Fluke Read online

  “Maybe you’ve got some condition, Fluke,” Sean theorized one night as I swept shards of broken beer bottle from his driveway.

  “’Condition?’” I asked, wiping beer from my shoes.

  “I’m no doctor, bro, but it’s just weird how you drop shit. What triggers it? What’s the factor, man? Is it because you’re a Fluke?”

  Thus the Fluke Factor was born. Or at least christened.

  “Ow! Shit! Hot!” I set the mug on the table as gently as I could with one hand, while wiping my chin with the other. Dammit, what is with me burning myself tonight?

  “You just look so much like him,” Sara spoke softly, her voice catching me completely off-guard, halting my frantic attempts to stop the burning. I froze and looked at her, one hand on my chin, one hand still extended over the table. I probably looked like a mime, mimicking a moron.

  “What was that?” I asked, “I look like what?” Just then, I heard the chink of the toaster as the toast popped up. The eggs sizzled and popped quietly; they needed to be tended to, or we would be eating hunks of rubber for breakfast.

  “Hold that thought,” I said, walking backwards into the kitchen, pointing to her with an index finger, “I’ll be right back.”

  What was that all about? You look so much like him, she had said. Who? I wondered. And, is that a good thing or a bad thing?

  I took the hot toast out of the toaster, and replaced it with two more slices of bread, pushing the button down. I found flowery plates that matched the mugs in the cabinet and removed two of them. I took a black, Teflon-coated spatula and used it to put the eggs on the plate. I was buttering the toast when I felt her hands on my bare back.

  “Wow, and you cook, too!” Her voice was normal and lined with laughter. She wrapped her arms around my belly, joining her hands over my belly button. I heard her take a deep sniff, and she said, “Damn, that smells good. I’m starving.”

  Gone was “Distant Sara,” arriving on the scene was “Confused Adam.” A wave of confusion washed over me. Okay, what’s going on now, I wondered silently. Lots of beer, amazing sex, dramatic mood swings, cryptic comments, all within the first eight hours of our time together. Dare I ask?

  I put two slices of buttered toast on the plate and waited for the next two slices to pop up. “Are you okay, Sara?” I asked. I said it a little more seriously than I meant to.

  “Yeah, I’m great. Are you okay?” She laughed nervously, confused by the serious stare on my face. She genuinely seemed to have no idea why I would ask such a thing.

  “I’m…” I paused, just wondering where you were half an hour ago, gorgeous, I thought. Instead, I said, “I’m great. Couldn’t be better.”

  Roll with it, baby, I told myself. Toast popped up, butter was spread, and breakfast was served.

  4.

  Mornings were terrible for me; I held waking up early in genuine contempt. My theory was that the body’s internal workings would wake you up when it was ready to do so, when it was rested and prepared to start back up. Alarm clocks, I felt, were nothing more than a plague rained down by an evil force, possibly even Lucifer himself.

  Of course, my theories brought accusations of melodrama from my friends. My friend and co-worker Kevin was an early riser, and his theory was that the earlier a man got up, the earlier a man could start his quest to grab his own destiny.

  “What if you missed out on true love because you wanted to sleep another hour?” Kevin, the dreamer and eternal optimist, would ask.

  “My true love would never wake up an hour before me,” was my standard response.

  Sara and I had done our share of sleeping in over the last four days. The normal waking time had been anywhere in between 10 a.m. and noon. When she woke up first, she was playful, poking my sides or pinching my nose shut, startling me awake. The one time I woke up first, I propped myself up on one elbow and watched her sleep for five minutes before she woke up, smiling. “I was dreaming you were watching me,” she had said.

  After waking up, we spent at least another half-hour in bed, smoking or talking, and enjoying the occasional invigorating burst of wake-up sex. They were good mornings, better than any other mornings I had experienced, and I had no desire to spend them anywhere else, with anyone else.

