Over the next four days, you repeat the process of
Monday. You get up at your usual time, you get dressed in
work clothes, you let your wife make you a brown bag lunch,
you get in your car, you drive out to Echo Park, and you
sit and you stare and you think.

        Tuesday.

        Wednesday.

        Thursday.

        Friday.

        On Saturday, you sleep in. You know you should have
been looking for another job all those days last week
instead of sitting and thinking and being depressed. You
know you should have been proactive, as they liked to say
at your last job. Accomplished something. Papered the
fucking town with your resume. You know this.

        But you just didn’t have it in you.

        The thing about your job is that you did it for
seventeen years despite the fact that you fucking hated it,
and it’s not the lack of work that’s depressing, it’s the
lack of money, the lack of income, your inability to
support you and your wife the way you would like to. The
job itself caused you no end of misery. It was depressing.
The way those fucking cunts treated you. Every day was
worse than the day that came before. And the thought of
papering the town with resumes, going to interviews with
sweaty palms, pretending to be charming and interesting and
qualified, putting on your little dog and pony show in
order to get another job you hate, it fills you with repulsion.

        You don’t want that.

        You slaved over progress reports and dealt with a
constant flood of memos and went through twelve supervisors
over a period of seventeen years, and not once, not once
did you complain, despite the fact that what you were doing
was something you despised.

        Was nothing like what you had always imagined
adulthood would be when you were a kid.

        But at some point your dreams just withered and died.

        Fell to the ground and rotted.

        And now the only evidence you ever had dreams is the
hollow dead shells of them lying in the mud, crumbling; the
black wind of time taking the remnants apart one flake at a
time. And soon enough, even the shells will be gone.

        Saturday, you wake up at ten-thirty, and even though
you know you should have been trying to get a job, that
thought is in the back of your head. You wake up, and your
wife is lying beside you, and she looks beautiful.

        She’s at her most beautiful like this.

        You’ve told her a thousand or more times but she never
believes you.

        She’s at her most beautiful like this:

        In her pajama bottoms and a tank top, her hair a mess,
all the makeup soaped from her face. She is just herself,
clean and smooth and beautiful. All the makeup covering her
glow, rinsed down the rusty drain.

        You prop up on an arm and watch her.

        And she feels you watching, and she opens her eyes and
looks at you, and you smile.

        And she smiles.

        “Good morning,” you say.

        “What are you doing?”

        “Just looking at you.”

        “How come?”

        “Because you’re beautiful and I like to look at
beautiful things.”

        There’s a long silence.

        “You haven’t told me I was beautiful,” she says.

        “You haven’t told me I was beautiful and meant it in I
don’t know how long.”

        “I say it all the time.”

        “Not with eyes like that.”

        “Well,” you say, “you are. And I’m sorry I haven’t
told you enough. I’ve been so absorbed in I don’t know
what. I’ve been so inside this,” you say, “this fucking
monotony of daily living that I haven’t noticed important
things.”

        You laugh at yourself.

        “Am I making sense?”

        Your wife nods.

        “You seem,” she says. But doesn’t continue.

        “What?”

        “This is gonna sound strange.”

        “That’s okay.”

        “You seem,” she says, “like yourself.”

        “I am myself.”

        “For the first time in years,” she says.

        You pause.

        You pause because you have nothing to say.

        You have nothing to say because it’s true.

        Here you are, lying in bed on a Saturday morning, just
one week after losing your job of seventeen years --
seventeen years for fuck’s sake -- and for the first time
since you can remember, you actually feel like yourself.

        You actually feel alive.

        You’ve been numb for so long you didn’t even miss
feeling anymore.

        You only noticed the numbness for the first time on
Monday, when all that feeling came rushing back to you.

        And then left as quickly as it had come.

        An explosion.

        But over the last several days you have felt a strange
sort of evolution of feeling’s return.

        You didn’t even know what it was till your wife told
you.

        “What?” she says.

        “What?” you say.

        “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

        “I think I have,” you say.

        “What?”

        “I think,” you say, “that I’ve just seen the other
half of myself.”

        “It’s like,” you say, “it’s like I’ve been living a
half life, and now that--“

        You laugh.

        “I love you so fucking much.”

        You kiss your wife’s mouth.

        Hard.

        And she kisses you back.

