by Jesse Miller
The store phone rang.
–Hang on. I gotta do this call.
Automatic doors opened and closed.
Two more beeps signaled the arrival of the boys from out front. He could feel one of them, probably the vocal one, standing too close behind him. He hadn’t properly extinguished his cigarette, and a small thread of blue smoke, like the kind you always see preceding a massive, abominable plume in the movies, waved from behind Thom in bleary, exotic tendrils. The little boy rocked arrhythmically. He didn’t stop lurching, searching for new space to occupy. This little boy was like a giant flesh gearshift that an invisible hand seemed to be sliding into first, second, third. The boy’s body brushed against his back. He could hear—almost feel the air he pulled into his small lungs, stealing it from an imaginary air repository under his own nostrils. And why couldn’t he stand still? His eyes stayed fixed on the clerk, coiling the cord around his wrists. The boy’s small fingers tapped Thom’s shoulder, the highest point he could reach without jumping.
–What’s the fuckin’ hold up in here?
Thom turned around slowly to meet two little eyes running at him before he was able to steady out a focus.
–Can you please, please give me some room?
–Fuck you.
What?
Fuck?
Fuck me?
You want to fuck me?
You want to unzip your little boy pants?
You want to take out your little boy cock?
And fuck me?
Until I bleed?
Fuck out my eyes with a raging torro torro cock?
Is that it?
Or is it a general desire for me to get fucked?
Fucked over?
Fucked up?
Fucked senseless?
Acute dysphoria bled into another feeling altogether. And, of course, at this point Thom was already long gone.
–What do you mean?
The boy’s eyebrows converged, uniting the two fuzzy caterpillars living on his brow.
–You a retard?
It had just been such a long day. Thom began to shake.
From the vitreous eye of a video camera, Thom could see himself in black and white. He could see his hand rise. He could see the little boy’s sneakers dangling above the grainy linoleum floor, his body like a rabbit pelt between his fingers. Sometimes things just leak though, even if you hold them back. Barriers are only so effective.
He could see the other boy reaching for something in his pocket. He could see his own leg raise and feed the boy’s stomach the heel of his boot. He looked curly before he hit the floor, a little overgrown fetus obscured by amorphous shadows, rolling uncontrollably down the candy aisle and out of view.
He could even see the whites of the boy’s eyes, two bleached moons there among the silent and imperturbable ATM machine. There, among the prolific lineage of thirty packs of ICE COLD BISHWATER BEER. There, among the MUSTANG promos. There, among the gelatinous coffee and swizzle sticks. There, among the dick and twat mags and spicy nuts and WOMEN ❤ BEER TOO plastic cigarette lighters and the splashy forever fanning of corn chips and the tedious arranged splay, the juke box array of individually wrapped factory snacks and salts. He could see him there on the floor in a kind of florescent manger among the universe of convenient things. Below the lightless awning of his hoodie the boy looked even younger than he probably was. He appeared all wrapped up, like all of the store’s goodies, all swaddled up like a newborn.
Thom turned back to the counter. A rack of black magic markers propped on a cardboard tree lounged against the lightly purring cash register. He yanked on one, and the entire tree took to the air and collided gently with a glossy green package of diapers stacked at the other end of the store.
He turned back to the boy who had since heeded Thom’s request for more space. Hand raised, still holding the marker, he looped in around the boy’s neck and reeled him against his chest. He squirmed, but Thom was off of the schneid now.
The boy had no choice but to be held there, pressed against his rib cage, against some strange, outfolded womb. He wanted to believe he was the only man in the boy’s young life who had ever really held him. It would leave an impression he’d never forget. Thom leaned into his ear and whispered the only advice that came to mind.
–Please don’t stand so close to people. It makes them uncomfortable. And don’t smoke inside. Please don’t rock so much, either. Please try to be still.
He could spin the boy’s head more easily than a doorknob. He held him tighter before releasing him, as if back into the wild, and the boy leapt toward the door.
Automatic doors opened and closed.
Two beeps rang, and they were out of the store. Thom’s arm stung and he noticed the boy had snuffed his cigarette into his forearm. He pulled on the crushed cigarette, a layer of skin attached, and dropped it to the floor.
He turned back to the clerk, who was now off of the phone. His nametag read: BILL.
–I guess I won’t be needing any cigarettes today, Bill. But I’ll take this marker.
He removed it from the package and dropped the plastic casing. Bill didn’t move. His eyes didn’t shift from the newly formed basin sinking in Thom’s arm like a fresh, puckering asshole.
–Take it.
–That’s real big of you, Bill. You’re a good man.
–It’s all good.
–Bill, you look familiar to me. Have we met before?
Bill’s gaze slipped below the counter and then followed Thom to the door, slowly opening, triggering a long hymnal beep once he moved to the doorjamb. The tone filled the entire store and leaked out into the street.
–Are you sure we haven’t met before?
But nobody could hear over the beeping that seemed to raise in pitch, higher and higher, and then went on to inflate Thom’s entire head, his entire brain, his entire body with helium. Every bruise and scab from the prior night began to vibrate and ring like bells all over his skin inside the squealing vault of sound.
