Smoke 'Em If You Got 'Em

I am haunted by dreams of crabs, my weeping mother, and a beautiful woman transposed onto obscure landscape paintings. I don't have a therapist and I live alone. I'm an insomniac because of my fear of crabs, so I stay awake and read and write until I pass out from exhaustion. The crabs seem to only appear at inopportune moments of my dreams, such as when the beautiful woman invites me to bed. Surely, it means something.

There is comfort in being alone. You can play piano to all hours of the night. You are seldom interrupted. You can do as you please. Watch what you chose to watch on the TV or throw it out the window. You can surely find a better way to entertain yourself. You can worship God or Satan, or nothing at all, and you don't have to go to bed at a decent hour. You can join a cult and drink antifreeze or maple syrup. 

Do what you want while you can do it.

You can read what you want to read. Filthy stuff, if you like. Jerk off whenever. Take several showers a day or none for a week. You'll never be accused of being lazy because you sleep until noon. You do not have to hear that which you don't want to hear. A blaring reality TV show. Commercials. Taylor Swift screaching reverbs on the car radio. Someone going on and on about her narcisistic mother or brother, the alcoholic podiatrist who thinks you're a worm. You don't have to care for that which you don't care for. Do that which you don't want to do. You have no obligations. You don't have to designate a beneficiary or ever do the math.

You can commit a crime and go to jail to mingle, if you want. To see how the other half lives. Play euchre with the boys because they're always playing euchre in jail. You can quit your job and wash dishes at Applebee's, or wrangle horses on a ranch in Wyoming. Take a Greyhound bus to The Alamo on a whim. You can eat that which you choose to eat. Get fat, if you like. Work out without being accused of trying to impress someone you don't even know. You can drink as much as you like and drink whenever you want to drink it. Take up spelunking. Buy a pet monkey. Watch a baseball game rather than reruns of Friends. Never share the radio or have to compromise on the thermostat.

There is freedom in being alone. You can do as you please. You can go to the market at three AM because you're bored and don't want to sleep. Or the casino just to see who goes to the casino at three AM. The real gamblers that all try to look like Kenny Rogers. Some racing around in Rascals. The junkies. Methed-out hookers. Wear a loud shirt and just keep saying "fuck 'em if they can't take a joke" or "smoke 'em if you got 'em" because, I am pretty sure, those are the only two things you need to say in a casino. 

You can get a spray tan at the Cococabana. You can go watch laundry tumble at the laundrymat and convert your entire paycheck into bags of quarters. Trade your car in for a mule. You can get a tattoo or buy a boat. You can get high with a hooker named Christmas who wears only thigh-high stockings and a Dolly Parton t-shirt on Halloween while listening to "Hypnotize" by Biggie and playing her kids' Nintendo. You can go to the beach and try your luck at flirting with a woman from Zimbawe, if that's your thing. You can take the long way home — everytime. The scenic route is always better. 

There's never a squabble over which movie to see or which seat to sit in when you go to the theater. You'll never have to sit through another terrible "rom-com" again with that woman from the TV show that wasn't even funny. How much butter you get on the popcorn is entirely up to you and you can flirt with the cute girl at the counter. You don't have to stay for the whole thing, or you can stay for the credits. You can lie down in the aisle and act like your dead to startle the teenage usher who checks to make sure everyone is gone when it's over. 

You can go to that hot dog place and stuff yourself. Or that Chinese place with the all the health code violations again. You don't have to worry about whether you put the toilet seat down, or left it up, or if you forgot to turn the coffee pot off. If your house burns down there is no one you have to get out. You can be late on your bills. Not answer your phone. No one will ask you if this makes them look fat. You can snore as loudly as you want. You'll never lose your covers to anyone's greedy passive-aggression. Never compromise your place in bed. No one else's alarm clock will ever wake you up.

There is no birthday or anniversary to remember or to forget. You needn't spend hours searching for a gift in a store you hate only to give up and buy a gift card or jewelry she'll only pretend to like. No need to spend money on Christmas presents at all. You can by expensive bourbon. No one will annoyingly harass you about a "honey do" list. No one says "happy wife-happy life" to you because they know that you will tell them to go fuck themselves. You can jerk off when you want (again). Like you did when you were 12. You can be the king of your own castle. 

