Cold Plate Special

by Rob Widdicombe

  “Better than sex?”

  “Mmm...a very close second.”

  “I haven’t had sex in weeks,” I said.

  “Congratulations.”

  “My girlfriend sucks. She dumped me.”

  Shred brought me a small glass with ice and poured me a bourbon, the mellow, charred-barrel life juice of corrupt French kings and courtiers and what, or dudes from Kentucky anyway. Colonel Beam. What a lovely, whiskered old man, sitting on his Southern porch, launching bon mots of timeless Kentucky wisdom at the gathering of raggedy field hands, hungry for any spark of divine knowledge he might spew. King of his plantation, and he freed all his slaves on a whim of mercy and followed the call of his calling—to make the best liquor known to God.

  “Crank it up!” I said. It was music. I think I liked it. I wanted to like it.

  Shred put his hand on my shoulder. I squirmed away. “Me and Farns want to go with you to case out the perv’s house tomorrow.”

  “Ah, fuck that!” I yelled. “Wanna help me? Wanna help me out? Then let’s party. That’s what I wanna do. Let’s go out and cele-fucking-brate.”

  “There’s an early show down at the Ditch,” Farns said.

  “Let’s do it!” I screamed. “Woo-hoo!” I drained my glass of Beam and poured another. Some of it went all over the table.

  “Easy there,” Kenny said.

  “Easy there!” I mocked him. “Listen to you—Colonel Careful!” Then I got up from my chair and plopped clumsily down on the couch right next to him.

  “Ahhhhh!” Kenny screamed. “My leg!”

  “You know what you are, Mister Kenny-Ken? You’re good people. A person people.”

  “You fucking bastard!” Kenny said in agony. “Ooooo…”

  I felt something under my armpits. It was hands. Farns’s hands pulling me up from the couch.

  “Doesn’t take much to get you wasted, does it?”

  “Wasted? Pasted maybe. Tasted. Let’s go out.” I laughed. I started to fall backward, but Shred caught me.

  “You’re already too fucked up to go out, dude. Damn.”

  “No, I’m not. No, I’m not.” I stood as still and as quiet as I could so they’d let me go out. I love these guys, I said to myself. And they love me. They are beautiful people. And so is Summer. Summer! Where did we go wrong? Oh, I hope she doesn’t hate me. I love her special muches. Maybe she’ll be at the Ditch thing place. I want to make out with her some more. I should’ve kissed her neck more. Did I really kiss her neck? I need more. I love neck.

  I picked up my glass for some more liquid soul power, but Shred tried to block me.

  “Whoa, whoa now. I think you’re quite done.”

  “Nuh-uh,” I said. “Don’t treat me like a red-headed step-child. I don’t have strep throat.”

  “What the hell’re you talking about?”

  “Are we going out or what? Y’all are a bunch of lame-o’s. Lame, lame, lame. I thought y’all were party professionals, like full-time. You’re lettin’ me down.”

  “Get him out of here!” Kenny yelled. “Fucking prick.”

  “Okay. Let’s boogie.”

  Farns had a beat-to-hell old Chevy van. They made me get in the back. It was full of crap, equipment, junk, but I didn’t care. Farns immediately started hauling ass, and I felt like floating delicious nothing. Nothing could touch me. Farns would slam on the brakes at stop signs or a traffic light, throwing me into some piece of steel equipment or his big metal toolbox, but it didn’t hurt. I couldn’t feel a goddam thing. I think I was singing.

  We got to the Ditch and I climbed out through the back doors and it didn’t go so well. All of a sudden I was kind of down there on the pavement. But they picked me up.

  “Thanks, Farnsworth.”

  “Don’t call me that, dickface.”

  “How’d you get that name ‘Farns,’ anyway? Huh, Farnsworthy?”

  “It’s my last name, you jerk.”

  “Your Farnsworthiness. No nickname for you? You need nicknames. Here’s one. Wait, I got one. How about Ringling Brothers and Farnsworth and Bailey?” I laughed.

  “Shut your fucking neck hole, Jarvis,” Shred yelled.

