big lurching steps as he approached the ball. His knees buckling. His body crumbling to the ground.
The coach never told us how Perry died. I always figured he had a heart attack.
I typed his name in the search box and clicked search.
Perry Whitcomb had come to
Two. And from the looks of things Perry still loved soccer and still loved his food. (He was wearing a soccer jersey in his profile picture and he was still fat.)
I clicked on his picture, but it wouldn’t let me look at his profile until we were friends. So I sent him a friend request. I wasn’t sure if he would recognize my picture, so I wrote him a quick message:
Perry, I don’t know if you remember me, we went to middle school together in Florida. Saw you were “here” and wanted to drop you a line. Maddy Young.
I sent the message.
I went to the bathroom and as I passed the couch, I looked at the two books. What was I doing? Why wasn’t I studying? I had just spent three months studying my ass off for this test. I knew all the material. If I crammed for the next twelve hours on the new stuff—according the JeAnn the stuff that was different from the past was highlighted in red, so basically I would just have to flip through the textbook and read all the highlighted parts—there was a good chance I could pass the Bar tomorrow.
I picked up both books and made my way back to the table. I placed my hand on the top of the laptop and was getting ready to close it when I noticed I had a message. I clicked on it. It was from Perry. It was titled, “No Fucking Way.”
I forgot to mention Perry had the dirtiest mouth and was the most sexually perverted individual I’d ever met. And he’d been twelve.
I opened the message:
No Fucking Way! Maddy Fucking Young! When did you get here? How did you die? What the fuck is up? You still playing soccer? Hit me back.
I hit him back.
I got here a couple weeks ago. You’re going to think I’m kidding, but I died jerking off in the shower. What is soccer?
Perry:
JERKING OFF IN THE SHOWER! Yeah right. How did you die? What do you think so far? Crazy huh? You know what soccer is asshole.
Me:
I’m serious. I died jerking off in the shower. Check, YouVid. (New Arrival with Stiffy.) I think crazy is an understatement. You still playing soccer?
Perry:
HA! I saw that video last week. Holy shit. Nice dick. Of course I’m still playing soccer. I play in three leagues. What Adjustment House you in? Miami? Tampa?
Maddy:
Denver.
Perry:
NO FUCKING WAY. I’m in DENVER!
Me:
Serious?
Perry:
Yeah, I moved here three years ago. I work for the Denver Chronicle. Let’s meet up. I’m going to a bar downtown in about an hour. It’s called Pubbar. It's on the corner of J and 23. Lot’s of girlies.
I looked at the books. Looked at the computer.
Me:
Okay. See you there.
Chapter 6.
The Bar(s)
I didn’t know what
fall
was, or what the word
autumn
even meant—there are two seasons in Florida; summer and summer-ish—until I moved to Colorado. Three weeks into my first Colorado October, I found myself enamored with the season. I would carve a couple pumpkins each year for Halloween, then bake the seeds. I loved Thanksgiving. I would cook all day, watch football, have a couple glasses of red wine, take three naps. The only people I would see were the people at Whole Foods and this was fine with me. And as strange as it sounds, I looked forward to getting that first cold of the year. The sneezing, the throaty cough, the sniffing. Going to the grocery store and spending sixty dollars on Theraflu, cough drops, throat lozenges, Cold Ease, a big thing of orange juice, renting a couple movies from the Red Box, and buying a crisp new book. Sad, I know.
But, I wasn’t so sure about fall in
Two. When I took a huge inhale of the sharp cold air through my nostrils, I didn’t immediately smile. Maybe I was jumping to conclusions here. Maybe in time, maybe in October, it would hit me. But right now all I could think about was how I didn’t fit. How I was the square block being pounded into the circular hole.
But why?
It wasn’t like there was that much different here. It seemed less of a change than Colorado had been from Florida. So then why did I always have this sensation that something was wrong? That I was the butt of one big joke. That I was Jim Carrey on the
Truman Show
and everything that was going on around me was just that, a show.
