Sad Jack at the Playground
Cy Hill
It was open mike Comedy Night at The Lone Wolf Tavern. The audience consisted of the five queued comedians’ scant entourages, maybe ten regulars who happened to be there, a couple of passed out drunks (one snoring), and Jack. The tavern was desperate for business, and the open Comedy mike was one of many spit-balled ploys to generate revenue. Any revenue.
The first comic wore a tuxedo and a big smile before the microphone. “Rubber baby buggy bumpers.” He said it happily. Triumphantly. And then, he said it again. “Rubber baby buggy bumpers!”
Jack, a minor cog in the Seattle insurance industry, seated alone, his first time in The Lone Wolf, assumed rubber bumpers would be installed on a baby buggy to protect a child from injury. Apparently, there were mothers considered unsafe baby buggy drivers. Or, perhaps it concerned acts of God vis a vis a baby buggy, its occupant, or its driver. Jack wondered whether there were actuarial tables considering the effect rubber bumpers would have on baby buggy safety.
“Rubber baby buggy bumpers!” the comedian grinned, proudly puffing out his tuxedoed chest and tugging at either end of this bow tie.
The leading comedian of their clique had challenged him to open his act with the tongue twister. The other comedians and their crews laughed uproariously. What Gloria, a regular patron of The Wolf noted was that they were laughing at him. Not with him. And he didn’t get it. He was their chump, their bitch. And he grinned. How much had he laid out to rent that tux to impress this sorry collection of want-to-be jokesters?
Gloria also noted Jack in the next booth; a man she had never seen before, in his early thirties like her, and like her wearing a black turtleneck. There was something about him; something a bit off. Unique characters were Gloria’s meat. She watched him through the next three comedians’ bits. He did not laugh at any of them either, but he did not look like anything could make him laugh; not seeing the world through those sad eyes.
“Heh,” she called to him during the short break before the last comedian came on. “Somebody run over your dog?”
It took Jack a moment to realize she was speaking to him. “I do not own a dog.”
“Why not?”
“It would die.”
“You get another one.”
“If I got another, it would die, too. I would outlive all but the last one. Then, what happens to that dog?”
Thus far, this guy might be unlike anyone Gloria had ever met, so what the heck, she picked up her pitcher of beer and joined him in his booth.
She smelled cologne. She could not remember the last time she smelled cologne on a man in The Wolf. “You ever been in here before?”
“No.”
“Why are you here?”
“I saw the flier, about the comedy.”
“You like comedy?”
“I don’t understand it.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know why I laugh when I do. Have you been here before?”
“Since I was fifteen. My name is Gloria. I heard Jimi Hendrix play acoustic guitar, right here in this booth.”
Jack wondered if even then the booth smelled of dead cigars and something that could be mold.
The last comedian had already started his act and noticed no one but his sycophants were listening to him. He lashed out.
“Heh, you back there! Girly. Yeah, you, back there in the booth. I’m working up here, Missy.”
“Is that what you call it? Now, you said ‘laboring’, I would have bought that. Go down to the Pike Street Market, there’s a thirteen-year-old girl, works with a chihuahua. You’ll learn something.”
“I can’t believe I’m getting heckled in this – place,” the comedian complained to Boom Boom, the barkeep-owner behind the bar.
“You’re heckling me,” Gloria said. “You addressed me; I didn’t address you. And this place is The Lone Wolf Tavern, you tourist. Show some respect.“
“Let him finish his set,” Boom Boom pleaded. This comedy night was his idea and he had high hopes for it.
“I am finished,” the comedian concluded, knocking over the microphone and stand. It squealed on the floor until Boom Boom turned it off as the comedy claque angrily grabbed their accoutrements.
Gloria stood, squawked like a chicken, and bunched her arms up like wings. “I dare you to make me laugh.”
“And we may not be coming back,” their leader announced.
Gloria slowly and loudly applauded. And whistled. After they all filed out, she called, “Did I just cost you money, Boom Boom?”
“No, they were drinking at cost. I was hoping they would bring in more traffic.”
“You gave them a discount? We should get the discount for having to listen to that shit.”
The rest of the regulars, scattered around the bar, figured it was worth a shot, so they chimed in their agreement.
“Ah, shut up,” Boom Boom reverberated. He hoped the upcoming open mike Poetry night would go better.