  We got up near the Ditch, and I had to kind of negotiate a curb and try not to lay myself out again. And while knowing that rising and swimming through the air in slow motion is impossible, I felt it was possible. To air-swim. To swim the impossible swim. The door guy said three dollar cover. I got out my wallet.

  “It’s on me, bros.”

  I couldn’t get my bills together, they were all crumpled and sideways and all folded all wrong and wouldn’t count up right. So Shred and Farns just paid their own way and went in, disappearing into the throng.

  I finally got some money to the guy, and then there I was, all up in it. The band was screaming. Literally. Guitarist and bass player were both screaming outrageous harmonies, whacky backwards guitar sounds coming out of the amps, blaring distortion, nuclear holocaust. I loved the organized chaos of it. The place was crowded, too, so you could stumble if you needed to, y’know—the whole losing-your-balance thing—it was okay because you could just fall into people if you needed to, as you make your way to the bar.

  Bourbon.

  Paid.

  Drained it.

  Bourbon.

  Paid.

  Drained she.

  I thought I saw one of Shred’s friends walk by, maybe someone I met at the diner, so I raised my glass and nodded to him in the party spirit of a good ol’ raise-em-high toast, but he just looked at me like I was an moron and walked off. Hey, fuck him if he can’t take a joke—I was only trying to be friendly. “Fuck you!”

  The Space Master must at all times be knowledgeable of the ways of the bad flying space robots, so that he can know how to successfully battle them real good. In space. A mosh pit was going. I smiled at the insane power-buzz mania going on in there, the wild smashing of bodies together, like an unsupervised high school football practice for punkers. And they didn’t care: it didn’t hurt, so they were free. I’d never fallen up into a mosh pit before, that is, not that I ever remember. I watched them mosh-pitting it up on TV once or twice on VH1, but nobody here in the Ditch place was doing the famous stage dives…

  I busted full force all up through some humanoids and climbed onto a little table. I was the tallest one in the room, über-manning the secret all-original fulcrum of Einstein’s triple magnetic space-time grid thing, diamond high above the rolling fields of electric hell screams. I stretched out with swimming arms, screamed a holy death yell of absolute balls-out Legageddon forever (way worse than Armageddon) and let my personal electricity fly: and I flew, flew like a blue goddam ribbon Olympic paratrooper champion with a giant magic silver parachute at my back, arching into the crazy sea of crashing bobble-head doll heads, all while wearing no death helmet whatsoever, launching myself away from the shit mess of the world and all common sense, which I left far, far behind, somewhere deep in the Vorzidian dust caves of Planet Yes-No.

  18

  Crunchy.

  The wafer on my head.

  Feels crunchy.

  Wafer.

  But wait…it’s a wafer, but—no: paper?

  I woke up gradually. On Kenny’s bed. I heard feet shuffling in the hallway. I guess that’s what woke me up. There were some stiff pieces of paper towel attached to my forehead for some reason. My head felt like a watermelon. Swollen. Everywhere in and on my body hurt like holy hell. Sunlight was blaring in through the window in a strange way. It was yelling at me. I touched my face and it made my fingers hurt. My face felt crusty. Something was quite wrong but I didn’t quite know what.

  The door to Kenny’s room opened. There was Farns. He opened the door and then knocked, in backwards order. I was just lying there, touching the wafery paper towel on my face.

  “Can I come in?” he said, already in. “Dude, how you feeling?”

  “It’s crunchy.” Speaking made my jaw hurt. My lips hurt. Then the pain s
pread from my jaw like a box of marbles getting poured out on a hardwood floor. I couldn’t move. Oh my god. I was dead. Did I have all my teeth?

  “Boy, you are looking rough.” Farns was smiling. He was big and looming, seeming to block all the light out of the room. “You must have a helluva hangover, too.”

  I somehow sat up on the edge of the bed. “Actually, no. That’s part of my problem. Don’t get hangovers.”

  “Must be nice.”

  “Yeah. Real nice.”

  I brushed at a flap of paper towel that was hanging in front of my eye and then touched the edge of my jaw. It was swollen. So was my chin. My whole face was scabby and swollen and sore.

  “What is up,” I mumbled, “with this paper towel?”

  “Shred put it on there to dress your wounds.”

  “Why do I have wounds?”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “I don’t remember anything.”

