6

After lunch I made my way downstairs and had a seat on the front steps of the office. Seconds ran into minutes and minutes ran into blocks of ten and twenty as I continued to sit almost zombified, reflecting on life and the duration of time we’re given. I knew Addie’s death meant there would be a change in my routine, and even though it was somewhat insignificant, I couldn’t help but think that I’d now be forced to make the choice between Dunkin Donuts or Starbucks each morning. I felt horrible for thinking such things when someone I considered to be an acquaintance, if not a friend, just passed away, but the brain has a tendency to overcompensate when you’re unable to give it any proper direction.

Just as I was about to head back upstairs, Rooster appeared from the doors of the office and joined me by my side.
“Too bad about the ol’ girl,” he said, unwrapping a piece of gum and popping it into his mouth. “You never know when your number is up I suppose.”
Without warning, Rooster spit the wad of gum out of his mouth and it landed in a gooey mound on the street below. “Ugh,” he groaned. “That crap was stale.”
“Where do you think Addie’s soul went?” I asked, catching my still gagging business partner off guard.
“How the hell should I know?”
“Don’t you wonder at all about death?”
“Who’s got the time, Babes? I got a wife and three kids and when I’m not dealing with them, I like to get in nine holes or take a relax

I didn’t respond to him, but instead stared at the mound of partially chewed gum that was just recently in Rooster’s mouth.
“Are you all choked up about Addie’s death or something?” he asked me.
“She was all right, you know. She had an appreciation for the truth.”
Rooster shook his head side to side. “You and your truth,” he complained. “It’s easy for you single guys to ask the big questions. Freedom this and freedom that. Well you know what? If I can free the fork caught in the disposal, I feel like I’m in Heaven. Life is what you make of it and the more time you sit around contemplating what it’s not, you don’t get to enjoy what it is. Get my drift?”
Like the ultimate salesman he was, Rooster just sold me on life.
“So how are your kids doing anyway?” I asked him, quickly changing the subject to avoid falling back into my depressive funk.
“Great actually,” he chimed. “Listen to this one. The five-yearold goes to one of these right-to-know doctors and the doc tells her he’s about to give her a shot and goes into this long explanation about what the measles are all about and why she needs the medicine. So out of nowhere the kid interrupts him and says, ‘Alright already! I’ve heard enough. Just give me the shot.’ I had to do all I could to keep myself from busting out laughing in the poor doctor’s face.”
“That’s funny. Now kids, kids have an appreciation for the truth.”
“No,” Rooster replied. “They just don’t know how to lie yet. Now, let’s sit down later this week and do a plan for a major expansion into other cities.”
“I don’t think so, Rooster. Like I said, I don’t think I have it in me anymore.”
“Says you, but I say we should finish what we started. Remember what you said to me in that pub the first night we met after you told me you’d invest in the paper?”
“Yeah,” I responded, not sure where he was going with the conversation.
Rooster sprung to his feet and bolted across the sidewalk toward the steady flow of midday traffic.
“WE ARE GOING TO WIN!” he screamed. “That’s what you said, right?”
“Right,” I said quietly.
“RIGHT!” he cheered at the top of his lungs, only to be interrupted by Roberto Pirelli, one of the brothers that ran Pirelli’s Funeral Parlor next door.
“STOP THAT YELLING!” the Pirelli brother shouted.
“HEY, FUCK YOU, PIRELLI!” Rooster returned. My partner loved to yell at people and his voice could carry like no other. I had never known him to turn down a good pissing match and I had never seen him lose one either. With his quiet, mousy voice, Pirelli was grossly out of his league. “What are you afraid of? That we’re going to wake up all of your customers?” Rooster said as he continued to provoke Pirelli.
“What’s wrong with you people? Don’t you have any respect for the dead at all?” Pirelli said with a look on his face like he smelled something rotten.
“I got your respect right here,” Rooster pointed out as he grabbed his crotch with his right hand. Disgusted and already sensing defeat, Pirelli returned to the safety of his funeral parlor and slammed the nearest window shut.
