HAVE YOU NOTICED YOU’RE ALIVE?

A fucking foreigner with grey hair gave me the evil eye when I banged my forehead on a low hanging piece of metal street furniture because I wasn’t paying attention, or was I the fucking foreigner? Man walks into a bar, and an ill-advised bar to walk into. Well, it was the mid-day heat, and it wasn’t me suffering from the third of the five phases of denial, teasing a future chapter as we speak. Straight away it was apparent that one moment of absent mindedness would produce a soreness that would last for days, and a bruise above my eye that might last for weeks. For all I’m aware, the modest-mouse pensioner does try to pretend he’s something he is not. As does the woman separated at birth a continent away from him, who scolded me when I attempted to throw out a paper-plastic blend coffee cup in a Walmart parking lot trash can. I acquiesced, leaving me no choice but to dispose of it via the rental car trunk when I handed back the keys, thus consigning it to a less environmentally friendly land fill into perpetuity.

What could I have done differently? Lisa left town without saying goodbye, to Texas to chase another accountant in training, and who moved back home to become a bookkeeper and functioning alcoholic for real, but he remained the exquisitely personable former high school jock, and for whom our senior year announcer loved it when he nailed a jump shot so that he could bellow: “Randy the Razor scores again!” I didn’t know Randy and Lisa even knew each other and there was nothing I could have done about that, meaning it’s not my fault Lisa and I lost touch, or it’s nobody’s fault. Larry was in the starting five that year, but he hardly moved at light speed and he preferred the calling card Fitz even so, being of the opinion that Larry the Laser would be more suitable a nickname for a pet clam. Therein the announcer’s dramatic late-season pronouncement in a game we nearly pulled off: “I can’t believe it! Fitzie stole the ball!!

However, I was pleased with myself to have scored a job a few blocks south of Scotty’s place of work, in the law office skyscraper – meaning 12 storeys at most – and we foreswore to fix up after work drinks, real cocktails at a Wall Street watering hole such as Harry’s at Hanover, or a dark Irish-American standard such as McSorley’s, but it didn’t happen. He didn’t contact me afterward, but I didn’t contact him either. When we ran into him and his new crew in the Village that time, and I felt chagrined that our chat was fleeting, the other three members of my longstanding friend-cast shook it off and explained to me that he had changed, don’t worry about it. What must Scotty have been thinking when as 20 and 21 year olds, we grieved in the Common Room that “you know you’re gettin’ old when the Playboy models are younger than you are.”

But he hadn’t changed, he was always like that. I could have done something. I could have called the week after our coincidental meeting on Waverly Place, I could have called and said goodbye to the friendship we had before. He was only 30. Never trust anyone over the age of 30, as the saying went, and I believed it.

He was a motherfuckin’ lawyer. Were he still alive today, he could have bailed me out of jail when I had singlehandedly engineered the second firebombing of the recording studio in which the Peloton commercials are filmed, after-produced and over-produced. What was the insurance company which granted the rebuilding cash thinking? Even if his valiant self-defence strategy failed, it would still be worthwhile from my perspective, eliminating these monstrous commercials from society for at least a temporary period, until the owners were able to crowd fund a third rebuilding trust.