I scooped putrid black leaves into my rusted wheelbarrow and took the goop down the hill, almost slipping on the sharp incline. I caught myself, though, with one knee, my heart fluttering wildly, my knee cut up and bleeding.
I cursed. Spat. Rubbed my wound. That’s what work was: a series of injuries I got paid for. The pain went away. I took out the shopvac wet/dry vacuum and started to suck up the remainder sludge. The sound of the vacuum echoed off every building in campus, reverberated into outer space even, alerting everyone and everything of my presence.
Deciding it was too hard to get to the bottom of the wet hill, I started dumping the sludge down the side of it instead. Nobody would be the wiser; it wasn’t too visible, and it wasn’t hurting anything. It was also good fertilizer for the grass.
I did that awhile longer, then went to lunch. Some strip mall nearby. Jade Temple Garden. Five-dollar chicken lo mein lunch speciaclass="underline" egg roll, Dr. Pepper, shrimp fried rice. My fortune cookie said, “You Will Be Judged For Your Heart.”
I left a five dollar bill in the metal can next to the register that showed an abused dog. Its ribs showing. I guess I related to that animal. When I came back to the college, the lots were jammed with shiny cars. Bumper stickers for all kinds of things that I couldn’t relate to. The students had arrived.
Walking back slowly, I glanced in classroom windows. What was it like to sit in a college class? In a lecture? I didn’t mind high school. Actually, I’d done fairly well. I just couldn’t think of a single thing I wanted to study in college.
As I climbed into the scummy pond, getting more of the filthy stench and slime all over my bare legs, my neck, my face, I heard a voice.
“Hey.”
I looked up. It was Natalie, my ex from way back. Long blonde hair. White dress. High cheek bones. I think I saw her working as a hostess in a restaurant by the mall recently. As soon as I walked in and saw her, I spun around on my heels and walked right back out.
“What are you doing?” she mocked.
“Eh, working,” I said.
“You’re filthy! Look at you!”
“Sure.”
I was embarrassed. More kids came. I recognized a few faces. They all stopped, looking at me just like I was an exhibit that had come to their zoo. They seemed to really be enjoying this animal on display there in the center of their campus.
“You in school here?” Natalie asked.
“No,” I said, to my shoes.
“This is my last semester. I’m going to Drexel to finish my degree.”
“No school for me.”
“I see how that’s working out for ya,” she said.
I glanced down at a pile of slimy, mucked-up leaves at my feet. Should I pick them up and peg her with them? I looked around at the kids. They seemed very interested. Did they think I was a swamp bear, that this was my natural habitat? Down here, this filthy sludge pit?
“Go away,” I said, shooing her with the back of my hand.
“What?!”
She was very amused by me.
“I’ve got work to do.” I didn’t like being the butt of her attention … anyone’s attention really. But Natalie took my attitude, amplified it, and shot it like a sawed-off right back in my face.
“Great idea to skip college, huh?”
She was a mother scolding her small child for spilling a cup of apple juice.
I didn’t say anything. What had I done to her? She’d been the one screwing around behind my back, with my best friend at the time no less. I left her here and hit the road without explanation. That’s it really. The heart of it. She was an ugly person in her heart, and she was the exact reason why I hadn’t had a real relationship since. It’d been two years, and I imagined it would be a very long time before I wasted my time with attempting another one.
“Have a good day down there,” she said.
“Go fuck another one of my friends.”
“I will,” she said, flipping me the bird. She walked towards the hill where I’d dumped all the sludge.
It was a shortcut to the student lot. She had one of those shiny cars down there. I didn’t stop her. And wouldn’t you know it? Natalie slipped, poor thing, and ruined that white dress of hers.
Ethan
Ethan was rich. That was the first problem I had with him. As a child, he took violin lessons in his family’s conservatory overlooking the ocean. He never practiced. He faked it.
If I’d been given an opportunity, just one opportunity, you better believe I would have jumped on it. My mom couldn’t stay sober enough to take me to the zoo.
Ethan probably had a pet tiger for all I know. I didn’t like him, he was uptight. Couldn’t take a joke for shit. Had a polo shirt in every color. Wore Ralph Lauren cologne. Had clammy, delicate hands. Wore a baby face 24/7.
He lived with his parents in a plaster mansion with a terra-cotta roof. He didn’t even go on the private beach in his backyard, because, “I have an in-ground pool, and that sucker’s heated, son!”
On his seventeenth birthday, his dad gave him a silver Lexus. Two years later, that was replaced by a Land Rover with heated leather seats that he never took off road even once. When I met him, he’d just been given a new white BMW 5 Series.
“That’s a funny car,” I said to him, at our band practice.
“Nothing funny about it,” he shot back as serious and blank as the moonlight. No sense of humor about himself. It was a funny car though. Not a man’s car. I wanted to key my name into it, but my name wouldn’t show up anyway.
That’s something I could never understand: having a fancy white car. My truck was always splattered with mud, and constantly on the verge of collapse. That was the difference between me and Ethel. I was on the verge of destruction, and he was over-carefuclass="underline" cautiously drove around town rocking out to crappy frat boy rock bands. He could sing, though. I mean, he had no sense of art about him at all, but he could sing … somehow.
Ethan had framed concert posters hanging on his bedroom wall. He grew his hair long, paint by numbers long. By the time I got back from my random travels around California, Ethan and Seth had started a cover band called Shore Thang. In Jersey, you pretty much had to be in a cover band in order to make any kind of money. I wasn’t down for that one bit. I thought it was the lamest thing ever. I’d rather be broke than make money playing cover songs.
Ethan was all about it. He got a job waiting tables at TGI Fridays and played there on Thursday nights twice a month: a two-hour set. Just him and his acoustic guitar. That’s how he met Denise. She and her likewise underage girlfriends were sitting in a booth drinking huge, blue margaritas with beach umbrellas. Ethan had a wireless system for his electric acoustic and his head-set and started to sing personally to Denise like she was the only person in the world. “Don’t Stop Believing” by Journey. “Living on a Prayer” by Bon Jovi. Denise ate all that shit right up. She blew him in the parking lot of the TGI Fridays in the back of his Land Rover.
Seth told me that story. I almost shot an entire can of coke out of my nose.
“He sang her Journey?”
“Hey, it’s a good song.”
“To chicks who suck cock in the TGI Fridays parking lot.”
Seth was closer with Ethan, but there was a distance between me and Ethel. I thought he was a weasel who only cared about himself. I’m sure he thought I was a scumbag. That’s the way it works. But he did try to be a friend to me in his own limited way.
He invited me over his house. That was right after we’d just formed the band, The Bedspins. He was only doing vocals. I was playing guitar. Seth was on drums. We’d just kicked Charlie out for fucking my girl, Natalie.