Since the first day we moved into the building there had been nothing but tension between the two business neighbors. The story goes that Pirelli caught Rooster tossing a banana peel on his perfectly manicured lawn. Rooster denies said claim, even once suggesting that he couldn’t stand the taste of bananas, nor could he stomach the mineral potassium. Things continued to escalate as the years went on and Pirelli even once called the cops and got all of our cars, which we then parked on the street, ticketed. This prompted us to lease out the lot up the street and also forced Rooster to call in the big guns. The very next day he went to his brother-in-law’s clothes shop downtown and got a naked mannequin, which he named Bonita for some strange reason that I never once asked him about. He placed Bonita’s plastic body in Pirelli’s bushes so that the legs were sticking out onto the sidewalk and then called 911, claiming that the funeral parlor was leaving dead bodies all over their property. Half of the police force showed up just as everybody was piling out of the home. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your outlook, the police don’t take either of us seriously anymore.
A middle-aged foreign man delivering Rooster’s lunchtime pizza came over to the office steps, carrying a full-sized box and bringing with him a bit of an attitude.
“How much is it going to set me back?” Rooster asked.
The pizza man looked at the slip sticking out of the box and came up with the total.
“Seventeen-fifty,” he said miserably, obviously hating his job.
Rooster pulled out his wallet and counted out eighteen dollars, handing it to the pizza man and telling him to keep the change. The pizza man looked down at the money dumbfounded, unhappy with the amount remaining after having to pay off his employer.
“We usually get at least a ten percent tip,” the man declared, his foreign accent making it difficult to make out every word.
“Is that so?” Rooster said, hesitantly pulling another dollar out of his pocket and thrusting it into the hand of the pizza man. “Well, who am I to argue with the majority? Can you believe that shit?” Rooster asked me as he sat on the steps, placing the greasy pizza box on his lap.
“You should pay him a few extra bucks so he won’t spit in your pizza or even do something worse the next time you order,” I told my partner.
“Just what I wanted to hear. I got to worry about the bastard shooting a load in my pie ’cause I didn’t pay him off. I just don’t believe in tipping everybody, you know. First of all, I think we tip the wrong people. Me, I tip the guy that pumps my gas when it’s cold. Nobody else does that. I mean, here’s a guy in the middle of the winter, his hands frozen and his nose runny, and he’s putting gas into my car while I’m sitting inside it warm as tit. Now I’ll tip him, but not some schlep that drives one block to bring me a pizza.”
Rooster was fired up, but if you knew him like I did, you’d know it didn’t take much to get him going. His eyes twitched in frustration as he opened the pizza box, eager to taste what he just tipped nearly two dollars for. Suddenly an angry expression filled his face and his skin went flush.
“THIS FUCKING PIZZA IS BURNT!” he screamed.
“Too bad for you that your delivery guy just drove off.”
Rooster took out his cell phone and dialed the number on the pizza box.
“Yes you can help me,” he told the voice on the other end in a stern voice. “My name is Rooster and I’m the exact opposite of a satisfied customer. I just had a pizza delivered to Grant Street and, newsflash for ya, it’s burnt! No, I didn’t ask for it light-crusted. Trust me pal, the back of this pizza looks like the bottom of my shoe. What do you mean you want to see it first before you send over another one? Listen you COCKSUCKER, if I bring this pizza back, there’s going to be a baseball bat to go with it!”
Rage winning over, Rooster hung up the phone and slammed it down into the concrete steps we were sitting on. I heard the tiny cellular device crack underneath the pressure of his palm, but he was to upset to care.
“Nothing’s easy,” he bitched in my general direction. “You can’t even get a lousy pizza these days without it getting complicated.”
“Maybe it wasn’t meant to be.”
“Yeah, it was in my horoscope today that some dumb shit was going to take a blowtorch to my pizza.”
I lifted up a slice from the box on Rooster’s lap and inspected the crusty bottom.
“It doesn’t look too bad,” I told him.
“Help yourself to it all.”
