Sunday, January 3, 2010

Insane Red Baby Steps

I entered the insane red bathroom, something out of a nightmare. There was an empty bottle of Corona seated in the strange, decrepit, filthy old sink. It was an unusual kind of sink, with two faucets and two sets of knobs. Pointed inward, forming a pie-shaped wedge with their negative space above the empty bottle of Corona. Inside that bottle, the slice of lime was still choked in the bottle’s throat. It was bright green and still looking clean and antiseptic in its bottle. I felt badly for it. The lime had had a rough night. Got sliced up, shoved in a bottle of shitty beer, left inside the bottle, and thrown inside this filthy sink. He was left out of context. You couldn’t wash anything in that sink. You could only make things dirtier in it. That sink was the lime’s hell. The white tiled floor was glistening and bright and slick with piss. I walked up to the urinal, which felt ridiculous, as it didn’t seem like anybody else prior to me had gone to the trouble of walking up to the urinal. I thought about the shoes that I would never be able to wear inside my house again. I took aim, pissed, and looked down. Below the urinal, near my left foot there was a giant squashed centipede, and near my right foot there was a smashed brown beer bottle. No label. It was pulverized. Broken into many very small pieces, it looked like the product of very deliberate effort. Perhaps the bottle had been used to squash the centipede? No piece of glass bigger than one inch in any direction. It didn’t look like that bottle had ever contained a lime, and I thanked God for that. If there had been a lime in that bottle he would’ve been having a worse night than the one in the Corona bottle in the sink. The rest of the bar was also red, and I returned to it as I left the mens’ room. My wife and the Girl From Moscow were still sitting at the booth, talking. I slid in beside them, sandwiching the Girl From Moscow between my wife and myself. She put an arm around me and cuddled up to me, and I bit her neck and chewed on her ear. She cooed a bit and didn’t resist. I held on to the moment, and rolled it around with my tongue like you do with a mouthful of whiskey before you swallow it. Apparently during the piercing incident from the birthday outing, my wife had learned that the Girl From Moscow’s carpet doesn’t match her drapes. I hadn’t had the privilege of seeing that yet, so it was news to me. We talked about it briefly, and why she dyes her hair black. It didn’t make much sense to me, but what does? Her thin left arm around me and the taste of her neck made enough sense. Our friend Stephanie was tending bar that night. We all drank and drank, and we closed down the bar at 2am. That’s as far as we’d get that night, but it felt good. Sometimes in life you must be content with baby steps.
 

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