Sam Pink - Person

So good the way the werewolf danced.

I’m with the girl from the first floor apartment again.

I’ve been calling her over a lot now, because I’ve been getting afraid of the dark for some reason.

We are going to bed.

She’s in the sleeping bag on my bedroom floor, sitting up topless with a rubberband between her teeth as she makes her hair into a ponytail.

I’m standing by the lightswitch.

I’m naked, one hand on the light, one hand kind of stretching my scrotum out at random.

Shivering.

This is amazing.

For some reason I have become the person whose job it is to turn off the lights.

I like it though.

A job.

Right now I can be confused for a happy person.

“What are you doing,” she says. “Turn it off.”

I look at her.

“Do you feel ok right now,” I say.

“Yeah why,” she says.

“Like right now, you feel ok in general.”

“Why,” she says.

I watch her finish the ponytail and I decide that I don’t hate her, I think.

“I can’t remember why I asked that,” I say.

I hold up my arm and smell my armpit.

“Come here,” I say. “Smell me. Do I have b.o. Like onion-style.”

“I smelled you before when you were showing me that really high jumping jack. It’s not onions. It’s—” she pauses, “It smells more like pizza.”

“Pizza sounds worse than onions,” I say.

“It could be.”

I lower my arm.

“People love pizza though,” I say.

“They do,” she says. “Turn off the light now please.”

I turn off the light and stand exactly where I am.

And I half-pray/half-wish that one night once she falls asleep I can turn the light on and off, a year passing with each flash.

No I mean I half-pray/half-wish that a year would reverse with each flash.

Haha shit!

My roommate is sitting at the broken desk in his room.

There is a dictionary in his lap and he’s about to fail looking up a word he just claimed to be real.

I’m in the doorway of his room holding the cat we’re babysitting for one of his ex-girlfriends.

I hold the cat like a baby and kiss its face, avoiding the random attempts to claw me.

The cat is angry.

It’s funny to me.

My roommate shuts the dictionary and sits back.

“Fuck,” he says.

“It’s ok,” I say. I kiss the cat’s face again and say, “I’m sure you really believed ‘bilomite’ was a word. I’m not saying you were lying.”

“Yeah I thought it was like, a fossil, right,” he says.

“People get confused,” I say.

He yawns and puts his hands on his face like he is holding his face together.

He puts his hands down and he blinks a few times.

“Should we get some beers tonight,” he says.

The cat tries to claw my eye and I move away.

There is absolute hatred in the cat’s eyes.

I feel afraid of the cat.

I set the cat down and it runs away.

Down the hall.

The word “safe” scrolls through my head in neon letters.

“Should we,” my roommate says.

“We could do that,” I say. “Or maybe we could just buy a lot of carrots and eat them and see what that does. I think I heard that carrots can make you feel drunk too, just like beer does. We could try that.”

“Yes or no,” he says, scratching the back of his neck.

“Yes,” I say. “Should we go to Lucky’s then. They’re closest. Unless you mean going to a bar. If you mean going to bar then I don’t want to go.”

He scratches his sideburn and says, “Fuck Lucky’s. I hate that place. Fuck that place. I don’t want to get shot. Plus that guy at the register always calls me a bitch. He always finds a way to call me a bitch somehow. One time he told me he was going to ‘erase me.’ I didn’t do anything to him. Fuck those assholes.” He leans back in his chair and says, “In conclusion, fuck that place and also, fuck those assholes.”

“The people there don’t mess with me,” I say.

“That’s because you look insane. They like you.”

I scratch my shin with the heel of my other foot.

“Remember that old homeless lady wearing the ‘Babe Magnet’ hat,” I say. “She used to be there a lot. I liked her.”

“Yeah, she was cool,” he says. “She gave me some of her animal crackers one time.”

“See. Good people,” I say. “Everywhere there are good people.”

He ignores me.

He says, “She told me that if I eat the rhino I will have its strength and then she watched me eat the rhino cracker and she looked scared like it was about to happen.”

“Did it happen.”

“I don’t think so but I haven’t decided,” he says.

I can’t think of anything to say so I walk down the hall and he follows.

We put on our shoes and coats and argue about whether or not it would work to just pass a huge piece of paper around to the entire world and have people sign it in agreement to become friends.

Would that work.

What would that change.

My roommate refers to it as a “worldwide friendship mandate.”

It doesn’t seem convincing.

At the liquor store I stand in line holding the beer while my roommate ties his shoes.

There is a song about love playing from the small speakers behind the register.

A homeless man gets in line behind us.

He’s holding a dirty plastic doll.

He smells worse than me and I smell worse than my roommate.

I establish a hierarchy.

My roommate looks at the homeless man then around the store, still tying his shoes.

“I hate this fucking place,” he says. He switches shoes and says, “Why do they keep the tampons by the duct tape and the gardening gloves.”

The homeless man behind us says, “In case shit gets real.”

His eyes are open wide and he is nodding.

He moves his tongue around his mouth, over two big teeth on top that look like tusks.

I nod upward once and say, “Nice tusks, man.”

The homeless man clutches his plastic doll closer to him.

“Don’t touch me,” he says. “Do not, fucking, touch me.” He laughs hoarsely, then coughs a little. He says, “Pretty soon everyone will have a better chance at falling into the pile. You know, I saw the plane crash in my dreams and it was boo-tiful. It was boot-iful.”

He kneels down and bows his head while holding up the doll.

“Boo-tiful,” he says.

I decide to play the disappearing game, where I try to see how completely I can be gone from any interaction.

The problem with this game is that with victory comes no recognition.

So I pay for the beer and the guy at the register holds up a red plastic chip I must have accidentally given him with some coins.

He says, “We don’t take bingo chips, bitch.”

He flips the bingo chip to the counter, where it bounces then lands on the floor.

I grab it off the floor and take our beer off the counter.

My roommate says, “You never told me you played bingo.”

“It was a long time ago,” I say. “I’ve changed.”

The homeless man shakes the doll at us as we leave.

It looks evil to me in the fluorescent lighting.

The bell on the door rings when we leave.

It is really cold out.

We walk home in the cold.

And I see Christmas lights still hung in a high-up window on an apartment building.

There is no talking.

The word “ouch” scrolls through my headhole in neon letters.

I feel concerned that knowing how to really forget something is a talent learned too late.

We get back to our apartment.

In the hallway outside our apartment, I hold the beer while my roommate gets out his keys.

“Hey, would you sign the paper,” he says.