salvo

She had the kind of looks that you hide behind. He never had the time. She wrote his phone number in lipstick on the driver’s side window of her dad’s Buick. He told her, “When I get you back to my place, I’m going to make a mess out of your hair.” His hotplate was heating up some stew just for two. He should’ve told her that he needed her, but instead he just said, “Let’s have a beer.” After a few more she was wishing that her car weren’t so far away, but when he held her it was always that time of year to be leaving. Soon it was back to, “I wish I would’ve stayed here tomorrow. I wish I weren’t still here yesterday.” Then the expenses started piling up, the movers arrived before they were expected, and she went the way of silent shorts and cassette tapes. He resuscitated his beat-up tuba from the attic and hefted it out to the porch where he started playing a sloppy and somber rendition of The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down. It rained and rained. That’s all it ever seemed to do for a while. He got high on oven cleaner. He spent a whole night vomiting. He drank whisky with ice, and then ran out of ice, so he bought more whisky. He smoked cigarettes until his teeth and fingers showed it, until his face was sallow and gaunt and leathery with wear. He ran through his entire record collection as loud as his stereo could take. The neighbors complained and complained. The cops came by and told him to keep it down. He told them he would. Food didn’t taste right. He stopped eating. It became a long while since he’d let anyone touch him. His skin prickled and itched and burned. The shower water was always either too hot or too cold. He stopped showering. He stopped shaving. He stopped caring about what it meant to be himself. He sold his car for a box of Christmas tree ornaments. He kept all the drapes closed. He drank until he passed out, and when he woke he started up with whatever was left in the bottle, again. Numb and alone, he grew anxious of leaving his house, of even crossing the street or taking in the mail. The oaks and maples lining the block lost their leaves, their gnarled branches poking through gray evenings like crippled and starved fingers under the streetlights’ globs of dull orange that saddled into sad arcs wending and scuffling along the pavement’s shoddy strip. Everything was bare and desolate, and he wanted to hear chipped harmonicas and beer-drunk brass bands and the berated crunch and crash of stepped-on cymbals and…