Get Lost

            by Levi Jacobs

 

Johna buried his head in his hands and for the first time in five years he felt like he needed a cigarette.

            “Did you hear me John?” asked Mr. Tenanbaum.

            “Yes. You fired me.” Johna smugly replied.

            Mr. Tenanbaum would go on to tell Johna that he was being fired for repeatedly showing up to work 5 minutes late. I can safely say that that is not the reason Johna was fired. He was fired for his well known sexual relations with a female colleague of his, more specifically a female colleague that had once been involved with his boss, David Tenanbaum. Women have always been a weakness of Johna’s.

            Mr. Tenanbaum had been the editor in chief of the Isaaquah Chronicle for 5 months, since the previous editor in chief had passed away. He was in his late 50’s. He had 3 children, all grown, and was working on his 3^rd wife. He enjoyed smoking Italian cigars. He hated all forms of public transportation.

 The previous editor in chief had been a dear friend of Johna’s, William Key, who had served as Captain of the 127^th Air Platoon in the Vietnam War, and who had been awarded a purple heart for bravery during his service there. William Key hardly liked anything but telling jokes.  He had been the one to hire Johna on as a journalist for the Isaaquah Chronicle some ten years ago, and he had approved his application for a weekly column only two years later.

            Johna cleaned out his desk devoid of family photos, as he was devoid of a family, and left the building with his tail between his legs. He tripped over his own feet to the on look of spectating coworkers, most without sympathy save the few he had made friends with over the years. Margaret Siegel waved a sorry goodbye and scurried back to her office, her tail between her legs as well. Margaret Siegel liked reading tabloids in line at the supermarket. She hated protests.

It’s not that Johna had loved his job, he had actually grown quite despondent with work, and his writing had become lazy and flavorless. Johna could remember when he was a newly hired journalist; he was always excited by his assignments and anxious to do the research. But as time went on he grew more and more bored by reporting. He had approached his late boss William Key with my problem and he had told Johna something that had always stuck with him.

 “John,” he had said, “If you ever find yourself bored by the world, your just not looking around enough, there’s excitement everywhere son.”

            Three months later he was found dead in the bedroom of his vacation house in Marin County with no suicide note. So it goes. It was no great tragedy that William Key killed himself in his penthouse across the Golden Gate; he was not a very social man. Three people managed to attend his funeral. The three were his sister, Johna, and Margaret Siegel. All Margaret said to Johna during the ceremony was something William Key had liked to say to anyone with a long face, which was something one could only assume he picked up during his tour in Vietnam. It was: “Buck up soldier, you’ll probably die tomorrow!” It always made Johna laugh like hell.

            Johna often find himself having to laugh like hell. In addition to his weakness for women, he had always found it difficult to see the world as anything more than a joke. He had always looked danger and adversity in the face and laughed, not out of courage, but out of an inability to take the moment seriously. He still believes he might wake up from this dream any moment.

Johna was the youngest of six children. He once read an article about how people who were raised with older siblings find it easier to be funny. The article suggested that the youngest develops this skill because it is the only way for them to break into the adult conversation at a young age. No one cares about the little ones day, or the little ones little problems, but you crack a good joke, and everyone loves you. In Johna’s case I think this ability to be funny took form more as an ability to find humor, even in serious matter.

Johna liked to tell people his name was John.

Johna’s name was Johna.

He took all the personal affects he had had stowed away in his desk and deposited them in the waste disposal bin by the door. The only thing Johna kept was a Zippo cigarette lighter, which had been his fathers. It had the words “Carpe Diem” inscribed on it, Latin for “Seize The Day”. Johna looked at the lighter as if it was new, and had never read those words before. For some reason those words carried more power than they ever had before, and he smiled. He had no reason to be happy, and he wasn’t sure he was, but god he smiled.

He felt full of himself all the sudden, like so often he had felt as a teen. HE felt rebellious. He felt empowered. He went and bought those cigarettes he had been craving and lit one up as he walked.

Johna passed a woman and smiled at her, which in turn made her smile. It had always tickled Johna the affect one can have on a passerby with merely a glance. You can smile at a stranger and make his day, but no one does. People carry great animosity towards strangers. Couples in conversation will cease speaking as you pass, and glare at you, as if you had no right to interrupt their day with your presence. People are so cruel.

Johna was by no means a drinker. Johna wanted a drink.

Johna had many problems, but drugs and alcohol had never been one of them. Even in high school he had rarely drank or smoked marijuana, he was not exactly considered hip. He had written for the school newspaper and played on the badminton team. On the occasion he did go to a party or drink, he more than likely threw up or made on ass of himself hitting on the popular girls. It wasn’t until college that he began smoking cigarettes regularly, and he had quite those more than five years ago. Until now that is. But right then, after being fired, he had wanted a drink.

