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sloughin · 5 years

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It’s nice that Jenny has the Civic, even if the car is a POS. I haven’t had a license in five years, not since I moved to Chicago. Get around by bike most of the time. Sometimes I wish Jenny biked more too. It’d toughen her up some and she might lose some of that extra poundage around the midriff. But yea, I can’t complain about the car. Beats the hell out of biking four miles with thirty pounds of groceries on my back. Plus Jenny always lets me play my music and she says she doesn’t mind me cracking roadies.

If you’ve never been to the Lincoln Park Whole Foods, then you’ve never really been grocery shopping. At least not in style. The place is the size of an airplane hangar, and with vaulted ceilings at least as high. They’ve got a food court in there with a taqueria, a pizza station, a ramen station, a smokehouse, a diner, whatever... The food is reasonably priced, it’s decent, and the employees aren’t allowed to accept tips. Win-win-win.

That’s where we were going. Shopping there is one of the few things Jenny and I still do together. Sure, we spend a fair amount of our nights at home, but something has changed. We used to play a lot of games: cribbage, gin rummy, boggle. Now we mostly just watch TV. It’s easier than having a conversation.

We’ve been together since I was twenty-two and Jenny was twenty-six. She turned thirty-one last month. I got her a card. It said, “Relax, your thirties are going to be just like your twenties, except you look ten years older and everything is a little less fun.” Inside I wrote, “Hey Cowpie, Happy Thirty.”

When she opened the card, Jenny said, “I turned thirty last year, Nick. We had a party.” I guess I remembered after she said that. I tried to play it off like I’d planned it, you know, “Baby, you haven’t aged a day…” She went along with it, but she had some kind of distance the rest of the night.

So, yea, maybe sometimes things aren’t great, but we’ve built this life together and it’s hard to leave.

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Nick sat in the car while I went up and knocked on our neighbor Pat’s door. Nick knows that I don’t much care for Pat, but when the ’98 Civic wouldn’t start and I asked him to go see if Pat would help with a jump he said, “Hey Cowpie, who left the overhead on last night?” He said it like it was all in good fun, but I sensed some underlying bitterness there.

We were on our way to the grocery store. Sometimes I wish Nick would make at least some small effort to look presentable. But there he was, in a faded and fraying army green t-shirt turned inside out, and baggy black jeans blown out in the crotch so that you could see his boxers underneath. Every other month he asks me to sew them back up. “Come on, Nick,” I say, “if you had one or two other pairs of pants than I wouldn’t have to do this all the time.” He makes enough money. It’s just plain obstinance, there’s no other word for it.

Pat lives in one of the rear units of the same four-family building as we do. He has a private entrance around the side. I knocked and then stood there staring at his door, waiting for him to open up. Pat used to work overnight stocking in a department store, but he got some big workers’ comp settlement when a ladder failed and he fell. Now he walks with a limp and spends his days inside playing video games. He’s probably put on sixty pounds in the last year. It’s the real loose kind of weight so that it looks like he packed Jell-O under his shirt.

I knocked again, this time harder, so that my knuckles hurt. Pat’s door is funny. The base is all painted with black eyed Susans and Queen Anne’s lace and the upper registers are of a stylized mountain range and river. I would have never expected Big Pat to be housed behind that door.

When the door opened I said, “Hey Pat.”

“Hey Jenny,” Pat said. He had marinara stained on his shirt above his abdomen. Or maybe it was ketchup. His shirt was an off-white color, so it looked pretty bad. It looked like he’d squashed a bug there and that that bug had been full of blood. His protruding belly pulled it taut and my eyes kept drawing to it.

“Sorry to bother you,” I said, “but the Civic’s battery is dead. Could you help us out with a jump?”

Pat’s mouth fell a little. Then he said, “Yeah, no problem. Lemme grab my keys.”

Five minutes later Pat pulled his huge Dodge Ram Hemi nose-to-nose with my little Civic. His truck looked funny next to my car, like it was ready to swallow it whole. The Civic may not look like much, what with rust creeping up the side panels, and the hood and bumpers all scored with dents and years of abuse, but for a car with 280,000 miles on it, it runs pretty well. That’s all I need. Really, that’s all any of us need. If the big companies stopped putting out new cars this year the world wouldn’t suddenly be short on cars. People’d just have to keep them longer, do more maintenance, take better care of them.

I had the jumper cables in hand. I’m pretty familiar with the procedure now. Red on dead first, red on the good battery’s terminal and then the negative on the same battery and ground the black cable on the dead side. My daddy used to hook them red on red and black on black, and he never had a problem, but he also used to have me dig a hole in the yard to dump dirty oil into whenever I changed the oil in one of the cars. So, now l ground the connection.

Pat stood by watching me. He looked like he wanted to take charge but I think it’s possible he’d never jumped a car.

