by John Jodzio
Who wouldn’t? You are no different than anyone else. A bagel hits you on the head—that is what you do. You look toward the heavens and see how this happened, see if someone will accept the blame. You quiet yourself, still the raucous pounding of your heart in your ears, hope that at the very least you hear someone giggle.
You got the idea for the pennies after the bagel. You call the bagel “inspiration” because you actually went home and brainstormed some ideas about what to throw. You wrote your ideas down on a yellow legal pad at your desk in the basement, crossed some of them out, circled a couple.
“Yes!” you yelled when you came to the word “Coins.” “Hell yes!” It was a boisterous yell, something that could have easily accompanied a karate kick. It was exciting and you actually got out of your chair, did this little jig, spiked your pencil onto the floor in a celebration of your brilliance.
“What are you doing down there?” your wife asked you over the intercom.
“Behind at the office,” you lied.
“Bullshit,” she said. “I heard cackling.”
“Just need to finish one last report,” you told her.
Ah, your wife Jeannie. You still love her. You still love her like you loved her before. That is what you tell her. And of course, you try so damn hard to love her the same. You know that is the way it should be. Love doesn’t disappear when someone is bedridden. That is what you tell yourself. You tell yourself that sometimes love just hides away from the light for a while. And right now in your life, you think, this is a point where love is hiding. That is what you tell yourself even though you don’t really know if that is the truth or if love will ever (peek-a-boo!) show itself again.
Before her accident, Jeannie was a teacher in this public school in the city. You remember how she brought home these stories. Stories about a kid shoving a pocketknife in another kid’s ear. Stories about kids opening their lockers and guns clattering out onto the floor. There was always gossip in the teacher’s lounge about what strange thing set off the metal detector today (His braces? Really?), about who was sleeping with who (The math teacher? With that slutty speech clinician?).
Jeannie loved her job, let it burrow inside her. All the pain she dealt with should have blackened her mood, but all she wanted to do when she got home was fuck, a byproduct of being around all of those kids’ boundless energy.
“I am burning up, my skin is on fire, I am dripping wet, please please do me,” she used to moan right after she walked in the door.
She stripped down to nothing, crawled over to you in the recliner, this trail of teacher clothes—blouses and long skirts—laid in her wake.
She especially liked sex from high places. On top of tables, suspended over staircases. One time on vacation in rural Connecticut you did it on a trestle bridge looking over a stony brook, and another time when you were house sitting you snuck up to the roof of your friend’s brownstone and held her body over the building’s edge. You made her feel like she was falling and then you reached out and caught her right before she actually fell.
“Again,” she always said and you always obliged.
Then came the first time you dropped her. She didn’t specifically ask you to do it, but you knew that she wanted you to let it happen at least once, right? You’d been feeling the excitement in your marriage slide away little by little and by now you felt that it had gotten all too familiar, a ride that she knew would never go off the rails. One night, you let her fall about ten feet from the staircase down into the front entry and she hit the floor. Hard.
There was that second when you stared down at her from the stairs, legs akimbo, arms askance, shocked at what you’d done. Jesus. Was your life going to be different from this point forward? Were you going to spend some time in jail? You were amazed when she stood up and brushed herself off.
“That was really hot,” she said. “Wow.”
After that, she demanded to be dropped. You didn’t want to do it after that first time, but she kept begging and pleading and sometimes you complied. Obviously you were always nervous about it, but months passed and all that ever happened when you dropped her were these bruises—black and blue knots that after a while turned dark brown and then yellowed and finally disappeared.
“People are going to think I beat you,” you told her.
“People are going to think whatever it is they always think,” she told you. “No matter what you and I do.”
Of course one day it went badly. You dropped her from the deck and she landed awkwardly on her arm. She got up and it was just dangling there, her forearm flopping around like a boiled noodle.
“I can’t do this anymore,” you told her after you’d driven her to the hospital and she had lied to the doctor in the emergency room—said she’d fallen rollerblading. “We need to find something else that’s exciting to you. We’ve got to be done with this.”
“There isn’t anything else,” she said. “This is what I like. This is how I like it.”
“You’ll get hurt way worse than this,” you told her.
“I don’t care,” she said.
It is Thursday night and Thursday is one of the nights that you put all the expensive oils and bubble beads into Jeannie’s bath. Your back is killing you and you have to wear a weight belt to lift her. You’ve gotten used to the piece of leather around your waist and sometimes you wear it even at work now, just for the little extra support it gives. You can’t really see it under your shirts and sweaters, but some of your office mates found out about it and they’ve started to give you the business.
“Just back from the gym, Sporto?” they ask.
You do not tell your wife about your co-workers. You used to, but now you save her your problems. She has enough of her own. She can still wash herself, but you sit on the edge of the tub and talk to her. You are happy she is still washing herself. There might come a day when washing is another one of your jobs, but you are glad that it is not now.
“I’m sorry,” she tells you again tonight. “I don’t know how you can ever forgive me.”