Gloria cut to the chase with Jack. “I am innately curious. I substitute teach – sometimes -- work part-time at my sister’s travel agency – sometimes -- and I drink too much. I spend an occasional night in jail and I won’t be sleeping with you tonight. Oh. And I like to gamble.”
“Okay,” was Jack’s tentative answer.
“Now,” she coaxed, patiently explaining how this worked, “you tell me something about yourself.”
“My name is Jack. I work in Insurance.”
Five seconds of silence.
“And?” she prodded. “You have to match what I gave you.”
“My wife and I moved out here from Cleveland for my promotion.”
“Where’s she?”
“She left me.”
Gloria shrugged. “No big deal, everyone in here’s been divorced at least once, except me, I know I can’t live with a man, and I don’t look good in white. What do you like?”
“Like?”
“What turns you on? When you lie alone in bed at night, what goes through your head?”
“Actuarial tables.”
She thought, “No wonder your wife left you,” and said, “I meant what do you do for fun?”
“Should I tell you the truth?”
Gloria was apprehensive. She liked meeting people with different slants on life, all kinds of people; had met them for years at The Lone Wolf. But what if this guy was simply a creep? “If I did not want the truth, I would not have asked the question.”
“I come to places like this. No one speaks to me, not usually. I come and go, and no one cares that I have been there, and I wonder if anyone notices my having been there. My presence. My life. And that is fine. Fine with me. I am anonymous in life. Like a number. Simply, an abstraction. I like it that way. It fits me.”
“Make it easy for me,” she said, unable to categorize this guy, but already hooked. And, wanting more alcohol, found a way to combine the two by filling her glass from his pitcher. “Are you a ‘the beer-glass is half empty’ or a ‘the beer-glass is half full’ kind of guy?”
“I’m a, ‘there are impurities in the beer’ kind of guy.”
“Impurities?”
“Bacteria, mold. Hopefully in small amounts, but they will always be there.”
Fascinating. “Go on. Tell me more.” What did he see out of those hooded eyes, buried in cavernous sockets?
What Jack saw was a moderately overweight aggressive woman who maintained moderate hygiene, needed to brush her hair, and dressed on the cheap. She probably suffered from wide mood swings. At the moment, she was up. The percentages were even that she could just as well be down. They were in a dark bar in a darker corner with cement floors and heavy wooden furnishings. Solid. Unbreakable (except for possible wood rot) as if prepared for sudden violent action. Everything about the place was utilitarian and he liked that. It was unassuming while assuming the worst.
“There is a sense of doom here that puts me at ease.”
“Are you always this depressed?”
“I am not depressed, I am consistent. I am particularly interested in life insurance. All is dying, all will die, all has to die. You like to gamble. ‘The Line’, in gambling terms, is the Actuarial Table. Insurance is a numbers game and statistics do not lie. I can’t lose with life insurance. It’s all a matter of odds, and Death is the House.”
He observed her, his eyes steady, awaiting her reaction. This was the point where every conversation ended with everyone with whom he was forthright. It either ended, or they launched into a defensive argument trying to convince themselves, rather than Jack, that he was wrong.
“Are you always like this?”
He nodded.
“Boom Boom!” she called. “We got us a keeper here, name of ‘Sad Jack’. Bring us another pitcher.” She said to Jack, “You’re buying. I wouldn’t say anything to Boom Boom about moss in his beer.”
Sad Jack was correct about Gloria’s mood swings. There were times when she could not stand to be near him. However, to his immense surprise, other tavern regulars also tolerated him being himself, and within the year he was a fixture, in a booth or on a stool, expressing his opinions, spending time with artists, construction workers, attorneys, teachers, and students from the nearby University of Washington. He played on the Tavern softball team. He was there during a failed robbery.
“Tell Clary about wedding cakes,” Michelangelo, a construction worker urged him one evening. Clary was a long-legged waitress at a pizza parlor who had just drunkenly – and foolishly – announced to Michelangelo that they would one day marry.
Sad Jack purchased 58% of the beer because he could afford it, but no more than that, because he did not want to create the impression that he could be taken advantage of. Michelangelo had caught on to this, was a much more capable drinker than Sad Jack, and laughingly matched his every order. Consequently, Sad Jack was uncharacteristically roaring drunk.
