Fingerless Gloves (3 page)

5pm and the wind kept pulling my postcards down. I remember the few still attached to the wall being feebly held by pushpins as they flapped outward. Postcards that had been sent to me by cousins and friends. Postcards of places I hadn’t been. That Friday, I left work at about 4:30 that afternoon. This, considering the nature of my job, was unusual. My Fridays were usually spent at the studio until at least 6 or 7pm. My bosses, had they been around, may have had something to say about my early exit. They always had eyes out for people leaving…and it was an unsaid thing that, should you want to leave early, asking permission was not only necessary, but the act alone was frowned upon.

Nevertheless, my work backpack was on the ground in the small entranceway to my apartment, and dinner was rotating in the microwave. I watched through the greasy glass wondering how the brown mess in the tray could be considered Chicken Marsala. Healthy versions of real food have this way of looking like Purina. On the movie queue that night was
Escape from New York
and
Escape from LA
… a monstrous Kurt Russell double feature. I hadn’t had a Friday night like that in a while. Usually James would come over and we’d watch basketball for an hour until we caught a drift of something happening around town. If things were quiet, we’d go to a chain restaurant to sit at the tacky bar. The last five Fridays had been spent like that. When we did actually have reason to go out in the city, I came home with pieces of gel-less hair flopping down on to my forehead and my clothes smelling like the subway. That week, James had been asked to cover some extra hours and I had earned my early Friday after a grueling week of shooting. That night was a lonesome movie night, and I couldn’t have needed it more.

My dinner beeped. I peered into the microwave, admiring the terribly small portion size smoking in the plastic tray. I ripped open a bag of Tostitos, pulled the tab on a can of Coke Zero, then sat down in front of the NFL Network while I ate. They say that eating while watching TV makes you gain weight. I could afford to put on a few pounds considering, since I moved out, the waist size on my jeans had just dropped from a 32 to a 30. By 5:10 I was done with dinner but kept watching some meaningless talking heads sputter on about a week of football I didn’t really care about. They played the same highlight packages over and over again until I knew the exact moments to expect the end zone dances and missed tackles.

My phone rang at 5:45. It was my mother, obviously worked up, telling me that James had just been rushed to the hospital. I felt the little hairs on the back of my neck grow rigid as a shot of adrenaline made my chest feel far away from the rest of my body. As she told me that she didn’t know anything and that he was probably fine, I watched the preserved, defrosted sauce covering my meal congeal on the bottom of the plastic dinner tray. I heard the words, but the image of my dinner putting itself back together was horrific. When I hung up, I knew I had to make it to the hospital. I wanted to make sure my mom was right and that everything was good…I had to see for myself. I knew that, at least that night, the story of Snake Plissken would have to wait.

I drove a Ford Escape. It was a functional SUV and I got a killer deal financing it. To boot, it was big enough to put my whole laundry basket in and still afford me rear-view visibility. I had the Escape because, in the winters I was at school, I’d still have to drive to class or run errands. It wasn’t a particularly big sport-utility vehicle. It turned no heads and, all things considered, it seemed like every third car I passed on the road was a Ford Escape. The best part of the truck, at least for me, was the glove box. Some people, mainly my parents, would have considered this reckless but, for as responsible a driver as I am, I kept a small baggie of pot and the one-hitter that moonlit as a cigarette in that glove box at all times.

Here’s the deal – I know some people who smoke pot like it’s a new religion. They have thousands of dollars worth of custom glass, from bongs to gas masks, to serve their recreational drug use. They use their own terminology and syntax. They are developing marijuana codes. I, as you might imagine, am not one of these people. I don’t have access to medicinal marijuana. My pot used to come from the starting catcher on the varsity baseball team. Now my pot comes from a bike messenger who happens to frequent the mailroom at my job. I buy 60 dollars worth of “decent enough” weed at a time, usually once every two or three weeks (when I have money to burn). The pot I buy is not fantastic, nor is it really made to last weeks at a time. I keep most of it sealed up, in a pill box in my apartment. The baggie of pot in my glove box is also sealed in a pill bottle. Sometimes, if I’m particularly lazy or broke, I ration the same pot for a month and a half. By the end, the weed is dried out and it burns down like a dry forest. I have the one-hitter, one small bowl shaped like a fish, and one big bowl with a red flower blown into the glass. I bought both bowls in a head shop in the mall just past my college. It was one of those practically abandoned malls that contained out-of-business fast food restaurants, a custom t-shirt printing store and the incense-infused head shop called The Holistic Healing Zone.