You don't have to worry about one's loyalty, or morals, or ever growing apart. Nor of consuming their germs, however pleasurably germs can be consumed. There's no one to get you sick. No one to clean up after, or to clean up after you. No one's laundry to fold when they leave it in the drier. No bra straps twisted up in towels. No tampons in the tiny bathroom trash can sticking to the lid. No expectations. No one to let down or to let you down.

You can come and go as you please. You can converse with others as you see fit. You can order Playboy if you want. Penthouse. Hustler. Smut galore. You can call the phone sex operator and finally ask what's she's wearing or just talk about your day. You can invite midgets over to play poker at all hours and make crude and offensive jokes. You can dream of some beautiful woman at the bar you frequent who you might never know in the way that you dream to know her, but whom you dream of, nonetheless, in wild and fantastic vivid dreams with inexplicale events and animals making cameos that you swear are real until the inevitable tragedy of waking up. She makes you happy to be around her. Not because you think you will ever date her, but simply because you know that she exists and until your dead, it is a possibility, however remote. So you take deep breaths when she passes by as though you can inhale her.

You're being disloyal to no one going there to see her. Hoping they aren't busy and she says hello. To share a word or two, if you're lucky. Or a belief. Or a joke. Or, better still, a dream. Find out your similar in some strange way. To speak of yourself and to listen to her tell you that which she wants to share about herself. Hopefully, she confides in you. Something of her you didn't before know. Something to further fool yourself that maybe. Just maybe. But she is so damn beautiful and you are you. You are one of a million and she is one in a million. The odds are not in your favor. But maybe — that wonderful but desultory word that tickles your imagination. Maybe she will see something in you that you see in her. If you weren't alone you wouldn't be there basking in her presence like the bar is a beach and she is the sun. Those opportunities wouldn't ever be afforded to you. You're there because you didn't settle or you got out somehow. The loveless trap didn't snap on your ankle and if it did, you gnawed off your fucking foot.

You can be a dreamer when you are alone. You can smoke 'em if you got 'em. You can offend whoever you want to offend and there is no consequence. Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke, after all, one Kenny Rogers says to another. You don't have to know when to fold them. Nor when to walk away. Otherwise your expected to be some sort of pragmatist. To hold a good job and make good money. To fit in and get along. To wear your mask and snip your balls. Everything is a compromise. You have to text and pay attention when they want attention and not pay attention when they don't. You're expected to have a retirement plan and a good credit score. And you must go to some beach you don't want to go to with her and her sister and brother-in-law who incessantly calls you "bud" and drinks Bud Light.

There are family reunions to attend and birthday parties for Aunt Karens and Uncle Rons and nephews and neices who all look like the same fucking person. You can't wiggle out of this one. Can't get out of the barbecue even though you don't eat pork. It's rude, she'd say. You can't talk politics because her LGBTQ sister (they/them) is a Democrat and gets offended by everything you say and think. Most of her family are Democrats, so just don't speak.

You can't go to the bathroom and jerk off at the in-laws on Thanksgiving while everyone else is watching football, or picking at food in ugly sweaters, or watching TikTok videos on their expensive phones. She doesn't like quickies anymore, or nooners. You aren't getting head on the way home. Those days are over. She likes watching The Bachelor and talking shit about people she doesn't like. You can't wear nothing but your underwear around the house because company is always threatening to come over. Or forget to put the bread ties back on the bread. You can't leave crumbs on the counter or dishes in the sink. You must kill the mouse or the spider rather than letting them be because she says so.

But when you're alone you can make love to yourself. Or to a hooker. And still it's cheaper. More efficient. Take yourself out to eat. Get a drink. Get drunk and take advantage of you for a change. No one should frown upon self-care. And hookers are always in the mood. They don't have headaches, but even when they do, it doesn't matter. They'll grin and fucking bear it. They have a menu of choices and they'll wear and say anything you ask them to. You can write them a script. Or you can meet someone who just wants a night or two here and there, but not to be bothered, otherwise. The occasional dinner or "date," in the loosest sense of the word. Someone who leaves in the morning when the trash truck wakes you both up and daylight streams through the inadequate curtain panels that promised to blackout the sun. You threaten to sue them for false advertising everytime.