“Wedding cakes.” This was a sore subject for Sad Jack, summoning up an exchange with his ex-wife as she was leaving him: literally walking out the door. “I hate Wedding cakes.”
“I didn’t think you hated anything, Jack,” Michelangelo laughed.
“Nothing is one hundred per cent. The likelihood of anything being one hundred per cent – it’s – “ he held his thumb as close to his index finger as he could without them touching.
“And that’s where you and Wedding Cakes fit.”
“Right – “ he squinted -- “in there. All Wedding Cakes come with a percentage of rodent feces, insect parts, ground up maggots – “ he had told his wife that, on their wedding day. Six months later she left him and moved back to Cleveland specifically citing his comment about Wedding Cakes. Sad Jack looked at Clary. At her long legs. “Will you marry me?”
“No.”
“Then I guess there won’t be a Wedding Cake.”
He was too hung over the next day to go to work and had to call in sick. It was the first time that had ever happened to him. When he finally made it out of bed, he was hungry and still a little drunk. A bland meal at a small walk-in restaurant settled that, and he found himself with several hours of free time on an atypically beautiful, sunny Seattle day.
He located a bench at the nearby park and playground, overrun with mothers and strollers and baby buggies and children too young for school, and decided to take stock of himself, of his life. This was unusual as he was not prone to reflection. Even as he thought, he blamed the presence of yeast in his over consumption of beer for causing this chemical reaction in his brain.
The Actuarial Tables told him that if he did not marry, did not have children, he would most likely die younger than he otherwise would. A certain undefined percentage of himself wondered why that mattered.
“That is the percent of me that already embraces death,” he thought. “Of course, we are all dying. That is life, life is death. Life is the beginning and the end.” He murmured, “I am Sad Jack,” and squinted into the sun. All around him were the sounds and syllables of children and birds and young mothers, and they were a type of music. But not his music. Theirs was not his song.
A multi-colored ball rolled over against his foot. He looked down at it.
“Sorry about that,” a young mother pushing a baby buggy called, twenty feet distant. She was tall, thin, and blond; attractive, with scant makeup.
A little girl that matched her mother looked up at him. He picked up the ball and handed it to her.
“Say, ‘thank you’,” her mother instructed.
“Thank you,” she parroted.
“You are welcome,” Sad Jack said. Attention attracted, he continued to watch the little girl and her mother with the baby buggy, both dressed in sky blue skirts and white blouses. He wondered about their lives. Most probably the husband worked and provided, the wife cared for their offspring and maybe she worked, too, or would when the children were old enough. He hoped the husband had life insurance. The timing of his death was affected by his job, the kind of vehicle he drove, and how much he drove. And there was always that random factor, sometimes called “luck”, good and bad; or “Act of God”.
Somewhere, not too distant, he heard a crack; like a snapping branch. The air parted, sizzled as if rent; concussed his right ear. Something nicked the tip of his right shoulder. He looked at his jacket. The threads were parted, jagged.
A gagging, a choking before him – it was the mother. She clutched the baby buggy with both hands but there was a nick on her neck, as there was a nick on his jacket. She reached up, touched her wound as it erupted, a quizzical look of shock, wonderment -- and slowly she sunk to her knees as he caught her. Jack held her head in his lap, futilely trying to plug the hole with his fingers, and the women around him screamed. One of them scooped up the mother’s child, another grabbed the baby buggy, and took them apart. The mother looked up at Jack questioningly, what was happening, what had happened, and she bled out all over him, eyes still open, staring into his eyes until all was drained.
Someone had accidentally discharged their handgun while putting it into their vehicle’s glove compartment. What were the percentages of that happening? What were the percentages of that single bullet just kissing Jack’s shoulder? What were the percentages of it striking this young woman’s carotid artery?
“Sir.” A hand shook him. It was a Seattle First Responder. Beside him stood another. The hand shook him again. “Sir. Is this your wife?”
“I’ve never seen her before.”
There was the squawk of a radio, broken conversation, and at some point, they took the corpse from his lap. He struggled to his feet. His clothes were heavy and damp. His hands were caked red. He was painted, head to toe, with pointlessly clotting blood.
“Is there someone we can call for you?” one of the First Responders asked, seating him back upon the bench.