He went to an old dive called “The Boom Room”, where aging drunks and bar hags went to forget the world. He ordered a scotch. Two scotches. Three.

Johna got sauced, which only enhanced the feeling of empowerment. He attempted conversation with the bartender, who made it clear he was uninterested in Johna and his problems. The bartender’s name was Walter Clemens; he was a direct descendant of Samuel Clemens, better known to the world as Mark Twain. Walter hadn’t inherited any of the family money, and was forced to make a living pretending to listen to the problems of sad and sauced strangers.

Johna struck up conversation with the aging drunks and bar hags, who merely dwarfed his problems with their own. It was then that Johna saw Mary Magdalene, but he was no Jesus.

            She was a beautiful girl. She couldn’t have been older than 25, with long flowing dark hair and a look in her eyes that would set the meekest of men ablaze. She liked soft cotton slippers and white dresses. She hated movies with unhappy endings. She carried herself with a naïve grace, and when she walked she seemed to glide, as if her feet were too good to touch the earth. She was walking from one end of the bar to the other, her dainty pink slippers sliding along the floor.

            Had Johna been a better man he might have offered to buy her a drink, but being the weak man he was, he took it upon himself to dethrone this queen.

            “Who do you think you are?” mumbled Johna through five scotches.

            “Excuse me?” replied the lady.

            “Walking into a place like this, full of morose and depressed souls, taunting us with your beauty. I saw you walk from stool to stool and I want to know who you think you are!”

            “I… I’m Julie Saunders.”

            “I’ll bet you are,” he snorted, “and you ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

            “Ex… Excuse me?”

            Johna’s stool made a loud screech as he turned to face her better. Her long white dress draped so elegantly over her body blew in a non-existent wind, and you could see an outline in the top of her dress where she kept her money nestled in her breasts.

            “There ought to be a law against women dressing and walking like you do!” he bellowed, “You come in here in your little pink slippers so I have to look at your precious little feet, and your wad of bills in your dress so I have to think about where that money is kept. You come in here and you just make everyone feel terrible!”

            “I’ve done nothing wrong!” protested the girl.

            “You know what I ought to do to you for coming in her like that, making everyone want to kiss you?”

            “No.” piped Julie.

            Suddenly Johna became aware of how still the bar had grown. Everyone was staring at the angry young man in the corner denouncing the beautiful girl in the white dress, but he was too far gone to turn back, he had the fire of hell and the certainty of youth burning inside him.

            He stood up to Julie’s level and looked her square in her tearing eyes. “I say to you what you would say to me if I so naively tried to kiss you. Get lost!”

            And with that he turned walked out the door, all his fire and rebellion gone, replaced now by cold and instant regret for making that beautiful girl cry. He stumbled over his own feet once more as he left.

            Johna felt ill. He felt burning shame creep up his spine, and he ran. He ran away from his old job, he ran away from the five scotches still fiery in his belly, but most of all he ran away from the tears he had seen in poor Julie’s eyes.

            He ran until his clothes grew heavy with sweat and his lungs grew tired of breathing, but the shame his my spine got hotter still.

            He ran until his knees gave way and collapsed in an alleyway, his heart pumping hot metal through his veins, and he burst into tears.

            It had been years since Johna cried, and he cried for all the things he had forgotten to cry for. He cried for his dead mother, he cried for his dead father, he cried for his lost job, and he cried for everything that had been building up in a hard lump in his chest. He cried for being a 30 year old boy, who had forgotten how to cry.

            And then, as if called from heaven, came the sweet sound of song. It was the voice of a woman, calling and cooing at Johna, her soft and billowy voice wafting through the city like a fog of beautiful sound. Johna was always amazed by the beautiful sounds almost everywoman can make with her voice.

            It was the sound of the songs his mother had sang in church before her death. It was the first song Johna had learned to play in school. It was the one chord the Angel Gabriel had played to please the lord. The song was an arrow and the singer was a bow, striking perfectly the target painted in tears on Johna’s chest.

The song called to Johna like a lullaby to a child, it calmed his pounding heart, and dried his salty tears. It was a sweet moan, and through it’s tones it soothed the shame in his spine and taught him once more that everything would be all right. The song gravitated Johna, not towards its singer like Odysseus’s sirens, but up to his feet and back to the sorry streets. And as he stood on the corner, no longer crying, the singing ceased and brought him back to reality.

            As Johna raised to his feet something fell out of his pocket. The object caught the glint of a full moon and glared back up at Johna from its place in the gutter. As Johna knelt to pick it up he saw written in bright glowing letters, “Carpe Diem!” Johna felt a terrible child. He laughed like hell, and wondered if perhaps he’d wake up from this dream any moment..