My equipment more than solidifies the fact that all I do is about recreation. I want food to taste better, movies to be more interesting, and music to sound the way it’s meant to. People would never mistake a bowl shaped like a fish for a serious drug instrument. Most nights, including that worst night, I still smoke out of the one-hitter. I’ll pack it 6-7 times, and I’ll be pretty well high for at least a few hours. I save the bowls, you know, the good china, for when I have company.

By 6:30 that night, the Ford Escape was parked in the lot furthest from the hospital. This was done to save me the 10-dollar parking charge that accompanied a space in the big garage. The walk was obscenely long, but I was also at the poor time of the month. I remember it being that strange time of an otherwise perfect day. The imposing building was backlit orange as the sun and sky fought to claim the attention of the hospital’s highest floors and rooms. The modern brick structure dominated the foreground of some strange painting. It was the time of day filmmakers wait for. As I approached, the huge automatic hospital doors opened without a sound as foot traffic moved all around me. I felt like I was in a Daniel Powder music video. The transition from cement walkway to strange, sterile tile was immediately noticeable in the soles of my shoes. I was, all of a sudden, more aware of certain things. The air changed, from fresh air outside to canned air inside. There was a faint hint of Purell and dry Cheerios wafting around.

“James Squire” was the only thing I could think to say to the very buttoned-up nurse sitting behind the first desk I came to. She was middle-aged and looked like she had spent her whole life trying to make something halfway decent happen for herself. It seemed like her success was measurable only when considering constants and absolutes. She typed a few things into what appeared to be prehistoric computer software. The keyboard clicked loudly against her fingers. She pressed the enter key exactly three times before telling me, “He’s in surgery now. He was brought in about 45 minutes ago but, if you want me to be straight with you, unless you’re immediate family, you’re better off enjoying your Friday night and coming back tomorrow.”

I told her that I was, in fact, not immediate family. After I insisted on waiting, she graciously pointed one bent finger with one chipped fingernail towards a bunch of couches and chairs a few doors down the hallway.

The waiting room smelled like a combination of stale popcorn, rubber gloves, and floor cleaner. The color scheme was a depressing white and navy blue. The paint had begun to peel gently off the walls. Next to me was an older woman, calm as could be, reading
Better Home and Garden
. The cover story, accompanied by a lush photo, was “All You Never Knew About Dirt.” A few seats away from her there was a mother, about 35 years old, watching her two kids play with one of those outdated toy fire trucks that had been donated to the hospital years before. The four of us were citizens without a country. We were not important enough to be allowed into any of the rooms to see anyone, yet we were too determined to accept defeat and be sent away into the night. I picked up a copy of
Sports Illustrated
and read about a recent scandal involving NBA referees. The article seemed overly long, hence the satisfied feeling when I finally finished it. The pages of the magazine were water-logged, fraying and coming loose from the staples. The date on the cover was from over two months prior. The corners of the magazine were finger-oil faded. Needless to say I lasted about 25 minutes in the waiting room. I couldn’t handle the smell. By 7:15, the automatic doors silently opened again, and I stepped out into the last moments of the daytime. Cars were passing beyond the wooden parking gates. I walked back to the Escape, heard the clunky auto-locks spring to life, and climbed into the driver’s seat.

I’m not sure what comes over people when they decide to smoke drugs. For some, all it takes is the right song; for others, the right group of people. Some people cave into peer pressure while others just want to feel something other than what they’re feeling. On different nights, I have been all of these different types of people with all of these sprawling reasons. Tonight, however, I was a strict subscriber to the most basic form, and most cerebral, of drug users. That night, in the Escape, in the parking lot of the gigantic hospital, under the timed parking lot lights, I packed the one-hitter because I was worried. I was worried about James and who would pay for his ambulance ride. I was worried that he’d need an organ that no one would be able to supply, or blood that was a different type than all his friends and family.

It never crossed my mind that James wasn’t going to get out of the hospital. Everyone makes it out of the hospital. You go for a day, sometimes two, and you watch a ton of TV, drink apple juice from tin foil-covered plastic containers and eat lukewarm chicken soup. In the end, they wheel you back into the sunshine. In the end, you just get up and walk out. Sitting there that night, grasping how sideways things had gone and imagining how they’d soon right themselves straight, I guess I just felt in-tune with the temperature outside. I was in rhythm with the muffled music pushing forth from the FM radio, even though my car wasn’t moving. I realized just how far I’d come from that first time I bought pot, all those years ago in high school. Your terminology is the only thing that ever really evolves. In the end, the way you are when you’re stoned is specific to each person. It’s a stamp and a brand …an untapped part of themselves. A long time ago, I had asked the catcher on the baseball team for “a few dime bags” and I remember him laughing into the phone. When I went to his house to pick up “enough weed to get two people high” I remember thinking how small the bag was that cost a whole twenty dollars. I remember hiding it in an empty cologne tin, under a stack of magazines, tucked away next to the unused condoms in my nightstand drawer.

