Meat Me Outside

One of my favorite people at the sports centre works in the kitchen. Paul is a few years older than me and though that makes him twenty seven, he says he is too young to think about what he’ll do when he grows up. For now, he says he ‘fixes cookies’.  I don’t argue with his reasoning because the cookies are incredible. Paul says they receive them frozen and he just microwaves them, but I think he’s being modest.  No one would hire him just to microwave, and at the very least, I imagine he’s in charge of propping his nuts (macadamia or cashew) into the cookie batter.  Regardless, it’s not my place to interfere with the process. He comes over to my desk on quiet afternoons, and his hands smell like dish detergent. He reaches into his apron pocket and pulls out a greasy envelope he made out of paper towel. In it are four cookies, for me.

Paul is my gossip bitch. He gives me the low down while I eat his cookies.  Most of the stories are true, and I  think everyone confides in him because he smells like a grandmother.   All that time spent around melted margarine has left his skin face glowing and shiny, and when you see him, you just want to tell him everything. That’s how he gets the dirt.

“..and then Maurice said, ‘I bet she could suck it like a champ!’” Paul told me one afternoon. I was eating a caramel pecan cookie. “Are you sure he said that?” I asked.          “He stands in the parking lot and rates girls’ mouths on how much meat they could pack,” Paul said. I was really hoping he was wrong.  When he wasn’t cooking steaks for his widow neighbor, Maurice was planning romantic nights for his wife. He couldn’t ever say that. At least not about random strangers. “Are you sure?” I asked again.  Paul pointed away and said, “You can ask him yourself.”

I heard Maurice’s eight hundred keys jingling. He carried them on an old string tied to his belt. He only used two of them, but he was the leading maintenance guy, and felt deserving of the fanfare-like announcement of his entrance that the jingle provided. He was coming down the hall, and the smell of cheese grease soon caught up with him, and with us. He turned the corner and I saw two Styrofoam boxes stacked in his right hand. Paul turned to walk away.

“Where you goin’ big guy?” Maurice laughed. “I got this one for you amigo!” He extended the top box to Paul and Paul took it. He brought it up to my desk and opened it. It was a pile of fries soaked in grease to the point of transparency. A thick load of cheese covered them. A fork stuck out of the cheese. Paul picked the fork up and, catching cheese on its end, pulled it up. A sloppy cheese string followed its captor. Maurice laughed, rolling his head back, but instead of rolling it back down to look at us, he twisted it to the side and walked off.

“What’s wrong with him?” I asked.  Paul leaned in closer to me and crouched until I could smell the olive oil on his arms. “Rumor has it…” he began. I put the cookie down.

“…his wife left him.”  My jaw dropped. Could it be? After all these years, all these Christmas parties I’ve seen them kissing on the dance floor, her lovingly twirling his cow skull necklace in her hand, what reason would she have to leave him?  “How do you know this?”

“We’ve seen him come in at six in the morning and just sit in his car crying. Other nights, he doesn’t go home. Just sits in his hatchback and smokes cigarettes all night. He’s also told JP from property that he’s looking for a good strip club. Oh, and have you heard his ringtone?”

“Has it changed?”

“Here, I’ll call him and you listen.”

Paul picked up my phone and dialed Maurice’s number.  I could hear Maurice struggling with a mold patch by the bowling alley just around the corner. We waited, then “I wanna be a rockstar!” hissed from his pant pocket.  Then silence. Then “I wanna be a rockstar!” again.  Paul hung up. He was right.  Maurice’s ringtone had always been Bryan Adams’ ‘Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman’ and every time his phone rang, he would remind us that it was the song they first made love to in the RV.

From the end of the hallway, I heard Maurice eagerly open his phone to check his missed call. “Oh its just yuse guys,”  he said to the wall quietly and put the phone back in his pocket. He then took out a cigarette and walked into the men’s washroom.

“The bankruptcy probably got to her,” I said. Paul nodded, “Yeah. She loved that trailer.”

Sole Mates

“Are you single?”