  “Getting thrown out of the Ditch?”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “Yeah,” he chuckled. “It was not pretty.”

  “It doesn’t sound very pretty. Jesus.”

  “You really don’t remember the fight or anything?”

  The Spentilator tee-shirt was ripped. Covered with dried blood. My brain started throbbing. My whole body felt like one large bruise.

  “Man, you must be an alcoholic. You were wasted!”

  I couldn’t tell if he was scolding me or giving congratulations.

  “So…Jeez. Who was I fighting?”

  “Oh, like three or four people. One of them was a girl.” He chuckled.

  “No fucking way. I didn’t hurt her, did I?”

  “Not at all.”

  “That’s good.”

  “She kicked you in the face.”

  “Was it Summer?”

  Farns laughed. “No.”

  I didn’t remember any of this. Everything went black after the stage dive. Zilcho. All memory, fried. Data tapes, fully erased. I did it. I fucked up. I drank. Failed to execute my mission. Failed. I ran a corner of the crunchy paper towel between my fingers. I tried to pull on it but it was stuck to my forehead with blood.

  “Your head got cut when they threw you into the iron fence next to the Ditch. We decided it wasn’t bad enough for stitches.”

  “Iron fence? What’d they do that for?”

  “Well, you throw someone out of a bar three times and they keep trying to get back in, over and over, after a while you throw them into an iron fence.”

  “Oh. I see.”

  “You’re lucky no one decked you in your fucked-up eyebrow.”

  “Yeah. Super-duper lucky. I gotta go to the bathroom.” I stood up. My legs felt like two telephone poles soaked in glue. I wobbled. Someone must have punched me in the stomach. And in my ribs. And my neck.

  “Reason I came by was to take you to case out the pervert’s house.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” I said, stepping by him. “I gotta go to the can.”

  I grabbed my backpack and headed down the hall, thinking: Mayday…mayday—must escape…must go home. Mission: disaster. Abort immediately. Must tell Farns: Sorry, but I’ve got some getting the fuck out of here to do.

  When I looked in the bathroom mirror, I almost laughed. The way insane people laugh maniacally before their laughter morphs into crying, and then full-on bawling hysterics. I had really gotten an ass-kicking. My face was half-covered with dried blood. My jaw was swollen and light gray down the right side and most of the left. My gums hurt. I had several crusted-over cuts on my cheeks and forehead and dried blood on my neck mixed with smears of dirt. Scrapes everywhere. Patches of scrapes. I pulled the stuck paper towel back and looked at my eyebrow. The rock throwing wound had obviously bled again but the stitches were still holding it together. Loosely. My knee still hurt from when Summer kicked it. My other knee hurt from I wasn’t sure what. My whole body was throbbing. Wanting to die was easy because I was already nine-tenths of the way there. I was the bruised, cut and swollen physical embodiment of the humiliation and regret that lived inside of me like black mold on a basement ceiling. This was torture. The worst kind. The kind that you do to yourself.

  So much for my goal of two full years sober. And blacking out—not so grand either. The last time I blacked out I lost my wallet, and so I reached around to check for it and sure enough—thing was gone! Keys too. Cell phone. Everything. Maybe they were somewhere in the house, but I knew they were more likely underneath a bench seat in the Ditch, or in the trash, or part of some art student’s collage of things found in the street. Maybe Summer had glued them to a mannequin’s face. Oh well, I figured, at least going the next two years sober should be no problem. All I’d ever have to do is think back to last night as a deterrent.

  What a total pathetic failure this whole stupid trip was, and now here was Farns intruding in my private business again. That was the last thing I needed right now. So damned embarrassing. Now everyone in Richmond knew I was a child molester victim. And that it bothered me. I felt naked and stepped-on. Literally stepped-on. Kicked in the face. What I needed was to be out of this living day-mare. If I was going to do anything at all before I left, it would be apologize to Summer. If my face doesn’t scare her off. Maybe she won’t recognize me and she’ll corkscrew me. Maybe she will recognize me and corkscrew me.

  With a little warm water, the paper towel came right off. There was a line of cuts coming down across the center of my forehead. They were wide and not deep, more like large scrapes, but they ran across this sick purple-black death bruise. My eyes looked like dried peach pits. Basically, my face looked like a pan of burnt lasagna.

