Sam Pink - The No Hellos Diet

You move a bag of candy closer.

Noticing yourself as a blur of white light on the bag’s gloss.

Realizing that work is fun because at least it’s a reason to leave the apartment and see people.

*

Like there’s this old man who comes to the store every couple days to play the videogame displays upstairs.

He’s a regular.

He comes in and stands by the videogame station and puts his face an inch from the television screen and plays without blinking.

Frozen bulldog frown — you think, watching him through the stockroom door window, right before lunch today.

He stands there in his purple sweatpants and black Velcro shoes and stares at whatever car racing game he’s playing.

By his black Velcro shoes, he keeps the plastic shopping bag he always has with him.

And he drives his racecar all over the road and into other cars.

Comatose and depressing.

Maybe though, you’re just dramatizing it.

Maybe coming into the store to play videogames is a fun thing he does.

Maybe he feels fulfilled while playing car racing videogames.

Maybe he races around happy and proud, and then an asshole like you comes along and feels bad for him.

You’re the worst.

Depressed about another person.

That’s stupid.

Yesterday after work you saw him at the bus stop in front of your apartment building.

He was holding his plastic grocery bag, and wearing purple sweatpants and black Velcro shoes.

He had on a sweatshirt many sizes too big for him and it was neon-orange with an exaggerated drawing of a big-muscled shark wearing sunglasses — the phrase “Rip It” written in “ripped-lettering” above the cartoon shark.

You wanted to walk up to him, and nod once upward with no emotion on your face, saying, “Rip it” in a quiet but assertive tone, subtly shaking your fist a few inches from your body. “Rip it, man.”

Because he’s a person who usually rips it, but sometimes forgets, like anyone else.

And like anyone else, you want the world to know you’re a person without any intentions of ever doing anything other than just ripping it.

Just fucking rip it nonstop.

*

You pass your mandatory thirty-minute unpaid lunchbreak in the breakroom looking at the same newspaper page without reading anything.

Because you don’t know where else to look.

Because there’s nowhere else to look.

*

After lunch, your boss tells you to unload a palette of backpacks.

They’re “Princess Gear” backpacks.

On the front of the backpack it says, “Princess Gear” in pink and purple camouflage lettering.

You’ve stocked it many times.

You’ve developed many pleasing memories, stocking it.

You’ve yelled out, “Princess Gear” while lasering the barcode, and then a co-worker yelled it back from across the stockroom.

You’ve imagined the owner of the company who manufactured the backpack, and s/he is on the phone yelling, “Look here, I need fifty thousand more goddamned Princess Gear backpacks by tomorrow goddamnit buddy, come on!”

You’ve taken a Princess Gear backpack out of its plastic to examine it.

It has many convenient compartments.

A place for almost anything.

You’ve decided it would be a good way to carry your gear if you were a princess.

You’ve seen yourself in a pink dress and you’re reviewing what’s packed in the backpack, “Wand, jewelry, snacks, butterfly knife, socks, ok.”

Holding the backpack and the laser gun today, you entertain a long idea about the person who will maybe eventually own this very backpack, and how ultimately, even remotely considering a day, an hour or whatever of that other person’s life — to have an experience of it as it is — would be impossible to endure. And in the terrible vertigo felt at observing even the smallest portion of any other life, there would be a death beyond anything previously experienced — happening so many times and so many different directions, that it doesn’t even matter where you try to begin understanding anything, because it kills.

Long transitions of thought that return to certain points, in and out of people.

A passing.

With no entrance or exit.

It makes you want to die.

No, but in a good way.

You achieve a small understanding of another person, and it makes you almost die — to think through a different person, realizing something at the point where you’re again resumed as yourself, standing there holding a backpack and a scanning laser.

The walkie talkie on your equipment belt comes on and someone says, “Hey, anyone know if we carry replacement beans for a beanbag chair. Not the actual beanbag, but just the beans that go inside.”

Your ex girlfriend still comes over sometimes.

She used to live with you but moved out and now still pays half the rent until May.

You separated when you asked her to help you carry out a garbage bag and she said no because it wasn’t hers and then there were no more words.

You both just stopped talking for a few months.

You looked at each other and she left and closed the door.

And you took the garbage out the side door.

There was no hate.

Just an unspoken mutual agreement not to talk again for a while.

Came back inside the apartment and felt exactly the same.

Watching some ants that were in the garbage crawl beneath the refrigerator.

A few days later she moved all her things out while you were at work.

She left her tv with built-in vhs player in your room.

That’s pretty much all there is in the apartment now except for your garbage and possibly a football somewhere.

You’re not sure about the football.

Tonight when she comes by, you lie on the floor in your room and watch a videotape that was left in the vhs player. It’s some show she taped off television when it was originally on.

“I’m more interested in the commercials,” she says. “It’s weird to see commercials you forgot about.”

“Yeah,” you say. “It reminds me that I hate my country. And that I won’t stop until I’ve killed everyone in it.”

She says, “Do you mind if I make a small peanut butter sandwich.”

“No, go ahead.”

“Do you have bread though,” she says.

“I don’t think so.”

She gets up and scratches the underside of her breasts with her thumbnails.

Her t-shirt has a black and white picture on the back, a picture of the woman Ed Gein hung upside down and disemboweled in his barn.

You can almost hear the sound of the breasts gently swinging against the air as she scratches.

The gentle swing.

Yes, swing on — you think. Swing free, but come back to me. Pass over me like a carwash of breasts, swinging free against me.

After the garbage thing, she moved back in with her dad, just outside the city.

They live in Riverside, a Chicago suburb.

You lived with them a few years ago when you had nowhere else to live, before moving to Uptown.

The dad worked construction.

He had his own company.

He had a lot of money and built his own house too and it was big.

Sometimes he’d give you work.

You’d go out early in the morning and spend all day at an old house in town and break it apart, sometimes painting, or blacktopping, or whatever else.

After work he’d come home and watch simulated basketball matches on a videogame console attached to a big television.

He’d never play the videogame, just watch.

He’d set up tournaments to watch.

“Oh shit, swish,” he’d say, holding the videogame controller and hitting a button to show the replay.

You’d say, “I didn’t see it, what happened. Who’s winning.”