The glove box opened and there sat my license and registration, a few forgotten CD’s, a car charger for my phone, the one-hitter and, stuffed into an old bottle that once held prescription decongestant pills - a decent-sized baggie of pot purchased three weeks earlier from the bike messenger turned drug dealer.

My purchases were never discreet or particularly romantic. I certainly never bought mass quantities of anything. On Wednesday, the messenger, in addition to collecting packages to be mailed out, collected money from anyone trying to “score a bag.” These bags were non-negotiable. They were 50 dollars, fairly large, and filled with somewhat acceptable pot. On Friday, when I left the studio, the bag would be waiting for me in the night receptionist’s desk drawer. Everything was always smooth and went off without a hitch. I never, in all my commutes back to my apartment, got pulled over and sniffed out by a German Shepard with a drug nose. I never had a problem with my landlord thinking my apartment smelled like dope…in fact, since I moved in, I had only seen my landlord once. He was walking around the roof of the building, wearing denim overalls and holding a broom. I was as harmless as I had been the very first time I smoked when, trying to convince myself I was super high, I ate half a pizza, two eggrolls, and a pint of ice cream, only to realize that I was stone-cold sober with a new, immovable brick of food in my stomach.

Before I turned my truck on, I packed the one hitter, pulled out a white mini-lighter, and took a long drag. My hand felt the side of my seat for the lever that let me slide the seat back. I put the seatback down and felt the dark start to envelope the outer edges of the parking lot. I held the sour smoke back, grimaced, and let out a smooth flow of illegal air out the open window. The back of my throat burned and I could feel the little hairs being cut down like trees. The hospital lot was empty at 7:45, when I pushed my seat back to its proper position. I was sufficiently high by 8pm. The bass drum inside my head switched over to double-pedal as I calmly placed the bag of drugs and the piece of paraphernalia back in their hiding place, safely stowed in the glove box. I pulled out a plastic knob, wisely adorned with a picture of a light bulb, to turn the headlights on. Everything seemed to be in front of me…the hospital, the black-orange clouds, the trees that formed the border on one side of town. As I slowly pulled away, red lights and bouncing tires brought more emergencies into the lot. For once, the world seemed slow. I was never one of those contemplative stoners trying to figure out hidden meaning in
Yo Gabba Gabba
episodes or Animal Collective albums. Tonight was different and, for some reason, I appreciated the way the streetlights came together, as I flew past them, into one, solid white line. Before I left the parking lot that night, I took notice of the hospitals height and depth and thought briefly of the human hands that created the structure.

I slowly pulled back onto a main road and reached for the bottle of lukewarm water that was jammed into the Escape’s cup holder. Once my fingers got past the iPod cables, gas receipts, gum wrappers and books of matches, I carefully unscrewed the water bottles “eco cap.” This is simply a more difficult twist-off cap, designed to save on plastic: A good idea in theory, but executed poorly as it usually results in the thirsty party spilling water everywhere but in their mouth. The water tasted metallic, like drinking from a bathtub. I felt it slowly make its way down my numbed throat, and drip like a faucet into my stomach. I felt it fill me up…like a cartoon gas tank. It was the same sensation as biting on your tongue after oral surgery. You know you’re doing something, but the sensation is so disconnected that the action, not the result, becomes the most interesting thing in the world. While my freezing stomach filled with spring water, I merged onto the main highway. I swished water around in my mouth …and took my eyes off the road for a second to gargle, then spit out the window. My destination was a dollar store called Burn Your Bucks.

As the car headlights created top-speed fireflies coming right at my face, I tried to wrap my head around why I had chosen Burn Your Bucks. Fact remains, this dollar store didn’t leave much to the imagination. They sold banana-clip hair weaves, Crystal Pepsi, and Wonka Gobstoppers in foreign packaging. I had never, in all my years living in this town, purchased anything useful from that dollar store…unless you consider a mosquito net and some Jolt Cola useful. Off the highway, the gigantic neon green dollar sign exploding into flames marked my destination. It shone like a beacon for weary tourists, even though we were far from any kind of tourism.