He supplied the first phone number that came to mind.
A policewoman took a statement from him, and then one of the First Responders returned.
“You are in shock, Sir. I want you to remain here. We will take you to a hospital.”
The hell they would. He waited until the uniforms were busy and then darted into the trees. From there, ignoring the focus of pedestrians and motorists, he made his way back to his apartment.
“Oh my God.” Gloria stood at the stairway he would have to ascend to get to his apartment.
“What are you doing here?”
“They called me, but when I went to the Park you weren’t there. Is that her blood?”
That struck him as an incredibly stupid question. Rather than answer it, he started up the stairs.
She stopped him at his door. “Give me the key.”
He did.
“You strip out here, then you go straight to the shower.”
He nodded.
It was her first time in his apartment and she was surprised at how tastefully it was decorated. He had a nice view. Obviously, Sad Jack did well in insurance. She sat on the couch and opened a coffee table book of Escher drawings.
He came out of the shower, still dripping water, and stood before her. She went into the bathroom, turned off the shower, found a bath towel, and dried him.
“Come on,” she took his hand. “Let’s find some clothes.”
She put him in a black turtleneck and jeans, and then sat him down upon the couch.
“Can I get you something?” she asked.
“Coffee. Black.”
It was the cleanest kitchen she had ever been in. What a stark contrast to hers with its sink full of dishes and cockroaches in every other shadow.
Music came on in the other room: Tom Waits’ Blue Valentine.
When it was finally brewed, she carried in two black coffees and set his before him on a coaster as he stared straight ahead. That was when she noticed his eyes. They were not – anything. They were blank.
“Jack,” she half whispered.
“Death chose her. It should have been me. Two orphaned children and a husband without a wife and I just take up space. Death gave me the horselaugh with that bringer of Life dying in my lap. I’m Death’s bitch.” He picked up his cup and drank. “This tastes good.”
She sat with him, listening to music as he remotely queued it up. He did not speak, other than periodically asking for another cup of coffee. The sun set and the darkness revealed a glow in his eyes, embers fanned in a blackened pit. She was frightened.
“We have to eat,” she suggested; anything to get him out of this place, to get him out of this state.
“Chinese okay?” he asked.
“Sure.”
She had forgotten that his bloody clothes were still in a heap just outside the door and returned to the kitchen for a trash bag. On their walk to the restaurant, she diverted to a dumpster and tossed it in.
After a nearly silent dinner, Gloria read him the fortune from her cookie. “A routine task will turn into an enchanting adventure.” There was nothing routine or enchanting about this adventure.
Sad Jack cracked open his cookie. “Well, this is something. It says, ‘Help! I’m being held hostage in a Chinese Cookie factory.’”
It took her a second. That was a joke? Sad Jack had just told a joke?
“Are you alright? Really, Jack. There’s nothing wrong with going to a hospital, having a doctor speak with you. You must have great insurance.”
“Boom Boom is bringing back Comedy Night to The Lone Wolf.”
“Yes, unfortunately.” Over everyone’s objections, Boom Boom was giving it another try.
“Tonight. I think we should go. That’s where we met, remember?”
“Yes,” she said tentatively. His eyes were muddy swirls, agitated ponds. “I’m driving.”
They took the same booth as the first night. When Boom Boom brought them back their second pitcher, he looked questioningly at Gloria.
“Just one of those days,” she said.
When they were alone again, Jack said, “I know what happened. It just came to me. I understand now. I died. The me that was, that Sad Jack? He died there with that poor mother. I thought it should have been me that died, but it was. We both died but I am here. I go on while she cannot. How deep is the sky, Gloria? How much distance is there between the stars? I fit in that space. And she, she has gone. My heart is overwhelmed with grief. I have never known such pain.” He said it all calmly, without emotion, and she took his arm. And because he could not cry, she did it for him, forehead pressed against his shoulder.
Standing before the standup microphone, Boom Boom announced the return of Comedy Night to The Lone Wolf Tavern.
The first comic up was the same grinning clown, sans-tuxedo, who had been up the night “Sad Jack” had been so dubbed by Gloria. With a big smile the comedian stood before the standup microphone and was just opening his mouth to speak, when from the back, off in a distant booth, the voice that had once belonged to Sad Jack cried, “Rubber baby buggy bumpers!”