  I met Sara Wednesday evening; Monday morning found me in my own dingy, soap-scum ridden shower at 6:30 a.m. instead of hers. One of the perks of being a pizza delivery guy was the fact that I almost never had to be awake at such an ugly hour of the day.

  Unless I’m still drinking or having sex, I never want to be awake at this hour again, I thought to myself.

  This was a popular saying of Sean and I when we had an audience. Standing in my shower, studying the chalky white layers of funk that trailed down the wall below the soap dish, I had no audience, and, good or bad, I didn’t have pizzas to deliver anymore.

  However, I did still have bills to pay. The rent was due in two weeks, the electric bill was three days late, and the cable television was about to come to an ugly, abrupt halt in the next two weeks. I thought of ways around this as I continued to wash the sex off my body (another Sean-ism), and a scenario played in my head.

  Hell, I already have a sign for my car, and a deluxe pizza carrying bag. I could start my own business, cooking pizzas in my home oven, and deliver them myself, too. I chuckled at the lunacy of my own silly thoughts, a mental picture of me, using my kitchen counter to roll dough, add toppings and sauce, and cut pizzas. Then I thought about Perry.

  Unfortunately, I would have to see the fat bastard again. In my living room lay the red delivery bag, mocking me with its happy, and not altogether truthful “Keeps your pizza oven fresh!” declaration. Inside the bag was the money I had carried that night; the change from Sara’s delivery. She had a medium cheese pizza, which came to $9.88 after tax, and she paid with a twenty-dollar bill. Standing on her porch that night, I had moved to give her a ten-dollar bill and twelve cents change, but she told me to keep it. That’s when she and I had started talking, she asked me out, and I realized I wasn’t going to have the job much longer. And now there was a red bag on my couch, empty except for the money that Sara DuBeau had given me that I now had to give to Perry. What was it that I had said that day that made her laugh while I handed her a nice, hot pizza? I still couldn’t remember. While the image of Sara was emblazoned in my memory from our first meeting, the words actually spoken by me were gone. I couldn’t remember what I said for the life of me, only the way she looked, her smile, the delicate way that she leaned lightly against the frame of her doorway.

  So, I owed Perry $9.88, delivery change, a delivery bag, and possibly a shirt and a hat. As much as I hated to think about it, I was going to have to go back to the Palace.

  I laughed to myself. This time it was the image of Perry sweating while he made pizzas and hollered at the crew passing through my mind. He was such an obnoxious prick, king of the world in his own mind, running his little empire, his grand pizza palace, in a shitty, old strip mall.

  I realized my fingers were becoming rather wrinkly and prune-like, so I shut off the water, grabbed my frayed towel from the bar, and started to dry myself.

  Sara, I thought. Wow.

  I couldn’t believe how quickly it had all happened. We had spent most every moment of the past four days together. It had all seemed like utter bliss to me, but the low self-esteem side was a constant hiss in the back of my mind. The fact that, at age 26, I was two years older than her, and yet so unaccomplished in what I had done with my life, crept into my mind every so often followed by, What can she possibly be getting out of this deal? It almost seemed unfair to her.

  Goddammit, accept the fact that she likes you! My rational, logical side screamed back. This was hard for me to accept; it was a new feeling inside of me, created by my burgeoning desire for Sara, and it wasn’t coming easy.

  There were, however, occasions in which I was compelled to escape from her for an hour or so. These were always under the guise of going to m
y apartment and picking up fresh clothes or a compact disc that I wanted her to hear. These weren’t complete falsities, but the truth was that even though I’m a 26-year-old guy, I suffer from a mixed bag of embarrassment and paranoia at the thought of using her restroom with her in such close proximity. I just couldn’t bring myself to shit in there.

  Her townhouse wasn’t incredibly big, the walls were thin, and the bathroom was a little too centrally located for me. I searched and searched, but couldn’t find any inner justification to perform such monstrosities in her nice neat place, to defile her home like that.

