360

By Will Pewitt

I’ve got about the worst memory a guy can have. Seriously. And I’m not just talking about how I can’t remember what I ate for breakfast this morning or how I can’t remember what my first bike looked like—or even if I had a first bike—I’m sure I did but maybe it was just my brother’s or something—but I’m talking like I can’t remember whether or not I liked a movie, or what my wish was on my last birthday. That kinda stuff. You know, the kinda stuff that people know, their own little secrets that they’re too embarrassed for anyone to hear but themselves.

It’s a problem I guess, but I look at it like this. People can lose their lives over their realizations. Yeah, like whenever they say, “I’m gonna do this…” like a New Year’s Resolution and some dude decides he’s gonna quit smoking or read more or stop watching porn—or other times when someone says, “I’m never doing that again,” like give his son money or do someone a favor or hug his father-in-law at a family reunion, or even when a guy says, “This is what I’ve been doing wrong all these years.” Those things that never last. And then every time he lapses or realizes that his realization was b.s. he feels worse about himself, or he gets more and more disillusioned. Since I can’t remember much of anything I don’t remember mine, and so I just go on, ignorance-is-bliss-style. Only I don’t choose to be ignorant. It’s just a quality.

Anyway, so today’s my birthday. And every birthday people are like, “since I’m one year older,” blah blah, and they try to figure out what life’s all about. I don’t think life’s about much of anything, other than whatever you believe it is. It’s a confusing train of thought, so let’s just derail it before we get on. I’ve been walking down the highway—360, in Austin, that’s where I live—because I lost my car. And losing a car on your birthday might make people think something pretty awful about life, or God, or His sense of humor I guess, but I don’t even bother trying to make sense of it, you know, because I figure I’ll forget.

I’m walking by one of those big oaks—they’ve always got big trees on the side of the highway, you never notice because you drive by so fast—and I start thinking about all this, and so I think I might as well try to get it all out. Anyway, up in the oak I think I see a cat, and so I go over—I’m like a firefighter this way—and try to climb the damn tree. I start scaling it and crap like Spider-Man and I can’t get a hold of the bark and once I look up anyway it turns out to be a possum and the thing is crawling down the other side of the tree. Possums scare the hell outta me, I guess I should say—they just look too creepy to be in the real world. They look like damn movie monsters, only smaller.

So I’m walking to a gas station just down a mile or so from where my car was looking out into this plot of land and thinking about a time I had as a kid trying to chase my brother through a corn field. It sounds innocent enough I guess but he ducked out and I lost sight of him and he had gone into the house—I used to live on a farm—and I was out there for hours thinking he was dead or had broken a leg at least. Anyway, finally my dad comes out and is pissed as hell and has his shotgun because he thinks maybe a coyote or something got me—I was only five or six, maybe ten, but young, you get me—and I finally pop up and he aims at me and shoots. The suckers flew by my damn head and I swear I could see the bullets. Every time I tell people that they don’t believe me—they say you can’t see bullets. Maybe it was part of that life flashing before your eyes business that slowed down time—I don’t believe in all that—but anyway I think I could see ‘em. The tiny little bullets—seemed like a million of ‘em, and they whizzed past my head, and I could feel the smoke and it burned me eyes ‘cause my dad was just like a few yards away. Scared him to death at first. He thought I was the coyote. And then he cocked the gun again—I had ducked back down—and I started talking, scared as hell, so I musta been mumbling and he still thought I was the coyote.

He was drunk I think, and so afterward he forgot it too—he’s like me like that I guess. And so then I eventually got to run off and said screw my brother and eventually went back in the house. I told my dad about it the next day, thinking he knew it was me, thinking he had just wanted to shoot me, and he said something to the effect of Jesus Christ why didn’t you say nothin’! And then I just shrugged my shoulders and he started eating his mashed potatoes again. He eats ‘em with peas. Gross as hell. I like mine baked, with butter and sour cream and all that stuff. My brother hates baked potatoes, mashed potatoes, any kind but McDonald’s French fries.

And so as I’m thinking about all this—the gun, potatoes and the field—I start thinking I could be hungry. That’s a thing I hate about birthdays, whenever it’s your birthday your mom always asks you what you want for your birthday. Here’s the thing, it always makes me feel like I’m dying or something. Like I’m gonna be executed. Birthday, death day. It seems the same an awful lot of the time. Like you’re about to go to the electric chair. Everyone being so overly nice to you and asking you what you want for dinner. One year I got fried okra, pizza and tacos—my mom makes the best tacos—and none of that goes together but it seemed like something a guy’d order if he were served his last supper—last meal whatever. So anyway, it freaks me out.

