Just Another Day in the Life

            by Emma Bloom

 

            Let’s begin.  I was born a poor black boy.  In my first year of life, I turned white.  See, Pa worked down the lane at the bleach factory and often brought his work home with him.  I was a troubled toddler taken advantage of by my big sister Lea.  She didn’t want me to have any good things in my life. I recall one cool autumn afternoon when she told me to climb a tree, knowing I couldn’t get down by myself. When I reached the top as king of the pines, proudly looking down on my kingdom of subjects, I saw Lea running back home in snickers. Just another day in the life. I was only three years old. I thank Lea now, for I’m glad she was such a part of my life; an awful part, but a part nonetheless.

Another part was the Good Lord Jesus.  I was quite fond of him in my youth.  We used to talk late into the night, head to head in our sleeping bags.  He could turn water into s’mores.  Unfortunately, this was a favorite trick of his when I was dehydrated after my weekly Little League games. But no fear, after bingo Grams would scoot down to the dugout to give me a sip of prune juice.  Sometimes I had to wait hours (she was in a walker and a bit of a bingo addict (she had a lot of trouble walking away from the game)) but still she always came.  But my aging grandfather didn’t those days, and I could tell it affected her mood.  “Dean!” she would scream from the living room, “Get your ass down to the drugstore and pick up Gramps’ prescription!”  I hated those days, when the pimply sixteen year old behind the counter would snicker as I asked for a new bottle of Viagra.  Little did he know that I had plans with that bottle of Viagra and his

pimply face.  One full-mooned night, Kitty, the one-eared kitten meowed three times and I knew it was time to put my plans into action.  After putting out a saucer of cat-breastmilk, I got on my super-hero outfit and slid down the pole in my closet.  Landing in my matmobile, (the floor and ceilings were covered in those yoga pad things in case of crashes) I let out my signature war call: JSKLDFJKLDJLJF (it’s not easily transcribed).  Zipping through the sky, because my matmobile could in fact fly, I brewed a cup of raspberry-apple-black tea in the onboard kettle.  Although I know that tea is only leaves in hot water and shouldn’t be a purchasable commodity, I drink it upon occasion for the sake of my antioxidants.  But I also realise, in an English way, that tea is delicious.

            Time for a new paragraph.  Ah yes, I’ve forgotten to include what I’m a super-hero of: Yo-Yos.  And mats, obviously. Obviously.  So anyway, I stashed the Viagra in the glove compartment, along with my tool belt and cat (she had finished her supper in the time that I was explaining my feelings about tea). Kitty posed as my sidekick, but only as a figure of publicity, for Yo-Yo Ma(n) works alone and alone only.

            As I hit the end of my speedometer in the sky, I saw that I had blasted past unsuspecting Frankie's apartment. "Oh shit," Kitty exclaimed, "hit a u-turn, fool!" So I flipped a quick bitch and I was on my way. Soon, I landed next to a gnome on Frankie's front lawn and disembarked. I left Kitty in the glove compartment for later, just in case. Creeping up to the front door, I slipped

my Sailor Moon mask over my non-pimply face. Then with an unexplained pizza box in-hand, I rang the doorbell. (Mysterious objects often appear in my possession when I'm not looking; I was arrested for "shoplifting" a few times in my younger years.) A gentle looking old woman answered the door, and with a sweet sounding voice inquired, "What's the trouble young man?"

 

            "Well," I responded, "The trouble is a young man. A young man by the name of Frankie."

            The weekday-knitter snapped back, "My, that's my grandson! Is everything alright?"

            "No. No, it is not," I replied, but determined to say nothing more. She knew too much already, so I administered a tranquilizing dart to the upper-left side of her neck.

            I stepped, quiet as a mouse, through the doorway over her listless body, which had somehow fallen in the shape of Nemo, from Finding Nemo, my favorite movie.  I stopped for a moment to admire it, in its fish-like beauty, then proceeded towards Frankie’s bedroom.  (I knew where it was because, as much as I hate to admit it, we were childhood playmates.  Our grandmothers were friends and we had to spend time together while they gossiped about Paul Newman and cream of wheat.)  Gripping the Viagra in hand, I swung open the door and pranced towards his sleeping figure.

            Quick to recognize him as a man of style, I dove toward his closet.  I had a detour to make.  I grabbed a green t-shirt that read, “Everybody loves an Irish girl.”  And burned it, because a man of style would never wear that.  For myself I took a Bape, and then throwing off my Sailor Moon mask, I zipped it up over my face.  In this way, Frankie would be confused, and think it was himself who was attacking him.  Little did I know, even after our childhood endeavors, Frankie in fact had a twin brother, Hankie, who dressed exactly like him.  In fact, this wasn’t Frankie’s room at all; I had taken a wrong turn.  And being swathed in the brothers’ own attire, I was mistaken by Hankie for Frankie.  Hankie leaped up, exposing his fierce teeth.  Legend has it he sharpened them daily with the rocks in his pen in the backyard.  Hankie was a vampire in training, I had stubbornly forgotten; Frankie was a vampire hunter in training.  Well the point (haha) is, I knew I was in for a harsh reality bite if I didn’t defend myself.  But then recognizing my face, he exclaimed, “Hey, you’re not Frankie!”  My realization that my Bape had simply fallen off in all the commotion was followed by an even bigger epiphany: “Hey! Neither are you!” I responded.  Hankie sat up calmly in bed, “Well fortunately for you, I already ate today!”  Then, promptly, he turned into a bat and flew out the open window.

