"I could sue you for the entire year’s rent. You can't break a lease agreement without covering compensatory damages. The expected income must be paid to the lease holder.” Said Mike, holding the receiver to his ear. Reaching for the ashtray, cord stretched, his normally steady hand trembling, he flicked too hard and got ash on the laminate kitchen table.
Listening to Cody talk on the other end of the phone, he stared at the cleaning schedule taped to the kitchen wall. It represented several iterations. He remembered presenting it on the back deck, where his two roommates were well into a case of beer. He had conceded then that the schedule exceeded the household average of expected cleanliness levels, and that a more relaxed schedule was better suited to the group. There was no pushback, nothing brought to the table. He left thinking the new schedule was a win, that it substantiated their shared living situation, and it showed the group was finally gelling.
As he waited for Cody to finish talking, Mike thought of his only contract law class, one of several base requirements of his business degree, which he completed last term. He had excellent recall. Thinking back on the lectures, assigned readings, power point slides, he knew there was no legal mechanism which allowed unilaterally abandoning a joint contract. He thought about all of this while half listening for a place to jump in, and relay further evidence of his current financial burden. Cody took a moment to catch his breath on the other end of the line, and gathered himself to control his frustration. That was the moment Mike, continuing as though no new information had been presented, and resumed his earlier line of reasoning.
"This is going to cost me. I had to write the landlord and ask to have an extension on next month's rent."
Cody’s reply was much more emotional. While thinking of what to say next, Mike pulled the phone away from his ear slightly to protect his hearing. His lips moved compulsively; they mouthed words silently. He waited, then slipped back in, cutting Cody off to continue his argument: "That's not the point of a contract. It provides stability and clarity about the future. It doesn’t matter that I don't have a job…"
Cody loudly cut off his speech. Mike tried to listen but could only note one thing: Cody was repeating himself—again. He hadn’t come around to Mike’s way of thinking at all.
While he listened, unaware, ashes fell from a dangling forgotten cigarette to the linoleum floor. Distracted by conversation, the ashes gathered under his white tube socks, as he shuffled about, along with weeks of crumbs and dust, smearing drops of partially coagulated milk spilt in front of the fridge whenever he drank from the carton, which was always.
Cody repeated himself but tried to use some bizarre analogy. Mike’s mouth hung open in response; tiny, imperceptible muscles twitched beyond his control on the right half of his lower lip; his chest filled with an unfamiliar tension; his hands vibrated wildly—though he had no awareness of any of this.
His voice rising slightly in kind, Mike felt no compunction addressing a new fallacy in Cody’s argument. "No, it is not the same. Your notice to leave is not the same; the two are too dissimilar to reasonably compare. The difference being: you moved out with our sublease and you…"
He furrowed his dark thick eyebrows. Confusion swept across his pale face. Coolly, he replied, "No. Jude never gave notice… what? No… I think you should stay calm. That’s completely irrational… Yes, it is. It’s a fal…’a…sea… Hello?"
…The line went dead.
He hung up the phone, slamming it hard, surprising himself, cracking the Bakelite. He followed a red tooth-shaped shard skip across the kitchen floor, through the open door, down three steps where it landed in the throat of his brown oxford shoes. When he jiggled the handset in his grip, a large magnet rattled threatening to get out. Where the triangular piece had broken off, the handset was now coming apart down the side. Pressing the molded plastic halves of the handset together, he increased pressure, firmly snapping it together. He put it to his ear, confirmed that it worked, there was still tone, then gently hung up.
He headed for the living room, edging around the oak side table, avoiding old dumbbells clustered around the base, past his guitar stand pulled too close to the end of the sectional where he could easily reach it while he watched TV. His heart was pounding. He was hot, lightheaded, caught in the intensity of busy—repeating facts—seeking explanatory reasons for his situation.
Standing in the inches of space between the clutter, he reached for his pack of cigarettes and a book of matches from the pocket of his khakis—cinched under a belt that made his hips look bigger than they were—before collapsing on the living room couch. He kicked his feet up, toppling an empty take-out container, its unfolded top tipped over into a plate of unfinished spaghetti barely visible under flyers and unopened mail that had been dropped in a stack some weeks earlier.
