Tacky Goblin

by T. Sean Steele

  “I have a question: What did you even do in Los Angeles for a whole year?”

  “Now you’re just harassing me.”

  “I’m entitled.”

  “You know who I like? Who’s a real cool person? Dad.”

  EVERYONE ELSE

  January 28, 2015

  I had the idea that if I hung around my sister’s bar long enough they’d have to hire me, but what really happened is I became a regular instead.

  “Man, you’ve got to get out of here,” she said. “You’re starting to blend in with everyone else, getting sentimental like everyone else. Pretty soon I’ll have to start treating you like everyone else: with total disinterest and disdain.”

  “You could, potentially, pay me to stay away.”

  She fished in her pocket and gave me three dollars for a coffee. She told me to go to New Wave Cafe to use their Wi-Fi and download our movies for the week. I hated doing this. It always took like five hours. Plus, we were on a Katharine Hepburn kick and it was making me a little heartbroken. Because she was dead.

  “Don’t be heartbroken,” Kim said. “She was probably a rich jerk like everyone else. And, I mean, what, she was in love with Spencer Tracy? Red flag right there.”

  “You can’t judge people by who they love.”

  “I can judge you for saying bullshit like that. Now get out of here. I’m cutting you off.”

  *

  Walking to New Wave, I thought maybe these errands would be more tolerable if I pretended to be someone else—say, my sister. So I started stomping around, kind of tensing at passersby like a big, mean dog. I started thinking Kim’s thoughts. I thought about how much I liked weight-lifting, soup, and my brother. I worried about him. It seemed like all he had eaten in the past three weeks was a giant tub of Portillo’s beef left over from one of our mom’s work parties. He refused to throw it out even though it had clearly gone bad. He smelled like gravy all the time and had developed conjunctivitis, two things surely related.

  *

  New Wave was packed and I ended up sitting at a small table across from a preteen. I could feel him sizing me up while I turned on my laptop.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Kim,” I said.

  “Me, too,” he said slowly.

  Great, a liar, I thought. His face was hard and chapped, and his teeth were clacking non-stop. He was only in jeans and a ratty Local H t-shirt. I pushed my coffee toward him and he took a sip. I asked where his coat was.

  He shrugged and looked into the coffee. “I got home from school and my mom was sitting on the kitchen floor chain-smoking her way through a carton of cigarettes and eating a whole brick of cheddar cheese. I decided I didn’t need to see any of this anymore. Like, I’m supposed to live here for six or seven more years, at least? Probably more, because I’m dumb as shit and no way I’ll go to college. So I looked around and thought, you know, no thanks. Then I guess I kind of walked out without any of my stuff, like the dumb shit I am. I guess I kind of ran away.”

  “I could never run away when I was your age. Even when I wanted to.”

  “Why?”

  “I had braces. I was nervous if I left home I’d never get them off.”

  “I wish I had braces. My teeth are all messed up.” He bared them at me. He was right, they weren’t pretty. He looked around the cafe. “If I had nice teeth like these people, I would at least try to dress better. Why is everyone here dressed like a shithead?”

  “Welcome to adulthood,” I said, then took the coffee back before he could take another sip. I didn’t want to stunt his growth. “The first rule of adulthood is you’re going to have to take care of yourself. Like, you have to get a job, you know. Also, you need to dress appropriately for the weather.”

  “‘You have to take care of yourself,’” he said, mocking me in a whiny voice. “You should talk. What’s wrong with your eyes? They’re all slimy and crusty.”

  I wiped them, pulling away a long, goopy string of discharge. “This is just how they are now. I’ve been poisoned by the Portillo’s corporation.”

  “It’s hard to look at.”

  “You are, too,” I said. “Your face is so chapped it looks like it’s going to fall off.”

  His bottom lip started to quiver. He shoved his hands into his armpits. “I really wish I had brought my coat. I really, really wish I had brought my coat.”

  It occurred to me he had a lot on his mind, a lot more than I did, a guy a decade older. What he needed was a few hours’ distraction.

