Prologue
“For what it’s worth, I don’t think that you are a complete failure,” she said laughing sarcastically at him as she took a loud sip from her coffee.
“Well look at you, you’ve gotten far more clever since the last time I saw you,” he said rudely.
“Hey,” she said seriously, as she placed the coffee cup down firmly upon the table, “you don’t know how good you are at being an asshole. Back in the day you at least had some moments when you were agreeable.”
“Agreeable is boring now, useless,” he said crossly. His face twisted and contorted into an expression of irritation, and resentment. “You know now that I’ve thought about it all these years, I’ve realized what a bitch you are.”
He picked up her coffee and took a large swig. Before he could put it down, she smacked it out of his hands. Stains of brown liquid flooded the restaurant. A man’s pants at a nearby table were affected more than the rest. He rose to his feet, dabbing them with napkins and cursing loudly.
She looked down at her ex-boyfriend, steam virtually releasing from her ears. “I don’t annoy you, I’m not a pain in your ass! You’ve got your head up there deep enough to know. It’s just you, you are a pathetic loser in a winner’s world. And you can’t stand them for what they are. That’s your shit, your issue, so don’t take yourself and the world out on me!” She sat there in silence staring down at him, fuming.
He sighed deeply. “You’re right, I am loser, a big fucking one at that. So, the fact that you keep coming back into my life, the fact that you have this boyfriend you love but you couldn’t stop playing with your hair and flirting with me earlier, what does that make you? It makes you an attention hungry slut. Not so high and mighty now are we?”
She slapped him in the face as hard as she could, clipping his nose, and stormed out of the diner. He wiped his hand across his nose to keep the blood from dripping on the table. He rolled up some ripped pieces of a napkin and plugged his nose. He pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his coat pocket, put the last one in his mouth, and lit it. He was two or three puffs in when the diner manager enlisted the aid of some agitated-coffee covered customers to remove him. They knocked the cigarette out of his mouth, pulled him out of the booth, and escorted him toward the door. The man with the badly stained khaki’s punched him in the gut, and once more in the face for good measure. They tossed him through the doors. He landed clumsily on his right arm and felt a pop in his wrist. They laughed as they returned to their seats.
He could hear all of them in there, cheering for the Neanderthals that had showed him the door. He pushed himself off of the ground with his left hand. He stood there, wrapping his right arm with his jacket in the fashion of a sling. He took one last look into the diner, and then walked down the road to the motel. He put the tarnished key in the door to his room, went inside and closed the door.
He opened a cheap notebook that the motel had provided as he sat there at that cheap desk, he could hear the couple next door giving it to each other quite loudly, it was very distracting, unpleasant, and a little comical. He grabbed a pen out of the drawer and stared at it, the logo on the side read The Marks Motel, where it’s always a pleasure. The last part seemed fitting with the noises he was hearing next door. He brushed his last ten bucks out of the way and placed the notebook on the table. He scribbled a little bit on the corner of the page to get the ink going in the pen.
I wasn’t always this way, this bad, and things weren’t always like this. But, it’s been a long life, and I’m only twenty-two. Twenty two years, a lot of shit can kill you in all that time, if you manage to survive it, you’ll feel as if you’ve made it, you’ll survive the rest and be one of the gods. If it kills you well, you’re dead, who cares. But I’ve dead for a while now, yet I’m still walking around. And, I’m still asking myself how that’s possible. A better question would be: Why the fuck am I writing this?
