A Short Story, Part Trois
But, alas, all of that is besides the point. The point is, our tragic, little hero loved nothing more than getting fucked up- he would drink himself into a stupor and roll around naked on his living room carpet reading excerpts from Henry Miller’s ‘Tropic of Cancer,” or Tolstoy to anyone whom was willing to listen to him on the phone while he was in this lowly state of intoxication. He also enjoyed doing ketamine to the point of k-holing himself into a world of disassociation, drinking cough syrup to the point of robotripping, and when he was still a high school student, he was so often fucked up on acid and weed, that for an entire month he went to school barefoot and wearing tie-dye shirts with grateful dead bears on them. If you are wondering how his teachers allowed him to get away with attending school barefoot, it is because his jeans were so long and tattered at the bottoms, that his teachers could only see his toes sticking out and assumed he was sporting flip-flops.
Having come from a very broken home, our hero found himself on his own from the point that he was eighteen years old onward. He filed all of his FASFA forms himself, paid for his own food, apartment, and books, and purchased all of his furnishings and the clothes on his back. He chain smoked to the point of nearly contracting lung cancer by the tender age of 21. He would skip class just to stay home and read Thoreau, and when a teacher called him out on his six, consecutive absences, he would make up a brilliant lie about how he was depressed having recently found out he had contracted HIV and unable to pry himself from bed in the morning… sympathy would usually be bestowed upon him and he would scrape by with a 65 passing grade. He had the potential to be so much more than he was, but he simply lacked the conscience that makes a good student attend class and a bad one say ‘fuck this shit.’ He would write the most eloquent of suicide letters that often landed him in the Dean’s office, and letters that he would email to his professors outlining his contempt for academia as a whole, and the modern-day college system. These letters also landed him in hot water with the Dean and with his professors who developed a fear of him and would remain wary for the rest of the semester that he was the type to bring a shot gun full of lead to school.
He probably was the type to do such, but he was rarely bullied as most high-school students who are driven to commit acts of massacre are. In fact, he was usually the one doing the bullying. Though he was far from being ‘popular,’ he was well-known for his in class commentary, sharp wit, and even sharper tongue when it came to verbally denouncing any idea he didn’t agree with or theory that he found dissatisfying.
Once, he set a bride on fire on her wedding night (on accident of course). He enjoyed a fine wine more than anything else, and though he was far from being well-traveled, he read so much about history, geography, language, and the sciences, that he could fool almost any stranger whom didn’t know his history into thinking he had traveled to all seven continents.
Our tragic hero’s downfall was though he thought himself to be a sort of Don Juan when it came to the ladies, he was so socially inept that he didn’t know a single thing about the way females processed their thoughts, emotions or their actions. This is the exact reason why he couldn’t hold down a relationship. He would either get wasted, verbally abusive, or both wasted and verbally abusive and there would be an explosive falling-out wherein she dumped him, but he would later claim to have dumped her. He didn’t really know how to pick ’em either.. if you know what I’m saying. He was obsessed by big breasts, to the point of being blinded to the rest of the body. As long as the girl had huge tits, he thought she was beautiful, even if said tits were saggy as fuck, her face looked like a braying donkey, or she only had huge boobs because the rest of her was also huge. He even dated a lesbian once who was on the girl’s rugby team and had no idea why she refused to kiss him four dates into their summer romance.
Many years after graduating college, he was working as a professor at a private university where he taught English and amused his students with stories of his reckless youth. He received a phone call from an old friend and an hour into their conversation, he brought up the fact that they used to joke that they were going to marry each other when they both ended up 40 and alone one day… they agreed never to sleep with each other, just to have a beautiful wedding and to share the expenses of a beautiful house by the sea shore. Oh, and they also had a common dream to open a day-home for the autistic, where they would blare the Kid Cudi song, “Day and Night” on repeat 24/7. Truth be told, they had been planning the details of this marriage for years, whenever one of them was in the depths of despair having just been kicked to the curb by their significant other, or the other one had been single for over three years and they were both at the end of their rope, they would come to the agreement to marry each other out of convenience and the desire to never be lonely again… there were going to be lilacs, a vanilla and rasperry creme filled cake, and the wedding was going to be on a lake in the evening in May.
They decided to finally tie the knot since she now was past child-bearing age and looked haggard as fuck in the face, and he had the same beer gut that his father had developed. What a comely pairing they were! On the night of the wedding, after the cake was cut (and half of it went down the portly bride’s gullet) and the champagne had been flowing for hours on end (yes, the groom was in a state of black-out drunkeness comparable to that of his college days), the groom rowed out in a tiny row boat into the middle of the lake. He planned to set off a fireworks display for his wife once he had made it further off shore. He looked up at the clear, starry night sky and the full moon. The fragrant and sweet smell of lilacs wafted above the water, and he could hear “lilac wine” by Jeff Buckley playing softly from the illuminated tent even though he was now quite far from sure. The melody was punctuated by laughter of the wedding guests, and he smiled thinking about this happy little life that was about to begin. Even if both of them never shared more than a single kiss and slept in different beds, at least he would have a companion to dine out with, travel with, and drink with. he looked up into the sky one last time and struck a match to light the fireworks which he planned to send out and away from the boat on a little plank of wood he had crafted especially for this occassion.
The fire flew up the spark cord of the explosives at a rapid rate, and before he could fully launch the plank carrying the fireworks to a distance safely far away enough from the little row boat where he sat, there was a massive and firey explosion. The poor sweet prince was blown into a million pieces that appeared as white and lilac colored waterfalls and twizzlers and bam-bangers in the night sky… he became a part of that firework extravaganza that evening. The onlookers back on shore underneath the tent ooohed and ahhhhed not knowing yet that the groom was dead. The bride cried tears of joy and looked into the distance in an attempt to see if her friend was smiling as big as she was. She waited 40 minutes for him to come back to shore, and when he didn’t get back, she sent out a search party. They found pieces of the blown up row boat, and a note floating in the water that simply said, “Just remember that you’re ugly, but try not to think about it.”
THE END.
The High Heeled C*ntessa 