WYSIWYG TALENT SHOW

I read this at WYSIWYG TALENT SHOW

Bowery Poetry Club

308 Bowery
WED | Nov 16th | 8:00PM

Five years ago, my ex-girlfriend’s father generously gave us a seven day ski vacation at the Snowshoe Resort in West Virginia for Christmas. He paid for the hotel, lift tickets, and the snowboard rental. All we had to pay for was transportation and food. This was fantastic; unfortunately I grew up in Texas and didn’t have any ski gear. So I went down to Sports Authority to see what I could buy with my limited funds. Since it was a December 26th, I had spent most of my money on presents. I only had about a hundred fifty bucks to spend. Hat—$15, gloves—$30, goggles—$30, thermals—$20, ski pants—$50…fuck! That only left five dollars for a winter coat. I was born in Daytona Beach and raised in San Antonio and had zero body fat. They could have used my legs as doubles in the movie Warm Springs about FDR’s battle with polio. My chances for survival looked bleak. I needed a coat. Fortunately, the sales clerk was a guy named Ron, a snowboarder/surfer burn-out who hated his job. He suggested that I pick any jacket out and just return it for a refund when I get back. I told him that I would feel weird abusing their return policy and would hate for anyone to question my integrity.

Ron said, “Fuck them, they only pay me six dollars an hour. Do it for me.”

He said it with such eloquence and conviction that it was difficult to say, “No.”

Since the ski season had already begun, the selection was sparse. Especially, since I needed a Size XL-T, the O negative in the winter coat world.

We finally found a bright, canary yellow Columbia® jacket. The sales tag priced it at three hundred dollars or two hundred ninety-five dollars over my budget.

Ron smiled and said, “It looks a little faggy, but it’ll keep you warm.”

“Thanks, you sure it won’t be a problem”

“No, man. People do it all the time. Shit, one dude brought back socks.”

“Okay, I’ll see you in a week.”

Since I never snowboarded before, it was extremely difficult to keep the jacket off the ground. I would have to estimate that in the first 48 hours, I was on the on my back for 93% of the time. Not to mention, my biological cooling system responds to cardiovascular activities by activating by sweat glands. Over a course of five days, my taxi yellow coat absorbed the equivalent of a forty ounce bottle of Old English 800®.

To make matters worse, I felt like I had joined a gang. Not like The Outlaws, the Bloods, or the Crips. Nor like Danny Zuco’s The Thunderbirds or The Sharks from West Side Story. My yellow Columbia® jacket “gang” consisted of used car salesmen, well-funded NASCAR fans, and un-hip middle-aged men called The Douchebags.

My cousin Todd called me and asked me to cut my vacation short because our family pawn shop was being swamped with post-Christmas customers. Including me, we only had four people running the store, so I agreed to drive back to Virginia Beach. He was worried because of an incoming blizzard the next day that would prolong my return.

My girlfriend and her family tried to dissuade me from leaving in the middle of the night.
I didn’t want to get snowed in the next morning, so I loaded up my girlfriend’s 1990 Jeep Cherokee and began my treacherous descent down the winding mountain road. When I was a quarter of the way down, I started to see small flurries. In a matter of minutes, I was blinded by a cyclone of ice.

I gripped the steering wheel with my left hand and down shifted to second gear with my right. In tense situations, I had a bad habit of licking my lips to soothe my nerves. When I was a kid my nickname was “Hot Lips” because my adolescent anxieties chapped my lips. This moment redefined the word, tense. My brain responded by sliding my tongue from the 9 o’clock position with the intention of sliding to the 3 o’clock position in one fluid motion. However, when my tongue reached high noon, directly underneath my nose, it slithered back inside my mouth without warning because of an unexpected salty flavor. It tasted brackish and metallic. I looked into the mirror and was frightened by my gruesome reflection.

The change in elevation had turned my nose into a faucet of blood. I tried to look around for a napkin or towel. I had to improvise with a Wendy’s® bag and a grocery receipt. They both proved to be non-absorbent and rendered them useless. I was concentrating so hard on stopping the salty, crimson cascade that I forgot I was still driving in a blizzard. I suddenly noticed a Suburban 4×4 up ahead spinning out of control, engulfed by an invisible tornado. It finally swirled to stop on the side of the road. Fortunately, no one got hurt—shaken not slain.

I would have stopped but it would have been more dangerous to slam on the brakes, so I had to selfishly pass them by. Sorry. Darwin’s Theory is that stronger species descend by modification. Future Man is being modified by apathy, emasculation, and self-interest. Anthropologist in the year 3030 A.D. will discover that I was the link between Homo Sapien and Homo Cowardus.

My salvation came when a general store appeared in the distance. I pulled into a parking space, jumped out of my car, took off my stained jacket, laid it on the hood, and went to the entrance. To my misfortune, the door was locked and had a hand-scrawled sign on the door that stated, “I’ll Be Back Tomorrow”. I found a bottle of water in the Jeep and began pouring it on the jacket and started to scrub it with my hat. I felt like Lady MacBeth, frantically trying to remove the dreaded spots.

My coat started to illuminate as if a ray of holy light was cast down by the heavens above. Being agnostic, I was taken aback by this and didn’t know how to interpret this “miracle”. Then entire Jeep lit up, my shadow grew larger on the hood, I turned around to be blinded by retina-roasting halogen lights from the Suburban 4×4 that I had left stranded. Once they parked, I rushed over to their tinted passenger side window. Someone had triggered the automatic window lever and it slowly slid down to reveal a family of four from Pennsylvania.

As I was about to ask for a towel or more water, the window went up twice as fast as had came down. The driver rammed the gear selector in reverse, slammed his foot on the accelerator, and the ass-end of the Suburban exploded way from the parking lot. They had successfully managed a 180° turn. Now perpendicular to the road, the driver cranked the wheel to the right and sped down the hill like he possessed by a suicide bomber with his eyes glazed over with visions of forty virgins and the embrace of Allah.

I didn’t understand what happened. Yes, I can understand there animosity for me for not helping them in their time of need, but that was an extremely bizarre response to witness.
What had I done to invoke such a shocking reaction? Confused, I went back to my pain-staking, hand-numbing task of cleaning my three hundred dollar “leased” jacket. Somehow I managed to get the blood out. After that episode, the rest of the descent down the mountain seemed like whimsical stroll on the beach.

Once back in Virginia Beach, I had the jacket professionally dry cleaned and went to the customer service counter of Sports Authority. I sheepishly told the clerk that I didn’t like the jacket and wanted a refund. She seemed unconvinced and stared at me with a sneered look of skepticism like I had just told her I was Elvis. I bit my lip, casually looked away, did a little drum tap on the counter, looked at my watch, looked at their clock on the wall, clicked my tongue on the top of my mouth, nodded my head, looked at the ceiling…and she still just stood there staring at my waiting for me to break.

Fuck that, I hated that jacket. It was tense for a few minutes, but the line started to grow, so she succumbed and began the refund process.

Then Ron walked by and said, “Hey, dude! Glad you made it back! Heard there’s been some crazy serial killer cutting people up and tying them to ski lifts.”

“What are you talking about?”, I asked.

“You know, like Jeffrey Dahmer and shit…he’s been doing for a month now. I didn’t want to scare you before you went up.”

“Thanks.”

“Oh yeah, good thing you returned that jacket…the news is saying that the police are looking for a guy in a yellow jacket.”

It all made sense. Each event in the space-time continuum is multi-faceted. It glistens differently depending on which angle you view it. The family of four from Pennsylvania freaked the fuck out, because a serial killer with a yellow jacket, blood soaked goatee was about to kill them.

Life is all about perspective.