Cy Hill
It was open mike Comedy Night at The Lone Wolf Tavern. The audience consisted of the five queued comedians’ scant entourages, maybe ten regulars who happened to be there, a couple of passed out drunks (one snoring), and Jack. The tavern was desperate for business, and the open Comedy mike was one of many spit-balled ploys to generate revenue. Any revenue.
The first comic wore a tuxedo and a big smile before the microphone. “Rubber baby buggy bumpers.” He said it happily. Triumphantly. And then, he said it again. “Rubber baby buggy bumpers!”
Jack, a minor cog in the Seattle insurance industry, seated alone, his first time in The Lone Wolf, assumed rubber bumpers would be installed on a baby buggy to protect a child from injury. Apparently, there were mothers considered unsafe baby buggy drivers. Or, perhaps it concerned acts of God vis a vis a baby buggy, its occupant, or its driver. Jack wondered whether there were actuarial tables considering the effect rubber bumpers would have on baby buggy safety.
“Rubber baby buggy bumpers!” the comedian grinned, proudly puffing out his tuxedoed chest and tugging at either end of this bow tie.
The leading comedian of their clique had challenged him to open his act with the tongue twister. The other comedians and their crews laughed uproariously. What Gloria, a regular patron of The Wolf noted was that they were laughing at him. Not with him. And he didn’t get it. He was their chump, their bitch. And he grinned. How much had he laid out to rent that tux to impress this sorry collection of want-to-be jokesters?
Gloria also noted Jack in the next booth; a man she had never seen before, in his early thirties like her, and like her wearing a black turtleneck. There was something about him; something a bit off. Unique characters were Gloria’s meat. She watched him through the next three comedians’ bits. He did not laugh at any of them either, but he did not look like anything could make him laugh; not seeing the world through those sad eyes.
“Heh,” she called to him during the short break before the last comedian came on. “Somebody run over your dog?”
It took Jack a moment to realize she was speaking to him. “I do not own a dog.”
“Why not?”
“It would die.”
“You get another one.”
“If I got another, it would die, too. I would outlive all but the last one. Then, what happens to that dog?”
Thus far, this guy might be unlike anyone Gloria had ever met, so what the heck, she picked up her pitcher of beer and joined him in his booth.
She smelled cologne. She could not remember the last time she smelled cologne on a man in The Wolf. “You ever been in here before?”
“No.”
“Why are you here?”
“I saw the flier, about the comedy.”
“You like comedy?”
“I don’t understand it.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know why I laugh when I do. Have you been here before?”
“Since I was fifteen. My name is Gloria. I heard Jimi Hendrix play acoustic guitar, right here in this booth.”
Jack wondered if even then the booth smelled of dead cigars and something that could be mold.
The last comedian had already started his act and noticed no one but his sycophants were listening to him. He lashed out.
“Heh, you back there! Girly. Yeah, you, back there in the booth. I’m working up here, Missy.”
“Is that what you call it? Now, you said ‘laboring’, I would have bought that. Go down to the Pike Street Market, there’s a thirteen-year-old girl, works with a chihuahua. You’ll learn something.”
“I can’t believe I’m getting heckled in this – place,” the comedian complained to Boom Boom, the barkeep-owner behind the bar.
“You’re heckling me,” Gloria said. “You addressed me; I didn’t address you. And this place is The Lone Wolf Tavern, you tourist. Show some respect.“
“Let him finish his set,” Boom Boom pleaded. This comedy night was his idea and he had high hopes for it.
“I am finished,” the comedian concluded, knocking over the microphone and stand. It squealed on the floor until Boom Boom turned it off as the comedy claque angrily grabbed their accoutrements.
Gloria stood, squawked like a chicken, and bunched her arms up like wings. “I dare you to make me laugh.”
“And we may not be coming back,” their leader announced.
Gloria slowly and loudly applauded. And whistled. After they all filed out, she called, “Did I just cost you money, Boom Boom?”
“No, they were drinking at cost. I was hoping they would bring in more traffic.”
“You gave them a discount? We should get the discount for having to listen to that shit.”
The rest of the regulars, scattered around the bar, figured it was worth a shot, so they chimed in their agreement.
“Ah, shut up,” Boom Boom reverberated. He hoped the upcoming open mike Poetry night would go better.
