The Garbage Times - White Ibis

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by Sam Pink


  Kept zooming in on a picture until it displayed ‘Unable to support file.’

  He tried three or four times.

  Load the picture …

  Zoom in zoom in zoom in zoom …

  ‘Unable to support file.’

  ‘You can’t keep zooming,’ I said.

  ‘Ohp, here we go,’ he said, looking at the phone from a weird angle with his chin up.

  He showed me a blurry picture of a warehouse with someone standing out front pointing at the warehouse.

  ‘That’s me, man,’ he said.

  Mmchlep mmchlep.

  I looked at the picture, then turned to look at him.

  His face was very close to mine.

  Without blinking, he sang, ‘Singin baby don’t worray!’

  Then he pressed some buttons on his phone, licking his lips, his hands shaking.

  ‘You can probably start on Monday but you have to get to Wheaton by train,’ he said.

  Before I said anything, he told me how to get there, using a large number of buses and trains.

  It was like four buses and three trains to get to a suburb just outside of Chicago.

  I could get anywhere in the U.S. with less bullshit.

  ‘Come on come on,’ he said. ‘Dial me. I’m serious. You’re not being serious but I’m serious.’

  ‘I’m being serious,’ I said. ‘I don’t have your fucking number.’

  He gave me the number.

  I dialed but didn’t send the call.

  He said, ‘Keep going keep going. Let it ring.’

  He kept looking at his phone, saying, ‘Keep going, there ya go, there ya go.’

  Mmchlep-chlep.

  He pressed a few buttons, hands shaking.

  ‘There. Now I got it. I’ll see what I can do. No promises, but, you know. I can try.’

  ‘Just shake the tree,’ I said, shrugging.

  ‘See if any apples fall,’ he said, staring at me like he was surprised I knew that phrase. ‘Let me call my boss on Monday, see what I can do.’

  I nodded. ‘Thanks, man.’

  ‘Hey, what a fucking saint, this guy,’ Minnesota said.

  ‘Hey, go fuck yourself,’ Tom said, walking back over by Minnesota.

  ‘Hoowee,’ said Larry. ‘Ion usually draynk that much but hoowee. Oh, you wont this?’

  He was going through his pockets.

  He handed me a coupon good for a free sandwich if the Sox hit two home runs in last night’s game.

  ‘Fuck yeah, thanks, Larry.’

  It was so exciting.

  This, how do you say, ‘having something to do.’

  He nodded. ‘Ain gon eat t’day, hoowee.’

  So I shook his hand and went to go redeem the coupon.

  I walked to the fast food place and was so excited I held the front door for a while and once inside even let some people go ahead of me in line, giving them a lil wink.

  Because why not.

  My time would come.

  My sandwich wasn’t going anywhere so neither should my manners.

  When it was my turn, I gave the cashier the coupon.

  She looked at it, flipping it around a few times.

  Yes.

  Go ahead.

  Inspect as you must.

  I think you’ll see things my way!

  She walkie-talkied a manager.

  A manager came over.

  The manager looked at the back of the coupon.

  She looked at me.

  She put a key into the cash register and said, ‘He’s good.’

  YES!

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  I sat at a counter that looked out to the dumpster area.

  Part of me wanted to hide in a dumpster, then when the garbage person came, jump out and yell, ‘Goddamnit, man, what year is it?’

  And the other part of me just wanted to help with the garbage.

  Things like that.

  I ate my sandwich.

  There was text on the box, explaining what made my sandwich ‘so unique’:

  Maybe it’s how the double layer of sear-sizzled beef mingles with the sauce and melty cheese, the snap of onion and the tart crunch of pickle … or maybe, it’s just tall.

  Or maybe suck my dick you fucking sandwich you’re just a fucking sandwich!

  I threw out my garbage and stacked my tray and left.

  There was a guy standing by the street.

  He was shirtless, wearing sweatpants and winter boots.

  He held out his one fist towards all the passing traffic.

  Expressionless, fist out, standing by the street.

  Yes.

  Fuck yes.

  This one’s for everyone who passes.

  This one’s for you, and you, and you, and everyone who isn’t you.

  This one’s for everyone who wants it.

  And everyone trying to avoid it.

  I wanted to stand right next to him and make a fist too.

  But I knew he didn’t need me.

  And yeah, it hurt my feelings a little, but whatever.

  Whatever whatever whatever.

  I crossed the street to the bus stop.

  There were a lot of people waiting.

  This girl asked me for bus fare.

  I gave her all the cash I had, which was just enough for fare.

  When the bus came, I got on and scanned my card and the machine said, ‘Insufficient funds.’

  I got off the bus and stood there.

  It was beautiful out.

  Across the street there was someone in an office-building window, one floor up.

  We noticed each other.

  I waved.

  She waved.

  I blew her a kiss and it shattered the window and exploded her head and went through the wall behind her, through the entire building and everything else in its path into the sky, moving so fast it didn’t even disrupt clouds, up and up, halving an airplane as it continued into space, crushing meteoroids such that they smothered and killed stars, piercing and assassinating the sun, eventually reaching the end of everything and opening a hole in the lining, deflating it and carrying it off like a popped balloon.

