Soup Is For Soldiers

I’m 14 years old and standing in Rachel’s basement. The air is moist and wood paneling covers the walls. Rachel leans against her pool table and shows me pictures of us from elementary school. Pages and pages of photos taken during a time when everything we wore was neon.

I don’t really see these pictures. I know what they contain because I have the same ones at home, and I have an incredible memory when it comes to things that involve me. Instead, I just listen to Rachel as her voice captures every piece of dead air in the room. I could listen to her for hours and I will if she lets me. The only other thing I think about besides her voice is her lips. I want to kiss them. I have no confidence in my ability to pull that off though, so I don’t.

Rachel puts down the photos and turns on the song “Saturday Night” by Whigfield. She dances. I’m nervous about her parents coming home early from work, and I’m nervous about getting back to school in time for third period, but her dancing makes it impossible to focus on either of these two possible problems. All I concentrate on is Rachel, her blonde hair trampolining wilding around her shoulders, some of it getting stuck in her mouth. She smiles brilliantly at me and it’s something I have a hard time not smiling back at. It’s infectious. Like a fucking disease.

Saturday night, da da da, Saturday night…

We don’t make it back for third period. The sun has fallen and we sit on her crusty couch, not touching each other, but sitting close enough to if it became an option. Her fun loving demeanor has gone by the wayside, replaced by one of comfort. She looks into my eyes while accidentally breathing into my mouth.

“I’m glad they haven’t come home yet,” she says.

“Me too.”

“My mom’s not so bad.”

She looks up at the ceiling then exhales, relieved to see it’s still protecting her. I imagine a wonderful scene; we’re in hell, the only ones, and the ceiling keeps others out so we can keep it to ourselves. I tell her this.

“That’s funny,” she says, “I was thinking it was heaven.”

I stare at her as she continues to watch the ceiling, almost willing it to stay up. I want to tell her that it’s not going to crash in on us, but she knows better.

“Heaven isn’t a place you can stay if you’re not dead,” she says.

Rachel’s pupils retreat as far back into her head as possible.

I wish I could kiss her.

***************

The next day at school, I talk to my best friend, Jason. Captain of the volleyball team. Captain of the basketball team. 3.5 grade point average. Good looks. Bad style. We live in a redneck town though, so style doesn’t matter.

“She says she wants to go out with you, but she doesn’t want to kiss you yet,” Jason tells me.

“Really?”

I’m excited. I’ve never had a girlfriend before, and I’ve been crushing on this girl since I was 9 when her family arrived in town. I’ve known Rachel for 5 years and still don’t know why they moved here. I never asked. It never seemed important.

I catch up with Rachel outside of her cooking class. She is all anticipation so I ask her out straight away…as if I was born with the courage it takes to do such a thing.

***************

I stand on Rachel’s step, having just bare knuckle knocked on her door. I never know if I’m supposed to use the fancy door knockers families have installed, so I never do.

The door opens, but it’s not Rachel. It’s her mom, a burly woman whom I’ve only met a handful of times. I don’t know why I expect her to welcome me with open arms and congratulate me for winning her daughter’s heart, but I do and she doesn’t. She simply opens the door, sees me, then leaves. I think I hear her calling for Rachel, but I’m not quite sure. Either way, Rachel never comes. Her sister, Donna, maybe the second most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen, appears instead.

“I think you better just go for now,” she says.

“Is everything alright?”

“You know what?” she says sincerely, “I’m not sure. I’m not sure if everything is alright, but everything will be alright again if it’s not right now.”

She gives me a friendly smile, one that also lets me know how naive she thinks I am. Left standing by myself, I inhale the infant grass from their lawn, and the freshly paved asphalt from the road.

***************

I walk down the road back to my house. The sun is low and fading. Wednesday is almost here, and there’s not a cloud in the sky. I am confused and wish I had a quarter so I could stop at the pay phone outside the school and give Jason a call.

Pitter. Patter. Pitter. Patter. Scuffle. Pitter.

I turn around and see Rachel. She shuffles her slender, defeated body towards me. She reaches me and grabs my shoulder. It’s hard to tell if she’s been crying, or if the glassy sparkle in her bloodshot and bruised eye is simply due to the top half of the sun reflecting off of this new asphalt.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

“For what?”

“I’m sorry I couldn’t come out. I’m embarrassed.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing. I just couldn’t come out.”

I look at her eye. It’s a beautiful combination of red and yellow, tinged with charcoal. I’m happy she’s here, and that she cares enough to say sorry. I hope when I’m sorry for something I own enough courage and care to say so.

Rachel looks to the sky. The sun is almost gone now, and it’s that funny time of night when it’s hard to see true colors.

“The clouds are gone,” she states.

“They are.”

“I wish they were still here.”

I understand what she means and I realize it’s not a nice night. Outside her basement, the clouds have all left. Heaven has disappeared. Wednesday is almost here. When it arrives, everything will be gone.

A RECOUNTING OF KYLE’S DEATH AT THE AGE OF 35 IN 6 PARTS
(MISSED THE PROLOGUE? START HERE: PROLOGUE)

It’s 2008. I’m 27 years old. Married. A father. ‘This shower is so fucking cold’ I think to myself , touching my nipples, checking to see if they’re as hard I believe them to be. I’m someone I hate, and HAVE hated ever since I refused to purchase cookies from a muslim Brownie member who came knocking on my door last year. ‘What if she uses the money to support the lunatics who crashed the planes into the Twin Towers 7 years ago?’ I thought to myself. She took my rejection like a champ though, soldiering on to the next door. ‘Soldiering on,’ I thought again to myself, ‘that’s exactly how a TERRORIST Brownie would react to rejection… they’d soldier on.’