I took a bite of the cheesy slice in my hand, but couldn’t eat anymore because of the burnt, stomach-turning taste. Grabbing the crust like a shot-putter, I launched the pizza pie into the street, hurling it inches from an oncoming car, which honked at us after it dodged the unidentified flying meal.
“Don’t worry,” I reassured Rooster. “It’s biodegradable.”
A swarm of seagulls swooped in and started pecking at the stray pizza slice.
“Great, I spent nineteen bucks so the scavengers and gravel could eat my lunch. This fucking day sucks.”
I headed back into the building slowly, this time creeping up each stair as opposed to making my way up them at a steady tick. I found that I was now lacking any and all motivation to work, which meant the afternoon was going to crawl by. Like my short-fused partner still moping on the steps, I had a feeling that the slightest negativity thrown in my direction was going to set me off.
I entered my office and checked my messages. Martha had called to remind me that we had a date for that evening and for once I was thankful for her nagging ways because had she not brought it to my attention, I would have forgotten completely. I was just about to return her call when Helen knocked on my door.
“Got a second?” the copy editor asked me.
“Of course,” I responded, though truthfully I would have liked to send her away. “Come on in and have a seat.”
“I spoke to Harry and he said it was okay that I come and see you.”
“What’s on your mind?”
“Well, I know it’s probably not a big deal, but I’m concerned that our cartoons are getting too scatological. They’re almost approaching bathroom humor.”
My fists clenched beneath my desk, out of sight from Helen’s beady little eyes. She might as well have been holding a knife to my neck because to me this was the same kind of vicious attack on a day that I thought would never end.
“What’s the subject matter of the most recent issue’s cartoon?” I asked her.
“To show the absurdity of the historical commission’s decision to stop development over an old shack.”
“And does an idle bulldozer sitting in front of a nineteenth-century outhouse get the point across?”
“Of course it does, but this is the third time this year that we’ve put drawings of toilets on the editorial page,” she whined.
“Okay,” I said, counting to ten inside my head. “Have any of our readers complained?”
“No, but my parents mentioned it to me while I was at their house on Easter, which sort of prompted me to bring it up when I saw yet another bathroom-driven cartoon in the paper.”
“And so you’re coming to me about this because you want your parents to dictate the editorial content of the newspaper?”
“No, of course not, but there’s got to be some kind of aesthetically pleasing images we could use to get our message across, don’t you think?”
“What would you suggest that we have used in place of the outhouse?”
“Well… I… umm… I guess I can’t think of anything else right now.”
I stood from my desk and began to collect my things. Helen was the straw that broke my camel back that afternoon and I was for damn sure not sticking around another minute more.
“Helen, humans have an ongoing obsession with excrement and if we get some on our editorial shoe it’s not a tragedy. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to leave you to ponder all things poop as I myself exit the office for an overdo number two break. And no, I will not be returning today, so enjoy your evening, but know that I am on top of this cartoon debacle that you’ve brought to my attention and if you think of something else to put in front of the bulldozer, we can certainly talk about it another time.”
Helen sat in awe as I left her staring at a blank chair with nobody around to listen to her frivolous complaints. The clock on the wall in the lobby suggested that work go on for another three hours, but I was pulling the plug before I was seriously injured by the continuous onslaught of bullshit being flung around the office. I walked the block east to the garage where my car was parked and threw my things in the backseat. I positioned myself behind the steering wheel and started the car, allowing the air conditioner to cool down the interior before I pulled off down the road. While I waited, I pulled out my cell phone and called Mikey. He answered in a half of ring.
“Yo,” he greeted.
“I need to call in a favor, Mikey,” I responded without even saying hello first.
“Anything. Name it.”
“Just so we’re clear though, it’s the kind of favor that I never really asked you about, if you get my drift.”
“I don’t even remember having this conversation.”
“Good. Now I need you to find someone for me that can spray paint upwards of twenty-five billboards. You know anyone who can do that?”
“I’ll ask around and get back to you shortly,” Mikey said in a professional manner. “Call you in a bit.”
