The Devastating Day
A priest who used to sniff glue and drink old-timey bum wine before he got sober liked to say, “My whole life I had a rough paper route.” Father Gabriel might have been full of shit but I liked him anyway. He definitely didn’t shoot dope like I used to, though, all loony pioneer-style down the way. Never said a dark prayer on the El platform, hovering, contemplating the last step to never knowing next summer.
That was Then, though. This is the wild, avocado-rinded Now, in full mantis shrimp color spectrum without sunglasses. The wheels keep turning. Just a few days ago, tragedy struck.
Down in Wildwood for work, I found Jolly Joes for sale at the bodega and I almost cried. Long lost relics. Beautiful packaging design. Grape. Last one in the bag pulled my filling out. Also, I had a different cavity next to that tooth which I had been neglecting. It woke me up every morning with a throbbing like one of the old gods pounding on my window with giant fists.
Later, at the dentist, this MF broke my tooth in pieces during the process of trying to fill the first cavity. He said, “Oops.” I couldn’t take the pain and it made me socially blind. I didn’t slap him in the face and call him a fucking tooth jockey but I slapped him away as he tried to put some weirdo reassuring hands on me, saying, “Sir, I’m so sorry, please sit back down…” and things of that nature. I repeatedly muttered, “No, no, no,” and just walked straight out of the office with my eyes all slitted like a disgruntled anthropomorphic cat man, ignoring the ladies at the desk and whatever they were yelling at me.
My tooth was all cleaned out but not filled and the whistling wind was like everyone in South Philly’s grandma hitting me in the mouth with angry hands while my own grandma was long dead and it just wasn’t fair. Not fair, I felt, how I couldn’t even just persevere and be good. Even simple things like setting and keeping doctor appointments and dentist appointments, shit like that, and how all the players of the day were continually fucking me over with their ineptitude. I had a haircut appointment in 40 minutes.
I stopped back at the apartment to roll something up. The Scorpions’ “Wind of Change” drifted through the open window of my neighbor’s Camaro across the street. Such a clean fucking song, with the whistling and everything. It always made me think of the Winter Olympics, as represented by the 80’s movie lightshow of my brain, with its cavernous gaps of time, tide and misadventure. “Take me, to the magic of the moment, on a glory night. Where the children of tomorrow dream away. In the wind of change.” On a glory night, to be sure. Even a devastating day.
I walked down to the Dominican spot and after looking down at my phone for 5 minutes in blank splendor reading about Charles II of Spain, the deformed monarch, my man Chio called me to the chair. He began to render folk art upon my head, smoothing the fade lines with planetary blur, while the bachata bounced hard out of the speakers with up down up down piano plinks.
The barber shop was filling up with customers. It was getting loud as fuck in there. Two guys kept coming in and out of the door, arguing back and forth with a group of pendejos posted up by the entrance to the liquor store next door. It became alarmingly aggressive. Looking back, I would have just got up and walked out, but my mind was too lazy, too burnt out for Spanish spoken quickly. No comprende.
One of the liquor store loiterers pulled out a small pistol and fired it through the barber shop’s front window, CRACK, CRACK, with two punctuated energies. The first bullet lodged in the back wall. The second bullet, like a real fucker, skipped off the ground and clipped my ear lobe as it whizzed past, lodging in the wall next to its brother- a miraculous one inch away, and dead parallel. Two jack o’lantern eyes.
Blood dripped from my severed ear but it was all weird ear-blood so it dripped funny. Like it was melting out of me, and true to form, because in this moment we were all made of wax before someone in the sky yelled “Action!”
I stood up from the barber’s chair slowly without putting a hand to my head. Instead I folded my hands together with a simian grip, breathing in breathing out the heartbeat quakes so slowly, so darkly. In the mirror I ignored my mangled ear and inspected my shape-up. The hair on top of my head was still long as hell, now even more so in contrast to the high fade.
Half of a cavity filling procedure shot to shit, now I was shot to shit and it shit on my haircut, halfway done which is fucking shitty. I went home to finish the jobs myself. I cannot trust my teeth with anyone anymore, though I will give Chio another chance with my hair. I like to look good.