Mostly Autobiographical

by Rob Gunther

  So I walked right into the garden and I started weeding. After all of that rain there were a ton of tiny sprouts. I plucked out all of the weeds, and my plants were having a great time. I’d pick one that was really close, and the plant would mock me, “Oh yeah, that’s it right there. Oh yeah, just a little to the left. Yeah, that’s the spot,” and they all laughed and laughed.

  Keep laughing, boys.

  Then I got a bunch of pots and some soil. And I replanted all the weeds. The plants got real quiet after that. I got out the hose. Those plants had been so busy having their fun they forgot just how thirsty they all were. And I turned on the hose real slowly. I brought it to my lips and took a nice, big sip. After my drink, I started watering the weeds. And I came back the next day and did the same thing.

  After a couple of days my garden looked terrible. All of the plants, they couldn’t even stand up anymore. They were all losing their color, fast. Finally the plants broke down. “Please! We’re sorry! Give us some water! We’ll do anything!”

  I said “OK, sure thing, boys.” And I got out the hose and pretended like I was going to feed them, but then I said, “Just kidding,” and I went to water the potted weeds, which, by this point, were getting just as big as the plants. And they were grateful for it. Their whole lives, it had always been simply whatever they could get, a few drops of water here and there.

  Right before everything died, I went outside with some lighter fluid in a bucket. I doused the garden. The plants must have been so deliriously thirsty that they couldn’t tell what it was. Those stupid bastards, sucking it right in, right inside. By the time they all started choking, it was too late. I struck a match, and they lit up all at once, combustion from the inside out.

  Gardening started out cool enough, but I was left wondering how everything fell so out of control. Next year I’m going to pave the whole backyard and make a basketball court. I was thinking about a volleyball court, but I went to the Sports Authority to check out volleyballs, and I couldn’t help but thinking they were all looking at me funny, like not even really caring if I’d buy them or not, imagining to themselves that I’m not even good at volleyball anyway.

  Stupid balls.

  I came back with a pin and, while pretending to check them out, poked a bunch of really small pricks. They wouldn’t deflate right away, but they’d all fall flat by the end of the day. The manager would find them, scratch his head, chalk it up to a bad day at the volleyball factory, and dump the whole supply in the trash.

  Lot of people in this city

  The other day it was raining when I got out of work, and when it’s raining in the afternoon everything’s always a lot grosser, a lot more uncomfortable. Everybody’s all wet, but everybody’s doing whatever they can to stay as dry as possible, walking single file around large puddles, carrying around giant umbrellas, even bigger umbrellas, like golf umbrellas, those umbrellas that the fruit stand guy uses to protect all of his produce from the rain or the sun, all at the same time, a giant picnic umbrella, really, something you would bring out at the beach to guard you and your family and your ten best friends from the harmful rays of the sun.

  I’m a lot taller than everybody else, and I’m never the kind of guy who brings an umbrella to work if it’s not raining in the morning because, what, I’m going to have to carry around this extra two pounds of dead weight every single day? It doesn’t rain often enough for that. But I don’t understand where everyone gets an umbrella from when it starts raining in the middle of the day. I go to work in the morning, it’s dry, nobody has an umbrella. I step foot outside in the afternoon, it’s raining, everybody has an umbrella. What did I miss? What am I not doing that everybody else is doing?

  So come quitting time, everybody in the city races out the doors, trying to beat everybody else to the subway, and I’m so much taller that I’m standing at direct eye level with everyone else’s giant umbrellas. I’m constantly avoiding getting my eyes poked out, and because I’m so nervous about those umbrella spokes - which, why are they so sharp and pointy anyway? - I don’t notice all of the puddles. Of course I didn’t bring galoshes, so my feet are soaked, and on these rainy afternoons, the rush hour commute just feels a lot more crowded, like when people get wet they just expand, they get slower, and crankier, and I can’t get my Metrocard out of my wallet because my fingers are wet, and the plastic that the Metrocard is made out of completely loses its grip when at all moist. But it doesn’t matter because there’s a huge line at the turnstile, because it takes people forever to fold up their giant umbrellas, to keep the line moving while shaking out all of that excess water right on my feet.