But I guess that’s why I was walking to a bar on a Friday night when I should be studying. I needed to meet someone. Talk to someone who had had the same feelings. Had the same frustrations. I needed Perry Whitcomb to tell me he’d felt like he was Truman at one time or another. (Well, I don’t think that movie was out before he died, so he might not get the reference, but you get the idea.) I needed someone who wasn’t a doctor or a counselor to tell me everything I was feeling was normal. Tell me that I wasn’t a square block.
And I needed someone to tell me about the Borns.
⠔
Through the window I could see a bunch of flat screen TV’s on the walls broadcasting a soccer game. No wonder Perry wanted to come here. There was a long bar in front with stools lined up and people packed two deep waiting for drinks from one of three bartenders. In the middle of the bar, a bunch of suede couches faced one another. Further back it appeared there was a door leading to an outdoor patio.
I took my place at the back of the line, swiped my card when it was my turn, and pushed through the revolving door.
It didn’t take me long to find Perry Whitcomb. In fact, Perry Whitcomb found me. I hadn’t been inside the bar two seconds, when the whole place erupted. I looked up at one of the large TV’s where they were replaying the goal that was just scored. Then I felt myself being lifted and someone yelling, “Did you see that shit?”
Perry set me down and I turned around, only to find that he had already found his second victim—some poor girl who looked terrified—and he was shouting, “GOOOAAAALLL,” into her right ear at eleven thousand decibels.
I screamed, “Perry!”
He turned towards me. I could see the confusion in his eyes. He hadn’t recognized me. I had simply been the unfortunate person closest to him when the goal was scored. His face exploded into a smile and he screamed, “Maddy!”
He put the poor girl down, rushed forward, and engulfed me in his large arms. After a lengthy bear hug, Perry set me down.
If I were a head taller than Perry then, I was two heads taller than him now. If I’d grown a foot since I’d last seen him, he’d grown an inch. In fact, he looked the same as I remembered. Short and fat, his curly brown hair shooting outward from his scalp, the soft tendrils never having been touched by either a brush or a styling product. His face wasn’t as fat as the rest of him, but the lines were soft, not the lines one would expect to see on the face of a 28-year-old male. No, the face; brown eyes, long almost feminine eyelashes, small nose, and delicate lips, was the face of a twelve-year-old.
I said, “Look at you man. You look great.”
“Thanks man. Yoga. Lots of yoga.”
If Perry Whitcomb was doing yoga, I’m pretty sure he was doing it incorrectly.
I said, “I see you’re still rocking the soccer jersey.” He was wearing a bright green jersey with NA5 stamped on the front in red lettering. The rest of the jersey was covered in endorsements.
“You know it.”
“Who is NA5?”
He pointed to the TV. “North America Five you idiot.” One of the teams scampering around on the TV was wearing the same green jersey. In the top of the screen the score read, “NA5 1, SA8 0.”
He said, “Don’t feel bad. Soccer’s different here. It truly is the ‘World’s Game.’ It’s broken up into continents, North America, South America, Asia, Europe. They each have their own division. Kind of like the NFL. North America would be like the AFC West.”
We went to the bar and ordered drinks. The bartender asked for my card, swiped it,
then handed me my drink. I had yet to see cash in Two.
“Does anyone ever carry cash?” I asked.
He scoffed. “Of course not.”
We took our drinks and found a table with a good view of the TV. There were seven minutes left in the game. Perry did a bit of yelling those last seven minutes. Especially when South America scored with less than a minute remaining. He groaned when the final whistle blew and announced that we would be taking a shot of tequila to nurse the loss.
The waitress came around and Perry ordered another round of beers and a couple shots. The waitress scanned his card into a little handheld device, then asked for mine. I handed it to her. She scanned it. When she gave it back, and left, I asked, “What was that all about?”
“What?”
“Why’d the waitress ask for my card?”
“Oh, that. They account for every drink you have. I bought the drinks, but you’re still going to drink two of them, so she had to move them to your account. Ten is the limit.”
