Luther Carey

What can you do when throwing people down staircases loses its fun? Where do you channel the creative energy that came from that, viewing each staircase the way a golfer views different courses? This love of mine is lost, as is every other I have had as I grew up. The way pinching Mary Lerner in kindergarten had, and hard fouling in basketball had, or the revenge beatings on my father after his accident had. None of it sticks and the more that we try to hold the candle for these things the blinder we are to something potentially satisfying. Who knows, while I am very disappointed that I can no longer take pleasure from tripping the odd passerby down a flight of say 20 or so steps, I might completely miss out on something amazing, like... insurance fraud, or pissing on the homeless from my fire escape, the future is open, really, and I can't tell you what it will be. I will try the pissing thing after work today, and if it doesn't work out, I will probably end up on the phone with Cindy or Karen, or whatever name they get paid 2.99 a minute to be called.
No pleasure can be counted on for permanence. In fact, this is the very reason that I think love is one of those things. If you could buy it for what its worth and sell it for what everyone thinks its worth, you would be a rich man. But, instead people go back to this like the rat that keeps returning to the drugged water bottle, and they behave in a similar way when the water bottle stops giving.
Before Cindy and Karen, there was Leanne, and yes, her name was actually Leanne. She was a guidance counselor at a local high school, so she was always dressing in business skirt outfits, with her reddish hair up in a bun. She would come home from school and tie me up and make me call her Mrs. Louis and I became the fool who thought the pleasure might last. We would sit on the fire escape in the morning, having barely slept an watch the sun filter through the other apartment buildings, bringing a greenish-blue color into the sky over the bay. I fucked every night, and I thought that I knew how to keep perspective on pleasure and the way it wanes. But when Leanne left, writing her final words in lipstick on the bathroom mirror like some sort of stylish movie character. She must have just covered her tattoos and gone to work at the school, putting on her act. She must have met someone else.
I think that if anyone at my work knew what I did, to others I mean, the pain I cause, I could be fired. When Daryl Skein from New Accounts cut his hand because someone removed the guard on the paper slicer, that was me. I am the one who broke the window on Sally Riali's new Camaro, the day she drove it for the first time to work. She was so proud, sitting in the little red matchbox of a car, revving the engine to get everyone to the building's windows. I pictured the car a year from now, littered with soda cans and gum wrappers and dust, stained with Sally's green eyeshadow.
I don't want you to think I don't like my co-workers, I do. I actually respect a few of them, and even have made a friend or two at times among the group. Jason Clark, whose cubicle adjoins my own, used to invite me out to watch basketball and drink, and the two of us even went to a strip club once, where Jason had gotten us kicked out for asking for lap dances and saying he would pay the next time we were there. I remember the bouncer was a short guy who bent our limbs in ways that made his size not matter, and who had bad breath and a fleck of cocaine in his nose. He told us not to come back without money, but we both had money and I didn't understand why Jason had been fucking with the girls in the first place.
I sat against a car that wasn't mine and smoked a cigarette, wondering whether I needed rotator cuff surgery, listening to Jason explain himself, and it began to make a bit of sense. I didn't say it to him, but Jason wasn't too different from myself.
“Life just isn't any fun by the book,” he said. He told me that he wanted to live in a way that always made people react to him. “If we just move through the world in our bubbles no one will notice whether we're there or gone.”