Plane flights look unable to secure themselves without plague.
There was an amazing accident underway as I rolled up onto the ramp that headed Eastward. I think by the time my car finally stopped tumbling and pushing through the burning remains of countless other large twisted smudges of steel and rubber and wires and glass, by then all but indistinguishable as automobiles, I’d unintentionally gotten quite used to the fact that life is a very fragile thing indeed. A man I’d never known before and to this day still with not even a name to call him by, hung upside down in my car, pressed through the passenger side window as though he’d merely been a homeless man sticking his head in to harass some change from me, with his jaw missing and a lolling black tongue draped over the seat like an octopus tentacle. The hair and flesh on his head was burned off so that I could see the face of his skull. I pitied him somewhat, but at the same time I’d lost feeling in my legs, which worried me a great deal. So rather than shed tears for the dead, I concentrated my efforts on prying myself from the car and possibly crawling to safety so that I would not be forced to join their numbers.
I made it, too. The burns on my back were enough to have me crying like a baby sometimes as I lay awake at night, unable to sleep. But it was a very lucky thing indeed that what I suffered amounted to very little more than severe burns.
I lost my job at the factory because nobody had ever telephoned them with the details of my condition, and from my hospital bed, I figured occupational worries were the least of my troubles, so I didn’t try to get the job back.
Weeks later I had very little money to my name, and not really much to care for anymore. The accident had left me in listlessness, with an astounding indifference to couple everything I’d ever cared for, weighing the importance of anything in the grand scheme of things if life can be so easily extinguished at any moment, at any second at all, without warning. My job became of no importance whatsoever. My family the same. My own well being, the same. So I took to hanging out as much as possible at the bars I could find a thumbed ride to.
Someone had put their quarter into the jukebox and paid for something I didn’t think was worth their money. But as I scanned the patrons around me, I soon started to get the feeling that their overall deal wasn’t so sophisticated anyway, and by the time the third song came on I was over it. I was throwing back a few more drinks, almost at the end of my money. I fully planned to drink beyond my ability to pay, however. I figured the worst development would have me cleaning up vomit and sweeping floors until my debt was paid, which was inadequate but should be acceptable.
But in one thousand thoughts I never intended what happened next.
A pool stick cracked in the near vicinity behind my back, followed closely by some gasps and approaching footsteps. I spun around, expecting great pain. But the violence was not intended toward me, so I breathed in a sigh of relief. Two or three feet away, a greasy looking man wearing no shirt under his leather vest was on his slow way to turning around in the direction everyone else was looking in, but not fast enough to catch the man with the broken pool stick swinging the heavy end down onto his head. Without warning, just as with the accident on the freeway, the mass of people before me turned into a dusty cloud of violence.
I kept my position at the bar and ordered another whiskey. The barkeep was nowhere in sight, so I grabbed a bottle within my reach and took a swig from it, feeling a bit mischievous about it but too drunk to stop drinking.
As a throng of what looked to be ten or thirty people wrestled with each other, throwing chairs and swinging pool cues, I began to devise a funny way of dealing with the bar tab. A quick exit under the radar would absolve me of my legal responsibility to pay for anything, wouldn’t it? And it would have been easy, since nobody was watching me; all eyes were either on the exits by which best to flee what could soon become a deadly episode, and then of course, some of them held fast to the frenzied brawl itself, which was a fantastic display of brutality indeed. I watched closely as two men wrestled another to the ground, held him there with feet on throat and stomach, while a third accomplice to the unfair murder lifted a pool table onto its side and pushed it over onto the grounded man. It was absolutely incredulous.
I was thrown from the barstool by two men trying to tear each other’s eyes out, hitting my head against a fire extinguisher. Before I could move out of the way I was shoved, so that somebody whose face was bleeding like a water tap could get clear access to the fire extinguisher. He ripped it from the wall, raised it above his head and ran screaming back into the mob.
More and more bodies seemed to float into the scuffle than fall out. Casting off any further notion of fleeing this attractive charade, I took the rings from my fingers and slipped them into my back pocket, and then proceeded to head straight toward the fight at full speed.
As I neared the two or three feet of middle ground between safety and danger, I leapt into the air, pushing at an explosive speed, pitching myself over and into the fray with an utterly perfect swan dive, soaring into the clouds of smoke and spit and heat, landing face first into the afternoon battle.
I made it, too. The burns on my back were enough to have me crying like a baby sometimes as I lay awake at night, unable to sleep. But it was a very lucky thing indeed that what I suffered amounted to very little more than severe burns.
I lost my job at the factory because nobody had ever telephoned them with the details of my condition, and from my hospital bed, I figured occupational worries were the least of my troubles, so I didn’t try to get the job back.
Weeks later I had very little money to my name, and not really much to care for anymore. The accident had left me in listlessness, with an astounding indifference to couple everything I’d ever cared for, weighing the importance of anything in the grand scheme of things if life can be so easily extinguished at any moment, at any second at all, without warning. My job became of no importance whatsoever. My family the same. My own well being, the same. So I took to hanging out as much as possible at the bars I could find a thumbed ride to.
Someone had put their quarter into the jukebox and paid for something I didn’t think was worth their money. But as I scanned the patrons around me, I soon started to get the feeling that their overall deal wasn’t so sophisticated anyway, and by the time the third song came on I was over it. I was throwing back a few more drinks, almost at the end of my money. I fully planned to drink beyond my ability to pay, however. I figured the worst development would have me cleaning up vomit and sweeping floors until my debt was paid, which was inadequate but should be acceptable.
But in one thousand thoughts I never intended what happened next.
A pool stick cracked in the near vicinity behind my back, followed closely by some gasps and approaching footsteps. I spun around, expecting great pain. But the violence was not intended toward me, so I breathed in a sigh of relief. Two or three feet away, a greasy looking man wearing no shirt under his leather vest was on his slow way to turning around in the direction everyone else was looking in, but not fast enough to catch the man with the broken pool stick swinging the heavy end down onto his head. Without warning, just as with the accident on the freeway, the mass of people before me turned into a dusty cloud of violence.
I kept my position at the bar and ordered another whiskey. The barkeep was nowhere in sight, so I grabbed a bottle within my reach and took a swig from it, feeling a bit mischievous about it but too drunk to stop drinking.
As a throng of what looked to be ten or thirty people wrestled with each other, throwing chairs and swinging pool cues, I began to devise a funny way of dealing with the bar tab. A quick exit under the radar would absolve me of my legal responsibility to pay for anything, wouldn’t it? And it would have been easy, since nobody was watching me; all eyes were either on the exits by which best to flee what could soon become a deadly episode, and then of course, some of them held fast to the frenzied brawl itself, which was a fantastic display of brutality indeed. I watched closely as two men wrestled another to the ground, held him there with feet on throat and stomach, while a third accomplice to the unfair murder lifted a pool table onto its side and pushed it over onto the grounded man. It was absolutely incredulous.
I was thrown from the barstool by two men trying to tear each other’s eyes out, hitting my head against a fire extinguisher. Before I could move out of the way I was shoved, so that somebody whose face was bleeding like a water tap could get clear access to the fire extinguisher. He ripped it from the wall, raised it above his head and ran screaming back into the mob.
More and more bodies seemed to float into the scuffle than fall out. Casting off any further notion of fleeing this attractive charade, I took the rings from my fingers and slipped them into my back pocket, and then proceeded to head straight toward the fight at full speed.
As I neared the two or three feet of middle ground between safety and danger, I leapt into the air, pushing at an explosive speed, pitching myself over and into the fray with an utterly perfect swan dive, soaring into the clouds of smoke and spit and heat, landing face first into the afternoon battle.