  “Hey man,” I said. “Do you know who Katharine Hepburn is?” He sniffled and shook his head. I scooted my chair over to his side of the table and offered him one of my earbuds, then queued up The Philadelphia Story. “Welcome to the rest of your life.”

  *

  Much later that night, I got home and ran to my room and curled in front of my space heater, hugging my legs to my chest. I told Kim I needed a steaming bowl of beef, stat. In a few minutes she came back with an apple and a blanket, which she draped over my shoulders.

  “I need twenty bucks for a new jacket,” I said. “Or however much a jacket costs. Don’t ask. Just know that today I performed a great act of kindness.” I bit into the apple. It tasted astoundingly good.

  “I’m sorry for what I said about Katharine Hepburn earlier,” she said. “Everyone should be allowed to crush on whatever movie star they want.”

  “Nah, man. I’m over her. I passed it on to some kid at New Wave. Kind of like the videotape in The Ring. It’s his problem, now. Speaking of which, I downloaded a slew of horror movies. Let’s get started.”

  “Finally,” she said. “Things are getting back to normal.”

  FREEZE OUT

  February 10, 2015

  My sister couldn’t get back into the apartment because the lock on the gate had frozen. “You need oil,” I said. “Oil will warm it right up.” I was telling her this from inside the gate, shivering in a bathrobe, my dead legs bare down to my slippers.

  “We don’t have any oil,” she said.

  “Talk to Manuel, four doors down. He has a tiny bottle. He helped me yesterday. But pass me the groceries first.”

  She tried, but the paper bag didn’t fit through the bars.

  “Did you get peanut butter?”

  “Yes.”

  “Give me the peanut butter, at least.”

  “It doesn’t fit.”

  “Then throw it over the gate,” I said.

  “It’s the good stuff. In a glass jar. You’ll drop it.”

  I argued but she told me to name one thing I’d caught in the past month.

  I couldn’t do it.

  She left the groceries on the sidewalk and went four doors over to Manuel’s. He was fat and old and wore a fedora. And he had cancer, which was either on the back of his neck or his spine. Maybe his ear. I didn’t know. He had been vague, calling it simply “the cancer” and pointing to the general area behind his head.

  I stayed outside to watch the bags. Of course, if someone wanted to steal them I couldn’t do anything. If it came to it, I’d ask them to at least leave the peanut butter. It was the natural kind and most people didn’t like that stuff. Kim liked it enough but didn’t know how to use it. She never bothered mixing and after one serving the jar was ruined. It was on me to get to it first and do it right.

  After a few minutes she came back, not with Manuel but with his daughter Paz. Paz was twenty-eight and owned the house where she and Manuel lived. Sometimes she hung out at Kim’s bar where she was known to go around trying to light the coasters on fire. She had a shaved head and big teeth. When she closed her mouth it looked like she was holding in a yell, or a small bird or rat. Kim once told me the way to get anyone to make out with you was to send gigantic coming-in-hot gamma thought-beams in their direction. If the cancer wasn’t hereditary Paz would have it soon anyway because I was irradiating her.

  “Where’s Manuel?” I asked.

  “He’s sleeping.
Not well. It’s hard for him to get up. He’s like a turtle.”

  “How’s his… the back of his head?”

  She frowned at me, then held the tiny bottle of oil to the keyhole and squeezed it. “Now try.”

  Kim put the key in the hole and it turned. Across the street, a middle-aged lady swept the thinnest layer of snow off her sidewalk with a plain old broom. It was getting harder and harder for me not to yell when I saw things like that. People mamby-pambied around lunatics, but you couldn’t let them do whatever they wanted. She needed to know: let the snow accumulate, then use a shovel. For now, strike it from your mind. Go inside. Have a warm drink. Put on some Django Reinhardt. A pair of slippers, a bathrobe.

  Kim, who knew about my thought-beams for Paz, picked up the groceries and slipped through the gate and into the apartment, to let me take a stab at it:

  “Do you want to come in?”

  “No.”

  A WIN

  February 26, 2015

  I was on my bed modeling my new black boots for myself while Kim sat on the weight bench doing arm curls.