I was greeted by Adam when I came in to work one afternoon.  “No, I’m not,” I answered, smiling to soothe the undoubtedly escalating tension.

“You think you might be, next month?”

He asked immediately. I couldn’t find the right thing to say to that. As usual, he wasn’t waiting on my response.  He pushed himself away from the desk, rolled towards the recycle bin in the office chair, and kicked the bin lightly with his hiking boot to let me know he had something on his mind.  It obviously had something to do with his current girlfriend, so I asked what happened.

“I’m done with her. I talked to my dad last night and now I’m done.”

I wasn’t sure which girlfriend he was referring to, so I tried to remember the last time we had a heart to heart.

The last time we had a talk about his love life, he was telling me about a Mexican woman he had been taking on dates to the mall.  He showed me pictures that he took with his cell phone, and in them, a forty year old woman sat, grinning, on a twenty year old boy’s lap.  His dad had bought him the phone, and according to Adam he was very angry when he found the pictures while doing his weekly check of Adam’s phone activity.

“Can you believe him?” Adam opened up to me once. “I mean, can you believe he got pissed because I have a girlfriend? I mean, he says I’m too young to be a father, but her kids are my age! I mean, how much of a father do they need now? I don’t even need my dad that much!”

The Mexican woman had two sons who were both Adam’s age, somewhere in the mid twenties.  He didn’t mind them at first, but later he explained that his reasons for breaking up with her included José and Javier.

“So, she’s Mexican, right?” He double checked with me. “…right,” I answered.

“So, that’s not the problem. The problem is her damn kids. Whenever I want to go somewhere with her, take her to the movies, go to the food court, she wants to bring them along! ‘Oh the kids don’t have a daddy, they don’t have a father’ well I don’t give a shit!”

I looked down to avoid displaying any involuntary feelings I may have been displaying.

“Come on! Who would want that?” He continued. “And forget about sex! Forget about kissing! Or making out!”

I really needed him to keep talking, so I had to participate in the discussion.

“Well Adam, sometimes you have to make sacrifices when you’re in a relationship. What is she supposed to do? Get rid of her kids?”

His look gave me shivers. That was what he wanted her to do.

“Well, no,” he addressed my thoughts, “She can’t really get rid of them. You know they’re my age, and people my age don’t just leave the house like that.”

With that, he snapped his fingers to show how quickly his forty year-old girlfriend’s children would have left the house had they been younger.

“But that’s not all. This girl, she’s crazy, okay? All day long we talk about God. She’s a…a…”

“Christian?” I suggested.

-“..No.”

-“Catholic?”

-“No!”

-“Mormon?”

-“A lunatic,”

-“What?”

-“I mean a fanatic.”

I nodded.

“So,” he continued, “We talk about her damn kids and her damn God, all day long. I can’t talk to her about anything else. And we’ve been together for almost a year now!”

How he stayed with her for a year was just as much a mystery as how she stayed with him. My first assumption (and hope) was that she didn’t speak English, but that still didn’t explain his interest in her. They met in adult high school and he offered to drive her home after class, just as she was ending her janitorial shift. Unfortunately for my attempt at not having nightmares, I was informed on several occasions that she had ‘really nice tits’, but aside from that, I never had any insight on what had kept them together. Still, a year later, he broke up with her because he just couldn’t take the damn kids anymore.

So here we were, months later, and Adam was angry once again.

“So tell me about her,” I said, opening my mental notebook.

“Well, I met her at school,” he began. Again? “On the first day of class I sat in front of her so she would always have to look at me. Plus, you know, body language. I had my body around her all the time so the other guys would know like ‘back off, she’s mine’.  Anyway, after class was over I invited her to the pool at the Boys and Girls Club,” I was bracing myself for her heartbreaking rejection, when: “…and she agreed.”  Where does he find these people? This wasn’t some seedy adult high school. I know because I’ve been there. To adult high school, I mean. During my high school years, in an attempt to ‘carve out my own path’ I refused to take some courses, and as a result, received a letter stating that I wouldn’t be graduating unless I took an extra credit. Luckily, that credit was offered in night school through a biology class, and for an entire semester, I studied fungus beside a guy who dealt cocaine over the phone from his desk. He found out I speak Russian, just like him, and assumed I would be doing his projects for him for this reason.  I didn’t mind because I wasn’t making any other friends in that class, and staring at a breast-feeding teenage mother resulted in me making at least one enemy. Plus the baby, so I guess that’s two.