I guess now would be a good time to mention that I wasn’t much of a drinker. Yeah, I’d done my fair share of partying when I was younger, but by the time I was 23, I had tired of waking up with a pounding headache, the sweats, heart palpitations, and more than just generalized anxiety. I would still tie one on a couple times a year, but for the most part I was good for two beers, three if I were trying to impress a girl.
Perry added, “And if you have more than one drink, your car won’t start.”
No arguing that one. I knew too many people who had gotten a DUI and another couple who had fared even worse. I made a mental reminder to check for them on Deadbook.
As if reading my mind, Perry said, “So tell me about my funeral.”
So, I told him about his funeral. About how his mom sat in the front row and cried her eyes out. How his step dad lost it while he was giving the eulogy and how our coach made us wear patches with his name for the remainder of the season. I expected him to get a little teary eyed, but he didn’t. In fact, he never even had the far-off look one would expect. It was a little odd.
I asked, “So what have you been up to since you
arrived
?”
“Let’s see. When I was released from the Fort Lauderdale Adjustment Facility I went to live with my Godfather in Iowa. My dad’s roommate in college. Died from some weird bacteria infection. Pretty good guy. But, man was Iowa awful. In the end it wasn’t so bad. I made some good friends. Went to school out in California and studied Journalism. Then I moved back down to Florida and worked for a paper down there for a while. Then three years ago, my car broke down in Denver on the way to Vegas. Fell in love with it. Month later, I got a gig at the
Denver Chronicle
.”
I nodded.
He told me all about his job with the paper. He mostly wrote about politics but he was trying to get his editor to let him write a soccer column. After a lengthy description of the editorial he would have written about the game just played, he asked me, “So did you nail any of those stuck up girls from Saint Tabitha’s or what?”
Saint Tabitha’s was the all-girl’s school adjacent to our all-boy’s school. I told him I dated Sara Evans—a girl a year older than us who was thought to be untouchable— for almost three weeks my junior year of high school.
“You nail her?”
“If by nail her, you mean rub her left boob for twelve minutes once, then yeah, I nailed her.”
Our beer and shots came. Perry proposed a toast to my fondling Sara Evans, “Perfectly sculpted left tit,” and we slammed down the tequila.
Perry was excessively curious about my sexual conquests—possibly because he hadn’t had many of his own, but more likely because he was perverted—and I happily obliged him with a few highlights.
He high-fived me on more than one occasion, then said, “I still can’t believe that was you in the video. I had like ten different people e-mail it to me in one day.”
“I’m famous.”
I asked, “How bout you. How the ladies treating you here?”
“Batting them off with a stick my man.”
I bet.
Perry spent the next ten minutes telling me all about the women he’d “had.” His stories were so detailed and well—bizarre—that I decided there was no way he could be making it all up.
For example: He met a girl at his “Favorite Porno shop,” who ended up being a stripper. When he asked her if he could take her to Outback for a steak sometime she said, “No,” but she did ask him if he wouldn’t mind babysitting her three kids that evening because her usual sitter was unavailable. He said yes and then when she got home at four in the morning after stripping all evening she asked if he wanted to be paid in cash or blow jobs. He picked the latter.
I’m sorry, but you simply can’t make that up.
This of course, led to story time, and the two of us spent the better part of the next hour narrating all the crazy stuff we’d seen, done, or heard about. Perry, who had the alcohol tolerance of a Russian potato farmer, kept ordering drinks for me, and well, I kept drinking them.
While I still had my wits about me, I asked Perry, “Can I ask you something?”
He nodded.
“When you first got here, did you, like, feel out of place? Like you were the butt of some big joke?”
“Of course man. That’s what everybody feels like. Shit. They tell you that you died and you came to this new place. Might as well tell you that you’re a fucking alien. Of course you’re going to feel out of place. Shit, man, when I first came here I was terrified. Pissed my bed every fucking night.”
“Really?”
“Really. But then over time, you start to adjust, and then one day you don’t think about it anymore. It just is.”