  Keep trying with that Metrocard, nobody can really get a grip, and then going underground, on this particular day, really it’s very frustrating.

  This guy ahead finally just screams out something like, “Jesus fucking Christ! You fucking people need to learn how to fucking move! Fuck fuck fuck!” and I’m just looking at this dude screaming his crazy screaming in the middle of the subway platform. He looks just like me, just like some guy who doesn’t want to be where he is so badly that the stress and the pressure boils over. It just gets to him. He starts shaking his fists at the universe, and me, I start getting really angry at this guy. I really consider yelling back because, what the hell? Do you think you’re the only person inconvenienced by this mob of slow moving human beings? Or the weather? Or being wet? Or feeling uncomfortable?

  He’s mad and he gets to express himself, and now I’m even madder and I want to express myself too, but what would I say, “Shut the fuck up, asshole!” or “Why don’t you just calm down there, pal?” How confrontational would I get? Nobody ever expects these things to work out. They always escalate. And we’re underground and what happens if things get heated and somebody gets pushed and, you know what?

  Let that guy have his little temper tantrum. I bet he feels like a big man, telling everybody off, telling everybody they’re in his way, making his life a little bit more inconvenient than it had to be. You know what I should have said? I should have said, “Listen buddy, why don’t you move someplace far away from the city, where there are no people to get in your way, someplace really dry, where it never rains, where nobody has to work, and nobody has to commute, and then you won’t be pissed off. That’ll solve all of your problems my friend.”

  Actually, no I wouldn’t have said that either. That would have been way too long and there’s no way I would have gotten all of that out without him interrupting me, going back at me. I would have gotten all flustered, my blood would have started to boil, and I wouldn’t have known quite what to say. So I’d just start yelling out things like, “Oh yeah?” but louder, because volume always trumps substance.

  But that would’ve been a different path to that same escalation. One time I read this article about how when too many human beings are close together and they start getting pushy that actual waves of energy start running through the crowd, like currents, like people can get crushed, lifted right out of their shoes, and then who gets charged with murder, everyone? Can you try several hundred people for the murder of one person? And how many sentences are we talking about, does everybody take turns in jail for a day?

  Yeah, I do the right thing. I keep my mouth shut. Somebody pokes me in the eye getting off the train, opening up an umbrella. It hurts, but my eye doesn’t fall out, I don’t get in anybody’s face, I just kind of say, “Ow … jeez,” semi-loudly, to nobody in particular. I’m pretty sure the person who poked hears me softly cry out, but I’m also pretty sure I hear that same person say something to me like, “You gotta watch out, buddy. Lot a people in this city,” all passive-aggressively, everybody hurrying home, hands in their pockets, heads in their hoodies.

  That’s the worst

  I’m so cold. It just started getting cold this week, and I’m not used to it. I can’t get warm. I hate it when you complain to somebody about how cold you are, and they say something dismissive, like, “Put on a sweater.”
r />   That’s the worst. Just listen to me complain. Or join in with me. There’s always more to complain about. It’s like when you’re really hungry and somebody just goes, “Have an apple.”

  Just shut up dude. Maybe I want something to whine about for a little bit. You eat an apple.

  All of this cold, it’s making me think about snow, how it’s always fun for the first day or so, but you can only throw snowballs at cars for so long before your gloves get wet and your hands start freezing. And then your socks get wet, too. And then you head outside to throw snowballs the next day, but all the snow is slushy and brown.

  I hate it when it’s raining or gross out and somebody says, “I just love rainy days.”

  Bullshit. Nobody loves rainy days. I like to storm around the house on rainy days and try to make everyone feel as miserable as I am. What are you supposed to do all day? Read? Get out of here. I’m going to get in the car and see if I can’t splash any pedestrians with gross puddle water.

  The worst is when you forget to move your laundry from the washer to the dryer. And then when you finally remember, it’s too late to rewash everything, and so you have to run those nasty clothes through the dryer, because you need a shirt and you’re already late for work. And then the rest of the day that smell is just following you around, it smells like feet, like an old wet towel.

