Who Cared, Who Cared?

I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to go home, because Sam had a key to my apartment, and I didn’t want to deal with her. So I drove out to this kind of punk house just outside of town. A bunch of musicians lived there, aged nineteen to about thirty. It was a big former Boys and Girls Club, with a swimming pool out back that had grown toxic. They always had something going on.

By the time I got there night had just fallen. Cars were lined up down the block. I felt bad I hadn’t brought any beer, but I knew somebody would spot me. I walked down the gravel driveway up to the front porch, where about fifteen kids were sitting outside, smoking cigarettes or weed, drinking High Lifes.

The opening bands weren’t very good, and neither were the headliners, so at some point in the night I wound up in the front yard with this guy named Dennis, who was an accountant or something. He had the hottest wife on the planet—her name was Therese, pure Delta sweetness, and wild—but he still showed up at every party anyway. She was cheating on him, had been for years. It was one of those small-town secrets that everybody seems to know except the guy it’s happening to. Dennis was bearable until he got drunk, like he was now. Then he’d want to do his one and only party trick. He’d take the gasoline can from the storage shed and dump it in his mouth. Then he’d hold a lighter up to his lips and spit the gas out in a huge flume of burning air. It was pretty impressive, the first time. 

“Hey Dennis,” I said. “Cut it out. You’re too drunk.”

But he wouldn’t. He guzzled that gas, held up the lighter, and spewed.

Maybe it was more gas than he realized, or he aimed poorly, I don’t know. But his shirt ignited, his chest bursting into flames. He went screaming around the house, his arms flailing, a burning human torch in the yard. I chased after him. Dennis bee-lined to the back and dove headfirst into the sludgy moss-covered pool. I wouldn’t have done that, not even if I was on fire. There were snakes in there.

When Dennis emerged, spitting poison water from his mouth, the whole place cheered.

Dennis looked around, surprised, his head bobbing above the water. His eyebrows burnt off, a dead armadillo floating belly-up next to him. 

I helped him out of the pool, all the cool kids still gawking. It was before the days when people filmed everything, so I can just remember it how I remember it and no one can prove me wrong.

“You okay?” I asked Dennis.

He laughed and slapped his beer gut. He was covered in leaves and garbage water from the pool. Probably some dead stuff too. “Never felt better!”

“That was crazy.”

“I’m baptized man. I feel smooth.”

“You have turtle shit on you.”

“I do?”

“Pond scum. Some kind of shit.”

Dennis swiped a hand over his back, looked at the greenish muck tainting his palm. Something seemed to break in him. His body started quivering, a hypothermic shiver. I wondered if he had swallowed some of that water,

“Therese is leaving me,” he said. “She’s been stepping out on me. With this idiot from a jam band. He plays bass.”

“I know.”

“You know?”

“Yeah man. Everybody knows.”

Dennis threw his arms around me, blubbering, staining my shirt with whatever was on him.

“It’s my fault,” he said. “I neglected her.”

“It’s okay.”

“She’s my whole life. I’ve fucked it all up. This is the same thing as dying.”

Dennis began to weep. The two of us, him shirtless, stinking and scorched, in the yard. All the punk kids looking on. I was crying too.

Hours later, the party long over, Dennis and me lying in the yard, every last beer and bottle emptied, everyone gone home. I wondered what Sam was doing. Snuggled up in her bed, probably, arm around the spot where I used to be. Here I was in this shitty front yard. Ants crawling over my skin, ticks burrowing into my flesh, who cared, who cared?

I hadn’t wanted it to end like that with Sam. Why did I end it like that? I never could handle people yelling at me.

I would call Sam tomorrow. We’d started off with really high hopes, that feeling of infinite possibility, like you just found the good road for the first time in your life and there was no end to the places it would take you. But then we just got kind of stuck. 

Dennis rolled over in his sleep. He slung his massive arm around me, pulled me close to him. Dennis reeked, burnt hair and dead water and sweat, nuzzling into my neck. The big wide stars overhead, the bears and gods and cutlery up there, just enough of a moon. Some bats flew by, eating the mosquitoes. Bats could be alright. Dennis was snoring by my side.

I’d seen a man on fire tonight, something miraculous, like a comet streaking through the yard. 

It puts me in mind of something that happened fifteen years later, in a woman’s apartment in New York, somewhere I never dreamed I’d be living. It was the last night of our relationship, and I would return to being alone, my natural state—but I didn’t know that yet. All I knew was the fight we’d just had and the wreckage it left. I was lying in her bed, unable to sleep, as I always was in other people’s places. She had this monstera plant, massive, more than six feet tall, and it spread out over the apartment window. I was staring at the ceiling, wondering what had happened that night and what it meant for me, for us, when the plant out of nowhere did a full body shiver. For half a second it shook its leaves out, like a wet dog tossing off lake water. Right there in her apartment. I couldn’t believe it. I’d never seen a plant do something like that. I didn’t know it was possible.