Thom noticed a height chart that lined the doorframe like a series of colorful discs stacking up a spine. Sickly pastel blues, reds, and oranges, the colors used to differentiate the height of all the would-be criminals stratified upward along the frame of the door. He pushed the base of his back against it, sliding his spine along the metal rail. He ran the tip of the marker across his head and plotted his height on the chart. When he pulled away, he half-expected to see his own body still standing there.
Marker thief∕vandal—Height: 5’ 8.”
Thom put the tip to the rail again and let the anemic height chart pull more ink from the moist black tongue of the marker. Bill, seeming increasingly concerned by Thom’s lingering presence, began searching blindly for his Louisville Slugger underneath the counter, forgetting company protocol to alert local authorities with complete equanimity. Thom wrote one word over the glass door:
MIDOR
Marker capped, he stared at the door. My door. Store left.
Outside, two phlegmy globules of spit ran down his windshield. Another frothy monstrosity rested on the driver’s seat. He stood motionless and stared at his car for a long time.
From the corner of his eye he noticed a long stream of piss as it seemed to sizzle against the corner of the convenience store, breaking against his ears at the same time it hit the side of the building. He followed the line from the edge of the wall across and connected it back to an exceptionally long green-grey cock that swung from a bum’s body like a panting tongue. Make no mistake, there was a special kind of kinship with this man that registered inside Thom, still listening to the stream, as they both had taken turns drawing lines along the same building. And even more interesting to Thom was that he could smell the ammonia frothing from his languid spigot as it hit the wall and oozed down to the narrow alleyway between buildings.
Unconcerned with his seat, Thom hopped in the car and pulled away, watching the last few impossible drops get shaken wildly into the air
like a child with a sparkler.
The sal volatile of piss stuck warmly in his nostrils as he drove. Back now, and hundreds of green lights ushered his car forward, sparkling now, beseeching green buttons that kept opening up the night into a widening smile that seemed to curl forever over the globe. He barely noticed the spit that soaked into his pants. It was perfect. The needle never had to touch the groove. There didn’t have to be any feeling. It was touching without really touching anything at all.
Thom sailed along the street with a Venetian lean, forward, over the wheeled shoulders of murky water, turning the radio on and off over and over.
Chapter Nine
Section I
Guinness is Good for You
The continuation of remembrances from years prior, during which Raymond Evans shows a young Thomas how to make a promise, and then how break one.
Over the doorway hung a carved wooden sign of an elephantine pint glass, black nearly to the rim. Flanked on either side, two huge green clovers stretched outward, as if to burst into the four corners of the earth.
THE PUBLIC HOUSE
He’d passed this pub for years and was always taken with the carefully carved still life above the door.
–How about this place, Thom?
–The Pubic Louse?
They both smiled.
–Right.
Thom brushed the hair from his eyes. He’d worn it short in high school, but other guys on campus wore theirs long, let it go wild. Deliberately bad rat nest heads of long hair made them cool, and more importantly, made them appear older, so he’d given it a go. Raymond cut the ignition. As he tucked the keys into his pocket, Thom swore he saw a butterfly vault out.
*
–Can I start you out with some drinks?
–That’s a good place to start.
–How about you milk us two Guinness from the tap over there?
–Very well.
–Sure thing.
The waiter turned back toward the bar, and Thom followed Raymond’s arms, followed the stretches of his skin to his eyes, searching for a signal of some kind. When he panned across his face, Raymond was already grinning.
–I don’t think…
–C’mon, it’s just a pint. It doesn’t even count.
He chuckled as Thom’s brow compressed into fleshy panels. The waiter returned a few minutes later and positioned dark, shiny pints in front of each of them like two huge rooks. He couldn’t see the palm of his hand through the glass. In a cosmos of bubbles, the atoms of the drink fizzed ebulliently as he brought the glass to his lips.
–Wait.
Raymond motioned for him to return the glass to the table.
–It’s not done! Watch!
Indeed, the glass was alive. Pinhole bubbles rained from an emerging layer of cream floating on the top of the glass. It grew darker, and soon a completely black glass sat before him, defiant in its fullness. He couldn’t see the bottom. In the air, in the night, in this room, Thom slipped easily into a little dream, like slipping a few pennies into your pocket, where he was the size of a matchstick supinely descending the glass, staring at the white film overfilling his eyes from above. If the glass were the night, that wet, black velvet canvas, then all of the light in the sky had been embroidered into a perfect white circle above. If there was a heaven in the universe of the glass, it was surely among that fat, creamy cloud.
–Wow.
Carried in the cosmography of the foam, he noticed the swoop of a full-bodied shamrock crowning the glass. His father nodded; Thom lifted the glass to his mouth, parted his lips and sipped courageously on the sweet-bitter.
–Do you like it?
–Yeah. It’s heavy.
–It’s rich.
–I’m not exactly comfortable… I thought you weren’t really…anymore?
–Do your old man a favor and enjoy it. Enjoy talking. How are classes?
