She rolled up into a question mark beside me and I rolled away from her like a coin going down a steep grade. I propped my head up on the pillow and watched her sleep. And it wasn’t as if she were the plague. She looked after me, and did it pretty well. But you know; why’d God make women anyway? Cuz. Sheep don’t do windows.

Well, I guess I feel that way about people in general. They’re pretty useless to me unless they’re doing my windows or buying my beers. The rest of the time I’d rather be alone. And I could feel no different about this woman I was seeing. She was usually just a nuisance.

The woman had long straight blonde hair, and sometimes I liked to look at it while she slept. Watch it as it lay, half-seeped from between the sheets, spreading itself over the pillow, demanding nothing, claiming nothing, without pretensions or words or an existence outside of the one I granted it with my stare. I could lie beside her for quite some time, secretly, content.

It was noon and she was still asleep. When she woke she’d just be a bother and she’d realize that neither of us had much to say and that we were both bored. She had her own ideas about life and they weren’t mine. She was older than myself. I think she even had a kid somewhere. So she’d just leave. Until next time. And she’d bring wine or beer with her when she came back, just like she always did. And she’d laugh at my jokes. I dragged my hangover from my bed.

In a pile of clothes on the floor I found a pair of pants, a shirt. My things were mixed up with her things. My things were cheap and it didn’t matter; hers were expensive, new and wrinkled. She had someone looking after her too. Her bra hugged by shoe; The old companions of a new orgy grown bored with itself and sleeping through wine dreams on the dirty hardwood. I dressed in a fashion, checking that woman’s long brown legs for a twitch of life. I hated it when she woke up.

The night before had run out of cigarettes, and I can be a little ugly without cigarettes. An ashtray beside the bed head over-flowed with two short butts, each laying as smokeless and as useless as wet revolvers. It was just another tired orgy, and I its conductor frowned.

I went to the bathroom and checked myself out. I need a smoke, a shave, the conviction to achieve both. There were no cigarettes in the bathroom and I didn’t shave.

I went to the kitchen and pissed in the sink. The bathroom was right across the hall from the bedroom and I piss loudly. The woman slept lightly when she slept with me.

I didn’t bother to First remove the dirty dishes, glasses, broken wine bottles and the other manifestations of desire. No. Just pissed in the sink and…

Well. Small Wonder she laughed at my jokes: (Still pissing in the sink.) “You know, my wife is such a lousy housekeeper; the sink’s always so full of dishes I sometimes can’t find room to piss.”

Well. She was somebody else’s wife, so I never made her do my dishes.

I zipped up, ran a little water over those and that stink and stuff and checked around the rest of the apartment for a stray smoke. And I use that term loosely; apartment. It was a filthy hole with no heat in the winter, and there wasn’t a cigarette anywhere between the folds and the layers and cold of my indifference. My fly on those pants only went half-way up, then stopped, perhaps disgusted. I tugged a bit, gave up, then ran my fingers through my hair in an asshole’s attempt at vanity. And went to the store for cigarettes with her money.

Outside it was October. Parliament Street had a grey and death-grey finality about it. The clouds were low and it was raining. The street was a long, long, dirty and dripping dishrag. And its small shops and diners and rubbies, like myself, like dished in a pissed-in sink, looked confused and disorderly.

It wasn’t very inviting. Stepping outside seemed to be just one more merciless ritual to be pushed through, dragged through by the scraps and ghosts of a more youthful philosophy. A necessary and responsible boredom, like trying to avoid dirty dishes or an unhappy fuck or hangovers. I walked very quickly toward ‘Cira’s Fruit Market’ at the corner.

In a polite line-up for the cashier, I ran into D.E. Smith. I’d known him most of my life and now he just worked in an office. He had a nose like a pool slide and he looked down it at me like he was looking into a toilet. He owned an inexpensive car, an insane wife and disagreeable children. He had a second car and a house nearby that he was paying for.

“How are you doing?” he smiled crookedly, straightening his tie, his hair.

“Same,” I said, “worse.”

“We never see you around too much,” he frowned, puzzled, as he always would be by people who weren’t just like him.

“Don’t like it outside too much.”

And then he put that big white racquet-ball-calloused hand of his on my shoulder, wanting to tell me that things’d get better one day. Which meant I could still be like him if I tried.

“Better than what?”

Maybe I could even get a job. Go to a movie or read ‘Toronto Life Magazine’. Stuff like that. Not that he gave a shit. And then he left with a bag of weight/cost conscious lunch.

