Them

I hit myself in the face with a dumbbell last week. I was in the gym and not depressed. I looked around after I did it, this way and that. No one. But I kept checking.

Safe? Safe.

But when I got home, I looked at my battered face in the mirror. (As opposed to a polished piece of brass?)

Safe?…

Safe my scrote. Safe my wrinkly, old scrote. The dumbbell had left a red bump right in the middle of my forehead. What? Really? Fuck.

Dude, come on. Fuck.

At one point, I brushed my hair towards it, towards the  bump. I don’t know if I actually thought that my hair would cover it up or if brushing hair over blemishes was a habit from a time when I didn’t have a buzz.

Habit, I think. Habit from a time when I had bad acne because that bump in the middle of my forehead looked like a pimple. I could tell people were looking at it. I wanted to explain myself. “It’s not a pimple. I know you’re looking at it. That’s cool. Hard not to, I guess, but let me tell you…”

And I wanted to tell them what happened, but I couldn’t. Well, I suppose I could, but this is what it would sound like. “This is not a pimple, this is where I hit myself in the face with a dumbbell.” So, to them, I just had a pimple.

Today, I had both bad intentions and time to waste. To them.

This is what happened:

One, I don’t have a long distance phone plan because my phone is what is called a “land line” by phone companies to make people with home phones and no children feel better about not having a cell phone and there are some, like my neighbors upstairs, who don’t care about that feeling of empty squareness and that’s okay because they’ll come down and use phone anyway and, as long as I have a flat local rate, hey, that’s okay but, old young foot down, I’m not risking a long distance bill or anything I’m responsible for on their asses — no, I won’t fucking do it because, yes, I’m a miser and, yes, they’re domestically unstable and, yes, I gotta eat, too, Ethics.

So, I remembered, I needed a new phone card.

Two, I ran out of whiskey this afternoon and the leftover wine sitting on my stove has probably gone bad and that’s really bad for a weird Australian Cabernet-Merlot blend that actually tastes like two wines mixed together and not just bad like how you think a blend like that would taste but I’m going to leave it sit there so I can cook with it and, really, by “cook with it” I mean pour into the pan for imagined zest when I make egg sandwiches.

So I needed more whiskey.

So I went to Wal-Mart and bought (1) a 1000 minute phone card and (2) a bottle of Wild Turkey Bourbon. The cashier made me show off my unsettling purchase because she didn’t believe that was me in my ID picture. So I showed her a gym card issued in another state, and she gave me the booze.  “They never do us right in those pictures, do they?” she half-asked.

As I left, thinking about how I could fit that into a novel, I saw two old men sitting in front of the photo station. One, with rashy age spots, was comatose. The other was talking to him about arthritis. He was holding a biography of Hitler in his lap.

Then I went outside. And rain fell all across America.