Sam Pink: Hurt Others

I’d gone to sleep with my hair wet the night before, and now there were like, antenna on the back of my head.

The wind hurt, blowing through my antenna.

Near a bus stop, an old woman leaned against a mailbox, talking to another person.

The old woman had no teeth and she was wearing a large, all-blue baseball hat with no logo or words or anything on it.

She was drinking a green Beck’s 24oz bottle, waving it at the other person.

She said, “And dat wuss in 1977, I wunnda what dey sell me for now.”

Passing this bus stop meant only one more before my apartment.

What a grown up.

Walking home like a big boy!

At the next bus stop there was no one — just the smells of piss and shit when I walked by.

I breathed in the piss and shit smell.

In the year 2009, there will be a man who breathes in the same piss and shit smell, over and over.

You will not meet him but he will save your life over and over just by imagining himself dead.

He is, a dumbshit moron.

I thought half a thought about a movie poster for a made-up movie called “Dumbshit Moron.”

Back inside my apartment, I lay on my bed and opened my window a little because my room smelled terrible.

The people in the apartment below were out on their deck.

They were breaking up.

Some really great lines from both him and her — and in the slight happiness of just having gotten off work, they rewarded me with their fight.

It was really funny.

They criticized each other harshly, then themselves more harshly, then complained about smaller issues they neglected to mention when they originally happened, then ended up at a state of unstable understanding, where both realized the relief of saying insulting things might jeopardize the safety they felt in staying with someone, to retreat.

Halfway through it all, I wanted to start announcing what was happening like a sports announcer at a school sporting event, loud enough for both to hear me.

Charles called me later that day and claimed that what he meant was he had to replace me, “For today.”

He said I could still have the job if I wanted it.

I said I wanted it.

He said he had to take me off the schedule for the week, because he didn’t know if I still wanted to work there.

But he said to call at the end of the week to see about the new schedule.

The next week when I called about the new schedule, the deli manager said Charles told him not to put me on the schedule, and then replaced me with someone from the produce area.

I said, “Alright thanks. Have a good day.”

And I went outside.

A man at the end of the block was selling cut-up mango in a plastic cup.

I bought a cup and the man squeezed lime all over it and it tasted great.

The taste made me want to eat the mango holding someone’s hand so that person could feel it too.

Kids were screaming and playing in the playground at the gradeschool across the street.

June 2009.

Summer.

Pilsen Neighborhood.

Chicago, Illinois.

Looking for socks this morning, I found a sock and picked it up and smelled it to see if I should wear it. When I smelled the sock a crumb went up my nose. The crumb didn’t go too far though, because when I stopped sniffing it fell out easily. It was a shitty feeling though. Really shitty.

After maybe ten to fifteen minutes I have now realized that what I thought was a cat off to the right in my periphery, is really a pair of shoes — one upright, one on its side.

I was at the train station in a town where I used to live.

My friend Rabb still lived there.

Rabbnuwaz Ali Shah.

He lived at his mom’s apartment.

He had a few pieces of an old drumset of mine.

I wanted them back.

“I want them back,” I thought, standing still as people got off the train and walked across the tracks.

I made eye contact with a few guys on the platform.

There were three of them, all in business clothes and sunglasses.

I kind of recognized them.

We went to the same high school.

They seemed to recognize me.

I could only remember half of their names.

Not like one half of the total people (which would be 1.5) — I mean either I knew their first name, or last name.

When they saw me walking across the parking lot, they drove up next to me and offered a ride.

I got in the car in the passenger seat, as offered by the person originally in it.

I usually don’t like to sit in the passenger seat if someone is sitting behind me, because it makes me feel tense.

When the driver asked where I was going, I gave him directions to Rabb’s mom’s apartment.

During the car ride, they all talked about something work/internship related and I sat there looking out my window.

I tried to focus on the blurry stream of trees and grass.

Then I tried to do this thing where I focused on a single tree, by moving my eyes side to side.

One of the people in the car mentioned the high school we attended.

Then someone said, “Oh yeah, did you guys hear about Ryan?”

Someone else said, “Ryan who.”

“Ryan Francis — he was in the same lunch as me and you,” the original person said to the driver. Then, to me, “Did you remember him man, you know who I’m talking about.”

At first I didn’t say anything. Then I said, “Did he have like, brown hair.”

“No, blond hair. Long sideburns, kind of an old lady face.”

Someone said, “Old lady face.”

Someone else said, “Oh yeah. And always with the inside out Pink Floyd t-shirt on.”

“Yeah. He’s fucking dead now, did you hear.”

I couldn’t tell who was talking at that point.

“Wait, Ryan Francis is dead.”

I looked out my window, hoping that Rabb or his mom hadn’t thrown the pieces to my drumset in the garbage — but at the same time, also accepting in advance that possibility.

Someone said, “So what happened.”

One person leaned forward from the backseat.

And I noticed, peripherally, how close his face was to mine.

And it deeply pained me.

Neither of us moved for a second.

During which time I imagined myself playing a fucking awesome drum fill, wearing no shirt, my mouth wide open and smiley, my hair sweaty and slapping my eyes.

The person who mentioned Ryan Francis said, “He was fucking walking along the uh, traintracks last weekend. He ate mushrooms and got too high I guess. And so,” here he paused, and spoke with deliberate clarity, “—a fucking train hit him while he was wandering around.”

Someone else said, “He got hit by a train? Shit.”

“Yeah, fuck man — hit by a train?”

I was doing drum fills with my teeth.

Trees and lawns outside, passing.

It didn’t matter who was talking anyway.

“No, he didn’t get hit by the train. It just kind of—” someone demonstrated with his arm from the backseat, “—he got his arm tangled up in the ladder on one of the cars somehow and it ripped his arm off. He thought he had to get on for some reason and it wasn’t going as slow as he thought or something.”

“Fuck man.”

I sat there thinking about myself sitting at my drumset with one arm ripped off and bleeding onto the drums.

Someone said, “Old lady face.”

One of the people in the car said, “I know — I talked to his girlfriend and she said he fucking bled to death on the tracks, probably panicking.”

Someone else said, “Yeah, wow man.”

“Old lady face,” I said.

Then we were all silent.

The silence was incremental.

Going into town down a significant hill, I saw in the distance the textbook warehouse where Rabb and I used to work and where we used to smash bottles at night.