  That’s another thing I can’t stand, when you’re taking a shower and you go to dry off and you’ve been using the same towel for one day too many, and it’s the same botched laundry smell. What are you supposed to do, stand there and air dry? It’s freezing out. So you grab the towel and dry off. Now you smell disgusting. But it’s over already, the whole shower is ruined, the whole day. What are my options? Take another shower? My skin’s going to fall off. That’s the worst, when you take too many showers and your skin gets all dry. And maybe I don’t have any clean towels. Or maybe they’re in the dryer, but it’s another load of bad laundry, and I don’t realize it yet because I already smell terrible from the first shower that I took and I think that the smell is just me. But it’s really this second towel, and that’s the worst, like even worse, the absolute worst, because the second shower is too much, my skin’s peeling, and I get out and dry off with what I think is a fresh towel, but it’s just as gross. Why does all of my stuff smell so bad?

  Or what’s terrible is when you make a pot of coffee then go to the fridge to get the milk, but there’s only like half an inch of milk left. I don’t feel like going out to the store. I need coffee to get out of the house, not the other way around. And so I try to ration. But I always find that whenever there’s just a tiny bit left, it always comes out weird, like some of it doesn’t blend in with the coffee, it’s just these little hardened dots of milk, and I try to enjoy it, but it’s way too bitter.

  Or when I’m trying to watch TV on the Internet and they keep showing me the same commercial over and over again. Every commercial break it’s the same lame ad, so lame that they won’t even run it on regular TV, only on the Internet because they’re thinking, hey, this loser is too cheap to buy cable, so we’re only going to show him ads for cheap garbage that maybe he can afford. The production value is so low–budget, it’s the worst actors, and these commercials are on repeat, like they’re thinking this guy is so incredibly cheap, maybe we’ll be lucky if we can trick him into buying just one cheap product, so we’re really going to suffocate this guy with only one ad until it’s all that he can think about, until he’s not even enjoying his show anymore, every four minutes, commercial time.

  Or when your phone vibrates in your pocket, and you get excited, thinking maybe it’s an email, maybe it’s of those jobs you applied to, maybe it’s one of your friends with news about some plans this weekend or something fun going on, but you open your phone and it’s a voicemail. Nobody leaves voicemails. And you have to wait for your phone to call the voicemail, and you put the phone to your ear, and it’s silence, but it keeps going. Two minutes of nothing. And then you have to listen to the options to delete the message. Why won’t the cell phone company just shut off my voicemail like I asked them to?

  And then the wall starts hissing, like way too loud, and you go to check what the noise is but it’s the heat, it’s finally kicking in, it’s been a whole season since the heat’s been on so you forget, and you touch the pipe and it’s way too hot and you get burned. And then you tell somebody about what happen, and they’re all like, “Get some ointment.”

  Seriously, why don’t you just be quiet and listen for a minute, just let me vent without being such a know-it-all? You get some ointment, you condescending jerk.

  Is it too late for me to be a doctor?

  I’m sure there has to be a path for me to do whatever I want to in life. I’m still in my twenties. I theoretically should be able to fulfill any dream. Like becoming a doctor. You just have to put in the hours, right? You just have to set a schedule and not stop for anything, right? You just have to sacrifice everything else in your life and devote every single breath and heartbeat to working toward that dream, to making sure you’re completing that goal, right?

  I just spend way too much time f’ing around. And while it would be amazing to get up in the morning, look myself in the mirror and think, goddamn it, Rob, you did it, you’re a doctor, a real doctor, I don’t think I’d be that into it. It’s like, if somebody came into my house, with a gun, and sat me down at my kitchen table, and, with the gun to my head, pulled out some textbooks, opened them to page one, and told me to start studying, and then he kept doing that, every single day, every page he’d turn and make me read, out loud, and he’d make me run all of these memorization drills and force me to use flashcards, and he’d have to hold a pen in my hand and force me to apply to all of the best medical schools, to really concentrate on writing the very best application essays, and if he kept doing that, just threatening to kill me if I even so much as stopped studying and working for one second, well then I think I wouldn’t have a choice but to become a world-famous doctor. I mean, I don’t want to get shot. That’s what happens when somebody comes up to you with a gun, right? You do whatever they tell you to. “Do as I say or it’s curtains!”

