Just a perfect day, part 1

When Tim said “Hey Bob, can you do me a favor?” he could smell the faint odor of trouble: it was an innocent question that reeked with something unpleasant, like a cute toddler who has made plans on taking a shit on your lap.

The party was running on empty. Most girls had left, and the ones who had stayed had not stayed out of choice: they were either too drunk to perform the complex acrobatics of walking, or were waiting for their rides like a famished African village awaits rain.

Sometimes, if it’s a long night, the hangover starts while you’re still drinking. It’s not that bad, it really depends on your agenda for the next day. Naturally, if it includes any kind of work for which you get paid, which implies that it would not be your preferred method of passing time, you are somewhat fucked. The degree to which you are fucked depends on the nature of your job, and whether it involves a monitor or not.

Bob however is smarter than to imbibe to such excess when he knows he has to work the next day, so he was nursing a Corona, trying to push back the rising tides of hangover over the Atlantis of buzz when Tim asked that ominous question. Bob is a nice guy though, he answered “Sure, what is it?” to which Tim said “well, Jen says she left her bag on Capitol Hill, she thinks she left it on the park bench when her friend went to use the park bathroom, she was asking me if there is anyway she can get a ride up there, she has all her cards and everything in the bag, so I was wondering if you mind giving us a ride up there man?”

Bob had once watched his friend’s bag get snatched by some guy on a bicycle on Cap Hill, right by the soccer field where they were playing. His friend had given chase and had fallen on his ass trying to run on asphalt with soccer cleats. That was 6 p.m. on a Tuesday, now it was 3 a.m. on a Saturday. The bag is gone, even if you had a pink semispherical force field from the future buzzing a finger-melting, limb-severing buzz around it, it would still be gone. The chances of retrieving a bag left on Capitol Hill are as good as a Bigfoot sighting in the Big and Tall section of a department store. But, Bob is a nice guy and he said “sure, I don’t think it would still be there, but sure, I’ll give you guys a ride” but thought “fucking Tim, why do I have to suffer your buzz murdering demands when it’s you who wants to get some ass, and from who? From Jen … that snobbish whore” because unlike most, some nice guys do know what’s up and Bob was one of them.

The car was filled with the black on black hum of tire on asphalt, that acted as a backdrop for the noises of KEXP that was itself a filler for the occasional silences in the three way conversation between the passengers. The theme: party gossip. “Dude what was up with Dan’s girlfriend, I mean is she antisocial or what?” Jen asked with a zealousness the source of which is beyond natural at this hour of a purse abandoning, heavy drinking night. To which Tim answered from the front seat without turning “Nah, I’ve seen her before and she was pretty normal and nice. I think she was as high as fucking kite this time though, that’s why she seemed a little off or weird.” And Bob concured “yeah dude, they were basically crawling on the ceiling they were so high, I mean Dan and his girlfriend.”

What they did not know as they gossiped (some actually prefer to call it “character analysis) the night away in the car was the futility of their journey. Jen’s purse had indeed been snatched. Around 2 a.m., and not by a homeless bum as the stereotypical, and usually true, scenario would be, but by a 25 year old, self-proclaimed anarchist with black horn rimmed glasses, who was strolling through the park on his way home from the bars on Pine street wearing his favorite black leather jacket and a pair of jeans that seemed like they were half a size small for him, out of the back pocket of which a small paper back peeked its head, and whose bottoms just touched a pair of black Converse All-Star’s high tops.

He spotted the fashionably big, white and yellow handbag sitting on a bench, stopped whistling “La Vie en Rose”, walked over and picked it up, and with one hand still in his pocket, used the other to throw the bag in the air so that it would rotate and caught its bottom causing the bag’s opening to face the earth, whose gravity helped disembowel it, its content hitting the park’s cement: several lipsticks, one thin box of eye shadow the door of which was a mirror that shattered upon contact, cell phone, various cards, a black purse and many other small things that Jen kept in her bag and had probably forgot about. He picked up the purse and kicked the bag and walked on.

In a few months he would ponder what he had done that night and would feel bad about it, not so much because he felt like an asshole, but more because he had acted like a badass wannabe, like some thug who has seen too many Hollywood movies where kicking stuff around with a cigarette on the mouth’s corner and a face like you don’t give a shit somehow has a transcendental quality to it whereas, he thought now, it’s nothing but a power high induced by exerting force over small, inanimate objects, of a women’s handbag in his case.

But that doesn’t matter right now. What matters is what drives a person to suicide: The ultimate triumph of the central nervous system over evolution which ironically causes the demise of the former and not the latter. The reason it matters is because just as Bob turned right to get on the I-5 north freeway entrance ramp that night, his car’s headlights suddenly revealed a human figure standing in the middle of the road as still as a cardboard figure, waiting for his knees’ appointment with the front bumper, which would probably send the rest of him flying into the windshield.