I hate waiting in lines. You never know what kind of idiot they’re going to invent next. What moron is going to sense unity in such suffering and contrive the right to tell you about his dog, his wife, his appropriate lifestyle. I’d rather deal with priests and other sanctified usurpers of the spirit. I asked for my cigarettes finally and paid for them with a handful of exasperated coins. I had a smoke in my mouth before I left the store an the line closed in behind me like insurance salesmen.

Outside, a man seemed, somehow, to be waiting for me. He opened the door for me with too much timing, struggling with the handle and precision, like someone fighting for attention or trying to prove a point. I felt obliged to smile and I don’t like feeling obliged.

“Hey!” He said suddenly, “I know you! Sure!” Phony surprise had spread itself all over his tiny round face. And I wondered what he wanted, and then judged by his size and stammering voice that he wouldn’t get it anyway. A small moustache kept his lips a secret.

His Grecian-formula black-grey and balding head wore a pair of fogged glasses. His thirty-five or so year old buck teeth made him look even smaller and more diminutive than he was. He wore a beige Mohair suit, and a dee-ziner tie wrapped itself like hands around his small neck. It peered at me from between the collar of a too long black leather coat. The man appeared to have money but couldn’t figure out how to spend it right. And I hoped he had a wife who did. He smelled like children or cats. I studied his face.

“You live around here?” I said.

“No,” he replied, surprised. He did not move from the door.

“So what do you want?” The man’s face flushed slightly. His blood, like his intentions were close to the surface, impossible to hide. He bugged me.

“Want?” he stammered, “uh, nothing. Just a coincidence, that’s all. My being in the neighbourhood.” He paused. “I do know you,” he claimed.

“Well,” I said, “if that’s all, then don’t worry about it. It could all be much worse.” His face went a little lame.

“Sure,” I shrugged, “you could actually BE me: imagine that. Not just KNOW me, but BE me. You’d really hate it. You’d hate yourself.” The man chuckled stupidly as I started to push past him.

“You really don’t remember, no?” he said, with a puzzled expression, the way a victim might smile at the man who has killed him, like pain at the wound and bloody instrument. He seemed inconsequential and at the same time terribly relevant. I suddenly didn’t want to know him.

“Remember?” I shrugged. “Naw. I drink too much for all that.” He continued to stand in my way, a statue in front of a building falling down.

“S’cuse,” I commanded, and pulled away from his questions like an old truck away from the pedestrian it had just run down. He followed.

“Johnson’s my name,” he pleaded, “dammit all, I’m Bill Johnson! I, well that is, we, I mean my…” There was a long pause as he swallowed something large. “… wife… and I were at a party. About a month ago. It was in that white building next to yours. For some reason, you happened to show up. There were a lot of school teachers there. Anyhow, late in the evening some of the party spilled over to your ‘flat’, my wife among them.” He pointed a delicate white hand towards my building across the street from the Winchester Hotel. I walked quickly toward it and he struggled at my side on his short legs.

“There. That’s your place, right? And you’re that Roscoe Head fellow. Right? Funny name, no? Roscoe Head.” I was too weary of him to fight back.

“Well, my wife and I, Linda…” he claimed, exasperated but squinting for my reply, “younger than myself. Pretty, very pretty.”

Linda? Sure I remembered. A damn nuisance for the most part. The ‘pretty’ I’d never thought about.

“Um. Well that is, yea. Sure thing,” I said, “’Linda’.” And I inhaled her name with smoke and it felt good. I said nothing else.

“Oh well Jesus,” said Bill, relieved and shrugging diplomatically in his coat. “I was beginning to think you’d forgotten all about me!” I took another drag and then put my arm on his sloping shoulder.

“Forget? Forget YOU? Hey,” I laughed, “that’s be like trying to forget to crap, eh?” Bill laughed that same creepy dead man’s laugh, and I thought: O you bastard you worm you pusil, pusill, pyoo’s’lan’e mes… Anyway life can be just like being stuck on an elevator with someone who farts, no?

Bill punched me in the shoulder. He hit too hard, a friendly too hard weighted by a familiarity he could only hope to have. He laughed.

“And let me tell you,” he said, “it was quite some party! Heh? You told the damndest joke; well, you told a whole bunch, but one of them was just about the funniest thing I’d ever heard. Do you remember the one I mean? Hmmn? Real funny. You could write jokes for that Don Rickles maybe. One day.” Silence.

“Remember?”

