The Big Phone Booth Lebowski: A Fable
A tale from the ghost of grad school past told recently recalled The Incident of the Bloody-faced Running Boy.
Upon wearying struggle, I was near the peak of Mt. Debauch. I was about to move from my apartment that used to be a garage, which was attached to but separate from a house where five failed frat boys lived. My things were in boxes and the boxes were stacked in the living room/kitchen. I had no cable connection for my tv, and my phone had had to be shut off early, which meant that I could neither phone a friend or access the internet. Instead I consumed extravagant amounts of liquor and cheap beer.
Early in the year I had pioneered the motto: Yes. Go ahead and be happy. This was good for a person as sheltered and restrained as I had been all my life. By this time, after several months of motto up the mountain, I’d been actively testing my moral limits. No specifics at this time, to protect the innocent. Near the peak, guilt-laced wandering wonder was settling into my nerves.
I passed an early evening with a few beers and then, without any entertainment but my fritzed self, I walked to the bar down the street. Oddly, none of my friends were there that night, just a few people I knew askew. I drank beers until the bar closed at 2am and then ambled home. No amount of beer, however, could tame the fritz in my nerves. I was hades-frenetic and needed to spill forth. Again, no phone.
I pulled a calling card from my wallet and walked down the street to a phone booth, about half a block from the bar I’d just left, and called my former boyfriend, who was and still is a good friend. The street was quiet but well-lit by streetlights and moon. Dirty black phone to my ear, I stood in the booth, flailing and wailing about my moral bends when I heard a hard and fast pah-pah pah-pah repeating itself. A mild flare of panic rushed through my body. There I was, drunk girl in a phone booth alone on the quiet street at three in the morning. I turned toward the sound getting louder.
From around the corner across the street came a boy running as if from death itself. He crossed the street, running in the direction of my phone booth. Sharply, my flailing and wailing turned: I’m drunk and I have no phone and I feel guilty about ____ and I question my morals and--Oh my god there’s someone running at me oh shit—
That mild panic that had rushed rushed more fully now. My heart and belly merged, my jaw stiffened, my limbs lost posture. He was running right at me. Why? He was close and I could see him vivid under the street light. His face shone oddly. He got closer and I could see his whole face was shiny with wet—the wet was red. It was blood.
By this time my flailing had become a deceptively calm matter-of-fact commentating of the event. Closer, closer he came running quickly, and then woosh: He flashed across the glass of the phone booth, and was gone. Nobody chased after him, or if someone had been, he or she gave up or made a wrong turn and lost the bloody fella.
I went home after that and made an enormous White Russian with the fixings a friend had left a few days earlier. I don’t know what I was thinking. There’s a lot of intoxication in a human-sized White Russian, and I’d made one for a king. Soon I began hallucinating. The walls began to shift. The longer I stared at a thing the more convincingly the thing transformed into something else.
Finally around six in the morning I fell into a stormy sleep and slept until I heard a knocking a few hours later. A candidate to rent out my apartment was there to take a look. She scanned my posters on the wall. We made conversation about Smog and Built to Spill. I had no idea what was going on. Everything had peeled away from itself.
What I learned: a White Russian is an intoxicant much stronger than it tastes, particularly in frenetic combination. Also, there is always something lurking around the corner to remind you that you never can see the whole big picture. Or, when you think you’ve knocked down all the pins, there is another game entirely to begin and you must play it. Go ahead and be happy, whatever that means.
Upon wearying struggle, I was near the peak of Mt. Debauch. I was about to move from my apartment that used to be a garage, which was attached to but separate from a house where five failed frat boys lived. My things were in boxes and the boxes were stacked in the living room/kitchen. I had no cable connection for my tv, and my phone had had to be shut off early, which meant that I could neither phone a friend or access the internet. Instead I consumed extravagant amounts of liquor and cheap beer.
Early in the year I had pioneered the motto: Yes. Go ahead and be happy. This was good for a person as sheltered and restrained as I had been all my life. By this time, after several months of motto up the mountain, I’d been actively testing my moral limits. No specifics at this time, to protect the innocent. Near the peak, guilt-laced wandering wonder was settling into my nerves.
I passed an early evening with a few beers and then, without any entertainment but my fritzed self, I walked to the bar down the street. Oddly, none of my friends were there that night, just a few people I knew askew. I drank beers until the bar closed at 2am and then ambled home. No amount of beer, however, could tame the fritz in my nerves. I was hades-frenetic and needed to spill forth. Again, no phone.
I pulled a calling card from my wallet and walked down the street to a phone booth, about half a block from the bar I’d just left, and called my former boyfriend, who was and still is a good friend. The street was quiet but well-lit by streetlights and moon. Dirty black phone to my ear, I stood in the booth, flailing and wailing about my moral bends when I heard a hard and fast pah-pah pah-pah repeating itself. A mild flare of panic rushed through my body. There I was, drunk girl in a phone booth alone on the quiet street at three in the morning. I turned toward the sound getting louder.
From around the corner across the street came a boy running as if from death itself. He crossed the street, running in the direction of my phone booth. Sharply, my flailing and wailing turned: I’m drunk and I have no phone and I feel guilty about ____ and I question my morals and--Oh my god there’s someone running at me oh shit—
That mild panic that had rushed rushed more fully now. My heart and belly merged, my jaw stiffened, my limbs lost posture. He was running right at me. Why? He was close and I could see him vivid under the street light. His face shone oddly. He got closer and I could see his whole face was shiny with wet—the wet was red. It was blood.
By this time my flailing had become a deceptively calm matter-of-fact commentating of the event. Closer, closer he came running quickly, and then woosh: He flashed across the glass of the phone booth, and was gone. Nobody chased after him, or if someone had been, he or she gave up or made a wrong turn and lost the bloody fella.
I went home after that and made an enormous White Russian with the fixings a friend had left a few days earlier. I don’t know what I was thinking. There’s a lot of intoxication in a human-sized White Russian, and I’d made one for a king. Soon I began hallucinating. The walls began to shift. The longer I stared at a thing the more convincingly the thing transformed into something else.
Finally around six in the morning I fell into a stormy sleep and slept until I heard a knocking a few hours later. A candidate to rent out my apartment was there to take a look. She scanned my posters on the wall. We made conversation about Smog and Built to Spill. I had no idea what was going on. Everything had peeled away from itself.
What I learned: a White Russian is an intoxicant much stronger than it tastes, particularly in frenetic combination. Also, there is always something lurking around the corner to remind you that you never can see the whole big picture. Or, when you think you’ve knocked down all the pins, there is another game entirely to begin and you must play it. Go ahead and be happy, whatever that means.
2 Comments:
If there is the possibility of an afterlife, I like to think that in it we'd be able to unravel things from different times/spaces, such as the mystery of this bloody-faced running guy.
I like this idea. Very much. Maybe a list of such events is in order, in case this afterlife indeed is to be.
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