        On Sunday morning, fifteen minutes after walking into
the church through the front doors and listening to Pastor
Highland try to make a god who would flood the entire
planet seem like a good god, you walk right back out and
light a cigarette while standing on steps just outside the
place.

        “How did it go?”

        Frank is standing in the doorway.

        “How did what go?”

        “The talk with your wife.”

        “Oh. That.”

        “Yeah, that.”

        “It didn’t,” you say.

        “Why’s that?”

        “Because I didn’t tell her.”

        “That’s an interesting choice.”

        “I wanted to,” you say, “but the words kept catching
in my throat. I couldn’t get them out.”

        “That’s understandable.”

        “I guess.”

        You take a drag off your smoke.

        “It’s understandable,” Frank says, “but it leaves you
in a very tough spot.”

        “I know.”

        “How do you plan to handle that?”

        “I don’t know.”

        “Well,” Frank says, “you better figure it out.”

        “You think I don’t know that?”

        “I’m sure you do,” Frank says.

        “Let me tell you a story,” Frank says.

        “When I was a younger man,” Frank says. “When I was a
younger man, I did something that even today fills me with
remorse. I had been away from my wife for almost a year. I
was in the Navy, y’see. And I had been away from my wife.
She’s dead now, and I hope to see her soon. I had been away
from my wife, and I was in Singapore. Now Singapore is part
of China, you know. Just off the coast. It’s very tough on
drug dealers and the like, but prostitution is rampant. At
least it was back then. I found out my first night there. I
went to get a haircut, and I was offered a cut and, and
oral sex. You see, they have these deals where the barber
cuts your hair at the same time as the girl, well, you
know. I didn’t do it. I was just shocked at the time. But I
was there for a while, and after a day or two I started
thinking about it, you know, and how I hadn’t been with my
wife in so long, and how it was just gratification and it
didn’t mean anything. And I did it. Not the haircut thing.
I went to a brothel. When I went home, every time I had sex
with my wife, I saw the whore from Singapore. The image and
the guilt were just there, there and haunting me, and I
knew the only way to get through it was to tell her, to
tell her what I’d done. So I did. And she stuck by me. She
forgave me. And she loved me.”

        You take one last drag off your smoke, flick it out
into the parking lot, and then you say,

        “What does this have to do with me?”

        Frank shrugs.

        “Nothing, I guess.”

        Shit. Tomorrow you will be expected to come home with a
check. A check for seven hundred and thirty four dollars
and eighty three cents. That’s how much you make a week.
Made a week. You fucking loser.

        You think about this as you wrap your blue and white
striped tie around your neck and tie a crooked knot in it.

        You were never in the boy scouts.

        You never learned to tie a proper knot.

        A panic runs through your guts as you realize you have
to get a job today or else your wife will find out what’s
been going on.

        But the panic is short-lived. It dies after less than
five seconds. That’s how long it takes you to realize that
even if you get a job today you won’t be receiving a
paycheck for at lease two weeks.

        Two weeks.

        Even if you got a job today, you would be two weeks
behind on bills. And you were living month to month before
you lost your job.

        Even if you got a job today, the chances that you
would even be making what you were making before you got
fired are slim.

        The economy being what it is.

        And now this.

        Your goddamned shirt has a stain on it you didn’t even
notice while putting it on.

        You start pulling yourself out of it. Then stop.

        You don’t actually have a job to go to.

        And you’re not gonna go get one.

        You decided that a long time ago, even if you’re just
realizing it now.

        What you haven’t decided is, how the hell are you
gonna get the money you need?

        How the hell are you gonna do that?

        Monday night you sleep in fits. Tossing and turning.
When you do sleep, the color of your dreams is grey. When
you open your eyes to stare at the ceiling you see spiders
that aren’t there. At some point, while staring at those
nonexistent spiders, which are plaid, you’ve decided, even
though you can’t tell in the dark, you decide what you’re
going to do for money.

        After that decision, you sleep soundly.

        The color of your dreams calm.

        You park your car in the spot reserved for those
putting air in their tires or water in their radiators, and
you swing the door open and walk toward the Texaco.

        You left the house in a pair of black corduroy pants,
a white shirt and a black tie.

        And that’s what you’re wearing as you walk toward the
Texaco station, a black plastic bag hanging from a couple
fingers of your right hand.

        You’re up to something.