  In loving memory of Rontel

  White Ibis

  ALSO BY SAM PINK

  The Self-Esteem Holocaust Comes Home

  Person

  The No Hellos Diet

  Hurt Others

  Frowns Need Friends Too

  Rontel

  Witch Piss

  White Ibis

  A Novella

  SAM PINK

  Soft Skull New York

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, companies, organizations, and events portrayed are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2018 by Sam Pink

  All rights reserved

  First Soft Skull edition: May 2018

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Pink, Sam, author. | Pink, Sam. White ibis.

  Title: The garbage times ; White ibis : two novellas / Sam Pink.

  Description: First Soft Skull edition. | New York : Soft Skull Press : Distributed by Publishers Group West, 2018.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017046521| ISBN 9781593766818 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781593766863 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Surrealism (Literature) | Experimental fiction, American.

  Classification: LCC PS3616.I5687 A6 2018 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017046521

  Published by Soft Skull Press

  1140 Broadway, Suite 704

  New York, NY 10001

  www.softskull.com

  Soft Skull titles are distributed to the trade by

  Publishers Group West

  Phone: 866-400-5351

  Printed in the United States of America

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  For the white ibis

  1

 
‘Just, whatever,’ I said, standing in a drugstore aisle with my girl. ‘Grab whatever’s gonna knock her out.’

  It was 2 a.m. and we were buying allergy medicine to drug our cat, Dotty, for the move from Chicago to Tampa Bay.

  ‘This should knock her out,’ said my girl.

  A guy in the next aisle looked over.

  I noticed him but my girl didn’t.

  ‘We need to make sure she’s out-out,’ I said. ‘Like for good. We can’t have her waking up halfway there. We just can’t.’

  ‘Yeah she can’t wake up,’ she said.

  ‘Once she’s out,’ I said, ‘we can stuff her in the cage and get her in the car. Then we’re home free.’

  ‘All right yeah,’ she said, shaking the pills. ‘These should do then.’

  ‘Cool, so what do we do? Mash some up and put it in her dinner?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Niiiiice,’ I said, smiling.

  My girl kissed me on the cheek.

  A couple hours later when the sun came up, I was still awake.

  Sitting on the broken couch we were leaving behind, in an otherwise empty apartment.

  An apartment that owed us nothing, not even a security deposit.

  Dotty pushed around a Styrofoam bowl of drugged food while my girl took a shit.

  And the sun came in through the peephole behind me, projecting a flowing circle of rainbow colors onto the wall.

  Like a quarter-sized jellyfish.

  I sat there staring at it as it waved on the wall.

  A portal.

  An exit.

  Like I could’ve put my hands on either side of it and stepped in, to find something else.

  A new home.

  The next level.

  Something else.

  ‘Ready?’ I said, as my girl exited the bathroom holding her stomach.

  And we went through the portal.

  2

  We pulled up to her brother’s house in Tampa at 5 a.m. the next day.

  We were living there while her brother lived in New York.

  And we’d fit all our shit in her car.

  As I braked, a cymbal and some paintings fell forward and hit me in the neck.

  Dotty screamed, ‘Oowwwwwwrrrrr,’ covered in her own piss and shit for the third time and still awake.

  ‘We did it!’ I said, stepping outside into the humidity.

  The air carried the scent of some beautiful flower.

  And the insects beeped and whirred.

  I looked around at the dark bayou as it swayed in the moonlight.

  Florida.

  I had moved to Florida.

  My girl and I unpacked a couple things and brought them inside.

  Then we drank a bunch of water and had sex on the couch.

  She lay down next to me, breathing hard.

  She fell asleep and I lay with her, staring at a message on the kitchen whiteboard.

  Her parents lived nearby.

  And her mom, in red ink, had written, ‘Welcome Home! :)’

  The other side of the sunlit portal.

  The next level.

  Something else.

  3

  I met many new kinds of animals in the bayou.

  In Chicago there were two kinds of animals: squirrels and rocks.

  But in Florida there were all kinds.

  There were armadillos, which were basically like small armored pigs that wobbled around at night, into and out of sewers.

  I badly wanted to pick one up and hold it like a baby or throw it like a football, but I found out they carried leprosy.

  So, uh, no thanks!

  Then there were possums, which were basically bigger/greasier rats.

  Imagine a rat that broke a vial of some futuristic steroid over its head.

  Every time I saw one, they paused and glared at me in the moonlight, like, ‘Take a good look, yoomin.’

  There were alligators.

  Bobcats.

  Snakes.

  Lizards everywhere.

  Millions of bugs, including one named after not being able to see it, which, for that very reason, was the worst.

  Spiders and frogs and birds.

  All kinds of birds.

  Gawky-ass, ornate birds just walking around.

  Like this one that basically lived at the end of the driveway.

  Every time I went outside, it’d be shuffling around where the driveway met the street.

  Not really doing anything or going anywhere, just kind of pacing.

  With a long white neck and a really long orange beak, walking around like a dumb-ass on its stilt legs.