“Drunk,” I said, flat, annoyed, “remember?” The man laughed again. I kept an eye on his hands. They were shoved into the pockets of his too long leather coat and I hoped there was nothing else in those pockets except that thing of his for asthma, the keys to his Cadillac. I remembered him, I didn’t trust him, I didn’t know what he was after, and I wanted him to leave me alone. And yet he seemed so harmless, perhaps even innocent in the way he imposed.

“Drunk? Yea, real drunk,” he said. “Poor Linda. My ‘wife’… she couldn’t stop talking about you for days after. And she couldn’t tear herself away from you at the party, remember? But then, you’re a pretty funny guy, yes? For such a young guy, hmmn? Linda even thinks you look like a movie star, though if you don’t mind me saying, I don’t think so at all. I mean, you’re pretty big, but probably really out of shape, you know? Funny, yes?”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, yeah, but oh, that joke. Right, that damn joke. The one about the guy who had his ‘pecker’ all cut off. Remember?”

‘Pecker’. It fit him like a beige suit or something appropriate to his mediocrity, but he approached the word unsure of both it and himself, like a man stepping reluctantly into a too-cold lake.

“Yeah, right. The guy without the ‘pecker’,” I said. We were almost at my building. Bill laughed again.

“Well, I can’t tell it as well as you did. I mean, who am I, right?” he snickered. “But, uh, do you remember it? This guy walks into a bar. He’s got this big cigar sticking out of his jacket pocket, yes? And, his crotch is all bloody. Real bloody. And so he walks into this bar. He sits down in front of the bartender, who just stares into the crotch of this fellow’s trousers, like he can’t believe it that maybe he had no pecker there or something.

“Anyway, the guy without the pecker orders three Scotches. Lots of pain on his face. The barkeep serves him and the man drinks all three in one gulp. He orders three more. And this goes on for a half hour. Until the pain starts to disappear.

“And now the bartender, curious as hell and trying to be polite points to the man’s crotch and says, ‘And so what the hell happened to you? If you don’t mind me asking.’

“The guy looks down into his crotch, and he’s real drunk, and says, ‘A jealous husband. I’d been screwing his wife. Heh heh. He cut my pecker off. I’m on my way to the hospital. I hear they can sew peckers back on, eh? So I saved it.’

“The bartender just thinks he’s full of shit, right?”

We had reached my building.

“So the bartender ask this fellow to show him this cut-off thing. The guy polishes off the last of his Scotch, reaches into his pocket absently, pulls out the cigar, tosses it onto the bar.

“And the bartender just laughs, you know? Says, ‘That’s a goddam cigar! What about the pecker? The dork, eh?’ And the guy with the cut-off dork looks down at the bar and the cigar, shrugs his shoulders and says, ‘Must have smoked it…’”

Bill howled with delight. It was a stupid joke, And he was right; he didn’t tell it very well. I exhaled the last of my cigarette, flicked the butt past him, and smoke lingered in front of his face.

We were standing at the bottom of the flight of stairs leading up to my apartment. It smelled of urine. Rubbies slept there at night. Glue sniffers sometimes in the day. Walking up to my apartment was like crawling out of a toilet. Or into one.

“Well,” I said. “Bill. We’ll be seeing ya around, eh?” He looked puzzled.

“Aren’t you going to ask me upstairs?” His smile, cruel and twisted, hung on his face like a dishrag over a faucet. “Mabe you got some more ‘good’ jokes, hmmn?” He made for the stairs an I held him back with my hand against his soft chest.

“No, that wouldn’t be a very good idea,” I said firmly.

I left him standing in the entranceway. He stared at my retreat and laughed.

“Hey,” he called after me, “your fly. You should fix it.”

I didn’t lock the door behind me.

She was awake. Draped over the old sofa and looking tired. She was wearing shoes. And I supposed she was pretty. Elwood Glover was on the black and white and I turned him off. I gave the woman a cigarette and we smoked cigarettes until some more of the morning ugliness wore away and we said nothing and when she tried to kiss me I got up and made coffee because the wine was gone.

I watched her dress from the bedroom door. She was going home. Wherever. Someplace with money, because she always remembered to leave some behind for me.

“I ran into your husband at the store,” I said. Linda had beautiful legs and I loved those legs.

She laughed and you could see some of those early wrinkles around her tired eyes even if you looked hard, but she still looked good.

“Strange little turd, isn’t he?” she saidm throwing back that long blonde hair over a wrinkled blouse.

Originally published in White Wall Review 7 (1983)