Exit Nothing

by KUBOA

And so in mid-August, broke and broken, I asked my dad to drive up to Philly and pick me up. He said I could crash at his place for as long as I needed, and I knew he meant it. We drove down that old 95, away from the city that had meant so much to me, heading toward a country town between D.C. and Baltimore. I had no money, no woman, no plans and nothing to do. I wasn’t quite the happiest man alive, but I was getting there.

  My dad and stepmom had a two-story house with a basement. I would crash in the basement.

  For the first two weeks I was virtually inert. I only left the basement to get another beer or to eat dinner. I only left the house to smoke. I didn’t try to look for a job. I didn’t have a way to get to work anyway. I mostly just watched TV and listened to music and drank.

  But then my stepmother bought a truck and suggested, not very subtly, that I might be able to use it to look for a job. Well, I did feel guilty about being broke and eating their food and drinking their beer without being asked to do anything more than wash the dishes after meals. They were right. I needed a job.

  There was a supermarket about five miles down the road. I figured they probably had a high turnover rate, plus, school would be starting soon and they would be looking to replace the summer help.

  I was right. They called me in for an interview just three days after I filled out the application. They put me in the deli. I would have much preferred a stocking position. The idea of so much customer service made me nauseous. It’s a drag to act like you enjoy the company of assholes. But the gig paid eight bucks and no benefits. It might not seem like much, but it was the most a job had paid me up to that point. Anyway, the money didn’t matter for now since I wasn’t being charged for rent and probably wouldn’t for a while.

  I mostly sleepwalked through the job. Got cut twice on the meat slicers too. Nothing requiring stitches or anything, though I did get to watch my blood squirt all over the blade, which was pretty cool. But getting cut didn’t wake me up. I wanted to fizzle out, to pop, to live as if I was in a coma. What was left for me, anyway? Nothing much, it seemed.

  And it was time to settle the Kaye matter. I hadn’t talked to her since July, when she had called to bitch about my cat. Neither of us had mentioned divorce but it must have been on her mind as much as mine. I didn’t know exactly where we stood, but I decided to write her a letter, to sort things out. And so, after six beers or so, I sat at the kitchen table and put pen to paper. I started writing and just a paragraph into the thing, I realized that I was writing my final goodbye. Maybe we could be friends eventually, but we had to finish whatever romantic relationship we had left and move on. Still, I couldn’t write the word “divorce.” Maybe I wanted to hold something back, to see if she would beg to get back together. Maybe it was a kind of desperation. I don’t’ know.

  I turned twenty six on August 21st. My dad and stepmom took me out to dinner and it was fine. We’ve always had good conversations. But none of my Alabama or Philly friends called me and I didn’t have any friends in Maryland. I felt a connection with the great Nothing that night. I was ready to give up, to submit. I was done. I was over.

  When I got home, I went out to the backyard deck to have a cigarette. I sat down in an old chair and took a deep inhale on the cigarette and looked up at the stars. Peaceful misery, they were.

  My phone rang. I pulled it out of my pocket and answered. It was Kaye.

  “I just wanted to wish you a happy birthday,” she said.

  “I didn’t think you’d call,” I said.

  “I wasn’t sure I would.”

  I sighed, so weary of everything. “Hearing your voice—I thought I was done with you. But—just hearing you right now—“

  “I feel the same way,” she said.

  “I wrote you a letter,” I said. “Maybe you could write me back. Maybe we could get to know each other again like that.”

  “I think that’s a good idea,” she said.

  I was crying. I couldn’t help it. “It was great hearing from you,” I said.

  “You too.”

  We hung up. I hung up and then remembered what was in the letter. Was there a chance that she could misread it as an invitation to reunion? It wasn’t likely. The letter, sent just days ago, had sealed a fate I didn’t want anymore. Was there any reason to hope? No, there wasn’t any hope left.

  A few days later Kaye called again. It was the last time I would hear her voice.

  “We’re getting a divorce,” she said.

  She’d read the letter.

  “OK,” I said. And there wasn’t much else to say anyway. I had my last chance and I fucked it up. It was time to accept.

  “I need your address,” she said. “I’ve gotten a lawyer. Don’t worry about the money. I’ll pay for everything. You just need to sign the papers when you get them. You also need a witness’s signature, but they can’t be a family member.”