But this wasn’t like that. This new school that Adam was attending was college, and he was in the engineering program, so this girl must have had some sort of understanding of reality.

“So we went to the pool and then she became my girlfriend. But now she is a really bad girlfriend, and I haven’t even seen her in two months.”

I tried to construct a timeline with this last bit of information.  Pool, Girlfriend, Bad Girlfriend….but all along they hadn’t seen each other?

“How long have you two been dating?” I asked.

-“Two months.”

-“So why did she become your girlfriend? Or umm, how?”

“Well you know, we were in the water, and we fooled around,” he twiddled his thumbs as he answered me. My head spun.  Picturing Adam fooling around with anyone, not to mention under water, was too much for my brain to handle.

“…And so then I went home and she became my girlfriend.”

I thought about it for a while and decided not to tell him that this was not how a relationship should form. After all, what did I know? I once decided a guy was my boyfriend after he slipped his number into my pant pocket as I lay drunk on a bathroom floor. To my credit, he did tell me he’d take me for breakfast after I barfed, so the intentions were there. To my discredit, he left long before I barfed.

-“So, after the pool, you started dating, and then what?”

-“She talked to me a few times on the phone but each time, her father would tell her to get off the phone. Asians. You know how it is.”

He nodded as he said this and I expected him to elaborate on ..how it is…but he went on:

“So one day, well it was last week. Well, it wasn’t last week, it was yesterday. Yesterday I came up to her class and looked at her through the window and told her to come out. And you know what she said?”  He looked into my eyes.

“No, what?” I was really anxious now.

“She said,” and with this his expression changed to what I think must’ve been that of a mean Asian girl.  “ ‘Oh I can’t come out Adam. I’m working on a project!”

He turned his face back to its original grimace, still monstrous but less Asian.

“Can you believe that? The nerve! I stood and watched her to make sure she actually was doing her project. I waited until her class was over, then I met her at the door and broke up with her right then and there!”

He stabbed the desk twice with his index finger. Between Adam dating a woman with children his age, and managing to assume a relationship with a girl he had only spoken to once, what I found most surprising in his behaviour was that I was next in line.

As I wondered what part of me showed willingness to be whisked away by the developmentally disabled, Maurice, a veteran janitor, came up to my desk.

“Have you seen deh pictures from deh party?” He asked us in his thick Rimouski accent. I shook my head no and looked at Adam who was already walking out the door.

“Let me see them,” I said.

Maurice reached into the front pocket of his faded blue paint-stained khakis and produced an envelope. He handed it to me and I felt the warmth on the envelope, transferred from his thigh. The photographs were mainly blurred and of girls who didn’t look like they were expecting to have their pictures taken.  Maurice brought three disposable cameras to the Christmas party, and by the end of the night he had used them all up.

“Eh, uhh, you seen my wife?”  He pulled the bottom portion of the photographs out of the stack and fanned them out on my desk.  “She’s a saint, you know.”

“She’s nice,” I answered, looking at the photograph of his wife holding up a piece of cake on a fork  and smiling.  Three of her front teeth were missing, and the lenses on her reading glasses had turned a shade of brown, reminding me, for an unknown reason, of a 70s porno I once saw.

“No she’s a saint. She been a saint dis whole rough time. With the bankruptcy, you know,” he said.

“Whose bankruptcy? What happened?” I asked.  Finally some interesting news.  Was the sports centre going out of business?

“Our bankruptcy! We ‘ad to sell da trailer and da Chevy. My wife, she been so good about it. She don’t complain. She been so good. We moved to a town’ouse now. No money, nuttin in da bank. Dat’s what ‘appens when you go broke,” he educated me.