  This is why I don’t drink. See?

  I knew there had to be a reason.

  I got my antibiotic ointment and started slathering it on. Then I taped the rest of my bandages onto my face. In a haphazard fashion. I looked ridiculous so I tore them all off and threw them on the floor. I stepped over to take a pee and I thought: boy, this day sure did start out in the toilet. I came down here to fix my life and fucked it up even more than it already was. And to top it all off, my pee was pink, which probably meant it had some blood in it. I cried for a second while I was peeing but then pulled myself together.

  Good thing I was in so much physical pain, because at least it distracted me from the searing pain of my stupidity. I pulled the Spentilator tee-shirt off and threw it into the bathtub. I had bruises all over my chest and ribcage. The death cloud of my personal nuclear winter was now visible—I was wearing it on the outside. I put on my beige polo shirt and went down to the living room, where Farns was sitting with Kenny.

  “How y’doin, wildman?” Farns said.

  I shook my head. I wanted no praise whatsoever for being a “wildman.”

  “You look like Frankenstein, bro,” Kenny said. He actually looked awake and alert for once.

  “Yeah?” I said. “Well, I wouldn’t mind crawling back into the grave, actually.”

  “No, man,” Farns said. “No grave for you. We’re gonna go find your pervert. You got his address and shit, right?”

  “Bong hit?” Kenny asked Farns.

  “Sure.”

  “I don’t suppose you guys have seen my wallet and keys or cell phone, huh?”

  “Nope.”

  “Nada.”

  I went down to Kenny’s room and looked in the bed, under the bed, everywhere. It was very painful. Nothing. Now I was trapped. No way to get home. I did find my flip-flops. They were both blown out and had dried blood and beer and some kind of goo on them. I went back out to the living room where Farns was blowing out a giant lungful of pot smoke.

  “Where’s Shred?” I asked. “He around?”

  Nobody answered.

  “So,” Kenny said, “looks like you had yourself an interesting night out. Sorry I missed it.”

  “I wish I’d missed it.”

  “Wanna get some breakfast, dude?” Farns said. “I’ll buy.”

  “No. No thanks.
I’m just…I’m not hungry.” I was actually starving. I just wanted coffee. And death.

  “C’mon, man,” Farns said, sounding pissed.

  “You know, this trip hasn’t exactly gone as planned. I mean, look at my face. I’m hurting all over. I should just go back home and regroup. I’ll come back in a few weeks when I’m feeling better.”

  Farns stood up. It was a threatening gesture somehow, even though it was just a guy standing up.

  “You shouldn’t put this off, Jerry. It’s not healthy.”

  “Jarvis.”

  Kenny chuckled.

  I hated these guys.

  “If you go back now, then you’ll have gotten your face smashed in for nothing.”

  Deep down in my guts, underneath the worm swamp of nerves where the truth lived, I knew Farns was right. Didn’t want to admit it.

  “I’m just gonna go home.”

  “Well, at least go out for goddam breakfast with me, then. I’m fucking inviting you. Kenny, you coming?”

  “No, man. I had some toast earlier.”

  “You’re turning into a real fucking degenerate junkie, Ken. You know that?”

  “Thanks, Mom.”

  “All right,” Farns said to me. “Let’s go.” He said it like I had already agreed to go. This Farns would have made a good lawyer. In a zoo. Down at Zoo Court. I figured, well, it was either go with Farns and get some food or sit there with Kenny and starve. So I picked the lesser of two assholes and went to fix my flip-flops.

  “You got the guy’s address and shit, right?” Farns yelled down the hall.

  “Yeah, yeah. Memorized. But I don’t want to go there today.” I came back into the living room. “Kenny,” I said.

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “Can I have a purple Titanic?”

  “A what?”

  “One of those super-pills? I’m dying.”

  “What’s in it for me?”

  “Give him a damn pill,” Farns said. “Can’t ya see he needs it?”

  “I only got four blue landmines left.”

  Farns looked pissed. It felt good that he was helping me out. Even though I basically hated him.

  “Give him the fucking pill or I’m gonna sit on your leg.”