Thinking of all that makes me shiver even though it’s like ten hundred degrees outside. My birthday’s in July. So I’m walking, sweating like hell, with bloody feet—oh yeah, that’s the other thing, I lost my shoes, and so I’m having to walk the whole way, on the side of the highway, with no shoes—that’ll bloody you up right there no doubt. I’ve already got calluses from playing basketball and stuff. You always tear up your feet playing sports. Sports and stretching, they tire you out, and everyone says it makes ‘em feel better about themselves. I think it’s sick. It’s like the Buddhist people who set themselves on fire. That’s what it seems like to me. I just do it sometimes ‘cause there’s nothing else to do. And my brother used to play. He made all-state. At least I think he did. I can’t remember.

See that’s what I’m talking about. Stuff like that, I just can’t even remember if my own damn brother made all-state or not. Or even if there is something called all-state. It seems like they should—maybe I saw it in a movie.

Anyway, so while I’m walking, thinking way too much, obviously, you can tell—people always say they think too much, or teachers or coaches—yeah, especially coaches, my brother’d always say that coach said he was thinking too much on the court—and I just don’t see how you can think too much. I mean you can’t help how much you think. I think everyone thinks the same amount. And the speed of thought is like, you know, forever fast. You can’t really slow something like that down. When I picture it I picture it like trying to stop the Millennium Falcon you know, from Star Wars. You just can’t stop something going that fast. Light speed or whatever they say. The speed of thought’s gotta be something zippity like that. You can’t control it. That’s what I think.

Anyway, sorry, so as I’m walking I’m thinking I’m hungry and then thirsty, and that makes me remember that I’ve gotta take a leak. I’ve got a problem with that. I’m doomed one day to wake up and not remember my name—‘cause of the memory thing I said you know—and have urinary tract diseases and not be able to piss standing up and all that. I’m doomed, I tell ya, doomed.
So as I’m thinking that I’ve gotta go, I look around and no one’s coming and so I go behind some bushes and I think I see a cat. But it turns out to possum. Possums scare the hell outta me, you know that. They’re all creepy and come at you like bad dreams—they make me think of bad dreams, always crawling around and stuff. Like memories you don’t wanna remember.

Ghosts, demons I guess are the words for what I’m trying to say. I’m not doing too good a job explaining it. I just wanted to kinda get it off my chest about my crappy birthday and how you can’t put too much stock in ‘em. I think that’s the point that I was going with when I started. But you never end up where you start. Like in an essay, at school, you know teachers always tell you to do that. But it never works. And if it does it seems fake. It’s like, “here, I’m gonna tell you about such and such,” and then you explain your ass off about why such and such is so important and then you end up right where you started. Plenty of books and essays and all that—there’s probably ten million essays in America alone that’ve been written and thrown away by the teachers, because they’re unnecessary—that’s what I’m saying—and it all could be avoided, wasted paper, wasted trees, all that, just if a teacher read the first sentence, “Such and such is important” and then said, “Hm, sounds good,” and then stopped. And then you wouldn’t have to write it, or explain it, and the teacher knows. He taught it to you for Chrissake. Same with books. I bet every author could sum up their book in one freakin’ sentence and just say, “I’m trying to say that the world is round,” or whatever and then you could just say, I agree or I don’t. And then you could save yourself the hours it takes to read something and form your own ideas. Books don’t change people’s lives, people change the lives of books. I don’t know if that makes sense, but it sounds good. If I made a book, that’s what it’d be about.

So while I’m about to piss and the damn possum scurries off with his creepy gross-ass tail slithering away—gah!—behind some other bush to scare the next poor damn sap, I’m thinking I wonder if a cop’ll pull over and arrest me for urinating on public property. And so then I think, I wonder if this is public property or if it’s this dude’s with this land. And if so, then how does the cop know that I don’t own this land, besides that I guess I’m too young. Who knows, maybe I inherited it, he doesn’t know, I don’t know, if you believe something enough then it’s true. That’s what I believe. And like if you take a—one of those tests—a polygraph—and you believe strong enough in something then they have to let you off, you know—you know. But like what does a cop say if he asks one dude, “Is there meaning to life?” and one dude says no, and he asks some other dude who says yes, and if they both believe in it, it doesn’t prove anything. That’s the meaning of life right there. Mark it. That everything’s just a contradiction and the harder you try to think about it the faster the ball—like the point of it, you know—just goes.

