Talkin' Short Story Blues

            by Daniel Heinrich

 

            Perhaps it was by extraordinary or particular circumstances.  The way he looked, the way he talked, it could even have been an issue with his hygiene that he simply overlooked every morning while grooming himself, but whatever the reason was, Pierre found himself at the age of 17 without a friend in the world to call his own.

            His mother was full of reasons.  He didn’t go out often enough.  He dressed too peculiarly (what girl would go out with a boy who wore such a flamboyant hat?).  He rarely shaved and when he did it was lazily and often left cuts, which soon turned into infections.  On weekends he woke in the early hours of the afternoon and then just moped about the house in a dismally orange bathrobe that you or I would have either washed or more likely disposed of long ago.  He didn’t return calls.

            Part of it may have been that he was simply lazy, and this is what his teachers and peers failed to understand.  He rarely shaved because it left an unpleasant sensation and reopened old wounds.  He slept in because he was tired–and he liked that bath robe!  He didn’t return calls because he forgot to, and remembering all those numbers was more trouble than it was worth.

            “Why don’t you get a cell phone?” we constantly demanded, to which he would let loose a kind of animal grunt and reply cooly,

            “Because I don’t want to be bothered with constantly answering it, besides, I can always use the phone of a friend.”

            “What if no one you know is around?” we would counter his explanation, to which he would launch into one of his limitless “stories,” many of which we had already heard before, some of which were not true.

            “One time, at the Costco,” he would begin, “my father and I were buying a new TV–and this is a true story–anyways, as he often did, he left me to wait in line while he ran off to pick up the last of our shopping, cartons and cartons of cigarettes.  Well, this was a big TV, like we’re talking 47 inch screen, and this ain’t no flat panel plasma nonsense–those are women’s televisions–this is the real deal, projector.  Anyways, I wasn’t too worried, since it was all procedure.  I’d just wait in line and right before I got to the front, he’d show up with his cancer-inducing sticks and we’d bust a move out of there.  However, this was a unique situation.  They didn’t have the TV we wanted at our local Costco, so we had to drive for like...45 minutes to the one a few towns over, it was unfamiliar territory.  I’m not proud to say that standing in that line I experienced a moment of weakness and panicked, I was afraid I was gonna get stuck at the front of the line with this large-ass box and no money to pay for it, but I acted quickly and smartly.  I asked the person behind me if I could use their cellular telephone to call my dad and tell him that I was nearly at the front of the line and that if he didn’t get there soon things could get pretty ugly.  She consented without so much as a shady glare as she told me that she owned the same set, and praised me for my good taste in televisions, though she was sorry that her DVD player did not fit on top of the set (due to it’s rounded top, sometimes style gets in the way of practicality).  Anyways, I phoned up my pa, and he was up there just in time, cigs in hand and a jump in his step and we were out of there and on the road again, blasting the radio and eagerly awaiting the viewing pleasure that the wonder box in the truck’s bed would give us for the next ten or fifteen years, more if we were lucky.”

            Pierre was, to his credit, a good story teller.  He had a story for just about every situation you could throw at him.  It was the hat, which he claimed to add a touch of style to the normally dreary life of a highschool student, that set into motion a series of events that ended with his downfall, though I’m sure that he would have fallen with or without the hat sooner or later.  It was simply not a nice hat.  It was, in a word, ugly.  It may have been acceptable if it was a normal hat color–brown perhaps–but this was not the case; it was a ragged shade of maroon that just screamed “A tuppence to the one who harms to the shlep who is bold enough to place me atop his head.”  We constantly tried to get him to stop wearing it.  He refused.  We even got a pot together from concerned friends and acquaintances that totaled up to nearly two hundred and fifty dollars.  He wouldn’t take the money.  We tried to get him to at least buy a new one, even if it was of the same design, but he would not buy a new one any more than he would stop wearing his current one.  If we asked him why he wore it Pierre would change the subject–which he was very good at doing.

            Time passed and the hat kept getting dirtier and soon became adorned with the names of bands that he liked, an Italian flag, and peculiar buttons which sported the image of a strange little man with large hair who leapt forth from Pierre’s imagination in the seventh grade, and whom he referred to as Mr. Shmee.

            The hat was like a part of his soul or something.  He would not even take it off at the request, demand, and finally the order of a teacher.  If a fellow student snatched the hat while he wasn’t looking he would begin to cry, which did not help his social status, and though it did succeed in stopping people from stealing his hat it also kept people from interacting with him if it could be helped.  Soon it was just his closest friends–myself included–who would hang out with him, though eventually even we didn’t want to be seen with him; it was bad for our own reputations.

            “Hey man, you wanna hang out this weekend?”  I would be asked and if I answered that I did the question would be followed by a condition.  “Ok, cool, just make sure you don’t bring that Pierre guy with you, aren’t you guys friends?”  

            “No, not really, I just hang out with him sometimes out of pity, you know?  Anyways you don’t gotta worry about it, I won’t bring him.”

            “Cool, you know, the other day in math–we sit in the same group–he was being really annoying.

            “Yeah?”

            “Yeah, he wouldn’t shut up about this movie, Goodfellas.”

            “Man, you don’t know the half of it.  Try having lunch with this guy, it’s all he talks about!  I mean, here I am, trying to tell this story about something or other and everyone is really engaged and everything is going great until who should appear but Pierre himself.  He walks over to us, sits down, listens for like half a minute and then interrupts me mid sentence to talk about Goodfellas.”  I would then mimic his odd drone,  “Hey guys, that reminds me of this part of Goodfellas...”   Sometimes my cruelty amazes me.

            So in the end the rest of my friends and I decided that we would simply cut off all contact with him.  None of us wanted to tell him so we decided that we would meet in a different spot every day at lunch and avoid all contact with him till he got the message.  It worked.  No longer were we scowled at from across the school yard by other cliques for hanging out with Pierre.  Eventually new people started to hang out with us and we gradually advanced in the struggle to avoid social awkwardness and yet we carried a burden of great guilt.  Every time one of us passed Pierre in the hall way, saw him on the street or shared a class with him it was impossible

to look him in the eye, fore he knew what had happened–and I regret it to this day.