He folded a single match over the comb, leaving it attached at the base. The red match head showed beneath his calloused thumb when he scraped it across the striker, sending a white-hot spark of phosphorus tracing through the air. He watched the arch sizzle out on the matted carpet between empty chip bags, beer cans, crumpled newspapers, and dirty socks. Mike lit his cigarette, then tossed the pack of smokes; it banked it off the edge of an upside down pizza box next to his feet, translucent and shining, landing on a some paper napkins cultivating a slow growing blotch of black sugary syrup pooling around the wax bottom of an unfinished take out soda. He turned his attention to the match: a quiet descending yellow and red plasma transformed the white matchstick in his hand, leaving behind an evermore relaxed and blackened figure, hunching over, slowly bowing its black head respectfully towards him. He smiled, blew it out, and tossed the match in the ashtray.
A cigarette dangled in the downward curl of his mouth, his eyes squinted in the upward trace of smoke, while he pressed his tight cropped black hair to his scalp a few times until the strays were smooth and obedient.
How could I have made such a horrible friend?
Grabbing the cordless on the side table, Mike put it on speaker phone before dialing. Midway through the first ring an assertive older woman answered.
"Who is this?"
"Mom, it's me." Mike said, grabbing the remote from the seat cushion next to him.
"Michelle? Are you okay? Are you feeling well?" his mother asked. Her voice was intuitive, probing, and relentless.
"Yes, I'm fine Mom." He replied, turning on the TV. The volume had been left very loud, and he scrambled to turn it down before she noticed.
“What was that?" his mother asked.
"Nothing Mom. Just news." He said while settling on a softer volume.
"Are you still upset about your girlfriend? Did you two work things out? What was her name..."
He heard his father in the distant background, shouting to know who was on the phone. Mike led himself down the hallway, unwittingly, phone face up in hand.
"Beverly."
"Right. Beverly. I thought you were upset with her… she stained the seats in your new car, right? Did she offer to pay to clean them?””
Once he reached the bathroom there was enough light from the hall to see the lid of the toilet was up. It gleamed clean and white, even in the shadows. With the cordless phone in one hand, he ashed into the toilet without missing, quickly taking a drag of his cigarette before tossing the length of it in the water with a hiss.
“Are you still wiping the toilet every time you stand up to pee? Girls don't like seeing the drips from guys peeing."
"Mom that's not why I'm calling.”
In the next room, a news segment reported on a fire at a popular restaurant. Through the earpiece his father’s voice, asked if it was Michelle on the phone, but his mother shushed him and continued. He held his breath a few seconds before continuing.
“Mom, my roommates moved out."
“What? When?”
“Five weeks ago.”
In the mirror, he scratched at toothpaste on the glass while he heard his father practically shouting at his mother through the phone. “Is Michelle upset about something?” Without acknowledging, his mother continued:
"What did you do? Did you upset them?" his mother asked. Then putting her hand over the receiver she said something to address his increasingly agitated father, but he couldn’t make out what she was saying. Mike’s hand drew away from the mirror, pumped itself into a tight fist, before he shook it out with effort.
"I don’t know. My friends… they left me Mom. They gave no notice; they just broke our lease."
Mike studied his own pale blue eyes, elongated face, square jaw specked in stubble and acne, noticing how his features combined undramatically in the mirror—even when half concealed by the shadow cast from the hall light. His hair was greasy and clumped together in wide strips even though he washed it only a few days ago.
His mother shushed his father in the background, then to him in a more considerate tone:
"I'm sure you still have lots of friends. Did you do to try to sort out your differences?"
He put the phone down on the counter; it was still on speaker phone. Before answering his mother, he grabbed a long strip of toilet paper, and from the medicine cabinet, he wet the bundle with a dab of rubbing alcohol he used to wash his face.
"Cody left. He just walked out on the lease and our sublet left to live with him too. They both left me Mom."
In the next room, on the TV, a reporter said the restaurant manager was inside the basement office when the fire started. In the background his father said: "What? What did he say?”
"Oh, Michelle, stop with the self-pity. You can't control the behaviors of others. You should know that by now…”
Working from the top of his head, methodically sweeping down with a side-to-side motions, never once lifting the bundle of toilet paper, maintaining uniform direction, like a Zamboni on ice, he collected every imperfection under the pressure of his thumb and fingers.
“…Michelle are you listening? In these kinds of situations, you can only control your own reactions. You can’t control other people. You know that.”
The mouthpiece on the other end was rubbing against fabric, then his father’s voice demanded: “Let me talk to him…” But several muted hand slaps later, he heard his mother over the dulled scuffle: “No you don’t! Don’t! Do not touch the phone! No! …Step away! No!”
She then continued where she left off as though nothing had happened,
“Did you find out why you got fired?"
"I did not, no. They did not give me an explanation, no."