My wife’s been working 40 hours a week to support us. I’ve been writing some bullshit screenplay about some bullshit character trying to ‘come of age’ during the apocalypse. I let my friend read it and he says it’s good but I can tell by the way his eyes dart to the back of his brain to search for positive adjectives that he doesn’t really mean it. We’re barely able to pay rent, my wife is permanently exhausted, and my daughter keeps shitting on the carpet because she’s happier without a diaper on, which means she’s easier for me to take care of during the day. We can barely pay rent and I’m spending 20 dollars a week on spot remover. I’m grumpy a lot. My wife tells me I need to get a job. She just read Coupland’s “Generation X” so she actually says I need to get a ‘Mcjob.’ This makes me mad because that’s the only Coupland book she’s ever read and I’ve read all of them, save for “Shampoo Planet.” Nevertheless, I agree and say I’ll go out tomorrow and get one. Somewhere.

I’ve dropped off 8 resumes when I stop for a coffee I can’t afford at Starbucks. Outside, a man in his 30’s is offering pedestrians the opportunity to start their own business. He says all it’ll cost me is three hundred dollars. I pay the man with the money my wife earns working 40+ hours a week and go home with 24 cases of Aussie brand Hairspray to market and sell at $9.87 a bottle.

My wife is livid about my new enterprise. She yells a bit. I yell a bit. We’re good parents though so we try to keep it down. We agreed to never fight in front of any children we might have one day, and today that rule comes into effect. The muted yelling makes the fighting worse because we make up for the lack of volume with melodramatic facial expressions and damning hand gestures. I tell her it’ll all work out, but she’s had enough. She takes our daughter to the bedroom and shuts the door.

I need a cigarette so I walk into our bathroom, turn on the fan, and light one. I smoke fast, barely inhaling. I get through half of it before deciding I need a walk. I take my half smoked smoke and start to leave the apartment, flicking the burnt ash from its tip into a tray by the shoe rack. I flick it too hard and the cherry pops off, landing on the 24 cases of hairspray our fight was about. I don’t notice.

In the stairwell heading outside, I hear and feel an explosion. Everyone that matters in my life is dead from the ensuing fire. I tried, but I couldn’t save them from my failed bad decision.

**********

It’s been a week since I was fired for punching a hole in my computer screen. Needing money, I decide it’s time to monetize the celebrity gossip website I’ve been running for the last year. My site doesn’t get the hit count that Perez’s does, but the web traffic it does own should allow me to pay rent and buy food every month…if I pay my landlord 2 days late and shop at Bulk Barn. I set up Google AdWords and convince the 24 hour video store down the street to purchase web banners. After the first week of monetizing my site, I predict it should become profitable in 2 months. Thank you, Google Analytics.

3 weeks later I luck out and snap a picture of Ben Affleck raising his hand to Jennifer Garner in a local grocery store. They’re in town shooting a movie and I just happened to be buying pop tarts. I immediately post the picture on my site and traffic spikes.

That night, eTalk Daily runs the story using my photo.

The next day, Valerie Pringle (of all fucking people) outs me to the general public as the owner/operator of the site. The Affleck camp threatens legal action against me, so I remove the photo and shut everything down. I call my friend, Slimy Jenkins, and ask if he still has that gun. He says he does and I ask how much money it would take to hire him as a hitman. He says not much and I tell him that that’s the perfect amount because that’s how much I have. We get together to discuss how to locate and assassinate Valerie Pringle, a task neither one of us believes should be too difficult.

A RECOUNTING OF KYLE’S DEATH AT THE AGE OF 35 IN 6 PARTS

It’s been two months since I gave up screenwriting. It was the right decision, but not one I’m happy about. Every morning I wake up and curse my natural writing ability for bringing me to this point, or more specifically, my lack of natural writing ability. For a lot of years I told myself that I was a good writer. A talented one. I wasn’t. 

My shower sucks. The water always runs on the edge of hot and cold, straddling the line so fucking hard that my body can’t decide whether to shiver or melt. My nipples can’t decide either, and they click in and out the way Snapple lids did when kids popped them on the school bus when I was nine. I hated those kids. Not because they popped their lids, but because their parents bought them Snapple. The closest thing I got to a brand name drink in my lunch was grape Super Socco.

I wear my jacket into work and plan on wearing it all day in order to hide the coffee stain on my white shirt. My head pounds due to lack of caffeine. I smile and say hello to everyone in the front office, cursing them silently while believing I’m better than they are. More cultured. In my second mind though, the one just behind my first, I know I’m not actually better than anybody. In fact, I’m worse than most people, and a much larger failure.

I turn on my computer, open my inbox, and click on a link in an email sent to me from a guy I used to pretend to be friends with because he said he knew Jason Priestley and I always had a crush on Jennie Garth. Clicking the link brings me to an internet meme of a cat wearing a crown and miniature G-Unit clothing. The Helvetica writing beneath the image reads, “Kanye’s A Pussy.” I don’t have a clue what it means. Angry, and with years of of failed decisions coming to a head in my head (not just failed decisions, but failed BAD decisions, which are technically 8 times more depressing than failed good decisions, and 13 times more depressing than stand alone bad decisions), I punch the computer screen. My knuckles break and my hand is lodged inside the old school monitor. I’m succinctly fired and “advised” to attend anger management sessions.

I scream, “You don’t know what it’s like!” over and over and leave the office forever.