In my brain I thought the words, “Well, it’s good to hear that from someone who has been here, who has been in my shoes, and has a bit of perspective,” but the alcohol decided this needed to come out as, “Thanks man.
Man, that makes me feel better. Man, thanks for inviting me out. Man, I really needed this. Seriously, man. “
I couldn’t stop saying
man
.
Man
.
Perry nodded and we clinked glasses. I believe the letters, “BFF” may have been uttered.
Man
.
There had been one more thing I wanted to ask Perry about, but I couldn’t remember. Then it hit me. I leaned forward in my chair. Perry was bringing his beer up to his lips to take a drink when I said the words, “What’s the deal with the Borns?”
Beer exploded from Perry’s mouth. Then he began violently coughing. After ten seconds of hacking, he leaned forward and said, “What did you say?”
I repeated the question.
His eyes darted around the room, left, right, up, down. “I don’t know who has been telling you what, but they don’t exist. Never have. It’s a myth, a legend. Let it go.”
“A myth?”
He leaned forward and said, “Let it go.”
I leaned back. If I had been sober, my mind would have been reeling. Trying to figure out what Perry’s reaction meant. But, my synapses weren’t firing as quickly as usual. Plus, I didn’t have much time to deliberate. Two cute girls had just taken up the two empty seats at our table.
Perry winked at me, then flagged down our waitress to order another round.
I didn’t know what
fall
was, or what the word
autumn
even meant—there are two seasons in Florida; summer and summer-ish—until I moved to Colorado. Three weeks into my first Colorado October, I found myself enamored with the season. I would carve a couple pumpkins each year for Halloween, then bake the seeds. I loved Thanksgiving. I would cook all day, watch football, have a couple glasses of red wine, take three naps. The only people I would see were the people at Whole Foods and this was fine with me. And as strange as it sounds, I looked forward to getting that first cold of the year. The sneezing, the throaty cough, the sniffing. Going to the grocery store and spending sixty dollars on Theraflu, cough drops, throat lozenges, Cold Ease, a big thing of orange juice, renting a couple movies from the Red Box, and buying a crisp new book. Sad, I know.
But, I wasn’t so sure about fall in
Two. When I took a huge inhale of the sharp cold air through my nostrils, I didn’t immediately smile. Maybe I was jumping to conclusions here. Maybe in time, maybe in October, it would hit me. But right now all I could think about was how I didn’t fit. How I was the square block being pounded into the circular hole.
But why?
It wasn’t like there was that much different here. It seemed less of a change than Colorado had been from Florida. So then why did I always have this sensation that something was wrong? That I was the butt of one big joke. That I was Jim Carrey on the
Truman Show
and everything that was going on around me was just that, a show.
But I guess that’s why I was walking to a bar on a Friday night when I should be studying. I needed to meet someone. Talk to someone who had had the same feelings. Had the same frustrations. I needed Perry Whitcomb to tell me he’d felt like he was Truman at one time or another. (Well, I don’t think that movie was out before he died, so he might not get the reference, but you get the idea.) I needed someone who wasn’t a doctor or a counselor to tell me everything I was feeling was normal. Tell me that I wasn’t a square block.
And I needed someone to tell me about the Borns.
⠔
Through the window I could see a bunch of flat screen TV’s on the walls broadcasting a soccer game. No wonder Perry wanted to come here. There was a long bar in front with stools lined up and people packed two deep waiting for drinks from one of three bartenders. In the middle of the bar, a bunch of suede couches faced one another. Further back it appeared there was a door leading to an outdoor patio.
I took my place at the back of the line, swiped my card when it was my turn, and pushed through the revolving door.
It didn’t take me long to find Perry Whitcomb. In fact, Perry Whitcomb found me. I hadn’t been inside the bar two seconds, when the whole place erupted. I looked up at one of the large TV’s where they were replaying the goal that was just scored. Then I felt myself being lifted and someone yelling, “Did you see that shit?”
Perry set me down and I turned around, only to find that he had already found his second victim—some poor girl who looked terrified—and he was shouting, “GOOOAAAALLL,” into her right ear at eleven thousand decibels.