“Do you have a new job yet?”
“No.”
His father, still near the phone, declared loudly: "I will not give him another penny! He has had more than enough to get himself started in life. I refuse to corrupt Michelle's character with more charity!”
The television was transitioning to a piece about the record-breaking heat wave. Until rain and cooler weather prevailed, there remained an elevated risk of dehydration, heat related injury... There was also an increase in reports of small back-alley fires which investigators were still looking into.
"You'll need to find a new place to live. You can't afford to live in that big house alone."
"I know.” He agreed, but then he asked: “Mom, was Cody a bad friend?"
"Yes Michelle, but you have to move out now and find your own place. I told you that signing that lease was not a good idea...”
His father, was now shouting in the background from another room “It’s gay to live with so many other men…” His mother shushed him quickly not bothering to cover the mouthpiece this time.
“You need to have your own place, Michelle. You can't depend on others for—"
"—Mom, I have to go."
"Michelle, call if you—"
He hung up. The mirror, unblemished by the newly cleaned glass, made a reality of the scars from severe never-ending acne. The stubble and many small cuts from his dull razor scabbed and covered over most of his neck like a grime that never washes clean.
He had stood this way before the mirror countless times—after Sunday church, prom, recitals, on school nights just before bed. This is when he contemplated the day and considered how events correlated to language and definitions as strongly as a light switch closed a circuit. He flicked the bathroom light switch on; it sparked to life and there was light. He flicked the switch off; and he killed the spark with darkness. He watched his pupils. Streaking through clouds of white, a storm of red lightning spidered from empty black rings. Searching, he waited for a sign, but saw no spark, nothing to close the circuit between the observer and the observed.
My face is too ugly to make friends.
He knew nothing of heritable traits but could easily recall a mental slide show of names from his past. Cycling through them, a rolodex of letters in sequences that associated to failed situations and people, who flashed their way through overhead layouts of places, this time at a bar, where he saw himself alone in a chair at a table for two. In these places, alcohol did little to relax him or others near him. Names, he knew, were music in the ears of others. He always tried to use other people’s names—often in the first few minutes of conversation. Nice to meet you Cody. He tried to make strangers feel special by complimenting them. Awesome job Cody.
This all worked in the short-term, but when it came to bringing other people around to his way of thinking, things fell apart. When conversational topics shifted to his own life, his script, no matter how much he worked at it, failed to kindle lasting interest.
He remembered asking at work, over the separation between the front of house waiters and line cooks at the restaurant, if Cody would go for a pint at an English pub after work. Cody surprised him and brought Jude along with a few others from the kitchen too. They signed up as a team to play trivia and won some Molson Canadian hats and other bar swag. A few weeks later they would sign a joint lease and sublease agreement and learned how to maintain a household.
Reaching, he flicked the bathroom switch. Light from the vanity washed over his entire face.
My thoughts are too ugly to keep friends.
Mike hurriedly left the bathroom, making his way to the landing by the back door. He thoughtlessly tried to put on his brown leather wingtips, one then, he let out a shriek of pain. The shard of Bakelite he broke off earlier had jammed his big toe under the nail. He shook his shoe violently upside down, and watched the red shard fall to the floor. With his shoes back, he searched the wooden bowl by the door, finding his car keys between many golf pencils and a few matchbooks.
Stepping outside, feeling more himself the moment the heat pushed hard against his face. He never remembered all the lyrics to any song but would latch on to phrases that grabbed him and repeated them. He started half-singing, half-talking the lyrics to one that drifted in his mind like a smell.
“Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnnie Ray…”
In the back yard he stopped at the deck where the house cleaning schedule had been adopted only a couple months ago. The round glass table, surrounded with mismatched folding chairs, was washed over with film from rain fall and dust drifting in from the freeway nearby. It was still covered with empty bottles, some tipped over, some filled with spent butts and matches from the last time Cody and Jude had heard him present the new schedule.
But instead of reliving that gross miscalculation, he managed to surprise himself and smiled. When they first moved in, in that very spot, he had shown his roommates how to make match rockets. You could separate the foil from the backing paper of a cigarette pack using heat from a match. Entranced, they watched as he pealed the thin foil away, then without tearing it, keeping things airtight, he wrapped a single match head in the foil. It had to be airtight, he explained, or it would fizzle and sputter in unpredictable downward spirals. He showed them how to leave a strip of surplus foil, roll it tightly, then fold it over into a small hook. In a hush they had watched him hook the tiny bundle on the end of an empty beer bottle. The rest of the matchstick dangled down the neck of the bottle and he lit it, like a fuse. As the flame crawled up the matchstick it heated the matchhead trapped tightly in tin foil chamber, and once the temperature was high enough, the match head ignited, releasing energy in a controlled jet shooting the tinfoil high into the air.