“So, how long will you be living in the town house?” I asked. “Oh, maybe forever. I don’t mind it. We don’t mind it,” he took the pictures back from me and shoved them back into his pocket, creating a flattering bulge.  “Dere’s a nice old widow, lives next door. I go over now and den, make ‘er steaks. She’s lonely, you know. No ‘usband, no kids. Old as ‘ell.”

I nodded.  He looked me in the eyes and arched his eyebrows to form a pained expression, and I thought he was about to cry, but instead he tilted his head back and laughed a jovial laugh, exposing the dark brown remains of his teeth.

I watched him walk away, keys jingling on his calloused leather belt, as I thought about Adam and his underwater relationship, and about my lonely morning on the bathroom floor.  Maurice and his wife were married thirty years. They were both missing the same set of teeth, were both comfortably overweight, and both inhaled nicotine more than they did oxygen.  Despite mine and Adam’s failed attempts with the opposite sex, it was extremely comforting to know that there was a soul-mate out there for everyone, even after the trailer goes.

A Rare Beauty

We rent out rooms at our sports centre.  Weddings, graduations, birthday parties for the blind…we cater to every celebration. Our rooms are normally rented out by tattooed brides and more generally by people whose party playlists are composed of the song about saving a horse and riding a cowboy played on repeat. The people who rent out our rooms for graduation celebrations are those who genuinely believe that a three week course on hair cutting is enough for them to go out into the world and actually contribute something positive to humanity. These people will be dancing in a conga line to said song with their diplomas in their hands, their names misspelled in 18 pt. Papyrus.  Not to bring down our street cred (we do serve a mean baked trout in our ‘elite’ wedding dinner menu) but when, for the single most important day of your life, you choose a room that is otherwise used as a volleyball court, you probably won’t be caring much about the thread count of your dress either.  At our weddings, everyone sparkles. However, most of the sparkles are left behind on the chairs by the end of the night, and the ones that remain are usually in the eyes of the drunk uncles who ask me what time I’m getting off as they swagger to the washroom to vomit.  Anyway, I’ve come to expect a certain demographic when it comes to our guests and was taken aback last weekend when a colony of limousines pulled up to our humble crumbling curb.  The passengers exiting the limousines were…vintage.  The word ‘old’ is ill-fitting here because it unfortunately conjures up images of overflowing bed pans, and these people deserve better.  They sauntered in, two by two, and more limousines could be seen arriving, one by one. They spoke in a quiet, seemingly secretive way. They made their way to the biggest room we have, the newly renovated cream of our crap, and I knew then that they had ordered the trout.

One couple instantly resurrected my belief in marriage.  As they were both at the top of death’s wish list, they moved slowly, and their intention to enter the room was such a tease that I wanted to look away.  Just get there already and quit pondering each step. While I would normally groan or fill a post it note with the f word in permanent marker to pass the time, I actually didn’t mind watching them.  She was very thin and her black dress offered a pleasant contrast to her white hair. Her husband’s pearl-white suit was a perfect compliment, and from a distance they looked like salt and pepper shakers- a swanky unison.  They linked arms, and he gently led her to the room.  The skin left uncovered by her dress was tanned, so obviously she was a snowbird. She probably spent most of the year in Florida, and probably tanned topless. She caught me peering at her and smiled. I smiled back whispering “please enjoy the trout”.  Could adults be adopted? By now, I could probably have grandkids of my own, but is it wrong to wish she was my grandmother? Is it even more wrong to wish we were best friends? I watched them disappear into the room like a dream. Except slower.

