The Taste of Penny (6 page)

He'd won them off a sign painter, in a drinking contest, and he could peel them off at any time. But they were fantastic white magnetic signs, and Sam was proud of them. They announced in the way the constant flyering at the grocery store didn't that he ran a real business. In beveled yellow letters, a yellow so fantastic you could almost call it neon, “Brotherman's Hauling.”

But this is only Sam's perspective. Actually he is a pisspoor drunk driver. He has been for years.

“Remove your mitt from your facial area.” Sam does and brushes the cop's cheek. “Jesus Christ,” the cop says. “Watch those things.”

“Apology,” Sam says.

“Now open it.”

Sam tries, but he can only manage a tight squint. Everything is blurred, and the effort it takes to open that one
forces the other one closed.

“How many fingers am I holding?” the cop says.

“I have no idea.” Which he does not. He sees refracted light, lots of refracted light, and shapes.

“Well don't lay down back there,” the cop says.

“Why would I lay down?”

“Some people lay down.” The cop shuts the door behind him then climbs in the front and radios for an ambulance. With the dispatcher, he refers to Sam as “some numb nuts who seems to have poked his own eye during the drunk test.”

Sam instinctively begins to gnaw on the thumbnail of his spare hand. He need not even, as he usually does, remind himself of the protein in fingernail.

When the cop opens the door again, he has a little gadget with a tube coming off it. “While we're waiting, you don't need neither one of your eyes to blow into this.”

 

There'd been no problem when the Two Men stuck to moving. But maybe the moving business wasn't too hot or something. Just last week they stumbled across a flyer at the PriceChopper that read, “Two Men And A Truck: Moving, AND NOW HAULING TOO.” Technically, yes, movers and haulers both haul things. They also both move them. But to Sam's mind the distinction was crystal: Things that people want or care about are moved. Things that people don't want or care about are hauled.

In some towns the Two Men And A Truck company is a franchise, the kind of place that hires buff frat boys and deducts FICA. This Two Men And A Truck was just that, two men and a pickup, just like Sam and Jeremy, the F-150, and Brotherman's Hauling. Sam and Jeremy might even have welcomed their
expansion, a little competition, had those fuckers not tacked their flyers up directly over the Brotherman's flyers.

Sam took one of the tear-off phone numbers from the Two Men flyer. He then called with a fake hauling job. “It's a little drive out of town,” he said. “But the payoff is worth it.”

“We have a few moving gigs scheduled,” one of the Two Men said. “If it's that big we can cancel them.”

Sam described the job to him. The job he pitched was a point-by-point description of the first hauling job Brotherman's had ever done, transporting 500 80-gallon drums, the kind bums make fires in, to the barrel refurbishing plant. The plant's drivers had gone on a strike. It had required precision stacking, four-inch truck cargo straps, and multiple trips to haul it all in the F-150. But it had paid extremely well. That one job funded the whole business. It bought Brotherman's computer and the mobile. Sam described the job to the one man, who sounded very eager. Sam gave him a fake address of a drum processing facility on the Old Highway. He gave him a fake phone number too.

So when the mobile buzzed later that evening he didn't think anything much of it. Sam's plans have simple flaws. It was actually the two men of Two Men on at the same time.

“You cost us a day, pussboy,” said one of them, Sam thought the same one he talked to earlier.

“A day,” said the other one.

“That's Brotherman to you,” Sam said. “You have conference call or something? How do you get that?”

“Yeah, we got conference call,” said the first one. “And you got a genuine problem.”

“What are they saying?” Jeremy said.

“They say we've got a problem,” Sam said.

“Talking to your pussy, dick?” one of the two men said. Sam couldn't tell them apart anymore.

“They ask if I'm talking to my pussy,” Sam said.

“Tell them your pussy takes umbrage at their comment,” Jeremy said.

“Takes what?” Sam said.

“You guys need to watch your backs. This ain't cool. We let you run your little show around here long enough. Now there may be some action.”

“An equal and opposite reaction?” Sam said in the voice of a black man imitating a white man.