“Holy cow! I’ve never seen anything like that before!” Cody had said.
Mike gave Cody and Jude matchbooks and foil from his pack of cigarettes. For hours they made match rockets. They had come around to his way of thinking. He delighted in that happy memory and resumed humming his funny tune as he made his way to the garage.
Stepping through the side door, pressing the button to open the overhead door, his mood soured at once. There, over the trunk of his car, through the open garage door, at the end of the driveway, he saw trash cans full to the top——with still more garbage piled on so it all slopped over in a heaping mound. Wooden dining room chairs snapped into splinters of various lengths were shoved into the trash cans. Between the longest stakes of furniture, liquor boxes were perched on top at uneven angles and had long since spilled their guts out the side of tears in the wet cardboard, splashing reams of used paper to the pavement, drawing the attention of anyone who might pass by. A long-dead fan palm, its soil still in the original plastic pot, was shoved up to the cans. A dresser, drawers missing——probably smashed and stuffed into the cans——made a stable base to pile textbooks from failed college classes. The garbage bags on top were mostly Mike’s from the past few weeks and even they hadn’t been picked up; most had tumbled over in the wind, or rain, or were torn open by magpies, crows, and passing dogs. He left it all there for weeks, expecting the city would eventually pick it all up for him, or maybe hoping his friends would come back. They did not.
Awesome, thanks Cody.
He sputtered a few more lyrics to himself:
“Children… of Thalidomide…”
Reaching in his pocket for a cigarette, he realized he had left them inside the house. Opening the passenger side door of his car, in the glove box, buried between paper napkins, matchbooks and packs of ketchup, he grabbed a stale half open pack. With a fresh match folded over the side, pressed to the striker, a single snap of the thumb sparked a new flame to life. Inhaling, he held the stale, calming smoke deep in his lungs, careful not to snuff out the match. His eyes came together on the flame, holding it before the tip of his nose. He watched as it revealed that frail black figure within. Bringing the flame into focus made the problem of the enormous pile of trash double in size and grow blurry.
With a skilled flick of the finger, the burning match tore from the comb, landing on the pyre of waste before he got into his car. He threw the key in the ignition and cranked it; then loud music blasted from the stereo. He adjusted the mirror, jammed it into reverse, but before he backed up, he reached for the volume knob, to turn it up. Then he sang:
“Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnnie Ray…”
Half the driveway was blocked, and he had to maneuver his car in reverse to get around the heap before trundling out of the alley. Along the quite residential neighbourhood he coasted with the windows down and sang at the top of his lungs. He filled the scorching air with his taste in music. The reverberation off the bungalows satisfied him. Most would be irritated, he knew, but some might hear and appreciate the obscure yet artful selection. He drove past homes where people were gathering inside to eat, waiting for the sun to go down before opening their windows to cool off in their sleep.
He drove. He wasn’t hungry or tired. The doors of his car were rattling; the paper cones were over-extruding, taking damage. Between drags he sang louder, hearing himself over the noise of the wind and stereo:
“Starkweather homicide, children of Thalidomide…”
The crispness of the rhythm guitar, the fast steady drums, the dependability of the arrangement reminded him of Cody and Jude. The song was on repeat and started again. He wanted his friends to be a Billy Joel song. The unnatural forced commitment to the concept, which was just a list of names and events, eventually became something more.
“Chubby Checker, Psycho, Belgians in the Congo…”
His car took him through a traffic circle, down the exit to the freeway, straight for downtown. Sediment and dust in the air painted the night sky with surreal pink and violet ribbons of thin clouds, but he couldn’t have noticed.
Though he enjoyed going for a drive, sometimes, when his thoughts were trapped in a repeating loop, he scarcely had any awareness he was driving. As complex as driving is, he often couldn’t recall how he ended up so far down the wrong road, or why he missed several offramps on the freeway. Time went funny for him, and he found himself driving the wrong way down a one-way street when things snapped back into focus. He made a sudden extra wide turn, whipping his car around, tires screeching, to fit the right way in an angle parking space. His heart was racing. Trying for a calming breath of smoke, he noticed his cigarette had burned down to the filter between his fingers, leaving a line of ash on the wood trim around the shifter and a stink between his fingers. Still regaining his sense of self, he noticed through the front windshield of his vehicle that he was parked before a high-rise, the one Cody and Jude had just moved into.