“Alright, Pat, start it up,” I said.

Pat got in his car and started it. He let the car run for about thirty seconds and then shut it off. He got out and stood above the Civic. I humored him some and tried to start my car. He just stood there expectantly while the engine struggled to turn over. “Sorry, Pat,” I said. “Could you try it again? Maybe let it run for a few minutes this time and leave it on when I try to start mine.”

The Jewel Osco is about ten minutes closer, but Nick always insists we go to the big Whole Foods on North Avenue because they have a bar in the store and it’s somehow acceptable to walk around in there with a beer while grocery shopping. It’s more expensive than the Jewel, but Nick works at the Whole Foods up on Halsted and gets a 30% discount. Alcohol hits me pretty fast so I never really drink much when we are out, but Nick always buys two beers, one for him and one for me. After he finishes his he drinks mine. He buys those kinds of beers that are 8-9% alcohol by volume. I don’t mind. He’s better when he’s buzzed, at least he has a sense of humor then.

We were heading for the checkout lines when I heard Nick say, “Hey Jake.” When I turned around Nick was clasping Jake Moran’s arm and grinning at him from the side of his mouth. A couple years ago, when he and Nick were still working together, Jake used to come around pretty often. He always kind of reminded me of a big blonde baby. They talked for a couple minutes and I stood a little apart from them, trying to smile at the right times. I was only half listening; I was ready to go.

Jake was telling Nick about living out in Hermosa and I heard him say, “It’s so nice not to live around white people.” Jake is very white. Then he started talking about this big pit mix, Cain, that he had fostered a few months earlier. Apparently his neighbor never kept a gate closed and the two chihuahuas that were supposed to be confined in that yard would often get out and run the neighborhood.

“So, I was out walking Cain and then the two little shits ran up and started yipping in his face,” said Jake. “Then one of the little bastards got up in his kill zone and tried to nip his neck.

“Well, Cain just dipped his head down, took the little dog up in his mouth and started shaking it. I mean really shaking it. It looked like a hornet had flown into his ear and started stinging. I thought he killed the thing right there. I thought, ‘Here I am with this dead dog and now I’m going to have to do something with its dead body, and I’m going to have to have a row with its idiot owner.’

“I was hollering at Cain to drop the damn thing, and of course he wasn’t listening to me at all, focused as he was. I didn’t know what to do, so I balled up my fist and popped him one on the top of his head. Well, then he dropped it, and I’ll tell you, I was surprised as hell when it ran off still yipping.”

I smiled weakly at Jake; it was a horrible story. Nick guffawed and then went right into to telling Jake about some friend of his, Roger, who used to have a pit. I never met Roger and I’d never heard Nick talk about him before. He was saying how he and Roger had been out walking this big pit and how there was a chihuahua running off leash… and then he told Jake the same story Jake had just told us.

Jake raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips. He looked like he was trying to smile through some internal pain. Our eyes met and I felt awkward, embarrassed.

“Come on, Nick,” I said. “It’s time to go.” I knew better than to add, “You’ve had too much to drink.”

Nick got into the passenger’s seat and slammed the car door shut. I’ve asked him before not to slam the doors. The poor old Civic can only take so much more abuse. But that’s part of being with Nick… Don’t get me wrong, sometimes he’s great, but when he gets upset he can be a real challenge to be around.

He didn’t say anything for the first five minutes of the drive home. Then he started to, shook his head no and swore. It’s a twenty-minute drive and by the time we passed Western he had cracked his second beer. He took a long gulp and sat there brooding. Then he started in on it.

“You don’t talk to people like that,” he said. He was talking about the person who rang us up.

“He didn’t mean it as anything personal,” I said. “He was probably just having a bad day.”

“I don’t care how bad his day was, you don’t treat customers like that.” He paused and then muttered, “I should have hit him.”

“You work back-of-house. You don’t know what was going on with him, you don’t know what it’s like to have customers treat you like dirt all day.” I remembered back to when I was a cashier, by the end of an eight-hour shift it gets pretty tiresome to smile through it. In a way, though, Nick was right. He had been pleasant and nonchalant with the guy, and you don’t treat the good customers with that kind of rudeness. I started to say that to him, but instead I said, “Just let it go, Nick.”

“Just let it go…” he said back to me. “She wants me to just let it go.” He shook his head a little as he said it and I could tell that the he wasn’t going to let it go.

He helped unload the groceries and then he took the fifth of Evan Williams down, went into the den, and shut the door. I checked in on him when I was heading to bed. He was slumped on the couch with the TV on and his eyes were bloodshot, like he’d been crying. The bottle was resting against his leg at a forty-five-degree angle. He didn’t even look at me when I said goodnight to him. He muttered something but I couldn’t hear what. I closed the door and something heavy moved up in my throat. Something was broken between us and there wasn’t any fixing it.

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