“It’s my fault, too,” you say. You don’t really want to believe that fact, but there is a reason that actuary tables exist, a reason that insurance company’s formulas can assign fault to simply being present at a certain map point at a certain time.
“We’re fine,” you tell her.
Sometimes at night though, lying in bed, you can’t get the thoughts of her with that other man out of your head, the science teacher from her school, the one who you met at the hospital, the blond-haired one with the cleft chin who was with her when she fell that last time and then didn’t get up.
“You know I still loved you when that happened,” Jeannie tells you as you lift her out of the tub. “You know that wasn’t what it was about, right?”
Most people are perplexed when it happens. Things falling from above have always perplexed people. Some forget that the sky is an easy option for violence, that the heavens can open up on you at a moment’s notice. When it happens, you’d like to think that God had something to do with it, that there is a plausible explanation, that if you looked up there would be someone there waving and yelling, “My fault!”
You throw one coin. Never more. More would be a pattern. Something to figure out. Something to track back to its source.
You stay late at the office on Friday, waiting for your chance. It is like masturbating when you were younger; you knew that if you didn’t do it you wouldn’t feel right for the rest of the day. So you wait as the office staff files out, as the partners leave for the night.
“Your billable hours are putting us to shame, Sporto,” they say.
You hear Pavel whistling down the corridor, some happy working song, he’s not finished yet either. He stops by your office to chat and then he won’t leave. He tells you about his weekend plans—he’s helping move his cousin into a new apartment and he’s going to church. You listen, even ask the few questions. You are distr
acted, though. You keep glancing over at the window. Yes, yes, you nod, what a life.
“Can I ask question?” Pavel says.
“Go ahead,” you say.
“I ask this because I need to know,” he says.
“Ask away,” you tell him.
You are still staring out the window. You are sitting up high enough here that sometimes you are actually part of the weather, low flying clouds sometimes engulf the building, occasionally you see lightning snaking from cloud to cloud.
“Your wife,” Pavel asks you, “how hard is?”
When you get home that night, Jeannie is there waiting for you. She’s lying in bed; the nurse you have hired for the daytime hours has just left. You sit down next to her, notice that she’s all dolled up, wearing makeup. Her hair is pulled back into a ponytail; she’s wearing a low-cut shirt.
“What’s the occasion?” you ask.
“No occasion,” she tells you.
“There must be something,” you say.
“Nope,” she says.
She pats the bed twice and you move over and sit next to her. She takes her hand and snakes it in under your shirt. She untucks you, unbuckles your belt.
“I’m fine,” you say.
She slides her hand into your boxers.
“You don’t have to do this,” you tell her.
You were only being polite, you need this, you need this badly, you are rock hard, shifting your hips into her hand.
“That’s what I’m talking about,” she says. “Uh-huh.”
You’d forgotten that this was a possibility. You’ve forgotten that this was how it was before. You slide up closer to her and she kisses you and unbuttons your shirt. You slide off your pants and you close your eyes and you feel her drop down and take you in her mouth.
Afterward, you help Jeannie back down to her pillow and you lay down next her on the bed. You take her hand in your hand and you turn your head to look at her.
“Thank you,” you say.
You both lie like that for a little while, nearly weightless, letting the bed, the floorboards, the house, do their work. You’d forgotten this feeling; you’d forgotten how all of these things cradle your body, how they surround you, how they stop you from being pulled into the center of the goddamn earth.
MAKE-A-WISH
He’s a professional baseball player, just not the one I want. The one I wanted to go deep sea fishing with was the shortstop, the one who does the back flip before every game, the master of infield chatter, the guy with the infectious smile and the chain of urban sports bars.
What I get is a designated hitter who once kicked a seagull for fun. His name is Eusebio Urbina and there are rumors.
Isn’t it obvious? all the pundits on TV scream, his skull is ginormous, he keeps pulling his hamstrings, his eyes are as yellow as post-it notes.
“Pleased to meet you, Danny,” Eusebio says. He holds out his massive hand out for me to shake, but I leave it suspended in mid-air. I spin on my heel, shove a photographer out of my way, and walk up the gangplank to the fishing boat.
“Let’s just get this over with,” I yell back down.
- - - - - - - -
We troll through the harbor, past all the cruise ships and docked sailboats. It’s just the two of us, Eusebio and me, in a huge orange boat that has “Doritos” written all over it. On the hull, on the galley tables, on the steering wheel cover. Doritos. There are bags of Doritos strategically placed on the benches to look like throw pillows. There is a mini-fridge stocked to the gills with sandwiches and pop. There is a fruit and cheese plate the size and shape of a small butte.
“You weren’t my wish,” I tell Eusebio.
Eusebio sighs. He digs into his duffel bag and yanks out a bottle of dark liquor. He spins the top off, takes a long swallow. He holds the bottle out to me, shakes it back and forth.
“And you weren’t mine,” he says.
I’m fifteen. According to every oncologist, shaman, and tea leaf reader in the tri-state area that my mother keeps dragging me to, I’ve got between three and six months to live. Right now, I am wearing a blue shirt that says “Carpe Diem” but I’ve scratched off the e and the m so the shirt reads “Carp Die.”