Gloria cut to the chase with Jack. “I am innately curious. I substitute teach – sometimes -- work part-time at my sister’s travel agency – sometimes -- and I drink too much. I spend an occasional night in jail and I won’t be sleeping with you tonight. Oh. And I like to gamble.”
“Okay,” was Jack’s tentative answer.
“Now,” she coaxed, patiently explaining how this worked, “you tell me something about yourself.”
“My name is Jack. I work in Insurance.”
Five seconds of silence.
“And?” she prodded. “You have to match what I gave you.”
“My wife and I moved out here from Cleveland for my promotion.”
“Where’s she?”
“She left me.”
Gloria shrugged. “No big deal, everyone in here’s been divorced at least once, except me, I know I can’t live with a man, and I don’t look good in white. What do you like?”
“Like?”
“What turns you on? When you lie alone in bed at night, what goes through your head?”
“Actuarial tables.”
She thought, “No wonder your wife left you,” and said, “I meant what do you do for fun?”
“Should I tell you the truth?”
Gloria was apprehensive. She liked meeting people with different slants on life, all kinds of people; had met them for years at The Lone Wolf. But what if this guy was simply a creep? “If I did not want the truth, I would not have asked the question.”
“I come to places like this. No one speaks to me, not usually. I come and go, and no one cares that I have been there, and I wonder if anyone notices my having been there. My presence. My life. And that is fine. Fine with me. I am anonymous in life. Like a number. Simply, an abstraction. I like it that way. It fits me.”
“Make it easy for me,” she said, unable to categorize this guy, but already hooked. And, wanting more alcohol, found a way to combine the two by filling her glass from his pitcher. “Are you a ‘the beer-glass is half empty’ or a ‘the beer-glass is half full’ kind of guy?”
“I’m a, ‘there are impurities in the beer’ kind of guy.”
“Impurities?”
“Bacteria, mold. Hopefully in small amounts, but they will always be there.”
Fascinating. “Go on. Tell me more.” What did he see out of those hooded eyes, buried in cavernous sockets?
What Jack saw was a moderately overweight aggressive woman who maintained moderate hygiene, needed to brush her hair, and dressed on the cheap. She probably suffered from wide mood swings. At the moment, she was up. The percentages were even that she could just as well be down. They were in a dark bar in a darker corner with cement floors and heavy wooden furnishings. Solid. Unbreakable (except for possible wood rot) as if prepared for sudden violent action. Everything about the place was utilitarian and he liked that. It was unassuming while assuming the worst.
“There is a sense of doom here that puts me at ease.”
“Are you always this depressed?”
“I am not depressed, I am consistent. I am particularly interested in life insurance. All is dying, all will die, all has to die. You like to gamble. ‘The Line’, in gambling terms, is the Actuarial Table. Insurance is a numbers game and statistics do not lie. I can’t lose with life insurance. It’s all a matter of odds, and Death is the House.”
He observed her, his eyes steady, awaiting her reaction. This was the point where every conversation ended with everyone with whom he was forthright. It either ended, or they launched into a defensive argument trying to convince themselves, rather than Jack, that he was wrong.
“Are you always like this?”
He nodded.
“Boom Boom!” she called. “We got us a keeper here, name of ‘Sad Jack’. Bring us another pitcher.” She said to Jack, “You’re buying. I wouldn’t say anything to Boom Boom about moss in his beer.”
Sad Jack was correct about Gloria’s mood swings. There were times when she could not stand to be near him. However, to his immense surprise, other tavern regulars also tolerated him being himself, and within the year he was a fixture, in a booth or on a stool, expressing his opinions, spending time with artists, construction workers, attorneys, teachers, and students from the nearby University of Washington. He played on the Tavern softball team. He was there during a failed robbery.
“Tell Clary about wedding cakes,” Michelangelo, a construction worker urged him one evening. Clary was a long-legged waitress at a pizza parlor who had just drunkenly – and foolishly – announced to Michelangelo that they would one day marry.
Sad Jack purchased 58% of the beer because he could afford it, but no more than that, because he did not want to create the impression that he could be taken advantage of. Michelangelo had caught on to this, was a much more capable drinker than Sad Jack, and laughingly matched his every order. Consequently, Sad Jack was uncharacteristically roaring drunk.