It was a couples’ event and it seemed all of the couples were in their seventies.  The women looked like well-preserved collectors’ item Barbie dolls. Some of the men began looking around and raising their eyebrows, and I instantly felt the feeling I’ve gotten used to experiencing during my party supervision shifts. They began to notice their surroundings. Really noticing. The wallpaper that needed touching up, the table cloths that didn’t stretch to the floor on each side of the fold-up tables, the under-stocked bar..the façade was undeniable. Did someone else book the room for them? They looked like they belonged at The Ritz, or at the very least in a room where the coat check was more than a metal pole on wheels.  “Excuse me miss!” My shame was interrupted by a man in a shiny black suit. I’ll save the creative writing techniques here and just say that with his white hair, delicious-looking moustache, and round spectacles, he looked like the Monopoly man.  “Is there a bank machine nearby? I would’ve paid cash but the bartender can’t break this hundred.” After pointing him in the right direction, I wondered who was more ridiculous. Was it Monopoly man, for only carrying around hundred dollar bills, or was it the bartender for not having enough money in his cash to break a hundred?  The bartender won. I was embarrassed. I wanted to leap up, tear my mock neck uniform off and yell “I don’t belong here either! I’m shocked too!” but I was being paid eight bucks an hour to remain a loyal ambassador of the unparalleled service we were about to provide to these unsuspecting people. Two thin black women wearing flowered hats glanced around the corner and one pointed in the direction of the washroom. My cheeks felt warm again. How could I be held responsible for the surprise these women were about to experience? Our washrooms, like the rest of the facility, were not meant for  parties. They were meant for hockey players to sweat in and leave their used paper towels in the sink.  They were designed for women who felt that a baby changing station was a buffet tray of shit-covered diapers, who also felt that they were welcome to bring their contribution to the potluck.  What were those beautiful old women about to find? I sat there, face turning red.  I thought of excuses I might make, and solutions I might provide. I couldn’t come up with anything. As a receptionist, I was to receive.  I consoled myself with the thought that they were probably far too well mannered and sweet to say anything. They would probably smile at each other, knowing they would never return, and I would never have to find out about it.  I looked up again, and the old man who accompanied the little old woman with the red lipstick to the room, had walked out and was typing something into his Blackberry phone. He looked up at me and smiled, giving me a little wave.  What’s more classy than acknowledging the presence of someone whose yearly salary is less than your monthly cell phone bill? And to act like he was happy to see me, at that. He wasn’t drunk, either, which was even more flattering.  I instantly signaled with my smile what I had wanted to scream. I smiled mischievously, attempting to say “I know, it’s awful here, but let’s both play along.” Realizing my traitor ways, I quickly looked down, and he turned his attention to the woman with whom I was planning a topless tanning trip to Florida. She wasn’t smiling anymore though.  At that moment, the two beautiful black women walked out of the washroom.  They stopped in front of my desk, and my adoptive grandmother approached them. “Have you been to the loo?” The flower hat beauty asked her. “I didn’t realize we were in a Cuban prison camp.”   Nana answered, “Almost as bad as the fucking trout!”

They all walked back to the room to face the remainder of their disappointment, and I looked down trying to find my jaw on the table.

Put Two and Two Together

I came into work one evening ready to replace Adam, whom I found leaning over the receptionist chair, with his backpack on.  He appeared to be wearing a sheer white blouse, and when I approached him I realized that it was his work shirt, entirely soaked. It was winter, so I couldn’t imagine how or why he would take a swim in our outdoor pool, and though it being drained wouldn’t stop him, if there’s no water, there’s nothing to make the shirt wet.  He came towards me, breathing deeply, raising his chest out in an inappropriately erotic manner. Without closer inspection, I noticed his areola, and at that point asked what the hell was going on.

“Health. Fitness. Important,” he answered.

“What have you been doing?” I asked. “Playing soccer?” He threw his backpack off and against the wall signifying the beginning of a long explanation. I sat down.

“No, not soccer. It’s not my sport. I was running. This is my wet energy.”

“Oh, where were you running?” I asked, wondering how he left in the middle of his shift for such a dedicated work out.

“Useless. Irrelevant. You wanna know what my sports are?” He was looking away now, towards the entrance doors, waiting to begin the list. I let him have it, nodding and feeling an unintentionally pained look blanket my face. He extended his open hand to count the sports off on his fingers.

“Tennis and squash. Those are my sports.”

