So… Zombies.
There is a thundering above you the night the lumbering dead cut open their bones and slide electrical wires in the slits. On the roof of the Safeway, six blocks and 125 days from blocks from the apartment where, our elbows and bellies buried in carpet, you told me you loved me and we would always be with me, you clap with glee and strech your neck over the roofs edge to see as I turned on the emergency generators and the remnants of all of all mankind began to dance in the parking lot below.
It was two in the morning and I’d found her at the end of the dock with her feet in the water. I sat down next to her and put my feet in as well, submerging my shoes. She just looked out at the lake.
Three months ago she’d been dumped, and every part of her that I knew had gone away. It was as if she had been hung on a clothes line in an electrical storm. She had begun to crackle and pop, in and out of states of giddiness, stillness, and violence.
Friends had given up trying to help her one by one, and after three months I was the only one still trying.
“Yeeeeah.” I whispered, for no real reason. It was so dark I could hardly see her.
I put my hands in the pockets of my hoodie and took them out again, rubbed my face and sniffed. “So…” I said and looked at her profile, sighed, and looked back out into the dark. She started picking splinters out of the dock.
“So, how are things?” I asked.
She snorted so loud that I wasn’t sure how to take it. Either what I said was genuinely funny, or I had pissed her off and was about to be shoved into the lake.
Down the shore our friends were just shapes in the distance, blocking and then not blocking neighbor’s porch lights. The cold started sinking in and I didn’t want to be there anymore. I felt like an asshole.
When I turned back to her my eyes must have adjusted to the dark a bit because, suddenly, I remembered the tremendous crush I had on her when we first met. Two years ago, whenever I was near her I was in a constant state of feeling like I had just jumped out of a full speed golf cart. (Shit! Faster than I thought!)
Suddenly, don’t ask me why, I knew what I had to do. I had to tell her, right then, about those feelings. I was relatively certain that they had faded a long time ago, and telling her could screw up our present friendship, but instantly it was all clear. She had to know, and I needed to tell her now. This would solve everything.
“You know…” I croaked, and cleared my throat. “Remember when we first started hanging out?” She turned to look at me. “That first day, when we rode together to rehearsal, which I think was first time I ever talked to you,…”
Suddenly, a great SPLOOSH broke the quiet about ten feet in front of us, as if someone had thrown a rock the size of my head into the water. We narrowed our eyes at where the sound had come from.
The Creature from the Black Lagoon lurched it’s gill ridden torso out of the lake and stuck a wrinkled hand up for our knees.
We shot up out of the water, up the dock, through the sand, over the dunes, and through the side door of the house. I tripped and fell forward, tangling our arms, and collapsed us in the downstairs hall. We rolled onto our backs to see if we had been followed into the house.
Anyway, thank God for all that, because nothing I was about to say was going to her feel any better.
—Sorry everyone who is reading this on the dashboard. This is a repost. Never try to edit an embedded vimeo video post that you made on your laptop with the new tumblr iPhone app. It breaks the link to the video and it can not be repaired. Hence, this repost. —
There was an air conditioning unit in my window as a kid and it’s the only real reason I never jumped out.
My neighbors house was too far away for us to run a cable to and slide across Goonies style. The side of our house was made of aluminum siding too thick for me to nail planks into to build a ladder that would take me to the roof. It was a one story straight drop down to a fenced in gravel yard where my dog shit below, that just screamed of bloody palms and knees, the dreaded broken arm. The nearest tree had branches that reached out towards my window, like it wanted to help, but was too far away.
Regardless, my imagination kept ending all kinds of scenarios dreamt up in bed, hours after bedtime, with proposals of escape out the window.
I thought having a summer job helping build a grocery store would be full of laying cement and stuff. We’d get to work with big equiptment, machines that could crush things, but I just helped assemble shelves, and had to get up butt ass early to unload boxes.
When the store was all put together they said I had to help customers on the floor. They gave me an apron and a name tag to write my name on. I wrote “Shmoger” because I thought “Kroger Shmoger” was funny.