  Like what the fuck is this thing?

  It was out tonight when my girl and I got on our bikes to go to the gas station.

  ‘Yo, what’s up, pea-head?’ I said, as we pedaled past.

  The bird took a few steps in the other direction, head sideways, eyeing us.

  My girl laughed.

  ‘I love that thing,’ I said.

  ‘That’s a white ibis,’ she said. ‘My grammy knows them all.’

  White ibis.

  Why, hello, white ibis.

  I really wanted the white ibis to like me and to be my friend.

  And to its credit, it—seemingly—did not.

  Ok.

  Well.

  Hell, I understood.

  Made sense.

  ‘Fuckin pea-head,’ I said to myself, turning onto a slippery street.

  ‘Are you still talking about that bird?’ she said. ‘Hey, you wanna get black-out drunk?’

  ‘No, goddamnit,’ I said, almost falling.

  I should’ve just fallen.

  The humidity covered everything.

  It was getting dark.

  And all the animals headed back to their corners, to wait for tomorrow.

  Hiding from the things with real teeth and power.

  The monsters.

  The real motherfuckers.

  We pedaled down a long unlit section, moving toward the furry light of the one and only streetlight.

  Halfway down the long unlit street it glowed white light onto the trees and road for like thirty feet.

  We braked, letting a group of peacocks waddle across the street.

  ‘Goddamnit,’ I said, wiping sweat off my face with my shirt.

  My girl and I laughed.

  We watched the peacocks waddle.

  They looked golden beneath the streetlight.

  They walked to the other side of the street, into the darkness.

  One of them screamed, like ‘Eeh AH! AH!’

  We biked on.

  The peacock and other weird non-bad-ass birds like the white ibis seemed hilarious, given evolution.

  I imagined all creatures at the beginning of time, right before it all begins, in private, devising their offenses/defenses and then coming out into an open field and revealing them.

  Into the field of existence with means to survive.

  Like hey, check this out, got a big horn on my face!

  Oh shit, that would hurt if I wasn’t such a small poisonous insect that can FLY hehe plus I only fly with thousands of others!!!

  I’m an insect and you can’t even SEE me.

  Yeah, well, I got claws AND teeth and can run seventy miles per hour.

  Fuck all of you, I live underwater, I don’t have to mess with that shit.

  Man, I live underwater AND have a poison tail!

  Everyone goes FUCKKKKKKKK! and OHHHHHH!!!

  Stingray, you bad, dude!

  Then a peacock waddles out slowly and says, ‘Feast your eyes on this!’ as it spreads its patterned tail feathers, tiny head bobbling at the end of a long neck.

  Screaming, ‘eeYAH AH, eeYAH.’

  And all the other animals are like, ‘Haha, what the fuck, dude?’

  ‘Fucking pea-heads,’ my girl said, from somewhere in the darkness in front of me.

  We got to the main road, across the street from the gas station.

 
A frog slowly hopped across the moonlit pavement.

  Blip.

  Blip.

  Hurling its tiny body through the air, landing hard on the pavement.

  Blip.

  I’m GOing I’m GOing! Sheesh!

  I imagined the frog, at the beginning of time, really kicking itself for choosing ‘the hop’ as its mode of transportation.

  Dude, why don’t you just run? That snake is gonna fuck you up.

  Or maybe not.

  Fuck, I don’t know.

  We put our bikes behind the dumpsters at the gas station.

  ‘I hope it’s Jo again,’ said my girl.

  We were already regulars.

  We had a favorite employee.

  And … yes, she was there.

  Jo.

  Jo was probably forty-three.

  She wore her hair like a pro wrestler from the eighties.

  She drove a green station wagon filled with stuffed animals.

  The stuffed animals were arranged in the passenger-side seat and backseat and even hanging from the rearview mirror.

  She had them in some kind of order, with the biggest in the back/center and the smaller ones arranged around them, like a bouquet.

  It was really beautiful.

  It really was that fucking beautiful.

  My girl and I stood on the sidewalk outside the gas station, drinking water, me holding a case of beer, and staring at the stuffed animal arrangement in Jo’s green station wagon.

  It really was that beautiful.

  I imagined Jo arranging the stuffed animals.

  Maybe acquiring a new one and being excited about where it’d fit in.

  Did they have names?

  Did she name them?

  Basically, I’m saying Jo is and always will be flawless and I’ll always be in love with her.

  Quite simply, my favorite.

  Even if it came out that she killed a hundred children—even if it was extra terrible, like she threw them into a wood chipper, you know, or boiled them in a giant vat, slammed them to the ground, flamethrower, whatever—it’d still be like, yeah, well, check this out: look at how she arranges these stuffed animals in her green station wagon.

  ‘I love Jo,’ my girl said as we pedaled back home.

  I lifted the beer onto my lap. ‘Me too,’ I said.

  ‘Let’s go over the bridge,’ she said.

  So we went the other way back.

  Through the bayou and over the bridge above the bay.

  I pedaled hard up the incline, hoisting the beer onto my shoulder like a cool muscle dude.

 

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