It Came From The Porch : Tales of a Theraflu Junkie : The List

The List

It was a dark and stormy night. Stormy because it was a Friday and a group of us were gathering on the porch with a head full of pent up stress and anxiety. It's been building up steadily for a month. I can feel it behind my eyes, changing the way I see things. They dart quickly from thing to thing, as if I was almost too full to take in anything else. Something had to be done.

It was inevitable. But what?

It gets dangerous around here to blow off steam all at once. It spends you quickly and when you awaken, you're a huge stretched thing with an empty middle, a balloon whose air had left. What I needed was a slow steady howl, a controlled seeping of steam that I could pinch off if I had to. What I needed was to get baked.

It's weird what happens inside of you at times like this. No matter how calm the world is outside your brain, you can almost hear thunder inside as you make every decision. As the rumbling grew, I decided to go see Trey. He was up for it, so we wandered into the living room and wandered back out happier people. By then Darlene had arrived. She fixed me with one of those stare I like so much, one eyebrow raised and a smile on one side of her mouth.

"Do you have any wine?" she said.

I considered the ramifications and quickly formulated an intelligent response, "Eeerrrrruuuuummmmm. I'm sorry, what was the question?"

"Are you out of wine?"

My eyes darted feverishly. My left eyebrow arched and fell slack in an apparently random sequence which meant nothing. But all this was merely to buy time. Time to find Trey and point at him screaming, "There he is! It was HIM! He drank it! Drank it ALL! That BASTARD!" I couldn't find him though. So I told her we were out.

"Damn man. You guys have got me on this wine kick. I'm going to have to go buy some. Do you guys want to go?"

I knew I had the answer to that one. Wisely, I raised BOTH of my eyebrow, squinted my eyes and said, "Yes?"

We found Trey next door, surfing with a remote control in one hand (the other was scratching his knee, but that's not important right now). Gathering him up, we climbed in Darlene's car, a tribe of three bent on hunting and gathering under the florescent lights of the modern jungle. We were not afraid. We were armed with debit cards and hunger. That made us dangerous. On the way I saw a dead dog in the road. My eyes drifted past like it was nothing. You may choose your emotions without guilt at times like these. It was the hunt, and it always involves death. In this case it ended up involving the death of two boxes of Tiscuits and a can and a half of Easy Cheese. But I get ahead of myself.

We ambled into Delchamps, looking for trouble, watching for signs of our prey. Searching..searching the aisles. Chocolate, Doritos, Cheetos that go crunch, all drifted past us as we made our single-minded way to the wine. I selected a dry cabernet from a vineyard in San Luis Obispo California. Darlene chose a merlot from the same vineyard. She likes her kill sweet.

Readying our cards, we went to the register. I made it through first, with little trouble, throwing in the Triscuits and cheese at the last moment. Trey followed me and we waited for Darlene. That was when we found THE LIST.

Looking down I noticed a small slip of paper on the floor next to a display of Easter candy that had been "Drastically Reduced." With a grin on my face, I let my mind wander through a scenarios where a store manager drastically reduced something. The pricegun worked furiously in my head. The manager, overweight and balding, sweating profusely, priced the candy as if the fate of the free world depended on it. The whole time he muttered to himself, "Must...go...down..the price... must...go...down." I was shaken from my reverie as Trey squatted to pick up the slip of paper. "Hey. What's this," he glanced at it.

Looking over his shoulder I could see that it was a shopping list, dropped by some poor sole. I wondered whether they had dropped it on the way in, or on the way out. Whether they had flailed madly at a pile of broccoli crying, "How?!? How will I know what to buy now?" Or had they cast it aside like a condom that had done it's job? "HA! I'm done with YOU, you little prick." I glanced at the items on their list and tried to guess at what they had been planning for the evening.

Curiouser and curiouser. The handwriting looked female. There were too many swirled loops for it to have been penned by a man. My eyes were drawn to the paper towels again and I wondered why she had needed a reminder to buy only ONE roll. Would she have kept piling them into her basket until it was so full that they fell out onto the floor around her feet? Piled until the shelves were empty and she was pulled away screaming by the same drastic manager who had marked down the candy? Yes...that was it. This place was getting weirder by the minute. I shot a glance over my shoulder at the armed security guard and tried to decide if he was paying special attention to the paper products aisle. I think that he was.

Tooth paste...cheep. That was odd too. Would she buy the most expensive brand otherwise and have to put the wieners back?

"Take the Goddamned wieners off! Take 'um! I don't need your fucking wieners."

I began to wish I had been there as she checked out. Sometimes it just never gets weird enough. You know? The chips caught my eyes again.

It was underlined. I was beginning to see the whole picture here and it wasn't pretty. This poor, frantic shopper must have been working for a mob boss. Engrossed in a heated game of old maid, he had sent her out to the grocery shouting, "And don't come back widout the CHIPS! I mean it this time! I swear I'll kill you and pee in your purse if you come back widout the friggin chips." That kind of pressure makes you crazy. You'll do all sorts of things unless you make a list for yourself. I pitied her. And then there was the last item on the list.

8am. That one was easy. She was supposed to buy 8AM coffee, the kind with chicory (ugh). The "am" had been underlined. Was there a 8pm coffee that was decaffeinated? Had she purchased that kind once, hoping against hope that her cruel mob boss would be unable to stay awake and collapse facedown in his wieners and chips? That must have been it, but he was on to her now. He had specified AM and made her underline it.

The whole sordid story was open to me now. That fat bastard-of-a-boss of hers was going to stay up all night after feasting on wieners, chips and juice. He would watch the movie while he used the paper towels and cheep toothpaste to make a high powered explosive to bump off a competitor with. It's the same story everywhere you go I guess, but I pitied her all the same. I felt that if I could just reach out and help her, I would in some way make the world a better place for us all. I could not though. She was not here. I could only look at her tracks and shake my head at the sad injustice at it all.

And besides, Darlene was finished checking out and holding her merlot in a very proprietary manner. Hot from the kill, we trekked back home to feed...feed... feed.

I could still hear the thunder.

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