“Wedding cakes.” This was a sore subject for Sad Jack, summoning up an exchange with his ex-wife as she was leaving him: literally walking out the door. “I hate Wedding cakes.”
“I didn’t think you hated anything, Jack,” Michelangelo laughed.
“Nothing is one hundred per cent. The likelihood of anything being one hundred per cent – it’s – “ he held his thumb as close to his index finger as he could without them touching.
“And that’s where you and Wedding Cakes fit.”
“Right – “ he squinted -- “in there. All Wedding Cakes come with a percentage of rodent feces, insect parts, ground up maggots – “ he had told his wife that, on their wedding day. Six months later she left him and moved back to Cleveland specifically citing his comment about Wedding Cakes. Sad Jack looked at Clary. At her long legs. “Will you marry me?”
“No.”
“Then I guess there won’t be a Wedding Cake.”
He was too hung over the next day to go to work and had to call in sick. It was the first time that had ever happened to him. When he finally made it out of bed, he was hungry and still a little drunk. A bland meal at a small walk-in restaurant settled that, and he found himself with several hours of free time on an atypically beautiful, sunny Seattle day.
He located a bench at the nearby park and playground, overrun with mothers and strollers and baby buggies and children too young for school, and decided to take stock of himself, of his life. This was unusual as he was not prone to reflection. Even as he thought, he blamed the presence of yeast in his over consumption of beer for causing this chemical reaction in his brain.
The Actuarial Tables told him that if he did not marry, did not have children, he would most likely die younger than he otherwise would. A certain undefined percentage of himself wondered why that mattered.
“That is the percent of me that already embraces death,” he thought. “Of course, we are all dying. That is life, life is death. Life is the beginning and the end.” He murmured, “I am Sad Jack,” and squinted into the sun. All around him were the sounds and syllables of children and birds and young mothers, and they were a type of music. But not his music. Theirs was not his song.
A multi-colored ball rolled over against his foot. He looked down at it.
“Sorry about that,” a young mother pushing a baby buggy called, twenty feet distant. She was tall, thin, and blond; attractive, with scant makeup.
A little girl that matched her mother looked up at him. He picked up the ball and handed it to her.
“Say, ‘thank you’,” her mother instructed.
“Thank you,” she parroted.
“You are welcome,” Sad Jack said. Attention attracted, he continued to watch the little girl and her mother with the baby buggy, both dressed in sky blue skirts and white blouses. He wondered about their lives. Most probably the husband worked and provided, the wife cared for their offspring and maybe she worked, too, or would when the children were old enough. He hoped the husband had life insurance. The timing of his death was affected by his job, the kind of vehicle he drove, and how much he drove. And there was always that random factor, sometimes called “luck”, good and bad; or “Act of God”.
Somewhere, not too distant, he heard a crack; like a snapping branch. The air parted, sizzled as if rent; concussed his right ear. Something nicked the tip of his right shoulder. He looked at his jacket. The threads were parted, jagged.
A gagging, a choking before him – it was the mother. She clutched the baby buggy with both hands but there was a nick on her neck, as there was a nick on his jacket. She reached up, touched her wound as it erupted, a quizzical look of shock, wonderment -- and slowly she sunk to her knees as he caught her. Jack held her head in his lap, futilely trying to plug the hole with his fingers, and the women around him screamed. One of them scooped up the mother’s child, another grabbed the baby buggy, and took them apart. The mother looked up at Jack questioningly, what was happening, what had happened, and she bled out all over him, eyes still open, staring into his eyes until all was drained.
Someone had accidentally discharged their handgun while putting it into their vehicle’s glove compartment. What were the percentages of that happening? What were the percentages of that single bullet just kissing Jack’s shoulder? What were the percentages of it striking this young woman’s carotid artery?
“Sir.” A hand shook him. It was a Seattle First Responder. Beside him stood another. The hand shook him again. “Sir. Is this your wife?”
“I’ve never seen her before.”
There was the squawk of a radio, broken conversation, and at some point, they took the corpse from his lap. He struggled to his feet. His clothes were heavy and damp. His hands were caked red. He was painted, head to toe, with pointlessly clotting blood.
“Is there someone we can call for you?” one of the First Responders asked, seating him back upon the bench.