I grab the bottle from Eusebio and put it to my lips and take a pull.
We clear the harbor and Eusebio cuts the engine. He’s already finished off one bottle of rum and he takes off his shirt and ties it around his head. He scratches his goatee, takes another pull on the new bottle he’s just opened.
“You drive,” he says. “I’ll sleep.”
He flops down on one of the benches in the back of the boat, lights up a cigarette. It is hard not to remember back to when Eusebio was hitting everything out of the ballpark. Every time he came up to bat, the place went apeshit. Whenever he hit a home run, he did this complicated dance full of elbow and chest bumps and high fives with the shortstop. I was fine then, not sick at all. Or maybe whatever was inside me had not decided to cause any trouble.
Now, Eusebio hardly ever gets off the bench. Whenever he does there are only heckling and slurs, the occasional syringe chucked at him. The shortstop won’t mention him by name in post-game interviews. The shortstop calls him “The Designated Hitter” or “Number 8” like he’s forgotten Eusebio’s name.
I slide into the captain’s chair and start the engine. I yank the throttle down and feel the boat lurch forward. I am drunk and sweaty and I can feel the liquor sloshing around in my gut. Eusebio points to some seagulls.
“A little tip,” he tells me as he closes his eyes. “Birds follow fish.”
I follow the swooping birds, cut the engine near where they dive down from the clouds. I drop anchor and grab a rod and reel from the compartment under the deck. Even though I’m pretty wasted, I slosh a handful of frozen jumbo shrimp out of the bait box, hook one of them through its gut. I take my rod and rear back, use my entire upper body to cast out. I set the rod into the holder and wait.
Eusebio’s snoring. If I had a Sharpie, I’d write something on his forehead. Something like “Cheater” or “I ? ’Roid Rage.” That’s the kind of thing we do all the time at Children’s Hospital. Kids wake up with the words “Pillhead” or “Sicko” written on their forehead in permanent marker. The parents never think it is funny, but the kids always find it hilarious, make the nursing staff bring a mirror to their bedside so they can look at it over and over.
I reel in, cast out again.
Eusebio arches his back, rubs his palms over his eyes. He stands up and stumbles over to the edge of the boat. He unzips his pants and cuts a whiz into the ocean.
“Catch anything?” he asks.
I shake my head and Eusebio digs in his bag. The skin on his chest has turned beet red. I assume he’s reaching in his bag for another bottle, but instead he holds up a greenish metal orb.
I know right away it is a grenade, but Eusebio is rolling it around in his hand like it’s a piece of fruit. He pulls the pin on it with his teeth and then he starts to cackle. I let my rod go, turn and face him.
“Time to stop dicking around,” he tells me as he chucks the grenade.
A few seconds later the ocean explodes. This is not my wish either, but it is a brilliant thing to see, a deafening explosion and a shower of sea water misting against our faces. There is a pop, pop, popping sound and I watch as the ocean starts to spit up fish. The surface of the water turns black with them—mackerel and sea bass and bluegill and fish that look like they are from the beginning of time. They have long skinny jaws and big jagged teeth. I take the fishing net and start to scoop them into the boat.
Eusebio jumps into the water and hands fish after dead fish to me. I pile them one on top of the other. First I fill the galley and when I run out of room I pile them on the deck. When that’s full, I shove them into the storage areas under the benches, then into the cooler with the soda.
Eusebio gets back into the boat. He opens another bottle of
rum, lights up another cigarette. We’ve been on the high seas for half a day, but I feel like I’ve been out here for months. I am shirtless and grey with dirt. I am rank with fish. I am drunk on rum and my legs feel like sea legs—rickety and bowed.
I pick at my teeth with a pocket knife and stare toward the horizon. I take a piece of rope and practice knots.
“Are you ready?” Eusebio asks me. His five o’clock shadow has turned into a rough beard; in the moonlight his teeth have a blue tint.
I sit on a bench and I tilt my head back to look up at the sky. The boat is running low on fuel, laboring under our catch. The stars above us are tiny, useless.
MONARCHS
I told Carmen I had a surprise for her. We were at Manny’s Good Time and she was lit on gin and juice. She was acting like a little kid, calling me Ricky in this high, squeaky voice. She was sitting on my lap and she had her skinny arms draped around my neck.
“Tell me what it is, Ricky,” she said. “Tell me, tell me, tell me.”
It was a happy hour and I breathed it all in. There were two-for-ones and free hot wings and Darlene, Manny’s wife, was calling out numbers for the meat raffle.
“I can’t tell you,” I told Carmen. “It’s a surprise.”
While we sat there, Carmen’s hair slid in front of my face. It smelled like apricots. I’d asked her about it once, hoping it was genetic, hoping that it could survive all the bar smoke and beer swill, but she told me that it was just her half-sister’s shampoo.
“C’mon,” she begged. “Just give me a hint.”
I looked Carmen up and down. She was totally my type—too scrawny to have hips, long dark hair, a mouth that was held in a constant sneer.