He stopped with his thumb and index fingers pointing out as though he was going to shoot me with a flesh bullet.

“Squash because of my speed and agility and tennis because of the net, and I know how to use the net. Put the two together and I’m a killer. The two Chinese guys I played against were laughing at how good I am. Well, it was a man and a woman, but still.”

I didn’t comment on that because he had said enough for the both of us. The phone rang and I bent over to pick it up. He leaned over me, chest throbbing against my back. I could feel his nipples through the wet cotton, and they grazed me with each inhale.  He was trying to see the time display on the phone, though he was wearing a watch. He earlier explained that he doesn’t think that the time on his watch is accurate, so he prefers digital. By earlier, I mean a year ago.  He’s been wearing the watch since then.

I craned my head forward trying to separate my spinal cord from his ribcage.

Suddenly our manager Karen walked by.  Upon noticing our vertical spooning stance, she stopped and squinted her face.  “What’s goin’ on here guys?” she asked, propping her knuckles against her Spandex thighs. Adam immediately retracted from his inexplicably long attempt at reading the digital clock, and I laughed, mainly because I was so relieved that it was over.

“Today work was good,” Adam said in one breath, unprompted, looking out into an imaginary audience above Karen’s head.  Her smile faded a little and she looked at me. “O….kay,” she answered and walked off.

Adam ran his hand through his mane of sweat-drenched hair.  It took a few seconds, and made me realize how long it had gotten.  He’d been growing his hair out for a year and a half, hoping to resemble an animé character. I can’t remember the name of the character, but I remember the appeal was that this guy murdered his father in some battle.  I’ve often heard Adam arguing with his own father over the phone, and I have to admit, at times I was concerned.

He spiked his hair into icicle shapes until most guys from the arena called him a retard. Later, it began to sag from the mounds of gel, and he’s had to cut it to a perfect length fit for the common pedophile.

“I fuckin’ hate Karen,” he leaned towards me again. “She told me to print some pamphlets today.  She couldn’t have just said, ‘print the pamphlets Adam’, but she just haaaad to make it complicated. She said, ‘print the signs to the printer in the main office.’ She always makes things so complicated! Like, with everyone else, when they’re adding stuff, it’s like …1 plus 1….equals 2. With Karen, it’s like 2 minus 4….” He looked towards the doors again, doing the math, “..plus …2….equals…2. She’s so stupid!”

I nodded, praying that I wouldn’t forget a single word of it so I could write it down as soon as he left. Luckily, he assumed that since we’re both foreigners, that we were both here to fight the system, and that this meant that I agreed with everything he said. His statements seldom called for any confirmation or input on my part, so he shook his hair out, grabbed his backpack again, and walked off.

“Stupid,” he repeated looking over his shoulder to make sure I was listening.

I couldn’t agree more.

Indecent Proposal

It was one of those Saturday evenings when the last thing I wanted to do was go in to work. I sat by the door for longer than I should’ve, trying to convince myself to put my mock neck and fleece vest uniform on, and by the time I did, I was running late and couldn’t stop off to get my usual coffee on the way. Because the cup of coffee meant more to me than my job, I stopped at the corner shop anyway, which made me even later, and as a result run faster, down the street to the sports centre where my shift was about to start. As I ran down the torturously endless path to the building, and as the boiling liquid playfully scolded my forearm with each bounce, the wind blew baseball diamond dust into my face, punishing me for my irresponsibility. I swore and ran faster, hoping that I would eventually throw up because then at least I’d look legit and could say that I had the flu, yet still showed up. Then I’d win and God could shove his lesson up his ass.  I ran up the stairs and into the main lobby, where no one seemed concerned about my tardy entrance.  Both receptionists had placed their phones off the hook, and the security guard leaned against their desk scratching his forehead.  A man in a wheelchair seemed to be acting out some sort of scene. He was arching his back and pulling his chest out, while slapping one arm against the other. My colleagues’ faces were too dim for it to have been a game of charades, so I assumed the matter was serious. I came closer and set the remainder of my coffee on the desk. Sarah looked at me and asked me if I speak sign language. “No, why?”.  She shot her eyes in the direction of the thrasher, and she did it so obviously that I was sure he would fall out of his chair. “I! Can’t! Do! It!” Kate said slowly but loudly.  I hate when people do that.  When you’re deaf, you’re deaf. You can’t hear, period. It must be so infuriating watching people squint and expose their flailing uvulas at you when you can’t hear them.  Unless the deaf person is wearing a sign that says ‘yell please’, or you actually see their hearing aid swelling out of their ear, don’t insult yourself, and their disability, by attempting to penetrate their charred cochlea.