  The liquor would tear at my insides each morning approximately one to two hours after I woke up. I could just about set my watch to it. I would often let it ride, enduring the pain of gassy, cramping bowels for hours on end, desperately wanting to stay with her, but needing, even more desperately, to sit on a toilet and explode. I was a victim of chronic beer shits. God forbid I went into that neat, nice-smelling bathroom of hers, sat down and had a nasty, loud, wet movement. I would be shamed and humiliated into hiding.

  You just look so much like him. Those words of Sara’s from our first morning together often haunted me as I screamed down back roads in the Civic, dangerously close to an accident, and not the automobile kind. My butt cheeks clenched as tight as I could keep them without duct tape or a nail gun, I sped home, worried about making in my pants. Those mornings I thanked my lucky star for my job at Perry’s. Delivering pizza, I had learned the absolute quickest way to drive between any two points in the city, and the seconds that these routes shaved off in the race between myself and my biological functions undoubtedly saved my pants and car seat from a fearful mess.

  You just look so much like him. I didn’t think about it too often when we were together, but as soon as I was alone in my car, guts churning and gurgling, begging for release, I would hear those words over and over: You just look so much like him.

  She hadn’t gone into a trance again like the first night, exactly. I had found her staring at me a little strangely a few times, but she would almost immediately regain composure, the big, white-tooth gorgeous smile forming, spreading out, taking over her face. Then she would do something that would make me forget about the “distant Sara” for that moment. Sometimes a beautiful woman had to do nothing more than smile to make you forget about any ugliness.

  During these alone moments, I reached the conclusion that Sara had unwittingly referred to someone that she had been involved with in her past. I was already becoming fearful of what our future was going to be. I had seen a ghost in Sara, and it scared me. I worried that she was comparing me to another person, someone bigger, more special than I could ever be to her, and I was stuck here in the real world with the shell of Sara.

  I usually felt inadequate with women; that was nothing new. But the women that I had gone out within the past with were nothing in comparison to this girl. My standard defense mechanism for situations like this, with other women, had been to overanalyze and misinterpret everything, drink, get angry or miserable (usually both), and slowly (or quickly) drive whichever girl it was away. You could say that I was an expert at it.

  Somehow I was controlling myself this time. I wasn’t pushing her away, not yet. I couldn’t allow myself to fuck this up.

  I walked over to my stereo and turned it on. The classic rock hour was finishing up, and I caught Mark Knopfler singing “money for nothin’, and the chicks for free...” Ahhh, if only that was true for me. I came back to the reality of why I was in my own miserable little apartment instead of with Sara at her neat, welcoming home.

  Today was job search day. There was no doubt that being jobless and poor could not help my current station in life. It was time to pound the proverbial pavement and find that company that needed a sharp guy like Adam Fluke.

  I grabbed my laptop and flopped down on the couch, completely unenthused about looking for a job. I logged into a popular local job listing website and scrolled around half-heartedly. The food service section was the most populated section, by far. It appeared that every pizza joint in town was hiring, along with most other fast food joints.

  I found myself wondering if that was still what I wanted. The odd thing was that I made a decent amount of money delivering pizzas, it was low responsibility, and it was mostly stress-free. You grab the pizza, jump in your car, jam some tunes, smoke a cigarette, and drive fast. Five to fifteen minutes later: hand over the pizza, collect the cash, drive back. Getting paid to do it all the while! It really didn’t get any easier.

  How long could Sara be satisfied with dating a pizza delivery guy? She deserved better than that. And what I considered a decent amount of money meant I had money for beer, CDs, and mere survival. Surely her definition would differ from mine substantially. My reasons for job satisfaction seemed to lack any real redeeming qualities as well.

  My low self-esteem side, which had been making quite its share of appearances since Wednesday night, and I had a brief debate:

  She deserves a lawyer or an actor or a doctor, not you.

  But she likes me, dammit, and I’m a good guy!