I hung up the phone, threw the cellular into the passenger seat and pulled out of the parking lot. I yawned uncontrollably for a moment and in doing so completely blew through a red light at what was frequently described as a “dangerous” intersection. Luckily for me there were no head-on collisions and I continued home the same way I did everyday, thinking that the job I was keeping was an absolute waste of time and utterly meaningless. Sure, at first it was fun, but it had gotten stale, mundane, and turned into a daily chore as opposed to a lifelong career. I was publishing news about local towns that I never stepped foot in and I was growing bored with business in general. The idea of a person spending his or her entire life doing the same task over and over again both amazed me and terrified me to my core. It all seemed so absurd, like the joke was on us or something, but then again I knew that for most people it wasn’t by choice. Life brings responsibilities and that means having to sack up and take one for the team, much like Rooster has done for his family his entire professional career. I guess that’s why they call it being stuck in a rut and why there are always long lines waiting to buy lottery tickets from every convenience store and mini mart across the country. Everyone was looking for an out I suppose and here I was looking for my own. However, I had the means of escaping if I wanted to, but I was loyal to the people in my life and it was hard to turn my back on them.
As I neared my neighborhood I made an impromptu stop at what was called a “flower studio,” though clearly it was a run-down building where various wilted roses and daisies sat in oversized buckets waiting for husbands who had been sent to the dog house to stop and purchase them. The elderly owner tried to talk me into buying a dozen mums, even though he had no insight as to why I was standing in his store in the first place. Apparently he was stocked heavily on that particular blooming item, but I was in the market for more of a plant than a flower and I handed the owner a twenty-dollar bill to take with me a potted germanium of some kind.
Oak Street was relatively quiet that early afternoon and I couldn’t help but wonder where all of the people had gone. It was hard to imagine them all with jobs because so many of them wandered the streets until the early morning hours. Perhaps they were all sleeping off the previous night’s buzz, but either way it was the most serene I had ever seen my new neighborhood.
The sun was shining bright that day and it hung heavy in the sky. I had to lower the visor to keep the fiery star from blinding me and its rays almost forced me to pass by Jennifer. She was sitting on her aunt’s porch writing in her usual spiral-bound notebook and looked up just as I drove passed her. She greeted me with a smile and I decided to stop by for a visit after parking my car in the driveway. I needed to smile today, and knowing I was going out with Martha later that evening, I figured Jennifer was my only hope at achieving that simple goal.
I grabbed the recently-purchased plant and walked towards the house where Jennifer still sat. I couldn’t wait to hear her voice. I imagined her to be especially perky today and that alone excited me enough to pick up the pace. As I made my way on the sidewalk towards the porch she inhabited, the beautiful dreamer that existed in a plane I was unfamiliar with welcomed me with an inviting hello. I returned her greeting with a smile and hesitantly sat down next to her. Suddenly I was like a school boy nervous over a newfound crush. She smelled fantastic and I took her scent in before ever saying a word.
“Hey,” she said, breaking the silence as well as my fragranceinduced trance. “Not working today?”
“I made it a half-day,” I replied. “It’s too beautiful out to be locked up in an airless office. I felt a little caged and needed to free myself.”
I realized I was still holding the plant and presented it to her by placing it on her lap. My finger grazed up against the smooth flesh of her thigh and I felt goose bumps pucker along my arms. I sensed the same reaction in her, but quickly retreated, returning my hand to my own personal space and making the potted gift the center of attention.
“I see you always working in the yard, watering and pruning and doing green thumb types of things,” I said. “I figured maybe you could add another to your already lush collection.”
Jennifer investigated the plant, rubbing the waxy leaves between her fingertips. “It’s very nice of you to do that. This plant is perfect for city growth because it requires minimal sunlight and flourishes in both an outdoor and indoor environment.”
“And that’s a good thing?” I asked.
“Sure it is. Boston isn’t exactly known for its mild winters, so they—the plants that is—appreciate it when you bring them inside before the first frost.”
“Ah, right. So I made a good choice then?”
“An excellent choice,” she said flirtatiously.
There was a distinct moment of silence as we both just took each other in.