–Sure…um…I’m taking this literature class. These poems we’re reading are…heavy.
–Do you write your own? Poems, that is?
Thom looked around the room, sipped a little sip.
–Yeah, maybe. Mostly, I’ve been thinking about old people and what they think about the young, the forever…foreverness of youth. I want to write a story or something about that.
–Wow, a writer in our midst!
–Do you know what midst means? The real meaning?
–What’s it mean, Thom?
–It means middle, it means in the middle of.
Raymond shook his head approvingly up and down. They sipped beer, dropping kidney‐shaped puddles onto the table.
–You’re in the midst of a good education, sounds like. We should have you down writing copy at the station. Ad guys make some mon-ey.
–I’m not a—I’m not a shill. I just thought…
Raymond waved his hand. Thom’s mouth closed.
–Listen though, Thom, I want to share something with you…sort of.
–What’s that?
He reached into his pocket. His closed palm stretched across the table with a new ease and loomed over the glass. It opened and a plop was followed shortly by a ping.
–What did you just do? What was that?
–Finish your drink and you’ll see.
–I’m not sure I really want it now.
Raymond’s lips receded across his face and formed a small fuzzy smile just as the waitress arrived.
Her face appeared to be separated from her body, floating above it like a flesh balloon, a bit too full for the carriage below. Red ringlets, the color of the filaments that push teakettles to a boil, curled back and reunited at her nape. The topography of her small features eased over her face like a coating of milk. She looked thin enough to spin.
–Hi there. My name is Samantha, and I’ll be taking care of you this evening.
*
Soft light unraveled from the ceiling as Thom, freshly deputized by hormones, gobbled down a herculean, sappy gulp of Guinness as fast as it would move.
–And for you, sir.
Samantha’s huge black eyelashes flittered as she leaned closer to Thom, and held him in a kind of webbing, pinning him to his seat. Every bone in the catalogue of his skeleton shivered.
–I’ll a have…
Menu spun. Eyes squinted. A foam mustache claimed his upper lip.
–I’ll have…
He could see her without clothes. Her nipples were pink dimes, and his mouth was a parking meter. Her shallow bellybutton punctuated her tidy abdomen, but Thom had visions of run-on sentences, run on and on and on and on, on her hands and knees, her stomach seemed almost as inviting as the veiled opening beneath it. For a second, wavy lines of steam appeared to be rising from her skin, groggily, all of it, all rising and fluttering, anesthetizing, all opening…
–I’ll have this burger cooked in Guinness.
–How would you like that done?
–I like things done well.
She nodded and suppressed a smile.
–Very well, gentlemen.
The menu she collected was like a belt pulled slowly through the loops of his fingers.
Time slowed way down as Samantha walked from their table to the kitchen. Eventually, Thom’s attention returned to the glass.
–So, what exactly am I going to find in the bottom of this glass?
–A useful trick.
–What kind?
–The kind you can really only pull off once.
–How does it work?
He sat upright in his chair, shifted his weight in his seat.
–First, you meet a woman who enjoys a Guinness. They’re a rare breed, but keepers, every one…practically every one.
–Okay.
–Immediately, fall madly, madly in love with her.
–Rrrrright.
–Then take her out some night, after all the stewed guys have been thrown out or carried home. Walk up to the bar. Buy her a drink.
When nobody’s looking, especially h
er, carefully drop what’s in the bottom of your glass, into hers.
Thom pulled the pint away from his lips.
–You want me to be a date rapist?
–A what?
Food plates touched down. Samantha crowned the table with a bottle of ketchup.
–Would you like another?
She reached for his glass, backsplash shreds coiling a smidge above the base, but he pulled it against his chest.
–Actually, I’m still working on this one.
She nodded, her pink lips momentarily drew closer to his as she leaned in and out from the table. Sliding away, knee-high black boots sheathed her striding pins. Rosewater ghosts of skin, so sweet, her wet metallic redolence hung in the air before collapsing onto the floor in her wake. Thom pulled the blushing ghost of her body into his lungs, away from everyone else and swiveled back to his father’s awaiting stare. His eyes were trained on the nearly empty pint glass. Slightly buzzed, he grabbed the base of the glass and held it momentarily under his chin.
–Buttercup.
Raymond’s lips fuzzed out at the edges.
–If you’re lucky, it won’t clank around the bottom of the glass until there’s just one swallow left.
He tilted the glass as fingers parted the blackness, swished in cool spiritualmud, and struck something solid.
–And if you’re really lucky, after she picks it up…
Between his forefinger and thumb, he produced a diamond ring covered in beer. He wiped the ring with his napkin. Raymond’s fingers unlocked, trembled forward slightly, and restored the ring to Thom’s control.
–Are you proposing to me?
Raymond’s smile was reproduced on Thom’s face.
–I want you to keep this, for the future.
–I’ll lose it.
–No you won’t.
–I’ll sell it.
–If your mother didn’t, I’m sure you won’t have any retention problems. Besides, she only returned it to me because I promised I’d give it to you.