The Black Laser

My finger tips are blackened with frostbite and I am not sure how much time I have left to recount to you the tale of the horrors that have brought me here to this remote outpost on the edge of the arctic circle where surely death will take me as it has already taken the intrepid members of my party who so bravely sought to understand the great hidden terrors which now wish to see me dead.  Or worse.

My tale begins at a waterfront tavern in the lower portion of New York City.  It was the type of place frequented by the sailors and longshoremen who plied their trade of loading and unloading various merchant vessels in the myriad ports serving New York’s thriving economic backbone.  Normally this sort of place was too coarse for a man of my learned stature, but I found something thrilling in the rough shod banter of these men, their saltiness, the way they embraced life and its mysteries without too much of preoccupation with propriety.  I found the company stirring, if a little bawdy at times, but what could one expect from men who spent so much time working with their hands?  As you often do with men from so many different places, strange tales would trickle into the tavern bouncing between the men.  Many times the tales were of strange beasts at sea thought to have wreaked some havoc on a ship which narrowly escaped.  Sometimes the tales were about tremendous storms that nearly blew intrepid captains off their courses, but which ended with the cargo being delivered safely to port.  Still other tales were of ghosts and demons who haunted the waters, dragging unwitting sailors to a watery grave in the embrace of Poseidon.

One autumn day I was sitting in the tavern enjoying a pint of their house lager with a colleague, indeed I might call him a friend, when a sailor darkly came through the door and sat at a table in the corner without ordering a drink.  My spirits were high with the briskness of the day and of the drink, and I made an offer to this man to provide him with a drink should he deign to entertain us with a tale of his times on the sea.  My friend encouraged this notion with no amount of restraint, but we received only dour looks from the man whose only response was to pull down his hat’s brim and light his pipe.  The barman then leant in and told us that the man came from uncertain stock and that we, being refined gentlemen and educated, should steer well clear of him.

Well, dear reader, you can no doubt imagine that this only encouraged us to hear this man out more.  We purchased a glass of whiskey to endear ourselves with the man in the corner and joined him at his table.  We placed the glass of whiskey in front of him and remained silent, for we both thought the best way to get him to talk to us was to wait him out.

“No….

“No….

“No.  I said, ‘No,’ how many times to you?  Do you not understand?  Melissa Robbins absolutely cannot show her work here ever again,” Yu Lee yelled into the hands-free attachment to his iPhone as he stomped around the half-painted gallery.  “Do you remember what happened last time?  ….no, I don’t care if she’s the hottest tentacle dildo installation artist of the fucking decade.  She’s a nightmare, Billy!  She.  Is.  A.  Nightmare.  Do you remember what happened last time?”  

He flicked his cigarette ash and pushed his David Lynch hair back into place.  

“You don’t remember?  Whatever.  You’re so stupid.  You have to remember.  Really?  You don’t.  You mean you don’t remember her opening her show here, getting all trashed like some dirty gutter skank, and insulting all my clients, Billy?  Our clients?  She is a fucking nightmare!  I can’t have that….”

His phone beeped.  He had another call.

“Oh my god.  That’s her.  I’m going to take this.  Stay.  On.  The.  Line.”

He switched the calls.

“Oh my god, Melissa, so good to talk to you.  Yeah.  No.  I know.  It’s been so long.  Yeah, I did.  I loved it.  Oh my god, I know.  It was so great.  Look, Mel?  I’m on the phone with Billy right now, can we call you back later?  Ok, yeah, great.”

He switched back.

“Billy, you have to save me from her.  I cannot handle her drama.  No.  You need to untell her that she can show her work here.  I don’t know!  Tell her something!  This is your fault!  No!  No!!  Don’t you start crying on me.  You need to grab those disgusting, gigantic balls of yours and tell her that she can’t show here.”

His cigarette went out.

“Fuck.  Billy.  My cigarette is out.  I can’t handle this, Billy.  I need you to take care of this for me.  No, she can’t come!  We have important artists showing here this time, Billy.  People who are making real art, not weird like caves of fucking dildos and shit.  I mean, you’ve seen them, right?  I’m a freaky bitch—you know this—and even I think they’re fucking weird.  Dildo caves, Billy.”

He lit another cigarette.

