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Midlife Crisis

Tom Fillion

    It was nine o’clock when I arrived at Flint’s house in Thonotosassa. His car was there along with another one. I presumed it was Ellie’s and that they had made up again. It looked like she had a different one from her previous visits, a little sportier too. I knocked several times, but there was no answer so I figured they were back in Flint’s bedroom doing what they usually did, knocking knees.
    “Flint,” I called out.
    No answer, so I opened the door. The reading chair with the orange and white parachute above it was empty. It reminded me of Montezuma’s throne without all the feathers and gold. I could hear voices in the bedroom.
    “Flint, it’s Billy.”
    Maybe it wasn’t Ellie Windows, come to think of it. She had probably made up with her husband, Frank, like they always did. Maybe it was Jacqueline, the English lit groupie working on her PHD and professors with tenure, or maybe the aardvark, the artist Flint told me about. Maybe she found Flint’s new place in the country and stopped by to have a go around with him. I had never seen her or her car so maybe that’s who it was. But it could have been Angelica, the lawyer’s wife, who met Flint in another lit class. She was bored as hell with her life and was writing about cement block suburbia. Didn’t she have a sports car? A white Mustang? I couldn’t remember exactly. Blame it on Flint’s tequila and weed.
    “Flint, sorry about last night. I haven’t gotten that fucked up in a long time,” I said, thinking I heard him get out of bed.
    If it was Ellie she’d just laugh when she found out I chucked all over the theatre in South Tampa last night. We went to see a foreign movie called Seven Beauties, but when I counted them it was more like fourteen to twenty beauties, and I couldn’t tell if they were beauties or not, I was so drunk and stoned. Too much tequila and weed. It was embarrassing not holding my own like I usually did. The guys in the battery factory where I worked part time would have laughed too at how pathetic I was.
    “Flint!”
    The door opened and Flint peered out. He didn’t have any clothes and used the door to hide himself.
    “What the hell are you doing here?” he said pushing his hair back.
    “I’ve got a couple of brownies someone gave me. I thought I’d share it with you. I owe you after last night, seeing I puked all over the place.”
    “Who is it, Flint?”
    It didn’t sound like Ellie. More like what I remembered Angelica to sound like. Of course, it could have been the aardvark. Like I said, I had never met her. I had just heard about her, the struggling artist. Maybe she didn’t even exist. Flint was always making up shit like the novel he was supposed to be writing just to see if I was listening.
    “It’s Billy,” Flint said, and I didn’t like the way he said it either. If he had said, “Oh, it’s Billy.” That would have been different. Like he was surprised and glad to see me. But “It’s Billy,” sounded like someone had dropped a brick on his foot.
    Whoever was there knew me. That meant it was Ellie Windows, Jacqueline, or Angelica. The aardvark was out.
    “You better go,” Flint said.
    “I brought you a brownie. After last night I owe you. I was truly pathetic. I think I’m having a midlife crisis.”
    “You don’t owe me anything. Besides, you’re too young to have a midlife crisis.”
    The bed inside the room creaked, and I could hear bare feet against the wood floor.
    “Stay right there,” Flint said.
    “Ellie? Hi, Ellie.”
    I forgot Jenna. Maybe Jenna had returned? What a happy ending that would be! Flint came to his senses and welcomed that raving beauty back into his life and recognized their son! I still couldn’t believe he had let her go so easily. I had met her one time when I had taken him to a party at my girlfriend’s house. Jenna was ravishing! I would have married her in a second.
    “It’s not Ellie.”
    I had been around the College of Arts and Letters long enough and had taken enough classes to have already graduated. Jacqueline, the English lit groupie had been in a few of them. She always sat in the front so she could fawn over the professor and let him see how good she looked in tight jeans and a white blouse that covered her freckles. When she was naked, Flint said she looked like a lobster with all the freckles. She was always laughing and posturing and had a preference for pricks with tenure. Flint was the exception to her rule because he was writing a novel called The Void.
    “Jacqueline?”
    “Just leave the brownie. I’ll get it later.”
    I looked at my watch. If it was Angelica she still had time before returning to Clearwater and a cross-examination by her ex-husband-to-be whom she still lived with because she didn’t have a job. They were working out the details of their divorce caused by her absolute boredom with having everything she ever wanted.
    “Angelica?”
    “Leave it over there.”
    He pointed to his favorite book, Gravity’s Rainbow. The thick book rested on a small night table next to his reading chair and canopied throne. A half-used roll of toilet paper lay on top of the book. Flint read and whacked off. Read and whacked off. He wore Playtex gloves to stop his hands from shaking whenever he was reading. The gloves were next to the book.
    Before I could put the brownies down, my instant ex-girlfriend came out of the bedroom wrapped in a sheet. Long dark hair. Brown eyes. Tanned skin. Sharon was a woman studies major who said she hated Flint after she met him at her party. She looked better than the last time I saw her when she dropped from first to seventh or fourteenth beauty and wore a razor blade on a pendant for cutting off men’s balls and told me she was a lesbian and couldn’t make love or be my girlfriend because her father abused her down there where she pulled Flint back into for more of the midlife crisis all of us were too young to have.

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