  Wait until she gets a handle on your earning potential, your economic “viability.” We’ll see how far that “good guy” card gets you.

  Fuck you.

  She and I had briefly talked about my 3-year stint in college (during which I accumulated a whopping 40 hours) and what I wanted from life. It all made me nervous, though, and I think she sensed that, so we didn’t stay on that topic too long. It was easy for me to pretend to be this idealistic guy with big plans when talking to people I didn’t know well or care to know well. It was a very different story when talking to someone I envisioned a future with.

  One day, lying in bed, I mentioned to her that I liked to write.

  She responded with the inevitable, scary, and practically unanswerable question: “What do you write?”

  “Um…” How do I explain that I haven’t finished anything I’ve started writing yet?

  “Nothing big. Short fiction, bad poetry, probably the same crap most angst-ridden guys in their twenties write,” I half joked, unable to rise above my insecurity.

  “Can I read some of it sometime?” she had asked me.

  “I don’t know…can you read it?” I said, moving my hand up a thigh. One certainty during that first week was that I couldn’t keep my hands away from those incredible legs.

  “Okay…MAY I read some of your stories, smart ass?” she replied, grabbing my hand and moving it higher. This had, of course, lead to brief laughter and then more sex.

  I smiled to myself yet again. I had to make this last.

  After clicking job links aimlessly for half an hour, I realized that my concentration was almost non-existent that morning, and I couldn’t stop daydreaming, so I closed the laptop and set it to the side.

  Maybe later.

  I lit a cigarette and sunk down into the couch, smoking and contemplating my next move. Sara was home, and I could easily go over there and lay around, listening to music and laughing and getting nothing done in my job hunt. What can I say? My mother would say that my inability to make a move towards starting a career of some sort is just a classic trait of the underachiever.

  Her special boy Adam, the underachiever.

  I caught the red delivery bag on my couch out of the corner of my eye and couldn’t stop looking at it once I saw it. I know, I know, you keep your pizza oven fresh, for Christ’s sake. Leave me alone about it, already.

  It was no use. I had to take the bag and the money back to Perry’s, and today was as good as any day to get it over with.

  Since Perry didn’t open his place until 10am, and I was stalling on my job hunt, I decided to do some laundry and straighten up my apartment. Sara was eventually going to see where I live, barring my blowing things over the course of the next few days. As I looked around the dismal little dwelling I heard my Grandpa’s words in my head, "You can’t polish a turd, son." I figured I could at least try to make
my turd more presentable to Sara. Maybe I could even fool her into thinking I was a neat and orderly person.

  Whoa, whoa, whoa. Let’s not get carried away now.

  First, I decided I could go ahead and knock out the laundry. It was piling up from almost two weeks of my having done nothing constructive aside from being with my wonderful new…girlfriend? Yeah, I guess girlfriend is the right word.

  So, I began the laundry-gathering process. I imagined most people had a hamper, basket, or other container in their home where they deposited their soiled garments. I didn’t. I just sort of let clothes rest wherever they may fall. When I thought about it and felt inspired beyond laziness, I tossed the clothes into the back corner of my bedroom closet. The “Adam Fluke System” of doing laundry began with a walk-through of every room, with a thorough scan given to each, to collect all of my washables.

  Even though my apartment was miniscule, without fail, I always managed to miss something. Socks could work themselves under the sofa, T-shirts made their way to the vast darkness underneath my bed. A pair of boxers once ended up in back of my entertainment center; I never figured that one out.

  After making my way through all the rooms in my humble little abode, I found myself with a pretty large armload of laundry. I made my way to the nicest piece of furniture I had, my queen size bed, and tossed it all down on top. I had purchased the bed last year, second hand, when my previous bed (a remnant from grade school) had collapsed to the floor. I was the only one in it at the time, as usual, and no injuries were sustained, so it ended up being a blessing. A grown man can only sleep on a little twin mattress for so long.