  “Are you wearing my shoes?” Kim asked.

  “No. These are mine,” I said. “In what hell do you think we have the same sized feet?”

  “The same one where I can bench more than you.” She let the barbells clank to the floor, then got on her back and grunted out ten reps.

  “You can’t bench more than me,” I said.

  “Then…unh!…prove it…unh!…pussy.”

  I had found the bench and a bucket of weights in the alley under an official-looking sign that said something about rats I didn’t read too closely. With a little duct-tape the bench was useable, but wobbly.

  “You want to know how I know you’re a psychopath? You have a weight bench in your bedroom,” Kim told me.

  Two weeks later she was on it every day. I didn’t mind. My room was freezing and I needed any heat source I could find. The temperature jumped about ten degrees when she worked out. I was almost impressed enough to not care about all the sweat.

  She sat up and rolled her neck until it cracked, then stepped aside and ushered me to the bench. I took hold of the bar.

  “Oh wait,” I said. “This is incredibly easy.” I pumped out ten reps, then another ten, then I started kind of lobbing the bar into the air and catching it at my chest. Kim looked upset.

  “We’re not in hell yet,” I said.

  BARF FLY

  March 14, 2015

  On the first mild day of the year I picked up my friend Meredith from the Logan Square L stop. We had gone to high school and college together, but apart from a blurry wedding in December I hadn’t seen her in over a year. Now she was in town from Washington, DC, to see a German puppet show with her parents in Naperville, which seemed about right. In the meantime she was staying with me.

  “For a while—do you want to hear about this?—for a while I was pursuing this twenty-eight-year-old who lives four doors down with her parents,” I said. “But she wasn’t having it. She turned out to be super Catholic and said I wasn’t spiritual enough. That’s the word she used, ‘spiritual.’ Not spiritual enough? I have the transplanted legs of a dead man and the last girl I saw put a demon inside me. That’s more Catholic than anything she’s done, I bet. Spiritual. I need an exorcism, I’m so spiritual.”

  She wouldn’t stop laughing. “You seem jittery.”

  “It’s all these icicles melting. All the dripping.” I stomped through a puddle. “How’s your life?”

  “Golden. I have a job, a boyfriend, and friends in other cities. I am floating through life.”

  “Must be nice.”

  “Give me a break.”

  I wrestled her backpack away from her. “Did you bring me anything?”

  *

  We dumped her stuff at my place then went to Kim’s bar. Paz was there, in the corner, trying to light a cardboard coaster on fire. As a whole it wouldn’t catch so she started ripping it into little strips, knotting them into kindling.

  “That’s not very Catholic of you,” I yelled.

  “Who are you shouting at?” Meredith said.

  “That’s her,” I said. “She’s here. Who knew?”

  “You, probably,” Kim said. “Your friend here has turned into the sort of guy who gets weird about girls,” she told Meredith. “I thought I trained him better than that.” She poured Meredith a beer but not me. At the moment we weren’t talking. I recently realized she had been feeding me lies about celebrity deaths. As the one of us who used the Internet, she was my gatekeeper for that stuff. (“You should be grateful,” she had said. “Most people never think someone is dead and then find out they’re still alive. I gave you a unique emotional experience, maybe the only unique one you’ve ever had.”) Still, I wanted a beer and I smacked the bar repeatedly until she gave me one. Then I had eight or nine more. Paz burnt the coaster to embers and I wanted to say something to her, mostly so I could call her ‘Zap,’ the cute nickname I would’ve used, had we grown serious.

  “‘Spaz’ would work, too,” Meredith said.

  “What?”

  “As a cute nickname or whatever, for that girl,” she said. She pinched the bridge of her nose.

  “Jesus. I make myself sick.”

  We slumped over the bar. Kim’s shift had ended hours ago. She got off early sometimes to do interviews or cover shows for a bunch of websites and local papers. I don’t know. Kim Steele, writer-bartender. She was doing great.