        Once in the Texaco bathroom, you lock yourself inside.
You had to slip past some teenager driving a Nova to
school, or wherever he was going, who cursed you and called
you an asshole and banged on the door a couple times, but
now he’s apparently gone.

        You set the bag on the small counter and open it.

        Inside:

        Temporary hair dye; a fake mustache, big and burly and
very Spaghetti Western, the kind of mustache Clint Eastwood
would shoot off a guy’s angel-eyed face; fake sideburns,
also exceptionally large; adhesive with which to apply the
mustache and sideburns.

        Also, a pair of black gloves and a rubber prop gun.

        The thing about living in Los Angeles is you can find
damn near anything you need at any hour of the day or
night.

        To get everything in your plastic bag, all you had to
do was drive down Riverside and make three stops.

        Less than fifteen minutes.

        And now here you are in the bathroom of a Texaco,
taking off your tie, and now your shirt (a Christmas gift
from your wife, fifty dollars from Express at the Burbank
Mall you learned later when you got the Visa bill). You set
them in as clean a spot as you can.

        Then you grab the hair dye.

        Your stomach is in knots. You can’t believe what
you’re about to do. You really must have lost your mind.

        You open the box and read the instructions. Squirt the
contents from the tube labeled with a

        2

        into the bottle labeled with a

        1

        and then shake real good. Spread on your hair and let
sit for twenty minutes. Rinse.

        Another banging on the door.

        “Come on, motherfucker,” Nova says. He hasn’t left yet
after all. “I gotta take a shit.”

        “Find another hole,” you say. “This one’s mine.”

        More banging.

        “Fuck, man. Come on.”

        “Fuck off, you little bastard. I don’t care if you
shit your pants. I’ve got this bathroom. Find someplace
else to take care of business. There’s a McDonald’s across
the street. Now get outta here.”

        Silence.

        Good.

        You mix and shake and apply the hair dye.

        Then you wait.

        You would apply the mustache and sideburns but you’re
afraid the adhesive will weaken or something if you get it
wet when you rinse the dye out of your hair.

        So you wait.

        And wait.

        And when the time comes, you rinse the black hair dye
out of your hair. It’s actually purple. You learn this as
it swirls down the rusty Texaco drain. It takes a long time
to get all the excess rinsed out. Once you do, you dry your
head off with about sixty hand towels, comb your hair back
on your head, and then get to work disguising your face.

        While you apply the mustache and the sideburns you
think of that prop gun.

        Now obviously you’ve no intention of shooting anyone
or you wouldn’t be using a rubber gun, but maybe any gun,
even a fake one, is too much.

        That’s armed robbery.

        And you’ve heard that bank tellers are instructed to
give someone money even if they just ask for it, no gun, no
threats, no nothing. They don’t want panic and chaos. That
would cause more trouble for people. Bigger chance of
people getting hurt.

        If you keep it quiet, you can keep the rest of the
people in the bank from knowing what’s going on. Drop the
chances of some fucking hero trying something silly.

        Like putting a bullet in the back of your fucking
skull and splattering the pretty bank teller in the face
with grey chunks of spongy brain, brain juice, and little
flecks of bone like wet ceiling texture.

        You look at yourself in the mirror.

        You look nothing like yourself.

        You look nothing like anyone you would have ever
associated with in the past.

        Before you were you again.

        This is good. Great even.

        No one who knows you would ever think you were capable
of this. You can barely believe you’re doing this.

        But it’s a one time thing.

        You’re just doing it to buy yourself another week.

        One week.

        And then you’ll figure out what you’re really gonna
do.

        It isn’t gonna be this.

        This is a temporary solution and nothing more.

        You’re not a bank robber.

        You’re a guy just trying to get by, a guy who the
system has made it near impossible for. Seventeen years at
a job, getting ground down like a bad tooth, till the
nerves are exposed and raw. Seventeen years slaving for
five and six days a week (fuckers making you work Saturdays
so you could do the jobs of the sons of bitches who made
twice what you did because they had so-called expertise),
and then you just get slammed out the door, shown the
pavement. Told to kiss the ground, motherfucker. Seventeen
years of barely getting by only to be told it was all for
nothing.

        Leave your company pencil sharpener with the security
guy at the door, thanks.

        You’re not a bank robber.

        You’re just a guy buying himself another week.

        You turn to face the door.

        You unlatch the latch.

        You walk through the door.

        The wind feels good on your face.