one, two, three

catch

garnet timothy harry


for my friends
and don bull

................


“The lord hates a coward”

Floyd Harry

...............

one...




Sometimes my head feels like a cinder block sitting on my shoulders. The weight of it, at times, seems as if it will cause me to pitch forward head-first into the pavement with my hands falling slowly behind and coming in a late second long after my head has hit the concrete. An ex-girlfriend, who was one to never mix words or lose the chance at a good argument, once told me I had a rather large head. Actually, what she said was, 'man, you've got a big head'. What ensued, an argument, at what was at best seven in the morning, ended with me making some sort of comment about her thighs and how I would never say that they were big-which they weren't. But it didn't matter, my point was lost and I was once again the bad guy and I still had a big head. We were in love, this is the truth, but I think deep down we really hated each other if for nothing else than the fact that we couldn't, for little better and much worse, stop loving each other. I wrote about her from time to time even when I didn’t want to but she brought out something in me I still can’t figure out. Back to my head, sure it's large, who am I kidding? It’s huge, but I can only hope it's full of something.

Two...

It's really odd, riding the bus, everyone trying as hard as they can to avoid the stare of others around them. Everyone wanting to just get the hell to work or wherever and be done with it, some smelling like cheap perfume samples from fashion magazines, others swimming in plain, blue-collar, everyday sweat. And, more often than not, I find myself wondering, as I ride, what the hell the others around me are thinking and where the hell it is that they go every day, every night. Where they wake up in the morning, at their place, someone else’s, in an alley, if they've actually been to sleep at all. And sometimes I find myself thinking that I actually care about the answer to some of these questions which, somehow, makes it worse. I wonder if they wonder what the hell I'm up to, where I'm coming from or going to, if I've been to sleep yet, looking at my big head.
I often hide my face in the newspaper and hope to god that no one, especially those from my high school or old neighbourhood, which happens more often than I care to admit, recognizes me and I have to talk to them. Having to go into some sort of built-in lying mode and make up shit, lies built upon lies built on nothing at all, to keep them at bay. Lie about my job and where I live and what I've been doing for the last ten years or so. I told a guy at my high school reunion, which I should have never gone to, that I had spent the last five years in jail in Montana for something I really didn't want to get into the details being sorted and somewhat disgusting to say the least. Another friend, who had been the one who had convinced me to go to the reunion, had been hurt in a car accident but hadn't seen anyone from high school since, helped come up with the lie and confirmed it when anyone would ask. Her somewhat grizzlie details better than anything I could ever come up with on my own. Some of which somehow made me very popular with some of the women there and somehow confirmed my status as the high school fuck-up, something I really wasn't. I actually had a B plus average and was on student council at one point, until they asked me to leave for reasons I could never really ever figure out, but if that's how they wanted to remember me I was satisfied. My end of the deal was to confirm that Sean had been paralyzed in a skydiving accident somewhere in Mexico. Lying has never been my thing but I was happy to become a criminal with untold crimes if it meant being left alone by the Science Club guys and somehow more attractive to their bored wives. Something I would have taken advantage of if I hadn’t been dating someone I actually cared about at the time. Plus, for some reason, I was the only one allowed to smoke in the hall where the reunion was taking place and take my drinks out into the public area. I didn't care much about the drinking but the smoking allowance was not lost on me.

Three...

Every morning, lately, my chest has felt as if it's been ready to cave in from all the cigarettes from the night before, like a smoking hangover of sorts, a punch in the chest from Mr. Winston himself. I have also wondered when I may have to stop this cancer habit and take care of my blackening lung and the other related hazards I was, perhaps, overlooking. I woke up the other night slumped over on my couch with a cigarette still burning in my fingers and the ashtray broken on the floor next to the couch. Sitting upright I gathered myself and, without thinking, took a final drag off the smoke before I putting it in a Coke can on coffee table. Smoking had or has become an obsession of sorts as much a part of my daily routine as sleeping and eating. I hope it passes, not the smoking but the obsessing about it.
But more than that, the blessed smoking, I have become obsessed with the goings on around me, especially those I have no real idea about, or that have anything to do with me. Not because I live a sheltered life, well maybe a little, but more that I have had no interest, up until recently, in any of it. Maybe because up until recently I had something that held my interest, at least a little-a job I went to daily, like those around me on the bus. Sure, it was a shitty job, bartending in a dive held together by career drunks but it was a job and it was mine. That and a few other outside jobs, usually under the table gigs, kept me afloat but somehow they've all gone south on me. For the first time in many years I have become dependent on my savings, which handled properly or at least responsibly, could last me a long time. My sister, bless her heart, calls me the most irresponsible responsible guy she knows. According to her I’m a guy who makes all the ends meet each month, packs a little cash away and then goes snow boarding until it's time to make the ends meet again. Now though I need something to do while all of my friends are at work during the day-sleeping in, smoking and pool only take up so much time each day. And so it was today, as if by some sort of divine intervention, that it came to me. What to do. How to make it all go away, pass the time I have some much of or at the very least make it make sense, to me anyway. Something to tell people I'm doing that somehow will make some sense to them and that I'm not just wasting my time. Because I will be wasting time to a certain degree, I just don’t want people thinking that’s what I’m doing.