Short Story: Slow Cooking

My friend Jared mentioned to me, laughing and in some defensive spirit about my character, that he talked me up to a mutual acquaintance of ours. I just happened to find her very attractive so he played the role of the good friend that tried talking me up, which is an exercise in futility. There is very little good to talk about but I’m biased. He said that he told her:

“Yeah he may be an ass but he will take good care of you.” And honestly it surprised me how confident he was in that assertion.

Did I just read that....yeah...you did just read that.

When I moved down to Atlanta I knew that coming down here would be exhausting. I set out to build my home down here. A place of refuge and stability that I had growing up and then some. I knew it would be hard work but I didn’t know how exhausting it would be. I wake up everyday for work at 2:45am with Sundays being an exception. I wake up at 5:55am for work. Sundays, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, I work mornings and nights. Mondays and Wednesdays and Fridays are days I have class. Mondays I run after class ends at 7:00pm to work at 8:30pm, and Atlanta traffic is set up to where I’m getting to work with five minutes to spare, even though I’m only a few exits away. Wednesdays and Fridays are slightly easier but not by much. It’s work, school, and maybe sleep. Sleep ends up being in the work break room. A dimly lit room with one  bright florescent light that bleeds through your eyelids, a television that’s always set to ESPN to let my coworkers dream their high school athlete dreams of playing. I don’t have the heart to say anything insulting about that to them. I never understood watching football or basketball that avidly. I don’t want to discuss anything like sports at 12:30am after loading planes. I want my body to stop hurting at that time.

My joints ache and I routinely feel my bones losing cartilage. My feet are crushed against the steel tips of my boots and my sweat sits within my clothing like rain on a car’s windshield. My elbows shred inside my skin and my fingers ache coldly, regularly bending and inappropriately contorting and hitting machinery. Never breaking or dislocating but never sitting comfortably either. I’m young enough to recover from this kind of physical beating but I know in my forties I’m going to be vacuuming enough Tylenol and Advil to kill a bear. I woke up one morning on the break room couch, two hours of crap sleep in my system, and I could feel my lower body fricasseeing in my clothing. A fever. Oh boy. Just the thing everyone wants when they wake up from what really was a nap at work on a stiff couch. I woke up to my body slow cooking like a well seasoned rotisserie chicken in my pants and I was hemmoraghing sweat. The back of my skull pulsed and throbbed like Stravinsky’s orchestra the night that his Rite of Spring premiered and I was boiling.

I didn’t go home. That would’ve been too easy and too smart of me to do. I got up, put my work boots back on, and felt every fissure and crack and crevice in my body fill with lava. I was on fire and my blood could probably boil a tea bag. I was cooking inside my own skin. I run my hands down my face slowly, stretching out the forming wrinkles and newly grayed hairs that stood as a testament to time bitching at my body. A testament to stress and my capitalist worship. I walk into the ramp office and lay down there against the long desks that overlook the ramp and the taxiway. Five planes in, two planes out. Three and a half hours of this and I didn’t want to die. There isn’t a difference between being stubborn and being stupid to me. I mixed those two lines together back in high school. It was at this point that I could feel my sweat velcroing my skin to my clothing. I could walk out right now and go home and still get paid for doing it. I’d get written up and ruin any potential of having a good reputation here when I leave but I would be okay with it, all I had to say is that I had gotten sick. Yet I’m stubborn.

I can’t sleep with my upper body slumped against the counter like that so I just keep my head down. It stopped the kick drum playing triplets on the back of my head. I look up and see against the computer monitor stand is a little white package. I reach out for it and my arm feels like pure steel. Heat and pressure pushing against my elbows and phalanges as I try to use them at least one more time before I willingly die from what could be classified as a low boil going on in my work pants. Extra Strength Pain Relief. That’s what was lying against the small space in the computer monitor. I looked at it for at least two second before I felt, not heard, a voice, in the sound of the silence that was in my head, say “You have to keep going”. I felt tears wanting to form. I couldn’t explain to you how I felt cared for in that moment but I did. Like my mom was looking over me and could hear her son’s blood boiling in his veins as he wanted to die from this new sickness. You really have to be a special breed of dumb to continue like this.