            Back to square one, I thought to myself as I left an offering of blood from an open wound and slithered back into the hallway in pursuit of Frankie’s bedroom.  (I’d been practicing my slithering recently in hopes of learning to better relate to my snake; our relationship had been rocky as of late.)  I retraced my steps and found I had bypassed a blue door, which I dumbfoundedly opened, as all the others were off-white.  Well, I realized, Frankie was off-hisrocket so it made sense for his door to be colored differently.  I opened the door and stepped in, but was surprised when my foot fell past where the floor was supposed to be and onto a stair.  I  had forgotten (my chronic amnesia seemed particularly bad tonight) that Frankie slept in the basement, also his father’s laboratory.  Hankie had been born in a test tube here, cloned from his brother’s stem cells, but with a few genetic mutations engineered in here and there.  One of these mutations was vampiric, and out of jealousy, his brother hated and vowed to kill him from the moment(s) of their birth.  Unfortunately for Frankie, another of these aberrations was invincibility.  Hence he slept in his father’s lab in hopes of finding a “cure” for invincibility amongst his dreams.  Too bad the lab table atop which he spent his restless nights was hard and uncomfortable and thus not conducive to dreams of any type. This was also too bad for me, because it rendered Frankie an insomniac. 

However I knew none of this at the time, so I strode down the stairs smug as Kitty when she is being incredibly smug.  Smug as anything that is being incredibly smug, really.  I was greeted by a murky room, with all sorts of scientific contraptions that I probably would know the names and functions of had I paid better attention in my science classes.  Particularly in AP biology: I realize now that Mr. Wolkenfeld could have taught me all I’ll ever need to know in life.  But sadly I had that class in the morning, and everyone knows that mornings are reserved for sleeping.  So instead I stood in the doorway, staring blankly at the objects surrounding me and wondering how I would be able to describe the laboratory in this story without the requisite(?) vocabulary.  Ahead of me, the back of a black leather, sinister-looking armchair spun around to reveal the tall, lanky figure of Frankie.  “We meet again.”

            “Yeah,” I said, then literally kicked myself (with my steel-toed boot (yeah, I’m hardcore)) for lacking a wittier comeback.  In all my fantasies of this moment, I had been the one to initiate the conversation.

            “Well,” he said.  “How are you these days?  And what brings you to my little corner of the world?”

            Damn, this guy was good.  “I just came to see you, you know, I wanted to see how you’ve been lately, how the wife and kids are, still got that great job?  AND TO GIVE YOU THIS!” and with that I leapt across the room, Viagra in hand.  But suddenly I stopped, midair, for I realized I had climaxed prematurely with my Viagra plot.  “Actually, never mind; do you wanna go get some coffee and catch up?” 

            “Starbucks?”

            “Peets?” I said at the same instant.  We locked eyes.

            “I like my grande mocha frappachinos,” he growled.  I glared for another moment before he shrugged his shoulders.  Victory.  It struck me that Frankie’s allegiance to Starbucks further solidified him in my mind as nothing more than a tool.  A Phillips-head to be exact.  (Shop was in the afternoon; I always paid attention).  As we got into Frankie’s new hybrid, he asked me a very peculiar question.  “So how did you ever get back from that Safari anyways?  I mean, didn’t you get lost in the jungle for four months?” 

I thought for a minute: no jungles popped out of my memories, but as I mentioned, my amnesia had been acting up that evening.  Perhaps this mysterious trip had even been where I had developed my condition.  In any case, I’m never one to let a conversation drop.  “Well you see,” I said.  “There was this one particularly friendly rhino and he was friendly particularly because he let me eat him, prolonging my survival until rescue came, in the form of a convoy of Texan tourists, all wearing matching Panama hats with a picture of their state printed across them.  Not wanting to seem unwelcoming, upon first sight of them I quickly hopped on top of the half eaten rhino carcass in a rodeo fashion.”

“That’s commendable,” Frankie said.  I had forgotten he was there.

“Mhmm.  I was awarded a medal by the CAN: the Collective African Nations.  They commemorated my bravery and willingness to survive.  I was also given two free flights on Air Angola.” 

   Frankie parked then thankfully, for I was running out of things to say and also lying makes me feel guilty.  Although for all I know the entire story might have been true, since you know, my amnesia.  We entered a snobby, upscale coffee shop that admittedly had the best coffee in town and took a seat, me placing the Viagra on the table as an intimidation tactic.  That’s when I remembered we had to walk up to the counter to order our coffee, but by this time it was too late.  I knew I would look like an utter dork standing up from my chair immediately after I had so suavely turned it around and swung my legs over so I was straddling the back, cowboy-style.  It was a trick I’d learned from the Texans.  Oh wait, that hadn’t really happened.  I sat there, pondering this quandary and feeling awkward about the whole sit down-stand up dilemma and just not knowing what to do in general.  Fortunately this place really had all the bells and whistles, because a little robot on wheels came over to the table to take our orders.  The future is now.

“Can – I – take – your – order – please?” the robot spewed out, pivoting back and forth so as to face both Frankie and myself.  Once every few pivots he rotated to face the Viagra, unable to quite decide whether or not it was a customer.

“I’ll have a grande mocha frappachino,” said Frankie.  The robot just stared at him blankly. 

“Does not compute,” it said presently.  After taking our orders, the robot turned to the Viagra.  It had finally decided to treat it as a person.  The customer is always right, after all, it must have figured, and it can be bottle shaped if it so wishes. I guess humanity was still in the early stages of artificial intelligence.  And artificial sweetener.  Peets’ coffee is always so gross if you don’t put in the real stuff.

 “What about you, Sir?” the robot asked.  “You look in need of a stiff drink.”

But then wonder of wonders, the bottle answered him!  “A drink would be lovely,” it said.  “It’s been a very long night.”