Mark Tufo - Alive in a Dead World

“Go ahead,” I told her. Yeah, that went over about as well as you think it did.

“Talbot, get your ass up off that couch,” she said. It wasn’t loud, it wasn’t threatening, but to not act on those words would have been tantamount to suicide. Kind of like the criminally insane do when they point a gun at the cops and then the cops have no option but to open fire. It was the same premise here.

So I got my ass up off the couch and off to the mall we went. Yippeee! The mall at Christmas time. I’d rather go to a drunk dentist for a root canal; it was a lot less painful. The mall was so packed, there was no place to park. They had to plow the snow off a distant field and offer a free shuttle service.

“Recession, my ass,” I grumbled as I parked the car. The mall was a distant pinpoint of light, off in the distance. “Maybe that’s where the baby Jesus lays,” I said sarcastically.

“Talbot!” My wife smacked my arm.

We walked up to the sign that said “Shuttle” just as a white tin can, packed with holiday revelers left.

“It’s friggin’ cold out here,” I said, stamping my feet.

“Maybe if you had worn your heavy coat like I told you to, you wouldn’t be so cold,” Tracy said, with the all knowing “I told you so” lilt.

I opened my mouth to argue the point, but she looked much more ready to do battle than I. So just a little background and you decide if I had a valid point or not, not that Tracy would have agreed anyway.

By ’09, Tracy and I had been married somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty-something years. Now, NEVER, ever will I claim to know what makes a woman tick, but I’ve been around this particular model long enough to know some of its quirks. I might have written this down in one of my earlier journals. but it’s worth reiterating. My wife researches and buys her cars on the recommendation of other folks’ opinions about how the heater works. So when we go auto shopping, we have to look for heaters that have an extra setting called “lava,” and until molten magma is pouring from the vents, my wife is not happy. I’ve actually lost the bottoms from more than one pair of sneakers as the glue has melted, and the soles have become un-adhered from the rest of the shoe.

There have been days when the temperature outside is zero or less and I have dressed in shorts and a windbreaker for long car rides, because I know that most likely, my face will, at some point, melt. This trip was no different, but it was a shorter ride so I actually had pants on and a light jacket, not in any way rated for the inclement weather we were in the midst of, but still I was not going to argue the point with her. It would have been a lot colder if I had to walk home.

So I waited, gritting my teeth, feeling my nasal passages beginning to freeze up. My wife looked fairly toasty in her heavy sweater and full-length jacket, scarf around her neck and leather gloves.

The shuttle showed up seventeen teeth-chattering minutes later. I had to rip my planted feet from the ground. Seems the melted glue had frozen fast to the ice slicked surface. Tracy entered before me and then I came in after. I stepped up on the stoop and looked to the left. Seems the shuttle had stopped to pick up half the state of Wisconsin before it got to our stop. An older gentleman gave up his seat when he saw Tracy approach him and somehow the seat next to her was vacant. I was about to plant my ass in it when it looked like someone had spilled half of an Orange Julius in the plastic bucket seat. At least, I hoped it was an Orange Julius.

Tracy shrugged her shoulders as if to say “What are you going to do?”

My next option was the large, silver, hand-hold poles that went from floor to ceiling on the shuttle. I was near to placing bare hand on metal when I spotted what looked like the world’s largest nose nugget wrapped around the bar twice. The offending brown-green slime was oozing its way down the pole, much like a low rent stripper. I was getting nauseous. Making it through the throng to another pole was out of the question. A kid of about twelve off to my left was sneezing like his mother was shoving pepper up his nose. The friggin’ germ factory wasn’t even covering his mouth. I felt like I was in a rolling Petri dish. And our shuttle driver must have been a foreigner because he was paying absolutely no heed to state and national laws in regards to load limits.

He kept packing people in like he was getting paid per pound delivered. I was being pressed closer and closer to the pole with the snot snake wrapped around it. I was using what minimal leverage I had trying to keep from pressing up against it. Something or someone was touching my ass. I kept praying that it was some hot Yugoslavian model, but the last time I had turned around, I remember seeing an overweight man who looked like he had just downed a bucket of fried chicken. I noted that his hands had appeared greasy. Now I wasn’t so sure what was on his diet and why his hands were greasy, but I was not feeling so good anymore.

I was losing the leverage battle. I pulled my hands up into my jacket so that I would have at least one barrier between the human goop that riddled the pole and me. I gripped it with both jacket-clad hands and moved a foot off to the side. Greasy Hands had two wet fingers shoved in his mouth and was sucking deeply. His other hand was still located where my ass had just been. I felt pretty dirty and violated. He winked at me when he caught me looking. I would have vomited had I the chance to make sure I could get away from it. My luck right now and this bus would break down with the doors unable to open.

Greasy tried to slide over my way, but a small, older woman blocked his path. I would have kissed her except for the thick moustache she sported, well, that and the scowl, well, those two things and the marble-sized mole to the left of her nose, or did she have two noses? I hadn’t quite worked that one out yet.

Someone else picked up the sneezing torch as Georgie Germ stopped. I think Fanny Phlegm started hacking up a lung. I could see particulates flying through the air like airborne missiles. I was going for a world record in breath-holding, forty-two seconds and counting. I wondered if anyone would pick me up if I could find enough open space to topple over. Greasy Hands probably would; that was of little comfort. And then I’d be left wondering what was on the floor and if the rest of the shuttle was any indication, then I’d be swimming in a sea of viral stew, with chunks of unidentifiable material.

Six or seven days later, the cross country journey finally came to an end. Two Nose cut me off as I tried to make a hasty exit. Greasy Hands immediately pulled up to my rear and Georgie Germ heralded our passage with a heavy barrage of wet, viscous germ spewage.

“Tell your kid to cover his mouth,” I said loudly to a mother, who was too busy playing on her phone to monitor her child. Of course, until I said something about her son, and then she became a Kodiak bear, protecting her cub. Her shrill screams of “Mind your own fucking business” are still etched on my eardrums.

Greasy Hands was making our last few feet out a free for all. As soon as we hit terra firma, I turned and slammed him back into the bus. He licked his lips at me.

I clenched my fists and was about to make him pay for our encounter, when Tracy alit from the shuttle.

“Ah, Talbot, I see you’re making friends again. I really can’t take you anywhere, can I?” Tracy said, laughing.

Greasy Hands winked one more time and got back on the bus. Obviously, this was something that got his rocks off and it looked like he had been doing it the entire holiday season. Tracy grabbed my tensed shoulder. “Come on, let’s go,” she said without turning back around to witness what I had.