I screamed, “Perry!”
He turned towards me. I could see the confusion in his eyes. He hadn’t recognized me. I had simply been the unfortunate person closest to him when the goal was scored. His face exploded into a smile and he screamed, “Maddy!”
He put the poor girl down, rushed forward, and engulfed me in his large arms. After a lengthy bear hug, Perry set me down.
If I were a head taller than Perry then, I was two heads taller than him now. If I’d grown a foot since I’d last seen him, he’d grown an inch. In fact, he looked the same as I remembered. Short and fat, his curly brown hair shooting outward from his scalp, the soft tendrils never having been touched by either a brush or a styling product. His face wasn’t as fat as the rest of him, but the lines were soft, not the lines one would expect to see on the face of a 28-year-old male. No, the face; brown eyes, long almost feminine eyelashes, small nose, and delicate lips, was the face of a twelve-year-old.
I said, “Look at you man. You look great.”
“Thanks man. Yoga. Lots of yoga.”
If Perry Whitcomb was doing yoga, I’m pretty sure he was doing it incorrectly.
I said, “I see you’re still rocking the soccer jersey.” He was wearing a bright green jersey with NA5 stamped on the front in red lettering. The rest of the jersey was covered in endorsements.
“You know it.”
“Who is NA5?”
He pointed to the TV. “North America Five you idiot.” One of the teams scampering around on the TV was wearing the same green jersey. In the top of the screen the score read, “NA5 1, SA8 0.”
He said, “Don’t feel bad. Soccer’s different here. It truly is the ‘World’s Game.’ It’s broken up into continents, North America, South America, Asia, Europe. They each have their own division. Kind of like the NFL. North America would be like the AFC West.”
We went to the bar and ordered drinks. The bartender asked for my card, swiped it,
then handed me my drink. I had yet to see cash in Two.
“Does anyone ever carry cash?” I asked.
He scoffed. “Of course not.”
We took our drinks and found a table with a good view of the TV. There were seven minutes left in the game. Perry did a bit of yelling those last seven minutes. Especially when South America scored with less than a minute remaining. He groaned when the final whistle blew and announced that we would be taking a shot of tequila to nurse the loss.
The waitress came around and Perry ordered another round of beers and a couple shots. The waitress scanned his card into a little handheld device, then asked for mine. I handed it to her. She scanned it. When she gave it back, and left, I asked, “What was that all about?”
“What?”
“Why’d the waitress ask for my card?”
“Oh, that. They account for every drink you have. I bought the drinks, but you’re still going to drink two of them, so she had to move them to your account. Ten is the limit.”
I guess now would be a good time to mention that I wasn’t much of a drinker. Yeah, I’d done my fair share of partying when I was younger, but by the time I was 23, I had tired of waking up with a pounding headache, the sweats, heart palpitations, and more than just generalized anxiety. I would still tie one on a couple times a year, but for the most part I was good for two beers, three if I were trying to impress a girl.
Perry added, “And if you have more than one drink, your car won’t start.”
No arguing that one. I knew too many people who had gotten a DUI and another couple who had fared even worse. I made a mental reminder to check for them on Deadbook.
As if reading my mind, Perry said, “So tell me about my funeral.”
So, I told him about his funeral. About how his mom sat in the front row and cried her eyes out. How his step dad lost it while he was giving the eulogy and how our coach made us wear patches with his name for the remainder of the season. I expected him to get a little teary eyed, but he didn’t. In fact, he never even had the far-off look one would expect. It was a little odd.
I asked, “So what have you been up to since you
arrived
?”
“Let’s see. When I was released from the Fort Lauderdale Adjustment Facility I went to live with my Godfather in Iowa. My dad’s roommate in college. Died from some weird bacteria infection. Pretty good guy. But, man was Iowa awful. In the end it wasn’t so bad. I made some good friends. Went to school out in California and studied Journalism. Then I moved back down to Florida and worked for a paper down there for a while. Then three years ago, my car broke down in Denver on the way to Vegas. Fell in love with it. Month later, I got a gig at the
Denver Chronicle
.”