So I’m waiting to get interrogated by this loser cop and thinking how I’d tell him off, whether or not I’d spit in his eye. I spit in one dude’s eye one time. We were playing basketball. It mighta been my own damn brother, I don’t remember. Anyway, and so he had been talking crap the whole game and then I scored, I think, and besides just saying something back to him or giving him the gratification—‘cause you know I didn’t wanna go back and forth, I just wanted to get in my two cents and show him what was what—I just spit on him. It got stuck to his cheek I think. Pretty sick. If someone spit on me I’d probably knock their block off—I don’t know if people use that phrase anymore, I haven’t heard it in a while.

Anyway, so I’m waiting for this cop and he doesn’t show up and I’m having a hell of a time trying to piss ‘cause the stuff’s just not coming out. Like I said I’m destined to be one of these folks in a retirement home with all these tubes and bedpans and all that stuff, unable to control what they do. It’s really disgusting to think about, but you have to accept some things I guess.
So I give up and start walking again and think I’m hungry and I wonder what my mom’ll make me for dinner, if she’ll make anything. Sometimes she’s too lazy lately. That’s not the nicest thing to say about your mom I guess but whatever, she knows what I mean.

And then I start thinking about my brother and how one year he got me this book for my birthday, a nice one, hard back and all, it mighta been autographed—I don’t remember the name of the thing, but still—so I was like young, I don’t know, or maybe not, maybe it was just a couple years ago—but I spilled some soda on it and the whole left side of it, the ink and whatever, all started to turn green. The pages—they were nice pages, the real old kind, you could tell—they started to go green, even though that’s not the color the cover or the pages or the soda even was, and I thought it was the strangest thing I’d ever seen in my whole life, and I ended up just giving the book back to him and said something you know, immature like, I’m sorry, I’m not responsible enough, you know something like that—or wait—no—I didn’t tell him, I wrote a note, a goddamn note!, and I said all that sorry stuff and then gave the book back to him—he had been at college, I guess the book had been his or something—and he didn’t ever say anything about it—I’m not sure if the book had been his to begin with or if he had bought it, but I was pretty broken up about it—really I was—now it’s hard to look back and feel sad about something that you know was an honest mistake.

Walking down the highway I thought that maybe I should call someone, or that maybe I should stop after a while at one of the gas stations. By now I’d passed a few and I don’t know why I’d kept walking, probably because if you stop and call someone on your birthday and say you lost your car and your damn shoes they’d say how sorry they were for you and act all apologetic. But they didn’t do anything wrong. So I don’t want a big fuss. So I just kept walking and not really knowing where I was gonna go or what I was gonna do. For your birthday, if you’re old enough, I guess you could go in a strip joint or down to a bar or something and get free drinks or something. But that didn’t sound like me. I don’t know that I’d do that, and so I kept walking and thought about how everybody tries to take advantage of things in the world, everyone and their mother. And everybody’s looking for charity. If there’s ever a dude who didn’t want that I’d call that dude a saint and give him anything I could think of. Even Jesus asked for followers. Least I think he did.

So I keep walking, wondering what to do next, and I say next even though I don’t even know what I’m doing to begin with, and suddenly I start to get dizzy and my feet don’t even hurt anymore. They’re just numb, you know, from all the walking, and so my legs are like bumbly, you know what I mean, like shaky and you can hear this buzzing in your head—bumbly is what we called it in my family when I was a kid—my dad, after coming home from a bar would be bumbly—and now I had it, but I wasn’t drunk. No I don’t even drink, too many people lose their lives drinking, smoking all that stuff. People look for what’s gonna bring ‘em down. Like my old man says, you find what you’re looking for, and so if you look for some sympathy or some pity then you’re gonna get it by bringing yourself down in the worst way.

So I’m thinking, man it’s hotter than hell out here, all of a sudden because the trees are starting to seem like they’re shaking an awful lot, and at first I chalked it up to just being windy or just being dizzy but then all the sudden I could see the trees like bending, and the branches actually, you know, like moaned and stuff, like in movies where the sky opens up and junk, and so I’m watching and I can see a possum in one of the trees and I try to hurry up—but not too fast, ‘cause if you try too hard to get away, stuff can catch up with you, sense fear, and stuff, and then you can’t get away from nothing—and then it disappears. And then though there’s one on the side of the street, and another one over a hill, and on the other side of the highway, and I think that they’re a family, and they’ve all been run over and whatnot, and then I realize that they just play dead. And so then I’m obviously like scared outta my gourd, and so I pick up the pace, and I get dizzier, and I start like chucking, you know, running like a madman, and then the possums start coming to life, just like I knew they would, and then I started to kinda collapse, but I kept my feet under me, and then I lost my balance and just before I fell—I was about to fall, hard, you know, on the damn highway, which coulda been bad, coulda died on my birthday, gotten run over, like a damn possum—possums creep me out—and I coulda been road kill, just another one of those animals.

