Chapter 18: untitled

I’m sitting outside of James, or Jim, or Jeff’s house. I woke up early and drank a pot of coffee, and then I had a few beer to feel relaxed. Now I’m sitting outside of his house in my car with a cooler of beer. His house is in a pretty nice neighborhood. His house is relatively small. His house is painted bright red, and there is a mailbox in the front that is completely full. His porch has two bikes that are tethered to his grill, and there is a broken skateboard on the sidewalk. His house is a one story ranch home. The curtains in all of the windows are drawn. His grass is very tall, and there are weeds in his yard. I bet his neighbors hate him. All of their lawns look really nice and are cut short. The Hudson Hornet is parked on the street in front of his house. All of the windows are rolled down.

I am parked in a Methodist Church parking lot that is across the street from his home. There are a few other cars in the parking lot which is nice because if there were not I would be paranoid that I would be conspicuous. I’ve probably had 4 beer at this point. I have NPR on. It’s one of their science shows. They’re talking about how the human brain can remember things wrong. I guess we focus very strongly on memories that give us pleasure because humans crave pleasure. This creates nostalgia because we have only good memories from the past and we tend to think the past was a lot better than it actually was. I don’t know if I agree with this because I have a lot of bad memories from my past, but I guess everyone’s brain works in different ways. Sometimes when I’m about to fall asleep I’ll remember something really embarrassing I did when I was drinking. Like one night I was drinking at a bar on the north side of town and I started dancing to this pop song and I saw a group of girls laughing at me and taking videos with their phones. It made me angry and I ended up throwing a beer bottle at a wall and breaking it. They kicked me out. I think about that all the time when I’m falling asleep. I know there are videos of that night out there, and that eventually I’ll find them somewhere and they’ll ruin my life. Usually when I have these thoughts I have to drink a little bit of liquor or take a Benadryl to fall asleep. That’s the only way to stop from spiraling into thoughts like that.

It’s been almost four hours and I haven’t seen anything interesting. The man in the brown hat is probably still asleep. It’s only 1 pm. I decide to call the red-haired girl. I’ve drank enough that I don’t feel nervous. She picks up on the third ring. “Do you hold your phone to your left ear or your right ear,” she asks me. I tell her I don’t know but that I think usually the left ear. “I try to hold the phone to one ear for five minutes and then switch. I don’t know how to explain this but the right ear feels more intimate and the left ear feels less personal. But I still like to switch or one of my ears starts to feel heavier than the other.” I don’t think I really know what she’s talking about but I tell her that I agree. I tell her I think I’m feeling better and that we should go to Friendly Beasts this weekend. She tells me she’s glad I’m feeling better and that she would like to go. Then I tell her about my ideas. I tell her about the symphony made of fax machines. She tells me she’s not a musician. I tell her it could make a performance art piece. She says it’s a good idea, and we agree to go to Friendly Beasts the next day. I think I love her, but I don’t know if I do. Maybe I just like the way she looks. But then again, that’s most of what causes feelings of love. The way people look. I wonder if blind people ever fall in love.

I begin to feel a little drunk, and I only have 3 beer left in the cooler. I look up. The curtains in the front window look like they are pulled back a little. I look really closely. I’m pretty sure you can see someone looking from behind the window. The NPR station starts to play jazz music. I don’t know why people like jazz. It is just people playing music and changing things slightly as they go. It doesn’t seem like art can be something you just make up as you go along. I think what separates art from randomness is intention.

I see the lights in the house go out. It’s starting to get dark. I decide to drive back home. It doesn’t seem right to drive back home, so I decide to drive out to the place the red haired girl showed me. I still have three beer to drink. I take the road out of town, park my car, and walk down to the clearing where the old cemetery is.

As I’m walking up to the cemetery spot, I hear some hushed voices talking. It scares me. I run behind some trees close to me, and look out toward the spot where the cemetery graves are at. I see three men dressed all in black. I can just barely see them under the moonlight. The men are wearing black hoodies, and they are sitting around a small fire talking. I’m too far away to hear what they are actually saying. At one point one of the men stands up and looks back in the direction where I’m sitting. He whispers something to the other men. They get up and start looking around. They move closer to me. I hunker down behind the tree and try to slow my breathing. When the men move closer I can hear what they’re saying.

“You really shouldn’t have done that shit,” one man says.

“I didn’t have a choice.”

“It is what it is.”

“Did you guys hear something back here?”

“Yeah, it probably was just a squirrel.”

“I don’t think squirrels are awake at night.”

“What the fuck do you mean squirrels aren’t awake at night?”

“I don’t know man, I’ve just never seen a squirrel out at night.”

“That doesn’t mean they aren’t there.”

“Listen, let’s just drive back to your place, and we can figure it out, tomorrow.”

The men walk right past where I’m at, and I feel like they are looking right at me, but they continue on down the path. I lay still. Then I think about my car. The men are going to see my car. They’re going to come back looking for me. I don’t know what to do so I just lay there and close my eyes.

Sometimes when I’m at home, late at night I’ll wonder why we’re always scared of the woods? Do we really think there are people out there just waiting for us? Just sitting in the woods waiting to harm someone? There can’t be that many people in the woods just waiting to kill you. But in this case there were. In fact there were three men. I can’t explain how I know this, but I have this feeling these men were going to kill me if they found me. It would be ironic to die in a cemetery. Is that actually how you use the word irony? I never know. I wonder how many people have actually died in a cemetery? I can feel my heart racing, and I don’t even feel that drunk anymore.

Then I hear another car start and drive off. Either they didn’t see my car or they didn’t care. I sprint back to my car and look around. There is no sign of anyone else. I don’t care if they see me now. As long as I’m in my car I can get away. I drive as fast as I can back to my house.

I go inside. I grab a beer from my fridge. I’m running low on beer so I switch to whiskey. I just sit in my chair in the dark and drink the whiskey. No music. No tv. Just silence. It feels kind of nice. I feel myself start to fall asleep, and before long I’m too tired to even walk to bed.