I nodded.
He told me all about his job with the paper. He mostly wrote about politics but he was trying to get his editor to let him write a soccer column. After a lengthy description of the editorial he would have written about the game just played, he asked me, “So did you nail any of those stuck up girls from Saint Tabitha’s or what?”
Saint Tabitha’s was the all-girl’s school adjacent to our all-boy’s school. I told him I dated Sara Evans—a girl a year older than us who was thought to be untouchable— for almost three weeks my junior year of high school.
“You nail her?”
“If by nail her, you mean rub her left boob for twelve minutes once, then yeah, I nailed her.”
Our beer and shots came. Perry proposed a toast to my fondling Sara Evans, “Perfectly sculpted left tit,” and we slammed down the tequila.
Perry was excessively curious about my sexual conquests—possibly because he hadn’t had many of his own, but more likely because he was perverted—and I happily obliged him with a few highlights.
He high-fived me on more than one occasion, then said, “I still can’t believe that was you in the video. I had like ten different people e-mail it to me in one day.”
“I’m famous.”
I asked, “How bout you. How the ladies treating you here?”
“Batting them off with a stick my man.”
I bet.
Perry spent the next ten minutes telling me all about the women he’d “had.” His stories were so detailed and well—bizarre—that I decided there was no way he could be making it all up.
For example: He met a girl at his “Favorite Porno shop,” who ended up being a stripper. When he asked her if he could take her to Outback for a steak sometime she said, “No,” but she did ask him if he wouldn’t mind babysitting her three kids that evening because her usual sitter was unavailable. He said yes and then when she got home at four in the morning after stripping all evening she asked if he wanted to be paid in cash or blow jobs. He picked the latter.
I’m sorry, but you simply can’t make that up.
This of course, led to story time, and the two of us spent the better part of the next hour narrating all the crazy stuff we’d seen, done, or heard about. Perry, who had the alcohol tolerance of a Russian potato farmer, kept ordering drinks for me, and well, I kept drinking them.
While I still had my wits about me, I asked Perry, “Can I ask you something?”
He nodded.
“When you first got here, did you, like, feel out of place? Like you were the butt of some big joke?”
“Of course man. That’s what everybody feels like. Shit. They tell you that you died and you came to this new place. Might as well tell you that you’re a fucking alien. Of course you’re going to feel out of place. Shit, man, when I first came here I was terrified. Pissed my bed every fucking night.”
“Really?”
“Really. But then over time, you start to adjust, and then one day you don’t think about it anymore. It just is.”
In my brain I thought the words, “Well, it’s good to hear that from someone who has been here, who has been in my shoes, and has a bit of perspective,” but the alcohol decided this needed to come out as, “Thanks man.
Man, that makes me feel better. Man, thanks for inviting me out. Man, I really needed this. Seriously, man. “
I couldn’t stop saying
man
.
Man
.
Perry nodded and we clinked glasses. I believe the letters, “BFF” may have been uttered.
Man
.
There had been one more thing I wanted to ask Perry about, but I couldn’t remember. Then it hit me. I leaned forward in my chair. Perry was bringing his beer up to his lips to take a drink when I said the words, “What’s the deal with the Borns?”
Beer exploded from Perry’s mouth. Then he began violently coughing. After ten seconds of hacking, he leaned forward and said, “What did you say?”
I repeated the question.
His eyes darted around the room, left, right, up, down. “I don’t know who has been telling you what, but they don’t exist. Never have. It’s a myth, a legend. Let it go.”
“A myth?”
He leaned forward and said, “Let it go.”
I leaned back. If I had been sober, my mind would have been reeling. Trying to figure out what Perry’s reaction meant. But, my synapses weren’t firing as quickly as usual. Plus, I didn’t have much time to deliberate. Two cute girls had just taken up the two empty seats at our table.
Perry winked at me, then flagged down our waitress to order another round.
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