He supplied the first phone number that came to mind.
A policewoman took a statement from him, and then one of the First Responders returned.
“You are in shock, Sir. I want you to remain here. We will take you to a hospital.”
The hell they would. He waited until the uniforms were busy and then darted into the trees. From there, ignoring the focus of pedestrians and motorists, he made his way back to his apartment.
“Oh my God.” Gloria stood at the stairway he would have to ascend to get to his apartment.
“What are you doing here?”
“They called me, but when I went to the Park you weren’t there. Is that her blood?”
That struck him as an incredibly stupid question. Rather than answer it, he started up the stairs.
She stopped him at his door. “Give me the key.”
He did.
“You strip out here, then you go straight to the shower.”
He nodded.
It was her first time in his apartment and she was surprised at how tastefully it was decorated. He had a nice view. Obviously, Sad Jack did well in insurance. She sat on the couch and opened a coffee table book of Escher drawings.
He came out of the shower, still dripping water, and stood before her. She went into the bathroom, turned off the shower, found a bath towel, and dried him.
“Come on,” she took his hand. “Let’s find some clothes.”
She put him in a black turtleneck and jeans, and then sat him down upon the couch.
“Can I get you something?” she asked.
“Coffee. Black.”
It was the cleanest kitchen she had ever been in. What a stark contrast to hers with its sink full of dishes and cockroaches in every other shadow.
Music came on in the other room: Tom Waits’ Blue Valentine.
When it was finally brewed, she carried in two black coffees and set his before him on a coaster as he stared straight ahead. That was when she noticed his eyes. They were not – anything. They were blank.
“Jack,” she half whispered.
“Death chose her. It should have been me. Two orphaned children and a husband without a wife and I just take up space. Death gave me the horselaugh with that bringer of Life dying in my lap. I’m Death’s bitch.” He picked up his cup and drank. “This tastes good.”
She sat with him, listening to music as he remotely queued it up. He did not speak, other than periodically asking for another cup of coffee. The sun set and the darkness revealed a glow in his eyes, embers fanned in a blackened pit. She was frightened.
“We have to eat,” she suggested; anything to get him out of this place, to get him out of this state.
“Chinese okay?” he asked.
“Sure.”
She had forgotten that his bloody clothes were still in a heap just outside the door and returned to the kitchen for a trash bag. On their walk to the restaurant, she diverted to a dumpster and tossed it in.
After a nearly silent dinner, Gloria read him the fortune from her cookie. “A routine task will turn into an enchanting adventure.” There was nothing routine or enchanting about this adventure.
Sad Jack cracked open his cookie. “Well, this is something. It says, ‘Help! I’m being held hostage in a Chinese Cookie factory.’”
It took her a second. That was a joke? Sad Jack had just told a joke?
“Are you alright? Really, Jack. There’s nothing wrong with going to a hospital, having a doctor speak with you. You must have great insurance.”
“Boom Boom is bringing back Comedy Night to The Lone Wolf.”
“Yes, unfortunately.” Over everyone’s objections, Boom Boom was giving it another try.
“Tonight. I think we should go. That’s where we met, remember?”
“Yes,” she said tentatively. His eyes were muddy swirls, agitated ponds. “I’m driving.”
They took the same booth as the first night. When Boom Boom brought them back their second pitcher, he looked questioningly at Gloria.
“Just one of those days,” she said.
When they were alone again, Jack said, “I know what happened. It just came to me. I understand now. I died. The me that was, that Sad Jack? He died there with that poor mother. I thought it should have been me that died, but it was. We both died but I am here. I go on while she cannot. How deep is the sky, Gloria? How much distance is there between the stars? I fit in that space. And she, she has gone. My heart is overwhelmed with grief. I have never known such pain.” He said it all calmly, without emotion, and she took his arm. And because he could not cry, she did it for him, forehead pressed against his shoulder.
Standing before the standup microphone, Boom Boom announced the return of Comedy Night to The Lone Wolf Tavern.
The first comic up was the same grinning clown, sans-tuxedo, who had been up the night “Sad Jack” had been so dubbed by Gloria. With a big smile the comedian stood before the standup microphone and was just opening his mouth to speak, when from the back, off in a distant booth, the voice that had once belonged to Sad Jack cried, “Rubber baby buggy bumpers!”