It wasn’t till my third week into my new “Welcome to Kroger. How can I help you?” position that I decided to pretend to be a smoker so I could get away from the damn Popular Mechanics magazines in the break room.
I swear, I was so fed up with customers that couldn’t form complete sentences, my boss changing the bullshit schedule without notice, get the damn chickens prepped before the lunch rush or there will be hell to pay, Refunds! Damn it! Refunds! What do you mean I have to fill out paperwork to get my money back? Just give me my fucking money!
Cute Cashier Girl (later named Jill) appeared next to me on the smoking bench behind the store.
“Fuck it’s cold!” she said. I didn’t realize. “Feel this” and she pressed a freezing hand to my face that shocked me, so much so that I didn’t quit for six weeks. It shocked me so much that I made sure she quit with me. So much that when we both walked out of that store for the last time, shoulders touching, we walked right over our aprons on the way to the car, laughing, 35 in the parking lot, 70 all the way down Park Avenue, and when she kissed me with a suction cup pop on my cheek I took my hands off the wheel, stuck one arm out the drivers window and another out the sun roof and pushed the accelerator down as far as it would go.
“It’s like this, we get on the bus. We do it right now. No thinking. We’re going to start to get real hungry by the time it gets dark, so we’ll go to sleep. When we wake up we will be in Chicago where we can start over. None of this ever happened. We will be able to get something to eat at Seths house.” I said. Then I told her a joke and she didn’t laugh.
I don’t want to talk to you (send)
I see you! You’re in the back seat of your car out front (send)
I don’t care how long you wait I’m not going come out and talk to you (send)
So just go (send)
Look what happened between us happened and I don’t want to talk about it (send)
So drive! (send) Who is in there with you? (send)
Are you making out with someone? (send)
And just like that…our fort in the lot down the street was gone and having to go back to school felt a million times closer.
I don’t know if you are even going to bother reading this, but, since you won’t answer the phone, I have to write. Even if you never want to talk to me again I thought you would want to know that it worked. Flawlessly. We were right. I tested it on myself. By myself.
Honey, when I said that stuff about the procedure allowing people to sneak into the girls locker rooms I didn’t mean that I wanted to. The whole point of all those experiments, all that research, was for us to run around like this together. It’s not any fun turning myself invisible without you here.
When people would tell me that me and my friends were playing in sewer water I knew they were wrong. I knew what sewers were for and we would have seen floating turds or yellow water. The water was so clear in fact that it must have been rain water but I rarely saw it dry, even during the summer.
The ravine that ran behind my elementary school was called “The Creek” but to me, it was a canyon. The end that I usually entered from featured an enormous six foot concrete tunnel that ran under a road. The water that ran thru the tunnel was rarely deeper than about 3 inches so you could walk thru from one side to the other if you knew where to step and didn’t mind getting your feet wet.
From there the creek wound its way around for blocks, probably 15 feet below the level that the school and the local houses were built on. The sides of the valley were covered in trees, bushes, and at one point a rockslide of 10 to 15 huge Han Solos frozen in carbonite sized slabs of gray concrete. Stuck in the dirt where they had fallen, these slabs were excellent for climbing on, and one in particular was positioned perfectly as a slide.
Numerous club hideouts were constructed in the creek, as well as several nicknames for it. I have a distinct memory of trying to sketch out a logo that renamed it the “Danger Zone” This memory also includes humming the Kenny Loggins chorus of the same name while trying to strategize the best places to take cover from someone lobbing grandees at you if you had just been running at top speed.
So I wrote this note that said “You’re the greatest thing since sliced bread” rolled it up into a cigarette sized tube and wedged it into part of the wire frame of a patio chair at the restaurant that I planed to take her to on our date that night. I’d also taken one of the napkins from the restaurant and written “feel inside your chair” on it. I figured I’d switch out her napkin for the one I’d written on once we got there.
When I went to pick her up she was talking on her cell phone with some guy she went to college with. She kept mouthing to me that she was almost done but eventually she handed me the tv remote and disappeared into her bedroom. I watched King Of the Hill, The Simpsons, and half of her Lost Boys dvd while listening to her laughing at his jokes thru the bedroom door.