She doesn't even have to shower here so not to leave your soap bottles disorganized and foreign hairs in the drain or a washcloth where it doesn't belong. Her scent on your My Pillow and your Giza dream sheets is all you have until you wash them. Then she's gone. Unless you chose poorly and she leaves you with a VD, then it is off to the clinic and she's gone when the meds kick in. Typcially, 7-10 days. Maybe you'll see her again. Maybe not. It doesn't really matter, though, does it? It was bound to get boring or complicated. It says so on the pill bottle. Some prevailing sense of being human is bound to take over and there will be a question of loyalty at some point that arises in some bar or store simply because you were sharing sex organs with each other once upon a time, though neither of you could really prove it if you had to. They'll be some tinge of jealousy, however modest, when you are with someone else or she is with some basic guy with a beard and ball cap who looks like everyone else. Who listens to Luke Bryan and drives a big truck and does HVAC. She will smile and you will smile and you're heart will go on. It will sing again without her. Don't let the alcohol play tricks on you. Don't be fooled by that subtle twitch of resent which is only a residual basic human instinct. You are free. You are not your parents. Not a caveman or some sitcom from 1962. Trapped in a loveless marriage of 30 years because it was "the right thing to do."

I often see couples in bars and restaurants who are matched like salt and pepper shakers. Like an austere bowl and plate you see at thrift stores. Who barely look at each other and who display no semblance of love at all. Nothing more than they are eating at the same table and putting it all on one check. There isn't a moment that I look up to catch him gazing at her, or her smiling at him. They're like a couple broken robots. Wax figurines. I've seen more love in a glass fruitbowl.

This isn't everyone, of course, but it is a large percentage of people in this sober world of ours that seems, at times, to have all come from someone's asshole. It is as though those moments were a trial period and are used up. The honeymoon is over. Often they're on their phones. Or they're watching a TV on the wall. Some terrible college football game. How maddening that is to me. How much I want to intervene like Jesus might have intervened when he saw sinners sinning. You're better off alone, I'd proclaim, or with someone that is capable of love. Then I'd part them like the Red Sea and maybe, without each other, they'd learn what love really is. It is certainly not boredom. It is not regret or loneliness — though you're together. It's not TV and sharing the same space. Sharing bills and a house and getting a tax credit for being married. That much I know.

I cannot fathom being that way. There was never a time in my life that I was ever indifferent to the person I was with, and if I felt like being indifferent, I left, or I got a hooker and sabotaged it. Sunk it like the Titanic. I never took anyone for granted, nor would I rather watch a game than see her face or to hear her laugh at a joke. I suppose it occurs over time for some. It sneaks up like a sniper in a bush. On a grassy knoll. But they don't even realize it when it does. Shakespeare wrote, "There is nothing more confining than the prison we do not know we are in."

Tis true, Bill.

I look at them and they do not know what has happened or where they are. Maybe I am simply not privy to their tender moments, but I'd bet my left testicle against it being any different at home. In fact, I bet it's worse. I know that many married wives stray because the relationship is loveless and there is a woeful dearth of affection. Or they get a vibrator and watch soap operas. 

This is what Martha said. Martha isn't her real name, but that is what she wants me to call her. We checked into the Holiday Inn because she didn't want to go to my place. It would be too much of a betrayal, she chuckled, the ice jingling in the near empty glass of bourbon at the bar as I pay my tab. Hotel it is, I agreed. It will be exciting, she whispered. Hotels are exciting places. The sign on the door says no smoking. Don't mind if I do. Martha admires the fresh linens as she gets undressed. She tells me to keep the drapes open. Some perverted motorist on the highway will get a free show.

I only get off with married women, anymore. No one else does it for me. I can't even jerk off because I bore myself. The casinos don't help. Laundrymats, neither. I like giving passion where there is no passion. Restoring love where there is no love. It is what it must feel like to be the rain in the desert. Making someone realize their life isn't over at 35, or 40, or 45 because their husband betrayed his vows and his husbandly duties. Stop wasting your time with some repressed homosexual rube who watches football all day. Who is as dull as a spoon.

I hope she will leave him, I think when my part is over. I hope this will break up their marriage once and for all. My properly put tongue. But not for me. Nor for someone else down the road. But for her. I am sin. I am betrayal. I am infidelity. I am the devil in slacks and a sweater buying drinks for ladies who look lonely and despairing. Who haven't taken the ring off yet, but who think of it. Who keep it under the bar or in their laps on certain occasions. Who don't think I notice, but I do. Who have that look in their far-away eyes. That terribly lonesome yet hopeful look that life isn't over. Who long for a hotel room and open drapes and to get in trouble with their spouse when they come home the next morning, barely able to walk. I fell asleep at Gina's, she'll say. Her insides feeling like a glazed Christmas goose. Her gizzard basted. Tingling. Her salad tossed. 