  She wanted a divorce. We were getting a divorce.

  The papers arrived the next week and I got someone at work to witness them for me. Then I sent it all back to her lawyer and got the official divorce decree a few weeks later. And it was over. Things dissolve quickly sometimes.

  And so it goes.

  I needed to go somewhere. I needed to try and make friends and get out of the suffocation of the open air and the country and get myself to a city. But which city? For some reason, Baltimore seemed like the more interesting place to explore. And so Baltimore became my city.

  It was a Saturday night in late October and I was inside Club Orpheus. It was a dance club that played mostly industrial music. Nine Inch Nails, Skinny Puppy, Stabbing Westward, that kind of thing. The music reminded me of high school, when I was an angry young man and an impossible romantic. It all seemed like an anachronism, a fad that should have faded. But at least I felt comfortable here. So I sat at the bar and ordered a beer and then ordered a few more. I didn’t talk to any of the patrons as they stumbled from the dance floor to order another drink. I mostly just watched the kids dance or try to dance, waving pink or yellow glowsticks and watching the tracer lights with fascination.

  Someone was poking at my jacket.

  “Where the fuck did you get that?” I turned around. It was a woman, a skinny blonde with short hair. She was pointing accusingly at my camouflage jacket.

  “I picked it up at the thrift store,” I said, trying to yell over the music.

  She pointed to a patch on the sleeve. “You’ve still got the rank on there. You need to take that off before you wear it again. I’m in the army and I can tell you, that’s really disrespectful.”

  “Uh, OK…”

  I didn’t even notice the patch, let alone think it meant anything. It only cost two dollars and I needed a jacket.

  Despite or maybe because of my interaction with the army chick, I decided to go to the club the following Saturday. I brought with me a cheap plastic army action figure that I got at the supermarket for a dollar. I thought it might be a nice icebreaker. It seemed kind of desperate, and maybe it was, but I was willing to try anything. I did feel pretty silly sitting at the bar with an action figure in its original packaging sitting on the bar, next to my drink.

  A thick girl, heavy-chested with long black hair, sat down on the barstool next to me and ordered a drink. The bartender handed her a beer and as she chugged at it, she looked down and noticed the toy.

  “What’s that?”

  I told her the story behind it.

  “That’s great!” she said. “Retribution. Revenge. That’s what it’s all about!”

  I was starting to dig this girl.

  We talked for a while. Her name was Jennifer Slate and she was a security guard somewhere in the city. Her arms were big against her tight black shirt and they were mostly muscle.

  We had a few more drinks. Then she suddenly got up off the stool.

  “We’ll talk later,” she said. “It’s time for some d
ancing.”

  I watched her walk out onto the dance floor, underneath the disco ball, flanked by strobe lights. She spotted some guy and danced toward him and they danced together. They danced innocently enough at first but then Jennifer’s moves became increasingly erotic. She started slithering like some sort of mad snake having a seizure, maybe an inch or so from his body. It looked like a club mating ritual that I didn’t know about. And maybe it was. Because it worked, and the two of them left together soon afterward.

  The next week was more of the same. Jennifer sat at the bar and talked with me for a while when she took a break from dancing to get a drink refill. Then she repeated the snake dance with a new guy and the two of them left together.

  It went on like this for a while. For weeks I would go to Orpheus and talk to Jennifer when I could, always hoping that she’d do the snake dance with me. But she never did.

  The last time I went to Orpheus was in January 2007. I had been sitting at the bar for an hour or so when Jennifer ran up and sat down next to me.

  “You’ve gotta be my boyfriend tonight,” she said. Then she pointed to a morbidly obese guy in a bondage outfit trying to dance but instead moving around like a spinning top, the fat on his chin jiggling in waves. “See that guy? He’s fucking obsessed with me. Stay close to me. I swear to god he’s a stalker. I’ve already told him you’re my boyfriend, so you’ve got to play along.”

  This left me a great opening. “That’s not such a bad idea,” I said. “Why don’t you let me take you out sometime? It might be fun.”

  Jennifer just laughed. “I can’t go out with you! You’re like, a friend. Well, a club friend, but still—anyway, I can’t be with just one person.”

