John Jodzio - Knockout

“Caruso,” the voice whined. “Hurry up already.”

Jayhole stood with his fists raised waiting for Caruso to charge him again, but instead Caruso just shrugged his shoulders, turned, and walked back upstairs.

In July I had a great month selling steaks. I sold them as quickly as I stole them. Some of my regular customers began to make requests for specific cuts of meat and I was more than happy to oblige.

Unfortunately July was also the month that Jayhole lost his job at the office supply warehouse. After an argument with his boss, Jayhole drove his forklift out to the parking lot and gored the side of his boss’s car. The cops were called, but Jayhole knew all of them from his bounty hunting days and they let him off with a warning.

“Everyone at work knows when I’m drinking tequila you should keep your distance,” Jayhole told me, “but I guess my boss didn’t get that memo, did he?”

Jayhole didn’t start looking for a new job right away and so he had plenty of time on his hands. Mostly he filled up his hours by seeing which hard lemonades mixed best with which flavored vodkas, but he also spent a lot of free time playing practical jokes on me.

One night he unscrewed the top of our saltshaker and I dumped a mountain of salt all over my chicken salad sandwich. On my birthday, he hid my wallet underneath the cedar chips in Stabby’s cage and I didn’t find it for three days. One time Jayhole spread cellophane over our toilet bowl and when I took a piss, the piss bounced right back up onto my jean shorts. Jayhole’s laugh was loud, and sometimes after one of his practical jokes he’d slap me hard on the back and shoulders and the next day my back and shoulders would be sore.

“Could you take it easy on the jokes?” I asked.

Jayhole pinched his eyes together, incredulous. He looked shocked I wasn’t enjoying his pranks as much as he was.

“Sure,” he told me. “I had no idea they were bothering you.”

I went to bed that night hopeful Jayhole would stop his practical joking, but the next morning I woke up and found he’d filled my car up with microwave popcorn and lured some squirrels and pigeons inside the car to eat the popcorn and claw and peck the shit out of my dashboard and bucket seats. Jayhole was watching the proceedings from a lawn chair in our front yard, laughing his ass off.

“Dan didn’t get my sense of humor right away either,” he told me, “but after a while he thought everything I did was hilarious. You’ll come around just like Dan did.”

Inside my car, a pigeon squawked at one of the squirrels. I wondered if the birds and squirrels would leave after the popcorn was gone or if they’d hunker down and try to make my car their home.

“Just get a broom and shoo them away,” Jayhole said. “They won’t put up a fight unless they’re rabid.”

Before I got the broom, one of the pigeons took a watery shit in my glove compartment. Lately, I’d thought a lot about moving out, but I’d recently taken all the profits from my steak stealing and sunk them into expensive glass beads I was planning to use for my fall jewelry collection. If I was going to move, I needed a few months to scrape together some money for a security deposit.

Afew weeks later, Jayhole started to inject horse steroids into his bad knee. He’d gotten them from a friend who was a trainer at the racetrack. His back acne got immediately worse, but his knee started to feel much better. One day, Jayhole woke up and his knee pain was gone. He tossed his cane into the closet and decided it was time he opened his own bounty hunting agency.

“I’ve gotta be my own boss,” he explained. “At this point in my life, I’m too set in my ways to answer to another douchebag in a suit and tie.”

To get his body in shape for the grind of bounty hunting, Jayhole lifted weights in our garage. He did yoga, sometimes naked, sometimes not, in our living room.

“I just need a little start-up money to open up shop,” he told me. “I just need a couple of bucks to buy tasers and tear gas. I’m not asking for much, but every single person I hit up for money tells me no.”

I knew exactly what Jayhole was talking about. I was having the same problem getting my jewelry kiosk off the ground. Over the last month I’d asked my relatives for seed money, but no one would help. Most of them gave me bullshit excuses like, “I just got arrested for vehicular homicide,” or, “I finally decided to start paying my child support.” The rest of them were shocked that I had the balls to hit them up for money after all the meat and lingerie I’d stolen from them over the years.

“I’m trying to remain positive,” Jayhole said, “but it’s damn hard.”

It was hard. So far I’d invested hundreds of hours designing my fall collection, but I knew no one gave a shit. When I’d started making jewelry I had visions of hot women handing me cold flutes of champagne, dreams of gold-toothed rappers stopping by my kiosk and begging me to design them diamond-crusted crucifixes. None of that had happened yet. I still did my visualization exercises to help make these things happen, but remaining positive was getting difficult. At the swap meet each weekend, I laid my piece of black velvet across my card table and spread out my wares, but almost everyone walked by my booth without breaking stride. On the rare occasion someone stopped, they laughed at my jewelry like it was some sort of gag gift.

“Keep plugging away,” I told Jayhole, placing my hand gently on his shoulder. “Don’t listen to the naysayers. Our passion to our craft is the only thing that matters.”

Jayhole must’ve appreciated what I’d told him because after I said this he pulled me into his arms and locked me in a bear hug. He held me there for a long time, squeezing my head into his chest. When he let me go, I saw there were tears in his eyes.

“You’re the only one who understands,” he said.

I knew the horse steroids were giving him crazy mood swings, but from what I could tell his gratitude seemed genuine. Maybe Jayhole just needed some time to trust me? Maybe these jokes he played on me masked some sort of unresolved inner pain? Maybe everything would be wonderful between us from this point forward?

Later that evening, Jayhole broke into my room and wrote the word “Fuckstick” on Stabby’s fur in purple marker. He also took a scissors and cut cock-and-ball-shaped holes in all of my T-shirts.

While I scrubbed the marker off Stabby, I thought about disassembling all my jewelry and selling the stones for scrap so I could get enough money together to move out. I got out a pliers, but I just couldn’t tear everything apart; I didn’t want to give up yet. In the end, I decided the best plan of attack to survive the next few weeks was to avoid Jayhole as much as possible. To make it harder for Jayhole to keep tabs on me, I started to climb in and out of my room through my window. When I was inside my room, I used a flashlight and moved around slowly, trying to not make my floorboards creak. At first I had a hard time adjusting to the darkness, but soon I became proficient at eating soup from a bowl I couldn’t see and pissing into a Snapple bottle using only the faint light of the moon.

One night, I heard Jayhole out in the hall doing some push-ups. I was paranoid he’d heard me moving around in my room so I slid underneath my bed to hide. As I lay there among the dust, I noticed a manila envelope taped to the bed frame with the words “Dan’s Suicide Note” written on it. I ripped it open.

“To whom it may concern,” the note inside said, “I’m killing myself because my roommate Jayhole is driving me insane. He keeps playing horrible pranks on me and every time I try to move out he tracks me down and brings me back here. It’s like some demented game to him. I’ve tried to escape a number of times over the last year, but he won’t let me leave.”