The worst is when, despite all my efforts, they decide to work things out. She confesses and he agrees to take her back and work on things for the kids or simply because they don't want to give up the house or ruin their credit score. Or worse, for the sake of not being divorced. For saving their loveless marriage. Prolonging it with a feeding tube for another five, or ten years, though it was dead before I got there. He will always have that carte blanche card in his pocket to whip out when he goes to the ER with Jellybean, their kid's gerbil, stuck up his asshole. Remember that one time, he'll remind her. No one survives an affair. It isn't love after that and it wasn't love before it. It's a dark comedy. It's a bad TV sitcom on We — Television for Women.

There is nothing more maddening than to witness couples embracing misery for the fear of being alone — not even bothering to fake it anymore. Their happiness withered, traded for false comforts, robbing their significant other of that they so richly deserve, doing just enough so that they will not leave them, but never doing what they ought to do. Playing that game of torturing their spouse by giving little gifts of often subtle misery in cutting words because once upon a time they were in love and now they are not. It's worn off and everything is disposable. As though love has an expiration date like an IPhone. As though we lease one another like a Honda. Love doesn't last forever, they lie. Off with their heads. 

There is comfort in being alone. If you want to sit on the porch swing and drink until three AM, you can, unfettered. If you want to plant purple coneflowers instead of roses, you can. If you want to paint your house red, or pink, or black, there is no one to argue. No one to complain of the olive-green bedroom walls or the worn bedding, or the strange puppet that dangles above her head named Herman. And no one to disagree with the painting of the horse above the headboard — Princess Doreen, the Kentucky mudder. The jockey is uknown. Someday I will have my face painted over the jockey's.

"What for?" Jessica asks before I impale her with my tongue.

"Because it is a metaphor for life. Sex is like being either a jockey or a horse. You are racing to an eventual end, not racing against anyone else but yourself. And then at the end, a million people tear up tickets because they didn't bet on you. But one person is screaming like an idiot because they did."

"I don't understand," she moans. I am wearing her like a mask. I expect giant crabs at any moment to swallow me whole.

"Don't try to. Let it be what it is. Let me have my fun."

"Okay," she laughed spreading her legs further apart. The invitation. "You can call me Doreen, if you like."

"No. You are Jessica." Then I rode hard for the triple crown. One and a quarter miles of flesh. Whipping her home. 

There is freedom in being alone. What affinity you have for that horse and those things is your affair. There is no one to question you or care about the orgy of Franz Kafka books you have stacked around the bed to suit your change of moods and not on a shelf. The book beside you where no one is. It is no one's spot but yours. Rather, it is the book's spot that you are currently reading and inside that book is a universe of people just as real as anyone you've ever known and events that have been neatly confined and chronicled elequently for you to unravel at your leisure.

Yet, though I declare it quite proudly as though some tyrannical king oppresses me, and as if I drafted an audacious declaration of independence to defy him, I dream yet still of that sovereignty that monogamous love brings. Not to be the merrymaker of slutty mudders and depressed chainsmoking married mares on various levels of anti-depressants. I dream to be encroached and to share this life with her. "Her" in the sincerest most allegorical and refined sense of the word. That which is a vague and insufficient moniker for someone I may or may not know. Maybe she is the woman at the bar who I occasionally see. Or maybe she only haunts me in my dreams

I want her to stay. I want to know of the prison of her presence that captivates me and convinces me to betray my liberty, though I am in love with freedom, and I know all too well the tender trap that turns into a steel cage. She that compells me to be so vulnerable to open up my heart for her to stab, if she desires. To feast upon it like an apple. To be wholly decent with her and decadently indecent as well. To do things tonher that I've never done to or with others. I don't want her to be married or involved in any way, and if she is, I want her to leave him immediately for in truth I am not the inveigler I pretend to be. It was only a fleeting hobby. A community service. I am not some parasitic worm who seeks to diminish what is by feeding off the host through my own selfishness and for my entertainment, faking some false virtue.

I need to make her laugh and wonder as no one else does. I need to write her stories that make her weep and realize the depth of her soul and my love and admiration for her, for all the characters are she and I recast in some often hapless yet romatic way. It is all, and has always been, expressions of my love for her. And even those I wrote before I knew her were for her.

Despite any inconveniences or any compromise one must make along the way, or any reminders or disagreements or inconveniences to personal liberties I pretend to relish far more than I do, it is far greater to be loved and to love dearly. The soul is not the same without it. The heart is a cold and hardened thing when it's locked in a chest of selfishness. It is worthless to any meaningful purpose in this world if not to generously and wrecklessly love. A confined heart is Confederate money.