It was a Friday night. Residents came and went through the row of large glass doors that lined the building’s face; they walked along the plaza deck, past the large decorative planters that lined the raised deck, making their way down the wide steps to the sidewalk. Mike thought the planters might have had beautiful arrangements of flowers once, but this late in summer, they had lost their colour and stood upright, stiff and dead.
He folded a fresh match over the base of the booklet and lit it with the same stroke of the thumb he’d used thousands of times. Once lit, his grip relaxed, and he moved the booklet expertly between his fingers; his other hand shook out another stale smoke from the old pack. He grabbed it with his lips and lit it.
A blast of hot air from the open door reminded him how utterly oppressive the weather had been. The door open, the motor running, never looking behind him, he walked up the stairs. The match was still flickering low in his cupped hand as he walked up nearest planter. It had thick decorative hardwood around the top which doubled as a bench to sit on. The soil inside was bone dry, hard-packed, cracked throughout in rivulets. Deep wide gaps had pulled away from the sides. There were many discarded cigarette butts that passersby must have carelessly tossed into the planter. Mike shook his head disapprovingly, while the flame was now very near the comb.
He knew a planter this size easily had a thousand pounds of peat moss in it. Peat moss, he knew, is still used as a fuel to heat homes in parts of Ireland. Under the right conditions, the vermiculite within the mixture could act as an accelerant. He had observed people enough to know they were too distracted to pay attention to a smoldering cigarette, especially on a hot Friday night. People were so careless.
His phone started vibrating in his pocket. He pulled out the soap bar sized Nokia from his pant pocket then checked the number. It was Cody. He let it ring a few more times, staring at the number. He squinted at the rising smoke and stashed his cigarette in the corner of his mouth, to make room to blow out the match. Then he answered.
"Oh, hey, Cody" He listened, for a time, nodding agreeably. "I'm still just getting used to this idea too.”
He listened while tilting his neck up to get a look at the high-rise. The brilliant fire red sky of dust at dusk was dimming behind the grey unfinished concrete. He replied, wondering which floor Cody was on: "I've been telling you guys it’s a contract. I don't want to sue you. The point I wanted to make is I can."
Listening to Cody, he took a deep drag still looking up, watching gauzy curtains blow out of ever more open windows the higher up he looked.
"Hey, is Jude there with you?" Mike asked and waited. "…just curious.”
Mike took another puff of his cigarette, then changed the subject entirely: “Do you guys want to grab a pint near your new place? I’m buying… How about the English pub by your place?"
While he waited for an answer, Mike counted 8 planters along the plaza facing the entrance.
"Yeah, well, you guys were just doing what is best for your state of mind. I understand… I do that too."
A quick mental account of his matches came to 18 left.
"How much time do you need to get ready?"
He went back to his car, phone still to his ear. Surprised the door was open, still running, making a mental note to lock up while reaching into the glovebox. He grabbed a handful of matchbooks——brand new, unused, twenty matches each——and stuffed them all in the deep pockets of his khakis.
"I don't mind waiting. Take your time. No point in doing anything halfway. I'll meet you there. No, that’s fine, you do your thing, if I get there early, I’ll enjoy a quick pint alone, no problem. Cool… I’ll catch you later." The conversation ended.
He killed the engine, locked the door, then stood on the sidewalk. He waited for a group of pretty girls who just stepped out the front doors to make their way down the sidewalk. He thought they looked nice in their outfits and assumed they were going out. He was glad to catch a look but when one of them noticed him looking their way, she grimaced at the sight of him, and he turned his gaze downward before the rest of them noticed. Head down, staring at the broom finished sidewalk stained with old gum and pigeon shit, he noticed the dust in the air had clogged his nose forcing him to wheeze through his mouth; his face was hot and uncomfortable under a mask of baked grease and smoke; he heard children playing half a block away in the fountains of city hall; the tip of his tongue was thoroughly numb from the taste of stale, cheap tobacco.
Keeping his head down, he crept towards the nearest planter. Just another shoe gazer. Lyrics to his favorite song came to him then, while peering down into the dry, cracked peatmoss, but instead of singing them, he spoke the words deliberately under his breath.
“We… didn’t… start…”
Matchbook in hand, the round match head folded over the comb, ready to strike under his thumb, he whispered to himself:
“Nice work Cody, this beer is going to taste great.”
~
END