I wanted to ask her to marry me, but I needed twenty dollars, bad. So I asked her for the twenty, figuring I’d see how that went, then maybe I’d ask her to marry me, later, after I’d paid her back.
“You don’t have twenty dollars?” she opined
inquisitively.
“Well, not on me,” I rejoined affirmatively.
I began to think this exchange did not bode well for
my chances of matrimony. At least not with her, the exotic gothic office
receptionist with an Iron Cross tattooed on her left shoulder.
I needed the Andy Jackson because I was suddenly stricken
by a prehistoric hunger for major meat—perhaps of the barbecued-rib variety—and
the twenty would cover it. Normally, I bring my lunch to the office in a brown
paper bag, and, actually, I had brought my lunch. But every once in a while the
hunger for meat on a bone overwhelms my senses.
Were this an earlier age and were I your run-of-the-mill
Cro-Magnon, then I would have taken my Magnon minions on a hunt and laid low a
big beefy bison or perhaps a wily warthog or two. It’s a guy thing.
“What do you need twenty dollars for?” she Spanish
inquisitioned.
“Meat.”
“Ha! Right!” she obtused, laughing mockingly as she
pretended to answer the phone suddenly.
“Well, if you can’t spare the twenty, how about
marrying me?” I said to her mentally.
Perhaps it was all for the best. Perhaps she would not
make the ideal mate. Perhaps I was moving a little too fast, considering this
was her first day on the job. But it’s like my great-great grandfather used to
tell my great-grandfather, who passed this ancient wisdom on to my grandfather,
who, in turn, passed it on to me, over and over again: “Take your aim and stake
your claim.”
Then I remembered the killer asteroid. In a movie I’d
watched the night before, this killer asteroid came careening into Earth and
made a terrible mess, dooming nearly everyone except those who were unusually
photogenic—and cockroaches.
There is no killer asteroid, I appreciated
spontaneously. Not yet. No killer asteroid. No end of the world. Just day after
day of waking up and slicing hair off my face with sharpened steel and scraping
away dead skin cells with a lathered loofah. Yes, everything is OK, even when
it’s boring.
I looked down upon my small self and laughed. My petty
concerns. Ha! Ha! Ha! How petty. How very petty. This momentary illumination
subsided and I refocused on the immediate task at hand: trying to satisfy my
most animalistic, procreational desires, i.e., meat and sex.
Near the end of the working day I returned to the desk
of the new receptionist and asked her if she’d like to go out to dinner.
“You’re kidding,” she ridiculed.
“Not at all. I think I love you,” I extravaganzized.
“At least I am interested enough in you to eat food in your company.”
“I thought you needed twenty dollars,” she
rationalized perplexingly. “I thought you were broke.”
“I just remembered,” I announced in an orgasmic burst of
self-realization. “I have a credit card.”
~ by Russ Allison Loar
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