And that is why I dream of her, however far reaching or delusional the dream may be. Why I sit in her presence and suffer through the wondrous thoughts of what must it be like to be loved by her and to be able to give my love in return, naked as I am, until such time that I no longer feel or wonder. How many others must have seen her and see her still, to have been and to be upon this same wayward raft as I? What fate befell or is to befall them? Men more handsome and wealthier than I. Are they as hopeful or as delusional as me? Are we all in some sort of lottery having bought our ticket with our flirtations?

I sometimes don't make love to married women. I don't troll Applebee's or The Olive Garden or the upscale local bars for them like a fish boat captain doing my public duty. Sometimes I don't make love at all, or jerk off, or get aroused by watching laundry tumble at laundry mats, or by seeing a beautiful women, or by hearing slots go apeshit in lit-up casinos. Sometimes I meet someone and there is nothing sexual about it at all, yet, I still enjoy their company. That priceless stillness between us. The inquisitive wonder. It isn't that they are not attractive, it is only that we don't match in that way. Or the mood isn't right. Or I am in a dream rather than reality and I cannot seem to control my actions. Or though the neon light on the wall flashes "smoke 'em if you got 'em," my once proud mantra, I abstain in my sincerest efforts not to become a complete and utter degenerate.

I decided that I could not float upon that raft any longer. I had to know if I could see her. If I stood a ghost of a chance with her. I was a mess. But I approached her and told her that I wished the bar had a piano in it so that I could play for her. And it started a conversation about pianos and Elton John that somehow turned to sledding and then to feeding park ducks. I was surely dreaming, I felt, but I wasn't about to pinch myself. I was enjoying it too much. She smiled. Her name was Barbara Murphy, she said. But no one's name is Barbara anymore, so I knew it was a fake name. It was a dream name.

"Matthew Merrymaker. That is my name. Dream or otherwise."

"Well, we sound like a couple news anchors from 1980," she joked. She had better jokes than me, I quickly realized. A much sharper wit. I was overmatched. But I was drowning in love. There wasn't someone a million miles away that would do anything for me. This was her. Everything I ever did, right or wrong, led me to this moment. Led me here and I suddenly had no regrets. I wasn't scanning the bar for married unhappy women. I was enthralled by her words, her mannerisms, and the underlying and mysterious sadness she seemed to bear, the falsity of being a killjoy when she was not all. How she pretended to have a cold heart, likely from some past disappointment, when it was evident that it was anything but.

I gave her my address and told her to her to come over sometime, not expecting that she would the very next evening. Expecting rather to see her again at the bar and to carry on that way until I found out she was in a loveless marriage or relationship. Or that she had been spurned by someone she thought she loved still, thus, the melancholic demeanor. But she came over and I poured us some wine and I played piano for her. And as we sat on the piano bench, I again swore I was dreaming and at any moment those crabs would appear to finally devour me, but it was a different kind of dream. One that could bear consequences, if that can be understood.

She talked and I listened. Then I talked and she listened, but I much preferred to listen to her. She was a beautiful and vivid woman. How woefully inadequate those words are. How little weight they carry as opposed to reality. How her beauty haunts me when she is gone and in the space between our time. I have never seen anyone more stunning there in lamplight, laughing, drinking a glass of red wine and wathcing my fingers play over the keys for her. I told her she was a cross between Heddy Lamar and Ava Gardner. She smiled and said thank you. But she is more beautiful than either of them, so it is they who ought to thank me for the compliment. She has an old movie star allure. Something in the eyes.

Then neither of us spoke and I just played the piano. She put her head on my shoulder. I was not judgmental of the world in those moments. No hate or anger seemed to exist. No ranker or division or petty squabbling. I am a good man and I have a decent soul, but I felt indebted and bankrupt for her company there and then. It was the purest moment of tenderness I have known since I was born. Nothing was polluted. Nothing hurt. I was free.

"How do you know when you're in love?" she asked. Her head weightless yet like the world upon my shoulder. I was playing something by Chopin, as I remember it. Not very well, but she didn't know the difference.

I thought for a moment and then replied as I played. "Well, when you are talking to someone and then there is a lull in the conversation and in that lull there is silence and you look at them, really look at them, and for a moment you forget everything else in the world, nothing else matters or exists, and it is like you are dreaming. And that you might be. There is something in the eyes. Something indescribable that there isn't when you talk to anyone else."