  “See, that doesn’t bother me,” I said, lying. “I’ve been wanting to try an open relationship anyway.”

  “Yeah, sure. You say that now.”

  And so there wasn’t much left to do but kiss her. I kissed her neck and worked my way up to her cheek and her ear. Her hair smelled like burning charcoal. She put her hand on the back of my neck, pulling me away from her. “Look,” she said, “I’m gonna go dance some more. Can we talk about this next week?”

  “Sure,” I said. I stood up and left the club. I felt like an asshole. I never wanted to see Club Orpheus again.

  And I sulked. I sulked for another month or so before I decided to switch strategies. It was true that I didn’t have friends, not even casual acquaintances. But I’m writer. Not a terribly focused one, perhaps, but a writer nonetheless. It’s really the only thing I have going for me. And so, I reasoned that the anonymity of the internet could provide me with a way to woo a woman with my creative wordsmithing. She would fall in love with me and then we could meet in person and by then she would be comfortable enough with my personality to give me a chance. I signed up for three or four dating sites and started e-mailing anyone who seemed even remotely compatible. At the time, that seemed like just about anyone. I ended up writing a lot of messages.

  It took a few weeks of bad connections and disinterested replies before someone e-mailed me with genuine interest. And it wasn’t someone I had e-mailed first. She decided to get in touch with me on her own. Turned out that she liked my honesty. I suppose she must have figured me for the honest sort because one would have to be pretty close to insane to admit on their profile that they were broke and lived in their dad’s basement. And was twenty-six years old to boot.

  Her name was Anne. She was five years younger than me and worked for a company that monitored clinical drug trials. Her last name was Polish and hard to pronounce. I had to write to her and ask her to spell it phonetically so that I didn’t fuck it up when we met. And we were going to meet in person. She liked me for some reason.

  We were going to meet at a mall and go to the movies. I was a little late getting there and worried that Anne would be pissed. Would she think me a slacker? But I was a slacker. Anyway, it looked like Anne was an even greater slacker since she was half an hour late. I hung around outside the movie theater, near a concrete water fountain that wasn’t running. I played with the single rose that I had bought her and watched the Friday-night teenagers laughing and giggling all giddy-like, flirting and laughing. I looked at them and wondered which of them would be like me ten years on, out of hope and nearly broken, one lover gone and searching for the next.

  When Anne finally arrived, she was smiling and waving. I hopped down from the fountain and handed her the flower. She was beautiful. She wore little wire-framed cat glasses and her hair was dyed red. She squinted as she smiled at me.

  “Sorry I’m late,” she said. “Traffic sucked balls.”

  “I’m just glad you made it,” I said. And I was.

  We got in line and decided on a movie. Anne wanted to see a new horror-comedy that had just come out. I was up for anything. So I bought our tickets and the movie didn’t start for another hour, so we had plenty of time to get something to eat. We went to a nearby Mexican restaurant and as I held the door open for her, I looked at her feet as she walked past and noticed that she had argyle socks on. I smiled.

  We both ordered root beer to drink and I was overwhelmed by the idea that we like the same kind of soda. For some reason, it seemed like a major connection.

  The movie itself was terrible. It was about a retarded stepfather who kills and eats his wife and kids throughout the course of the film. I didn’t know that Anne was nearly deaf in one ear and at one point during the movie, she turned to me and said, “This is fucking horrible!” It was a quiet part and I was sure everyone in the theater could hear what she had just said. I nearly got up and left but I remembered that she was beautiful and wore argyle socks and liked root beer and she was willing to take a chance on me. I didn’t get up. I wasn’t leaving.

  When the movie was over, I walked Anne to her car. She leaned against the driver’s side door and I leaned in and put my hands on the back of her neck and kissed her. She accepted. I never wanted to stop kissing her.

  “You want to go out next week?” I said.

  “Sure,” she said. “I’d love to.”

  She got into her car. I waved to her as she pulled out of the parking lot. I headed toward my stepmom’s truck, the cold wind or my ecstasy blowing me from side to side. I breathed in so hard that my chest hurt, and then exhaled slowly. I could feel the Nothing leaving me.

  That Dreadful Noise