  “So maybe I’m not spiritual,” I told Meredith as Zap blew the ashes into the air. “But remember that summer in college when we ate fifty-cent ice cream cones and had that cooler of mini Coronas and used my dad’s projector to watch outdoor movies on a sheet against the garage? Jackass? Jackass 1.5? Jackass 2? Jackass 3? If I die and somehow fail to cease to exist, I hope I go back to that. I hope I’m a ghost, hovering behind our lawn chairs, wisping against our necks…”

  “Which is the one where they set up a miniature town and there’s a green hill overlooking it but really it’s a painted butt and then he has diarrhea?” Meredith asked.

  “Jackass 3,” I said.

  HYPERVENTILATE

  March 18, 2015

  I stepped out of line at the grocery store to take a call from Alec. “What’s up, Bonnie?”

  “Not much, Clyde. Except I’m holed up in the bathroom at a student’s house in Studio City. Midlesson he asked if I’d been losing weight. Which I have been. Then he asked if I knew how people lost weight. Do you know?”

  “You poop it out.”

  “You breathe it out of your mouth. He told me this and my brain made the clanking sound of a car running out of gas. Unnerved, I left for the toilet.”

  A familiar situation. He didn’t want me to talk him down, so much as talk about anything at all. My voice itself is enough, I told myself.

  I looked around.

  “There’s a nun here selling gray bread but giving out pity for free,” I said. “Half the pre-packaged deli meat is expired. I don’t know why I keep coming here. Well, I do. They sell homemade chips. Plus, sometimes the fluorescent lights flicker and chase me down the hall.”

  Now I was in the back corner of the store, in front of the men’s restroom. I lingered there, pretending Alec was inside and I was waiting for him. It would be better for him to walk out into a shambly grocery store in Chicago, I decided, instead of back into a marble living room where some television actor’s kid was fucking with his head.

  “Eight pounds so far,” he said sadly.

  ONE LEFT

  March 24, 2015

  We were at our parents’ house, not on purpose. Every time I drove us anywhere at night, we ended up in their driveway. It had been going on all week. No matter where we wanted to go, we always found ourselves here.

  “This never happens when I drive,” Kim said.

  “You never drive.”

  “Well, it wouldn’t happen if I did. Going home to our parents’ house every night?
This is distinctly a you problem.”

  *

  We went inside and yelled at the pile of blankets that was our mom.

  “It happened again,” Kim said. “We’re home. Wake up.”

  The blankets stirred, then yawned.

  “Come out from under there,” Kim said. She tugged on the blankets, but Mom held them in place.

  “Get away,” the blankets said. “Leave me alone.”

  “Excuse us?”

  “You’re ghosts or ghouls or something. I know this is a trick. Every night you come in here and try to get me to take the blankets off. Well, I won’t do it. My kids live in the city. They wouldn’t come home every night just to harass me. I mean, maybe they would, but they can’t afford the gas.”

  *

  Kim had a theory that our apartment was low on supplies, so it kept sending us to La Grange to get more stuff. That couldn’t have been the answer. A week had passed since the problem started and we had cleaned out our parents’ reserves of paper towels, toilet paper, tissue paper, food, light bulbs, laundry detergent, end tables, etcetera. But it kept happening.

  “Maybe it’s this deep fryer,” Kim said. We were in the kitchen. “Maybe it’ll stop if we take the deep fryer.”

  I told Kim I thought maybe we kept getting sent back here to spend quality time with our parents.

  “But why?”

  “Maybe they’re going to be dead soon.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Kim said. “We’ll be dead long before them. They’re safe here. We’re the ones being driven crazy. Even now, I feel like we’re coming up on the end. Because what’s on the other side of all this stuff? All this garbage that happens to us? Certainly not a normal life.” She gestured at me to pick up the fryer. I followed her out to the car and put it in the backseat.

  *

  We were on the highway, almost to the California Avenue exit. The curse seemed to be broken. We were going to make it.

  “Tomorrow,” Kim said, “me and you are going out.”

  “I’d rather not. I have plans. I’m going to sort through all the underwear I stole from Dad. A lot of the pairs are in shreds, or have holes blown out the backside.”