“
Um-bridge
,” Jeremy said.

“Payback action,” the two men said.

“My pussy takes umbrage at your comment,” Sam said.

“Umbrage
to
your comment,” one of them said, and they hung up.

Sam regretted making the phony call.

“Well?” Jeremy said.

“They corrected you.”

“Corrected what?”

“They said it's umbrage
to
your comment.”

“Bullshit,” Jeremy said. “Bullfuckingshit.”

 

Sam is hyperaware of his shit as it moves through him. He searches the bowl. He probes with a wire coat hanger, but there's no penny. He feels it still, somewhere within him, a point of pressure there above his stomach, a little insignificant weight.

He removes two bowls of hot sauce from the fridge and soaks his fingers for ten minutes like he's seen women in manicure shops soaking their fingers. When time is up, he
drip-dries over the bowls. The tips turn a crusty orange. They sting and tighten.

Today the hot sauce serves a double preventative purpose. Because the floors in Sam's apartment are paper-thin, the Red-haired Girl downstairs can hear him masturbating at his computer. Yesterday, the Red-haired Girl had a little talk with him during which he pretty much got the picture. She knocked on his door while he had the news on. She told him the news was too loud.

“It's the news,” he said. “How can the news be loud?”

“I can hear everything that goes on up here,” she said. “
Everything
.” This being her subtle hint that he might want to check the volume at which he engages Internet porn. He understood that she issued her complaint intentionally during an innocent moderate-volume news moment so as to get her point across when he was not in the middle of the activity she really wanted to put a stop to. She was smart, he figured. Of course he knew how troubling it was to be able to hear something like that. He could hear the guy above him jerking off to Internet porn too.

Some queerbaits might find the guy above you jerking off at the same time as you exciting. It really bugs Sam though. And because he can never hear the Red-haired Girl downstairs doing anything, he knows the guy upstairs can not hear him. Sound moves downward, he thinks.

So when he breaks for attempting to expel the penny again, he hears the guy upstairs watching
The Price Is Right
at a normal volume—normal in this building means, in the quiet of his apartment one floor removed, he hears the sound of Bob Barker's voice over his own bathroom fan.

Sam goes upstairs and knocks on the door. He keeps
his hands in his pockets.

“Hey neighbor,” the guy says. “Why the eye patch?” They have never spoken before.

“Work injury,” Sam says.

“Workman's comp. That's my secret.” He grabs his thigh and says, “Oh my leg!” He hops around in his foyer. “If you know what I mean.”

Sam delivers the exact same lines the Red-haired Girl used on him, and the guy upstairs responds at first pretty much as he had.

“Loudness is a subjective thing,” the guy says.

“I can hear everything that goes on up here,” Sam says.

“
Everything
.” He tries to approximate the Red-haired Girl's expression. And he thinks the guy upstairs gets it, just as he had gotten it. Unlike Sam though, he pushes.

“Give me an example?” the guy says.

“Oh, I can, you know, just about everything. You walking around. Opening the refrigerator, listening to music, the boob tube.”

“Like what? What was I watching at two a.m. this morning?”

“I don't actually log,” Sam says.

“Sure you're not just an asshole?” the guy asks, sincerely Sam thinks.

“No, look, it's just that these apartments suck. I can hear everything all right.”

“To travel, sound requires a medium of transmission. For instance, solid, liquid, or air. I suppose I could convert my apartment into a vacuum of space. There is no sound in a vacuum of space,” the guy says.

Sam goes back downstairs. In a little while, just as Sam
is thinking about quietly jerking off, the guy upstairs starts in. He clearly isn't trying to hold it down any. Sam can hear him talking to the monitor. Sam blushes, picturing the Red-haired Girl hearing him saying very similar things.

Instead Sam sends out emails to old clients, offering them Proven Customer Discounts.
You Know Who to Call, When You Need a Haul: Brotherman's
, he writes at the end of each. Most of them come back asking to please have their addresses purged from this list. Many simply write,
remove
. The guy upstairs orgasms. He goes off like a bear. There is brief silence, then Bob Barker's muffled voice fills the room.