She repeated with a wistful grin, "Something in the eyes."

"There is comfort in being alone. There is never a lull in conversation when there is no conversation. There is never heartbreak when there is no love."

"I don't think that I have been in love before," she declared faintly as though she swallowed the words with her wine.

I didn't say anything. I didn't need to. It is better sometimes to not respond to everything someone says. To leave it there untouched.

I thought in my head of how I was falling in love. It was as though it were in slow motion yet as enormous as all the world and everything in it. I was Jack in the ocean with Rose on the door. But Rose wouldn't have stayed on that door in my movie. Not the Rose in my love affair dream. William S. Burroughs once wrote, "There is no intensity of love or feeling that does not involve the risk of crippling hurt. It is a duty to take this risk, to love and feel without defense or reserve." 

And so I did. 

If you're not prepared to be vulnerable, or to be hurt, you're not prepared to love. Love is not convenient. It is not simply when and where you want it and we do not dictate the terms. It knows no proximity and doesn't wait for anyone to be ready. It is not bought or sold and it doesn't grow on trees, nor is it unraveled and solved by some algorithm. And when it is had, it is either nourished or it withers. It is there or it isn't. And here it was, at last. Sitting right next to me on a piano bench where kids that have grown up and have long-since died took lessons and where someone surely sat and played Christmas carols long, long ago. 

Barbara kissed me and I stopped playing. My fingers froze on the keys. She nibbled my bottom lip and held it there for a moment before reluctantly letting go. The old familiar feeling overtook me. What it must have been like for the jockey to strap on his boots or to pet the mane of the horse he was about to mount and ride as hard as he could for one and one-quarter miles. I could have taken her upstairs, but it wasn't right. Not anymore. Not with her. Perhaps something would fall through. She might change her mind and not feel as I feel. But I wanted to do one decent thing in my life. I wanted to wait and to be loyal to her. I wanted it be right.

I stood up and got her coat and took her hand. Then I took her to the door.

"Where are we going?"

"I'm taking back to your car so you can go home."

"What? Why?"

"I'm retiring. There's no pleasure in it anymore."

"In what sense?"

"In all but the most basic, and if there is one thing I'm not, it's that. I'm a complicated, man, darling. I no longer wish to be any sort of thief of virtue."

"You cannot thieve what's given."

"You're too generous then. I've yet to deserve you. What feels stolen is stolen nonetheless. I'd like to be able to sleep someday. I'd like to take you on a date and impress you. Bring you flowers. Hold doors for you. Stand up when you walk into the room. I want to know you better than I do. I want to have new bedding and I want the moment to be right in some way that it isn't, yet. Maybe in some castle somewhere. Somewhere to remember. Does that make me a fool or foolishly old-fashioned?"

"No," she grinned. "It makes you pretty fucking wonderful."

I took her arm and walked her to the car. Just then a man made himself known to us from behind a barberry bush. He wore a black hooded sweathshirt with a white crab on it. Some crabshack. Before I could see him or say anything in my defense, he pulled a pistol and shot me twice in the gut. Barbara screamed and he ran off. A distant dog barked and I heard someone shout across the street. He was the husband of a woman I had slept with some time ago. Breaking into my dream and ruining everything. But he was more than that. He was life itself. Interrupting, as it sometimes does.

I recognized him from once seeing them together. They had patched things up and worked them out, apparently. It brought me no pleasure to think that my assailant would be arrested and convicted and some people would mourn me. How silly that all is. How silly we all are.

"Serves me right," I groaned. "I had it coming."

Barbara cried as she put her hand on my stomach trying to hold in the blood. One of those futile things a person does in a moment of panic.

"I guess we should have made love," I joked.

She chortled through an absurd stream of tears. I never considered that I would someday have the opportunity to say a few last words when the time came. Have ample time and conscious thought to render them. How I desperately wanted to say something grand for her to repeat when she recalls the story someday. Something she might remember me by so not to forget me. Wisdom to bestow upon her. Sirens blared in the distance. Barbara frantically encouraged me to hold on. I wanted to say smoke 'em if you got 'em. But I didn't. It was suddenly a dumb thing to say and I was no longer dumb. Maybe it was all just a dream and I would wake up to the familiar screech of the trash truck, swearing I'd sue whoever made those blackout curtains.

"It was worth it — to meet you," I said. Then I grinned and died on the sidewalk like a worm.