chapter 12: a big cowboy hat

The man in the brown hat is outside of my house. Today is the day I do it. Today is the day I confront that skinny little hipster in the brown fedora. I decide to have a couple of drinks. I drink quickly. I don’t want him to pull away. I pace around the house. I keep looking between the blinds. He’s still there. Finally I feel good. It’s overcast outside which makes me feel better about what I’m going to do. I don’t think I could do this if it was too bright outside. It’s easier to do things in the shade. It’s easiest to do things in the dark.

I push through the door and I walk outside. The car looks different. It’s a classic but it looks like some muscle car. Maybe something like a Ford Mustang. Not the big tacky car from the 1950s. I think Tanner called it a Hornet. I feel like maybe this isn’t the guy who has been watching me. This isn’t James. Or Jim. Or Jeff. But he is wearing a brown hat and he is sitting outside of my house in a car. I’ve already walked this far. It seems stupid to walk back inside my house. It’s easier for some reason to go forward than to go backward. I walk up to the car window. The window is down. I lock eyes with a stocky man wearing a large brown cowboy hat. I immediately can tell this isn’t some skinny hipster in a fedora. The guy is huge. Muscular. Brawny. He has a full beard. Muscles are bulging out of his tight flannel shirt. He looks pissed off. He stares at me. He has a gun mounted on his hip. This man is dangerous. I was dead wrong. This man is a threat.

Anger flashes across the man’s face. “What the fuck are you doing?” he says to me, “Get the fuck away from my car. You’re going to ruin this.” I start to stagger backwards. I don’t know what to say. This clearly isn’t the moment I had been dreaming of for so long. This doesn’t seem like the hipster in the fedora that Tanner and his friend (what was his name again?) described. Then I feel some jolt down low in my stomach. Adrenaline maybe. I look back up at the man and I demand that he tells me what he’s doing there. I tell him he needs to leave. He needs to get off my property. “Listen, numbnuts,” the man says to me, “I’m not on your property. I’m on a public road, and last time I checked this was a fucking free country, you little prick. And this has nothing to do with you. I’m watching your neighbor’s lady. She’s been running around on him, and she’s gonna be back any time, and then the golf pro from Morrison Manor-the exact same golf course I like to golf at- is going to pull up into that driveway, and I’m going to be sitting here taking pictures of both of them. I’m gonna catch them red-handed. Your neighbor is going to write me a check, and you’re going to get the fuck out of the road and go back in your house, and not ruin any of that from happening.”

I lose all confidence. I go back inside my house. I immediately open up a beer and sit on my couch. I feel defeated. My cats come running up and sit on my lap. They always seem to know when I’m not feeling well. Someone should study that phenomenon in cats. They should figure out what chemical cats release that immediately relaxes me. I keep sipping on Budweiser Light. I keep the blinds arranged so that I can just barely see through them, but so no one can see me looking out at them. Like a two-way mirror. As I continue to drink beer I see the neighbor’s wife pull up into the driveway. She’s in her mid 40s, but she’s still something to look at. You can tell in her younger years, she must have been the envy of the town. I watch her get out of her SUV. She’s wearing leggings, and a short white ADIDAS shirt that just barely shows off her midriff. The way she walks is very sexual. She’s still very attractive. Her whole body is tight. She keeps in great shape. My neighbor is a lucky man. Her long brown hair falls down over her long slender frame. She’s a tight package. Her cream colored ADIDAS BOOST shoes tap down the driveway as she walks inside her house. I have an erection.

I keep watching out the window. I’ve had about eight beer at this point and I’m feeling pretty good. I’ve cooled off since the man in the cowboy hat yelled at me. After about 10 minutes another car pulls up. It’s a tacky silver Sebring convertible. A car that is almost cool, but not quite. This skinny balding man steps out of the car. He’s like a walking cliche of a golf pro. The little hair that he has left is gelled back and spiked up. He has Oakley sunglasses backwards on his head. He’s wearing a Nike DryFit polo shirt tucked into some khaki colored Dockers that are a little bit too long for him. They cover up his New Balance golf spikes. I watch the man walk through the side gate and toward the back of the house. I watch the Mustang (??) and see the man in the brown cowboy hat snapping pictures through one of those long lenses that private eyes use in movies.

After the golf pro disappears behind the house I turn back around and decide to watch a documentary about Fatal Familial Insomnia. FFI is this rare degenerative brain disorder. There is a guy being interviewed. He says that it started out like normal insomnia. Every once in a while he couldn’t sleep. He says that then he went a week without sleeping. Then he went a whole month. He says he saw a doctor. He’s looking right at the camera. He says he started having panic attacks. One day when he was at the grocery store he thought he was having a heart attack. He started sweating, he got tunnel vision, he hadn’t slept in over a month. They took him to the ER, they gave him sleeping pills and Xanax, and Ativan, and Ambien. It just made him tired, but he couldn’t sleep. He says he started hallucinating. He says he’s hallucinating right now, but he just knows what is real and what is not. He says there’s a cat on his lap but he can’t pet it or he’ll look insane. He says he’s lost 75 lbs. He should sell the condition as a weight loss plan. People would pay money. He says he developed a phobia of scotch tape. To combat the phobia he used scotch tape to pull out all the hair on his face and arms. He has no eyebrows or facial hair. He says he wrapped his penis in scotch tape. He says it didn’t work. He’s impotent. He’s still afraid of scotch tape. He says the average life-span is 18 months but some people have been known to live for 7 years. He says the next step is dementia. He knows that he will go mute. Then he will go blind. Then he will become unresponsive, and then he will be asleep. He will also be dead. He says there’s no cure. The only action for doctors to take is to make him comfortable with drugs. He says drugs don’t work on you when you haven’t slept in months. He says addicts should just be kept awake. He laughs at the camera and you can hear a producer on the set laugh nervously as well. He says there’s nothing to do. The camera cuts away. Serious music swells in the background. Then the narrator of the documentary begins to talk about the mutated gene that causes the rare disease. While he talks about this there are images of a sterile doctor’s office and I begin to feel tired. My eyes get heavy.

I’m snapped out of sleep by a loud knock on the door. The man in the cowboy hat is standing there. I open the door a crack and ask him what he wants. “Look. I got the pictures. You won’t see me again. I’m finished with this business. I’m going to give your neighbor the pictures and that will be the end of that. You don’t want to get involved with this. Don’t say shit, and this will all end like it is supposed to.” He stares at me. I tell him I don’t plan on saying anything. He laughs, “You don’t look like you’re gonna say shit. Get some rest. You look terrible.” He gets back in his Mustang (??) and drives off. I sit back down on the couch and let the documentary play. I doze off.