“I don’t care…. What?  Who?  Really?  Wow.  That does change things.  Brad Pitt, huh?  God, I love him.  She’s really seeing him?  What about Angelina?  No!  You bitch!  Oh my god!  I can’t believe you said that!  Nasty!  Ok ok ok.  Put her on the guest list plus one.  But, Billy…  Billy, are you listening to me now?  Billy.  You are responsible for her.  If she ruins even one sale, I am never going to talk to you again.  You remember that.  This is your problem now, Billy.”

He took a deep drag.

“No, I’m not mad at you.  How could I be mad at you?  No, I’m just stressed, you know, it’s so crazy right now.  That’s all.  No.  No.  Yeah.  No, don’t worry.  Yeah?  Ok, that sounds good.  Sure, yeah, ok.  I’ll meet you there at 9:30?  Ok.  Kisses.  Bye.”

He is smarter than I am.  He is smarter, taller (slightly), more handsome, funnier, faster, stronger, and does way better with the ladies than I do.  I bet he fucks way better than me too.  I bet he’s able to do all sorts of crazy sexual shit that I’ve never even thought of before, stuff that would blow my fucking mind.  And I bet he’s so good at it that he makes chicks explode.  Literally explode from having sex with him.  But, I bet it doesn’t phase him at all.  He just makes chicks explode by banging them and then some other chicks just line right up to get freaky with him with the full knowledge that allowing him to dip his wick into their most wonderful and mysterious piles of wax might make them explode.  They’re down.  He’s just that great.  I’ve never gotten close enough to check, but I bet he even smells good, like some fancy English cologne or cookies or some crazy thing that makes women go totally nuts for his junk.

Every day after football practice he comes into my deli and orders the same thing: turkey with provolone and pickles on a dutch crunch roll.  Then he buys a single bag of chips and a Gatorade and leaves.  Turkey and provolone?  Seriously?  He even orders sandwiches better than I do.  I usually just go with ham and american cheese on white bread.  Why don’t I think to order turkey and provolone?  I even work in a fucking deli!  I make his god damned, perfect turkey and provolone and pickles on dutch crunch every day, and I still lack the imagination, the foresight, to order something so utterly perfect.  It haunts my dreams.  In all honesty, I will go to my grave never having ordered a sandwich quite as perfect as that.  It’s disgusting.

But no, the worst part about all this?  He’s nice.  I know, right?  He’s fucking nice.  All of this perfection—the turkey and provolone, the athleticism, the blowing chicks up with his dick—would be tolerable if he were a total, raging dick bag.  But guess what?  He’s fucking decent, man.  No no no.  Not just decent, he’s practically a fucking saint.  I mean, he walks around and birds land on his shoulders and chipmunks run up to him like Saint Francis.  Everyone in our town stops him and says hello in the street, how are you doing, I’m fine, thank you.  And how could you not?  He freaking radiates good will.  

Do you even know what that feels like?  To be shown up by someone who is totally perfect in every single way?  To want to be liked, to be popular, to finally make it with some girl in your high school class—she doesn’t need to be perfect, just not fat or ugly, I’m not that picky—and have every effort trampled unwittingly by some golden locked Adonis who can save the world with his smile?  Do you comprehend the frustration that brings?  Can you smell my seething rage at this horrid state of injustice?  It’s not fair, man.  It’s just not fair.

She woke and found him gone.  She cleared the gunk from her eyes and stared out the window at the gray day outside, the kind of day that never cleared up, but never rained.  She stretched and looked around the room, tidy, minimal, nice big windows.  And high off the ground.  She suspected that the view was great on clear days.  

Though she did not fully recall what happened here or how she got here, mostly, or the name of the man whose apartment this was, her clothes were still on which told her that she was, in the very least, not a complete tramp the night before.  That was always a nice thing to discover.  She hated the alternative.  She rolled on her back and felt something dig into her spine, realized that she still had her bra on, and sat up.  I guess I was better than I suspected, she thought.  Upon sitting up, her head swam and he consciousness swayed, found a handhold, and righted itself.  

“Whoa,” she whispered ad rubbed her face.  Today was going to be an interesting one.  Before she could deal with the impending misery this afternoon held and all the ‘cuddled under a blanket half-comatose on the couch’ness of it all, she had to figure out how to get home.  But more importantly than that, she had to pee which meant finding the bathroom.  She had never been a fan of peeing in her pants or the bed and she had no intention of starting now.  She stood, buckled her pants, and stumbled across the room, passing the alarm clock on the dresser which yelled “9:15” at her in angry red letters.  She hated alarm clocks, so fucking smug.