Sam eats a Pepcid and goes outside to walk around the apartment complex with his hands behind his head to try and get rid of the cramp coming on in his gut. The bad thing about the Red-haired Girl is that she has a dog, an ugly little English bulldog named Lusya. She walks it constantly with all the other women in the complex who have dogs. She's told them about Sam. He imagines her telling them about him going at it up there, three to four solid hours. Every woman with a dog in the complex avoids him. When he walks past them in the halls they look at the floor and allow their menacing dogs to the farthest reaches of their leashes, close enough to feel their hot breath on his marinated fingers.

The Red-haired Girl, however, being complicated, does talk to him. She has this nice thing. She wanted to let him know that she could hear what he was doing by telling him she could hear him doing something else, in order to get him to stop doing what he was doing so loudly, but in a way so he thought she really didn't hear what he was doing, because that kind of embarrassed her. And when she sees him with the patch over his eye, she feigns concern. He doesn't know her
name and she doesn't know his.

He keeps his hands in his pockets—women notice hands—and tells her that he scratched the cornea at work. It's funny, he thinks, the loss of an eye doesn't really even bother him; the addition of a penny does. When they talk, while it is obvious she is trying to be nice, she maintains a nervous glance in her eye. Sam wonders if she has this with everyone. Lusya donates a half-hearted jump at his leg. Even her dog pretends to like him.

Evolutionarily speaking Sam considers himself a fluke. He is short, not tall. Like his fingernails, his toenails are bad, though he has never bitten them. He is not particularly smart; is weird looking; and no good at sports or fighting. He compulsively has bad idea after bad idea, such as starting this hauling company now dying a brisk death. There's not much propulsion behind his orgasm.

“You were right you know,” he says. “These apartments really do suck. I mean. I don't know if I should tell you this. But the guy upstairs from me…” Sam leans toward her. “I don't know if I should tell you this.”

“Yeah,” she says, and steps backward.

“He masturbates all day,” Sam says. He takes his hands out of his pockets but resists the urge to use the universal hand signal for jerking off. “For hours and hours. It's so loud.”

“Are you kidding me?” she says.

“No. It's terrible, like he's in the same room with me, which you have to admit if you've ever seen him, it's a scary thought. But I don't want to go up there and tell him I can hear that, you know.”

“Yeah, it's awkward, or something.”

“You're telling me. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if you
could hear him straight through to your apartment.”

“Hours and hours and hours?” she says.

“At least. And talking to the screen.
Oh baby, oh yeah baby.
It's enough to, I tell you. Freaking pathetic. I've heard him—and you know he's the only one up there—going
Rock with me. Rock with me. Suckle, suckle…
”

“I have in fact. Well, talk about embarrassing. I thought that was you.” Her skin turns the exact shade of her hair and freckles, causing her freckles to temporarily disappear.

“Oh, no. No! You should—you can come up some time and listen. I mean just to prove it.”

She immediately gets all apologetic. Her skin color deepens and deepens until it begins to brown. The shade of her skin overtakes the freckles and they resurface. She checks him out, seems to see him in a new light. She leans in, as if they're chuckling a secret. The dog rubs its butt against his boot.

“Do you smell hot sauce?” she asks.

 

There is an immediate, marked transformation in the way women with dogs around the complex relate to Sam. When he leaves that afternoon to pick up Jeremy, a blonde with a Newfoundland the size of a Yugo, a dog which she'd just yesterday allowed to plant both its front paws on his chest as he backed into a corner, waves hello at him, and when the Yugo goes for his hands, she jerks it back. “He's nothing,” she says, “an absolute vagina monologue.”

So Sam is as upbeat as a guy with a foreign body in him can be until they cruise around town checking their flyers. They discover all of them—at the gas stations, the COTA stops, the dump, the post office, fish camp, the industrial parks, in the Port-O-Lets at construction sites,
Skyline Chili, Payless Shoes, the comic book store—covered up with Two Men And A Truck flyers. They append their flyers with super sticky double-sided tape, which ruins the Brotherman's flyers underneath.