And then I duck out onto the side of the road, and there’s a gas station and I wonder should I go in or not but I think about that saint guy that I made up, not asking for anything, and I wanna be like him, even if he’s not real, and so I think, Hey I don’t need any help—and so even if I collapse, or die even, then I could maybe be happy with myself. Because if you die, the last thing I bet you know is just whatever your last thought is, and so dying isn’t all that bad, if you just end on a good note. So I’m trying to think happy thoughts, you know, like that I’m satisfied, and then eventually I obviously start lying to myself. Making myself feel better about life than it is, and I figure it’s all fake. And I realize that and mark it and just leave that as that. And then, thinking of all this last words business I remember a dude I met in a hospital once.

It had been my birthday, I don’t know which one, I was little though, littler than any of the other ones, and I’d hit my eyeball on a swing—on a damn swing on my damn birthday!—and I’d been trying to cover it up and whatever but I couldn’t see anything outta that eye and eventually it started bleeding and all the kids at my party—my parents always throw you a party even if you don’t want ‘em to—all the kids got freaked out, and the parents too, and some of the parents wouldn’t let their kids play anymore with me—so we go to the hospital and I’ve gotta wear this patch and stuff—I think I got stitches maybe, on the inside of my eyelid, if you can do that—I don’t know, I’m not a damn surgeon.

So there’s this guy in the room next to me, two beds per room you know. He’s got his eyes closed, and he’s flat as a board—skinny guy, short guy. He had blonde hair like a movie star, and like I said his eyes were closed, but if he’d opened ‘em I bet they’da been blue—and the lights are off and his flat stomach is there and I realize he doesn’t have any arms—he’s an amputee I think. And I crawl over near him—this is after my parents left—and I didn’t even know the dude was awake and he says to me, “You awake kid?” and I say yeah, and he asks me how old I am, and so I tell him, and I tell him it’s my birthday, and he asks what I got, and so I told him I guess, and he says, “And what did you give?” and I say it was my birthday, I didn’t have to give anything, and he says, “Everybody gives, and everybody loses,” I won’t forget it ‘cause the dude didn’t make no sense, “and keep it, keep it all for yourself, all to yourself.” And I think those were the last things he said in his whole life. His family wasn’t there or anything. And he died with his eyes closed. And so I told him, his dead self, that he musta been wrong, because now he’s dead. And I guess that doesn’t make much sense, but it did then, because I thought that nothing you said mattered if you were dead, because they lost—you know—they didn’t live, so they musta been wrong, about everything, it didn’t make much sense when you tried to piece it all together, but I wanted to stay alive, being alive was what mattered, existing, being, whatever you call it, and when you tried to lay it down you only got confused, and you scared everything that made sense away, and it was just jumbled and screwed up and confusing and then you got stuck asking yourself stupid questions like, “Why did I write a note instead of say I’m sorry,” or, “Why were there so many possums all of a sudden” or “Why didn’t I tell my old man that it was me when he was shooting at me, and would he have cared,” and none of ‘em have any answers and they just roll off your brain, and you interrupt yourself when you think about it and it gets so annoying, like a headache, and you try to pin it down but it’s so strong, life’s so strong, I guess, sometimes, and it can get away, like a possum, so scary, I hate possums, and so slippery, without any voices and without any pupils, you don’t know where you’re going and you don’t know how to talk to anybody, and that’s when I started wondering about why I gave that man my car, and my shoes, without putting up a fight, the bastard, you know, who was under my car in the parking lot, when I was going to get my brother a book, at the bookstore, it’s his birthday today, I forget how old, and this dude hid out under my car, waited for me, and took me, took my car as I opened the door and then he took off my shoes, and that was miles ago, miles and miles, and now I’m stuck here, walking, trekking, and I’ve walked around the city four times, 360, runs around the city like a spiral but you never get nowhere, and I’ve gone around it four times, trying to wonder why I didn’t call for help, or run after him, or why I didn’t say, “No, it’s my brother’s birthday,” but he stole the present too—I guess he didn’t steal it—I had already chucked it in the back seat, a book, the one like with the green pages, all new, no rips, no soda, no stains, and I could give it to him and maybe then I’d be able to think, I didn’t keep everything for myself, and I could remember that man in the hospital, and put away that ghost, and realize, Hey I’m not him, and I can live forever.

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©2007 Will Pewit. All rights reserved.