The shopping plaza was fairly crowded as I pulled in and accidentally parked across two spots. Truth be told, while my high driving has always been up to par, my high parking could use work. My eyes burned red as families knowingly avoided me. My steps were uneven and slow. Inside the store, the fluorescent aisles held everything from rolls of wrapping paper to rubber kitchen gloves. I spotted World War II Lego playsets and neglected children’s books. The carpeting was spotted and stained. The cashiers watched me enter, knowing full well they’d have to deal with me soon enough. While I wandered aimlessly, one of the employees on patrol stopped me, looked me up and down, and asked me if I needed any help with anything. “Not right now….just simply… browsing” was all I could make my voice box push forth out of my lips.

The employee, all 20 of his years collected poorly underneath him, stood pimply with matted hair. He leaned in and asked, “Whatever you’re on, I need some tonight for me and my girl. Can you hook it up?” The horror must have crept over my face like the beginnings of a tsunami. I am not a drug dealer, at least not in any traditional sense, nor did I realize how my high was so blatantly evident to everyone else. The weird itching in my eyes must have visually manifested itself in two pools of red suffocating my pupils. I put my hands in my pockets and continued staring at the shelves while saying, “I have nothing…nothing at all for you friend…for that, I apologize.”

The Burn Your Bucks employee rolled his eyes and rushed by me into the next aisle. His green apron vanished as fast as it originally appeared. I realized I had been staring at a plastic bow and arrow set for what was going on 10 minutes. The store was very weird. The whole store just felt warm. I felt the dish towels for softness and tried on the latex gloves, then smelled my hands. I wore the foam Little-League style hats. I kept clicking away at mysterious objects with one of those extend-a-reach claws. In the last aisle, I picked up a chintzy, tin Speed Racer lunchbox and a Snickers bar. I brought my items to the checkout.

The girl behind the counter was also about 20, with red hair and skinny jeans over the green Burn Your Bucks mandatory apron/t-shirt combo. She was made up …as her eyes were outlined and her cheeks were the right shade of red. I had begun eating the Snickers bar before reaching the cash register. It was all gnawed caramel and nougat. She laughed to herself as she rang up the two items, one of which was half-eaten. My total came to $3.78. As I fumbled with my wallet, trying to impress her with my display of counting correct change, she sighed. “You know, I’m off in about two hours. I don’t mean to be too forward, but if you’re around, can I hang with you? I’ve never done what, well, you seem to do. I’d like to try it with a stranger, without my friends there to judge me.”

I guess burnouts and stoners still exist even in small towns across America. When you don’t take the time to recognize what you are, you overlook everyone who is just like you. These kids will always be looked at as missed potential or shameful examples of youth gone wrong. This girl ringing me up, as I looked at her, I imagined the friends she used to have …the dances with her father …the way boys made her feel. Maybe it was the pot, or maybe just my overworked mind, but I felt close to her. I guess judgment will be passed based on misunderstanding, from now until the end of time. When you’re working a Friday night shift at Burn Your Bucks, probably paying your way through some local college…trying to avoid having to go home, there is no shame in smoking marijuana…I mean, if that’s what you need to keep your head on straight. I felt bad for this girl…she was, in some backwards way, cute. Her confidence, probably a result of years of repressed desire to do/feel something new, was oddly refreshing.

In one hand, I had exactly $3.78. In the other hand, I had my wallet that refused to close. A credit card had lodged itself sideways in the bill flap. I had heard what she asked me, but was still deciding how to address it. I finally stuffed the bulging wallet into the back pocket of my jeans, and handed her the exact change. As I reached for the label-less plastic bag containing my purchase, I told her, “I’m not sure where I’ll be in two hours. I might be here or I might be around somewhere else. You’re just like me: everywhere already. You’re knee-deep in the most important night…possibly ever.”

With that, I turned and made my way towards the door. As I walked out, the bells on the door smacked hard against the glass behind me. My cell phone read 8:45pm. The night had moved from open hoodie to closed hoodie. I was considering the jacket I had stuffed in the back seat of my car. The lamps lit a line down the center of the shopping plaza. Shopping carts stood fast like islands. Noises we unidentifiable and distant…just the air moving around. There was an old video rental chain where James and I used to rent direct-to-VHS horror movies and old video games. The tapes were worn and the game cartridges required pretty primitive means to get them to play on our consoles. The clerks used to know us by name because, more often than not, we’d end up in the store for an hour before we found something to rent. Sometimes we’d just look at the box art, wander around, and not rent anything at all.