“Sorry!” Kate yelled. The man didn’t like that. He looked at the security guard, Pete, then at Sarah, then at me, and then at Kate.  He suddenly rolled his head back, and then let gravity pull his skull forward again.  Then, the thrashing resumed. I could tell he wasn’t mentally disabled. He was just angry.  When you can’t swear or yell, arching your back is the next best thing to signal protest. I’ve seen babies do it hundreds of times, and sometimes I do it when I’m mad at my boyfriend and he’s trying to kiss me.  He was flipping us off with his spine, and I liked his attitude. “What’s wrong? What’s going on?” I asked the girls. “Okay, listen, how squeamish are you?” Kate asked. I looked at the man, and hoped she would elaborate at her earliest convenience. Instead, he did. He wheeled himself closer to me, and made a motion in the air as if he was writing something. Sarah handed him a pen and paper.  He leaned towards the desk and wrote, as quickly as he could with his shaking hand. He slid the paper over to me and I concentrated on the inky pinworms he produced. “Can you stab me?” it said.

I stepped back. I must’ve looked confused, because he shook his head, and pointed at his arm. Could I stab him? In the arm? And with what? A pen? A fork? I kinda liked that. He was being funny, or sarcastic, or maybe he had just lost a game of squash. I kinda wanted someone to stab me as well, so I could empathize. While I imagined the scenario of myself stabbing a deaf man in a wheelchair, he interrupted with a long moan. He rolled up his sleeve and pointed to his arm again. He then quickly grabbed the pen once more and wrote, “I have diabetes. I need” and before he could finish, Kate finally decided it was a good time to fill me in on the fucking story.  The man had diabetes, like he had been trying to explain, and needed an insulin shot. Because his hands were shaking, he couldn’t do it himself, and was rolling around every wheelchair accessible area looking for someone to shoot him up with insulin.

I couldn’t do it either. I wanted to, but I couldn’t. I could understand Kate now. She wasn’t yelling to get through to him but to silence her own shame in being unable to help. Then Sarah had an idea. “Why don’t we find out what group he came here with and where their room is? Maybe they can help him there!” We started acting out each word of our question, each of us with their own idea of what worked and their own moves to reflect it, like an unrehearsed dance group. I honestly still don’t know why neither of us wrote the question down on the piece of paper. I guess the panic really crippled our logic, and walking our fingers across the reception desk was the most reasonable way to symbolize someone walking into a meeting room. Sarah started looking through our room bookings schedule.  She gave up soon. Her panic had won, and she ran away and down the hall madly.  I heard her running into a nearby party room from which Madonna’s ‘Holiday’ resounded. Maybe the panic didn’t win after all.

“I’m not sure the deaf club party is in the room with Madonna,” Pete laughed, and we all joined in. We laughed because we were completely freaked out of our minds. Things were looking worse by the minute. We must’ve looked like maniacs. A deaf man in a wheelchair was convulsing from a diabetic attack, and there we stood around him, laughing.  Sarah came back from a different room, and brought a man with her. He said he would help, and reached out to the deaf man, who had somehow, without our knowledge, taken out his syringe. ‘Fuck it,’  he must’ve thought, ‘I’ll do it myself. It’s worth a shot. I can’t die here with these morons.’ Luckily, he didn’t have to do it himself, because the man wheeled him to the nearest washroom, and stabbed him there himself. Bless his soul.