“I’m going to run you over!“ Paulette screams, tears launching out of her eyes. Her car is jerking forward, inching toward me down the drive way. ‘The truth will set you free‘, last nights words echo, the truth will also get you ran over by a car I think as I hold my arms out trying to reason with the girl;
‘Vehicular manslaughter baby, you want that on your record? Huh? You think Brown takes students with vehicular manslaughter on their record? I don’t.’
“I’m going to kill you!” Her voice is piercing and shrill. A howl of a woman wronged. “Move!”
I’m scared, not of her possibly killing me, at least if I’m dead I’ll be able to sleep peacefully with her boar like snoring, maybe catch up on ‘Weeds‘, that is if hell gets digital cable. But I am scared that all this yelling will attract the attention of her mother, or even worse her brother Steven. Steven is a gigantic man and looks like he’s carved of stone. He played football at ASU and if he was born a few thousand years ago I’m sure he’d be the chief in a cannibal tribe.
“Babe, please relax. We need to talk about this.” I stammer. I’m looking through the car window, making sure never too break eye contact, I figure it would be harder for her run me over while looking directly in my eyes. I don’t blink, its like a high stakes staring contest. One twitch of the eye lid, she’ll put the pedal to metal and then I’ll be a fucking grease spot on her mother’s drive way. I’d never seen her eyes like this, all puffy and flaming pink. They seemed to be the only part of her that doesn’t want to flatten me.
“I love you babe, but I aint perfect alright? I‘m sorry.” I’m pleading, inching my way to the driver side door so that maybe I can open it and pull her out. The engine revs hard. Like the roar of a jungle beast and I stop in my tracks.
“I’m pretty sure I just pissed myself.” I say in a weighted voice. And as a little pee-pee trickles down my leg I realize this is exactly what I deserve. I’m a dog, a drooling hound. And she’s an inch away from perfect ( it’s the snoring see, that keeps her from being perfect, like a feral, asthmatic badger) . She invited me to her family’s Thanksgiving celebration at their home in southern Illinois, 5 hours from my apartment in Chicago. We spent the night in the guest room, and we were suppose to be half way back by now. But I got drunk and all that pressure of being engaged that I had been ignoring hit me like a brick in the spine. I told her things she could of gone her entire life without knowing, I meant well and I was only being honest, I’m not a bad person, I swear It’s just sometimes I get scared and would much rather run away. It’s defense mechanism, I’m perennially a nervous little boy who stutters and fantasizes about the love affairs of anime characters. I think she knew that, And that was probably the reason she hadn’t turn me in to a pancake. “Why couldn’t you have told me Jason? You could of told me you didn’t want things to go this far. You could have been mature and considerate and a fucking adult and told me you wanted time to think!” She’s screaming again, it’s about 12 in the afternoon and I’m certain her family can hear us from inside. I imagine that behemoth Steve chomping at the bit to come outside. I imagine him ripping my fingers off and putting them up my butt (or his own butt, if he‘s into that type of thing.). Paulette’s mother is probably holding him back, she likes me. I cringe as I think about her mom and the how this one time she tied my shoes for me, it was a heavy gesture. She trusted me, their whole family did.
“Because I don’t want time apart, I love being with you its just this shit is scary babe. Its heavy, really heavy. And I..I don’t know. I screwed up, but I think we can fix this.” My voice cracks a little as I think about losing Paulette. Her face softens. Steven rushes out with a hammer and says he’ll crush my skull. I take off.
(photo by John Kemp)