“Can I ask you a really strange question?” I asked.
“Sure. Why not?”
“Did you ever watch or read Charlie Brown?”
“The cartoon?”
“Exactly. The bald kid that was the resident nice guy, but always finished last.”
“Yeah. It’s a classic. Of course I know who Charlie Brown is,” Jennifer smiled.
For a minute I felt stupid. Of course she knew who Charlie Brown was. He’s a pop culture staple and an American icon. I was definitely nervous talking to Jennifer because I was certainly rambling and not playing it as cool as I would have normally under different circumstances.
“Duh,” I said, slapping myself in the forehead. “Of course you know who he is. You had to grow up in a cave if you didn’t. Anyway, do you remember the bitchy girl Lucy and how she used to set up a little psychologist stand and charge the ho-hum Charlie Brown a nickel for some ‘professional’ advice?”
“Sure,” she replied. “That was one of the ongoing gags, right?”
“Right,” I said as I reached into my pocket, pulled out a nickel and handed it to Jennifer. “Do you mind playing Lucy for a minute?”
Jennifer took the nickel out of my hand and flipped it through the air, grabbing it and biting down on it as if it were a piece of gold. “Well, this seems to be a legit nickel, so I guess I owe you some legit advice. What’s on your mind?”
I decided to open up to her about my predicament at work and how I was trying to break away from the business. I filled her in on all of the details that were giving me stress and the things that were pulling me in opposite directions, including the difficulty I was having because of my loyalties to Rooster and the staff. She seemed genuinely interested in helping me with my growing work problem and at the same time, was curious about what went on behind the curtain of a publishing company. She referred me as the Wizard, a reference she made numerous times in regard to my pulling of the company’s strings, and I told her about the two sides of human nature at work in the office—one being the editors who were motivated by pride and the other being the sales team who were motivated by money. I explained to her how most of my days were spent maintaining a level of peace between the two departments and how that juggling act was beginning to affect me in a way that tied knots my stomach. I told her I was planning on quitting my job any day now.”
“What will you do for work after you leave?” she asked me.
I pondered my response for a moment and told her that I had built up a moderate-sized kitty, so that I didn’t have to work for a while. I chose not to tell her that I had made enough money over the course of my professional career to last me a somewhat frugal lifetime for fear of coming off as cocky or as a braggart.
“The value of money is to secure your future and have the freedom to find out what you really want or don’t want in life,” I explained.
“So after you leave your job, Drago, you plan on trying to find out what you want in the long run? Discover who you are, if you will?”
That was the first time I had heard Jennifer call me by name and I was suddenly hit with a warm feeling that gushed through my veins. These were the moments I had heard about from others that claimed to be in love, though having never experienced them myself, I always thought of them to be folklore like plesiosaurs in Loch Ness or Bigfoot monsters in the forest. They eluded me my whole adult life until now.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I replied. “I thought I knew what I wanted, but I gave up on the idea long ago.”
For a moment I felt like she was baiting me, nudging me into sharing a piece of me that I had chosen not to share with anybody. I hesitated to tell Jennifer anything more, but her voice and her eyes were like trumpets of truth, and as they worked me over, I sang like a bird.
“What did you give up on?” she asked.
“Meeting Ms. Right. Meeting ‘the one,’” I divulged. “When I realized I couldn’t find her in the places that I was looking, I figured it was better if I just stopped trying altogether.”
Jennifer was thoughtful, respectful of the personal bubble I just popped in her face, and she chose to stay quiet instead of responding.
“Are you looking for your prince?” I asked.
“Like you, I gave up on that idea a long time ago, when I was much younger.”
“Much younger?” I blurted out sarcastically. “What are you, like one hundred-ten or something?”
I expected a smile, but got a cold shoulder instead. For the first time I witnessed Jennifer pull away from me and I hated myself for trying to be witty. I hit a nerve inside the dreamer and I apologized to her for being a clown and ruining the moment.
“I feel light years away from my youth,” I told her. “For me, those were the happiest times in my life.”
