Apathy and Other Small Victories by Paul Neilan Read Free Book Online Page A

it’s the spotlight.”
    “I think I mentioned something about married women. What do you have to say about that?”
    “Not too much,” I said, holding my voice steady.
    “Oh come on, you can tell me.”
    “I don’t think I can.”
    “Well let me do it for you,” he said seriously, leaning forward in his chair. “I think you have a deaf girl fetish. And I think you had a perverted little crush on a married one who turned up dead. That’s what I think.”
    He leaned back in his chair and looked at me. I felt immediately at ease. If there was anything to know, he didn’t know it either.
     
    Doug was crying again. The bus door had smashed him up pretty good this time. He showed me the dents in his head. When he asked if I wanted to touch them, I said no. Even worse, as he lay on the ground—dizzy, sobbing, a shell of a man—and as the crowd gathered around him, someone said, “Hey! He got his head stuck in the door two weeks ago. It’s the same guy! It’s Bus Door Head!” and some people laughed.
    Bus Door Head. It was mean, juvenile and stupid. It hardly even made sense. I was rolling. Luckily I was laid back in the chair with a latex dental dam jammed halfway down my throat so the laughing made it sound like I was choking instead. Doug shoved a suction hose underneath the latex and I was nearly asphyxiated.
    “I just don’t understand why. Why does this keep happening to me?” he said. And Doug cried like the girl in the After School Special who hates high school and boys and life. He didn’t understand, but I did. It was obvious to me. This was how Doug’s life was, how it had always been I imagined, and how I knew it would always be. He just had that look. Game show hosts, mountain people, those Masai tribesmen who are on every other fucking cover of National Geographic , women who say, “Why would I ever get married, I’ve got cats!” and amputees. You know just by looking at them who they are. You could pick them out of a lineup. And if you had to pick Bus Door Head out of a lineup, you would always pick Doug.
    He had strawberry blond hair. That’s enough right there. That’s all you need to know. If you’re a man with strawberry blond hair and you’re not in the circus or a Viking, odds are you have not found your place in life and never will. Doug’s strawberry blond hair hung down in limp curls that always looked like they were wet, like he was an out of work Hasidic Jew who just didn’t give a shit anymore. But then he also had the monk’s tonsure up top where male pattern baldness had started its slow, inexorably humiliating crawl. Doug’s head was an aesthetic and theological mess. And he had a mustache. It was too big and too ragged and trying too hard to compensate for what he’d already lost up top, and it was a few shades more strawberry than blond. He looked like the star of a new “Would you leave your child alone with this man?” pedophile awareness campaign, one that would be very effective.
    Damn good dentist though. Damn good. And he let me pay my bills in installments, which hadn’t started yet.
    “I know you’re good for it,” he said.
    If it weren’t for his fainting spells I’m sure he would’ve had more patients. I never saw anybody else in there but me. Not everyone had my kind of time. The constant fits and iced tea breaks made every appointment a daylong affair. Except for the crying it was very European.
    “I mean, Bus Door Head?” he said, tears draining into his mustache. “I’m sorry!” and he ran out of the room with his face in his hands, leaving me to take the fucking dental dam out of my mouth. Marlene came in and we were both laughing at Doug. After some sign language pantomime of the bus door squashing his head, we talked about her husband. His name was Brian and he was deaf too. I assumed that meant they had a lot in common and that they’d always have plenty to talk about.
    So, we’re deaf huh?
    Yeah, how about that.
    Yeah.
    They’d met