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Sidewalk Omelet

Robert D. Lyons

    After a week’s drinking, I decided to kill myself. I didn’t tell anyone. I figured I would do it while all my girlfriends were in the clubs looking for a new gullible bastard to take for a spin. You see, I’ve always been used because I am a good guy. Women see me and think to themselves I can use this son of a bitch. I can push him around and he is the kind of guy who will do anything if you look him in the eyes. And that’s just what they do. I begin to resent it: being pushed. Just always being pushed around like they have my cock on a string.
    I had checked into a cheap downtown corporate hotel with ten floors and a pool. It was a hotel near the top of a hill, just enough tilt to help you run down to the liquor store to grab a bottle, just enough climb to make the effort worthwhile. The hotel had once been painted a peacock green, lots of hot flair, but after the rains, the peculiar Midwestern rains that erode and fade everything, the hot green was just hanging on by its teeth: like the people who lived inside. It gave me time alone, and I liked that. There was something appealing about being in one locked room for a week’s time without having to hear anyone’s voice or see anyone’s face. One thing I have always cherished was my privacy, but recently the phone hasn’t stopped ringing with other people’s problems, and I have been trapped into spending time with pot heads in a smoke filled garage with no beer and playing video games. I have accepted this, but it’s not me. Sure, I get lonely, but I am more alone with a group of people than I could ever be on my own. With each break from all this ordinary madness, I retreat to my room, pull down the shades, and I become myself again. Sometimes I just lay down in bed alone for five or six hours, and marvel at how the depression and loneliness feels both dreadful and relieving at the same time. I just lay in that bed until I get something back: something that had been taken out of me, that juice. The absence from humanity can be so graceful that even god could understand if he invented them.
    When I checked into the hotel, the first thing I did was set my typewriter on the desk, and immediately began laying out the wine, which consisted for ninety percent of my luggage. I had bought a few huge jugs of port and lined them up on the floor, then I began laying out the eight or nine ordinary sized wine bottles behind the jugs of port, and behind the ordinary bottles I had four or five slightly smaller ones. They looked like a platoon of red velvet soldiers waiting to do battle for my soul.
    When the wine ran out, I knew I was going to do it. The depression, the fear, the uselessness became too much without wines protective barrier of courage. Besides, I couldn’t get drunk anymore, I couldn’t forget, the wine just warmed me and brought me strength but made me remember, and when the wine ran out I would be shaking on the floor after several hours and the cold spot spirits of my past slide up my back leaving me with nothing but ghosts to touch my body and to haunt me with everything that could have been. It was too much. I knew I was going to do it. How? I wasn’t quite sure, but there were hundreds of ways. I began thinking about all the ways I could kill myself. I remembered stories about a man who bought one bullet, went into a pawn shop and asked to look at the gun, loaded the bullet and blew his brains out right there in the shop. It certainly was cost effective, but seemed like a lot of effort, and I didn’t feel like going anywhere. I could shove a fork in the electrical outlet. Electrocution is just kind of a kiss. It leaves the body whole, but room service only sent up plastic sporks. Damn. Then I got it. I was on the fifth floor and there was a patio outside the room to stand on and look out at the bog, and the crummy buildings, and here the sound of gunshots on the sunset. Too low to jump off, unless you were on the tenth floor, so I decided I was going to weave the sheets into a kind of rope. Like you always see them do to save a princess or damsel in distress, but I was going to make a noose out of mine. It was a good plan: classy and poetic, something to be remembered. It made me glad that I hung out with the scouts as a kid.
    I sat outside the patio tying my knots and weaving the sheets together when I heard a knock on the door.
    “Senor! Senor, please open the door. It’s been a week, and no clean. Please, senor, I must clean.”
    “Not now!”
    “No senor, I must come in. I come in, senor.”
    She came in and looked around in horror,
    “Oh, senor, there are bottles everywhere! What have you done? This mess unbelievable!”
    I kept on weaving my sheets together, and out of nowhere, a body drops down in front of the patio, only a couple of feet away from me, heading straight down to the sidewalk. He was fully dressed in a suit, and had his neck tie on very neatly knotted. He was going in slow motion, when you think about it, a body doesn’t go too fast when watched. Evidently he had gotten on his patio and jumped off. He probably had the top floor: lucky bastard. I wondered if I was going crazy, but no, that had to have been a body that went by. Our eyes even met, like they would on the street, and he looked at me very strangely. I knew it was a body so I hollered into the room while the cleaning lady began to work,
    “Hey, Senora, guess what!?”
    “What now, Senor?”
    “The strangest thing just happened.”
    “Yes?”
    “Yeah, a human body just dropped by my patio. His head was first and his feet followed. I mean, he was all lined up and everything. He was just dropping through the air right in front of me.”
    “Disparates! Una completa mierda, you fool!”
    “No bullshit, it actually happened. I’m not making it up, I swear.”
    “You no funny, Senor. Stop trying to be funny.”
    “I know I’m not funny. Please, just come out here and look down.”
    “Alright, Senor, alright.”
    She came and looked down off the patio and saw the guy looking like a fried egg on the sidewalk and screamed, “Dios Mio! Dios Mio!” She ran into the bathroom and puked and puked and puked. I decided to drop the sheets. I didn’t feel like killing myself anymore. I sat down on the naked mattress, and saw that she opened the drawer of the dresser and it had a refrigerator compartment. I had no idea. I walked over, opened it, and was stricken the bliss when I saw all the beers and mini whiskeys. It felt good again. I could live now. I sat down and began to drink my beer. I felt like a king. After many threats to do so, someone had finally committed suicide for me... at last.



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