“Sometimes our world can change overnight and yesterday can seem like a thousand years ago,” she responded in a quiet, somber tone.
I immediately thought of what Mikey once told me regarding Jennifer’s parents and how she was left an orphan. The details were not important. What was important was that she was obviously still mourning a childhood lost and here I was pointing out how fulfilling mine was. I was at a loss for words and didn’t know how to restart the conversation in the same pleasant space where it once began. There was now a heavy feeling in the air, and it wasn’t the summer humidity that was weighing it down. “Good grief,” I thought to myself, taking a page out of Charlie Brown’s book of self-deprecation. I had managed to bring up a major trauma in Jennifer’s life, while also establishing the fact that neither of us was looking for a prince or princess, and I did it all in the span of a few minutes. I didn’t have a plan when I sat down on the porch with Jennifer that day, but I was blowing whatever had happened naturally and I needed to pull a rabbit out of my hat and it needed to be real.
“Jennifer, you are one of the most unique people I have ever met and I mean that from here,” I told her, pointing to my chest. “I think you are wonderful.”
Jennifer turned her frown upside down and gave me a half-smile, just big enough to let me know that I didn’t ruin my chances with her.
“Besides,” I said, lifting up my arms. “Who else do I know that spends more time on a doorstep that me?”
Her half-smile turned into a full on grin and we seemed to be back at square one.
“So what are you going to do about work?” she asked me. “I’m not doing a very good job at being your Lucy.”
“Forget about work. I’m sorry I even brought it up. That was just an excuse for me to get your ear and let me sit down. Besides I don’t want you being anybody else with me. I like the real you. Screw Lucy!”
“It’s easier being yourself anyway. Once you start taking on traits that don’t belong to you, things start to get complicated. I never was good at playing roles. I didn’t do very well in my high school drama class.”
“I took an acting class because I though it was going to be an easy A, but it turned out to be a disaster. I was in a play my senior year and I kept changing the original lines to new ones that I thought were better suited for the character. The teacher canned me from the role and insisted I play the part of a mute clown. When I refused to wear the makeup, she expelled me from the class.”
Jennifer started to laugh and I savored every childlike note I heard.
“I think I like it when you are a clown,” she said.
“Oh yeah, sure,” I said. “The next thing I know, you are going to have me walk down Oak Street in a clown outfit with makeup on.”
Jennifer laughed some more. She asked me if I realized that there were no oak trees on Oak Street. For the first time, I actually looked at the street on a broader scale, past the litter and trash that lined the curbs. She was right, there were no oak trees anywhere to be found, and I convinced myself that it was probably Getman that cut them all down in an attempt at breaking the system of street names. I pictured him cutting down the maples on Maple Road, the dogwoods on Dogwood Ave, and even going mad with a saw on the pines over on Pine Circle. He was a bastard from head to toe, so it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility.
“They should probably call it Oakless Street,” I said after returning from my Getman trance. “Or, I don’t know, maybe No Oak Here Street.”
Jennifer tried to talk, but she was laughing too hard for me to make any sense of the gibberish that was coming out of her mouth. It took awhile for her to compose herself, which meant my Oak Street jokes were a slam dunk.
“Do you realize how funny your house looks?” she asked me. “I mean, not to offend, but it’s pretty silly looking.”
“I know. You don’t have to apologize. I’d think it was haunted if I wasn’t sure that ghosts are too afraid to live in the place. I mean, if you were a ghost, would you scare there?”
Jennifer chuckled, shaking her head no.
“Last night I sneezed and my bed moved all the way across the bedroom. For a second I suspected a poltergeist, but then I remembered I had wheels on my bed frame and that my floors were slanted.”
Jennifer was laughing so hard that she was holding her stomach. It was like both of us were hopped up on laughing gas, two patients sharing nitrous oxide while the dentist wasn’t looking. We were like kids and I embraced the moment like one—wide-eyed and eager.
“Why… Why… do you have wheels… wheels on your bed frame?” she asked, struggling to finish her question in between her snorts of laughter.
“I get confused in sto