A String of Callers

I quickly forgot about Des, though.  She was probably still hot anyway.  But word of my injury and recuperation, that I was back on my feet again, must’ve gotten around, because not even five minutes after I’d walked inside did I get a call from my enormous neighbor, Sparkplug Dixon.  He said he’d be done with his shift at the Smoothie King at 8 that evening and asked if he could bring me anything, perhaps a smoothie or two for dinner and dessert?  I thanked him for his thoughtfulness but told him I had plenty in my own fridge that I needed to eat before it spoiled.  A cold smoothie did sound refreshing, though, partly because of the summer heat and partly because I’d been subjected to Ms. Spigot’s cooking for the past several days.  While Sparkplug talked my ear off about the craziness of head injuries, I secretly wondered if he’d even be able to fit through my front door anymore.  He’s always been a massive man—at least for as long as I’ve known him—but I swear with each passing day he continues to grow larger and defy not just the bounds of human anatomy but the laws of physics, too.  The man can barely walk the length of himself without getting winded.  In fact, at my barbecue a few months back, he’d asked me where the bathroom was, and, after I told him inside and up the stairs to the left, he just looked at the back door and then waddled around the rear corner.  At the time, I hadn’t thought anything of it.  It was only later that I figured he’d gone back there to take a leak behind the condenser.  Not sure why he’d asked about the bathroom in the first place if he didn’t think he could make it up the stairs, let alone fit through the door, like, was he hoping I had an outhouse or something?  I reminded myself that I needed to take a look at his front door the next time I passed by, to see if it was noticeably larger than a normal one, a door engineered specially for the morbidly obese or something.  Don’t get me wrong, Sparkplug’s a good guy, but I knew that if he swung by, it would turn into a prolonged hangout, inside or outside, and I just wasn’t quite ready for visitors.

Then, not long after Sparkplug hung up, my doorbell rang.  When I opened the door, Corncob Esposito was standing there with his usual, eerily empty stare.  Seeing him, I’m always reminded of that line from Jaws about a shark’s eyes, delivered by that craggy fellow Quint, about them being lifeless…black eyes, like a doll’s eyes… Anyway, in Corncob’s hands was a store-bought sheet cake.  It was Fourth of July-themed, red, white, and blue, the edges lined with decorative dollops of frosting, the inside surface covered in scattered sprinkles and firework explosions of piped icing.  In the smack dab middle of the cake, an exploratory hole had been dug, the obvious tool a finger, the owner and operator of such finger clearly the mute doofus who was standing in front of me.  I looked up at Corncob and spotted a splotch of white icing clinging to his chin.  I asked him if the cake was for me, and he shook his head yes and then handed it over.  I thanked him and asked where his degenerate brother, Giovanni, was, and he simply made a motion as if he was pulling a lever.  Gambling, I took it.  I suddenly felt bad for Corncob and asked him if he wanted a full slice, not just a fingering, of the cake.  He shook his head no, and then I noticed his normally vacuous eyes tighten, focusing on something behind me and inside my house.  I looked over my shoulder but saw nothing, and when I turned back around Corncob was gone.  Not even an hour finished with my convalescence and the little fucker was trying to give me a heart attack.

Anyway, I took the cake inside and set it on the counter.  The first thing I did was cut out a large square directly from the middle, making sure I excavated every nanometer of cake that Corncob could’ve touched.  But right after I’d sat down, about to have myself a slice, someone knocked at my door.  Fucking Corncob, I said, scooting my chair back.  When I opened the door, though, I realized it wasn’t Corncob, but yet another neighbor, Clive S. Roosevelt, a.k.a. Meth Man, the disbarred attorney and YouTube rapper.  Clive hadn’t brought me any Get Well or Welcome Home dishes.  Rather, he was looking for something from me.

“Hey, Sterling, you don’t happen to have any crutches lying around here, do you?”

He went on to explain that he’d recently bought a new 60-inch flat-screen TV and that he wanted it mounted on the wall.  The TV was as light as a feather, that wasn’t the problem.  The problem was that that field of domesticity had always eluded him—drill bits, drywall anchors, stud finders, all that do-it-yourself stuff—so he’d hopped on Taskrabbit and hired somebody to come over and do it for him.  Pleased with the ease and efficiency at which life’s problems could be solved with only a few quick taps on an app, yet equally embarrassed by what this suggested, namely, a deficiency in manliness, Clive figured that he could deceive the handyman—or, fuck, he said, the handywoman, please God don’t let it be a handywoman—and justify sitting this one out on the sidelines by faking an injury. 

“You can’t expect someone with a bum leg to hang a TV,” he said.  “But my girlfriend says I’m appropriating cripple culture.  Do you think she’s right?”

I told him that I wasn’t going to get involved and that, sorry man, I didn’t have any crutches just lying around the place.  What I didn’t tell him was that, if he’d asked, I would’ve come over and done the damn thing myself for free.  Or at least for a beer.  Well, actually, better make it a six-pack.  Clive brainstormed other ideas, and at one point he thought he’d had a eureka moment, saying that he could don some dark sunglasses and pretend to be blind, until I enquired what would a blind person want with a 60-inch TV?  He hung around for a few more minutes, but, eventually, he left, despondent.

I shut the door and locked it, promised myself I wouldn’t answer any more callers, in the flesh or over the phone, but the universe is an ironic and sardonic fucker, because it was at that exact moment that my phone began to ring again.  A weak millennial, I forgot the promise I’d made only a second earlier and instinctively checked the screen, but I’m glad I did, because it turned out the call was from Kelley.  She said she was happy I was feeling better, and I was even happier that my well-being wasn’t the primary reason why she’d called.  She said that she and some friends were going out to the lake for the upcoming Fourth of July holiday and asked if I wanted to join. 

And just like that, my second date with the doc, the lovely Dr. Kelley Tablebottom, was scheduled.