  I wish I had that in my life, somebody with a gun to make me stop wasting so much time, somebody to really make me commit to doing something all out, professionally. I wonder if I can hire a hit man to do it. That would probably be pretty pricey. From what I’ve read about hit men and have seen about them in the movies, they’re expensive, and that’s just for killing somebody. How long does it take to kill somebody? From a professional point of view, if I were the hit man, I would want it to be as fast as possible. Like, kill this guy. OK, give me the money. OK, BAM! Dead. That took like two seconds. The longer you take, the less money you’re making per hour. And so for me to hire a hit man to follow me around, twenty-four seven, making sure that I’m working hard, sticking to my goals, that’s probably going to cost a lot, like way more than I can afford.

  And what if after a couple of weeks we start to grow attached to each other? Like, we develop a friendship. And we start cracking jokes. He’ll start using the gun to scratch my head when I’m studying something especially hard, and we’ll both laugh, but a really controlled laugh, only for a second, because he’ll realize the laughter means a bond is developing between us. So he’ll straighten up quick and say something like, “All right, back to work, knock it off.” And I’ll get quiet and serious, and he’ll be quiet and serious. But then maybe ten seconds later we’ll both start cracking up at the same time, like we couldn’t hold it in, and this time the laughter is really intense and very genuine.

  So yeah, once that happened, I’d start to doubt that he’d actually kill me if I stopped studying, even if only for a second, and I’d test it out, and maybe he wouldn’t shoot me. After all, I’d be paying him a lot of money, and if he actually shoots me then I can’t pay him anymore, and he’d have to go back to being just another contract killer, which, after not killing
anybody for a couple of weeks, he’d realize he likes the non-killer life a little better. And so yeah I’d stop studying for a second and he’d let it slide. And then it would be a full minute. And then just one episode of Community, come on, just one movie. Let’s go out for pizza. And then we’d both be sitting around my living room watching online videos and eating snacks, and I won’t be a doctor, and eventually my money would dry up. He’d have to leave, not because he’d want to, but because, hey, a guy’s got to eat, right?

  So yeah, I don’t think I’ll ever be a doctor. An MD. Who knows, maybe I’ll get some bullshit PhD someday. But probably not that either. Dissertations sound awful.

  I’ll only accept the best

  What can I say? My tastes are expensive. I have a palate that demands the finest things in life: luxury automobiles, small-batch whiskies, vintage wines, and exotic pets. I’m not going to sit back and accept life by the Kraft Single. No, I want the whole block. I want it to have been hanging in some rural villa in Southern Italy for the better part of a decade, carefully tended to by some second generation Italian-American immigrant’s grandmother, making sure that when the cheese importer stops by later in the season to see how the batch is progressing, he’ll make faces of disgust, reaming her out in Italian, telling her that his customers, me, won’t accept anything less than the very best, most artfully crafted cheeses. He’ll spit on the floor and walk out in disgust before finding an even more rustic Southern Italian cheese maker, and he’ll buy the whole wheel in bulk, whereupon he’ll send it abroad to sell at the most world-renowned cheese shops in America. And that’s where I’ll get my cheese, really expensive, a really sophisticated cheese. I don’t eat grilled cheese sandwiches, I eat cheese in little blocks, little chunks, skewered by ivory toothpicks, and no, they’re not reusable. I still throw them out. I don’t give a shit if ivory is endangered. Blah blah blah trafficking, blah blah blah poaching. Get me a fucking elephant, chop its fucking tusks off, and make me some fucking ivory toothpicks. Now. What do you think, I’m joking? You’re fired. Get the hell out of my house. You want a recommendation? Sure, hand me a platinum-plated pen. No, not that one, the good one, you moron. Throw that other one away. In the garbage. Here goes: