By Any Chance
Chapter 7:
Tossed Greens

by: Nicholas Nocketback

Evan stuffed the prophetic napkin in his pocket and opened the book Janelle had given him. Languishing over paragraphs, he read and reread passages without comprehension. No one has ever threatened him on a level like this before. Granted, the old man was most likely a nut job, probably a disgruntled English professor who failed as a novelist, he thought. But why would someone, especially a person he’s never met, tell him he was going to die? It had the trappings of a young adult book, an Agatha Christie novel, perhaps. Evan imagined the old man armed with a candlestick, lounging in his home library with thousands of leather bound works—all Agatha Christie, Tom Clancy, and Nancy Drew mysteries.
“Hey, what’s so heavy? The book can’t be that interesting, philosophical musings, yes, but nothing that deep,” Janelle smiled wide, exposing her ultra white, perfectly straight teeth. She twirled the ice in her plastic cup with a red straw.
“No, it’s nothing, I was just thinking. Listen, you ready to go? I need a drink,” Evan said while gathering his things and wiping off the table with a napkin.
“You all finished eavesdropping, then?”
“Yeah, I’ve heard enough for today. This city’s full of characters.”
“Yup, that’s the truth. And just think, you’ve only been here a few days. I bet you already miss Boston, don’t you?”
Evan fell silent and treated her question as a rhetorical one.
“Hey,” Janelle turned quickly on her heels and grabbed Evan’s arm, “follow me.”
She escorted him towards the bathroom. “Kevin,”
“Yeah, baby?”
“We’re gonna use the potty; make sure no one bothers us, okay?”
“You got it, toots,” Kevin giggled like a girl scout and displayed the international sign for shame on you: one finger brushing the top of the other.
Pulling Evan into the stall, she latched the bolt behind her. Janelle produced a long, cello wrapped cigarillo. Although she hadn’t rolled marijuana in a cigar before, she thought of an easy solution while watching Bobby Flay slice open a vanilla bean on Good Morning America. He was preparing a quesadilla con picadillo; she was preparing to get Evan and herself a bit off kilter. After procuring an eighth of an ounce of bright green cannabis with orange hairs that protruded from the grass like dandelions from one of the workers, she sat on the toilet while Evan leaned against the bathroom door. Pulling a pen knife from her bag, she set down all the necessary utensils on her lap, a surgeon preparing for duty. She licked the tobacco paper a few times in order to moisten the skin and cringed at the taste. It was bitter and stung as she retracted her tongue, making a lemon face, or so Evan thought. Janelle carefully sliced the cigar as Flay had done the vanilla bean. She emptied the loose tobacco into the small, black trash bin next to her feet. The leaf hung limp in her hand like a weathered patch. The grass was sticky and pungent, contaminating the restroom with its aroma. It reminded Evan of cat piss. She pulled a tiny pair of toenail scissors from her bag and began to manicure the spongy nuggets. After a minute or two of work, in a state of deep concentration the entire time, she sprinkled the contraband into the Garcia Vega tobacco carcass, then rolled, licked, and sealed her project, running a saliva-drenched finger along the seam. Looking it over, she marveled at how obscure it seemed, certainly not the best in the world, but decent enough for her first time. It reminded her of the apricot tree twigs she used to collect in her backyard, dark and coarse.
“Well, you all set?” she held the blunt into the light for Evan to examine.
“Right here in the bathroom?”
“It’s as good a place as any, right? Don’t worry, everyone smokes in this town. There isn’t shit else to do. Smoke, drink, and procreate, that’s Fresno in a nutshell.”
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The sun shone brilliantly, cerulean sky with intermittent cloud patches that looked like bleached ripped wool. Sitting at a two person table outside the café, Ilene’s, Evan stared at a blank sheet of journal paper while Janelle searched for a free newspaper, which proved to be a fruitless project, as they didn’t allow reading material at their establishment. Reporting this to Evan in a huff, she sat down, lit a smoke, and checked her phone messages.
“What kind of place doesn’t allow reading material?” he asked.
“Well, get used to it. People here embrace their ignorance and will do anything to hold on to it, like an Amish having a heart attack who chooses a horse and buggy over an ambulance with only minutes to live—backwards and blissful.”
Evan was beginning to question his surroundings. Where had he come? If only Buckley’s dart would’ve hit Chicago or Brussels or Amsterdam, anywhere but here. Nonetheless, if he was going to live by chance and pick fate over faith, then he’d have to keep playing. He wanted to write, but wasn’t sure how to go about it. Is detail more important than dialogue? Should I concentrate on specific areas of Fresno or simply create a bulleted chronological inventory of products consumed and money spent? Finding no solution, he folded his journal paper in half and ordered an Amstel Light from a petite Surinamese woman; a truly remarkable specimen. This Eve of sorts was a dazzling blend of alabaster and cream; her soft skin glowed in the sunlight, mother of pearl. As the waitress walked away, he studied her dress and dimensions. Unaware of what he was doing, he opened the folded journal paper and jotted down his thoughts.
She is wearing a lazily draped summer dress, free of any undergarment, strap, or attachment. It has a crimson floral pattern and is wrinkled from neck to calf hem. She is an ogre with the dishware, but responsive and amiable with the customers. She smiles at a small bird braving its way through the feral crowd for a crumb. I hope she smiles at me that way. Evan, now grinning widely, suddenly felt aware of the fact that he was heavily sedated. He hadn’t consumed that drug since he was in high school and now it all came rushing back. He laughed out loud and soon noticed he’d gathered an audience. Janelle, smiling as well, eyes bloodshot and squinting, cupped her mobile phone with her left hand and shot Evan a look that said Yes, I am loaded too, but you don’t see me cackling out loud for no reason, occupy yourself. Taking the hint, he shook a cigarette out of his pack and lit it with Janelle’s Zippo. Studying it, he noticed that there was a sheep etched in the metal.
“Where’d you get this lighter?” Evan said, looking up to find an empty seat.
Accepting his beer from the waitress, he gave her a twenty and declined the change. Evan received a smile.
After four more beers, paying twenty a piece for each, Evan began humming Lennon’s Mind Games reflexively. Janelle returned from somewhere after quite some time and sat down at the table, shouting her order to the waitress (two lasagna fromage, one mixed greens salad with raspberry balsamic vinegar, and a Black Widow: Grey Goose vodka, Grand Marnier, Limon cello, lime juice blackberry syrup, Crown Royal whiskey, and pineapple juice). The two ate in relative silence, enjoying the weather and their high. They devoured the lasagna simultaneously, knife and fork working in a symbiotic relationship. Janelle chimed in after several minutes of silence.
“Life’s only aesthetic qualities are experienced in hindsight,” she said straight-faced and humorless.
“What? Are you drunk?”
“Let’s just say I am not incredibly fond of the hand I’ve been dealt. Yes, I have loads of money, so what? I don’t have parents, but the traditional American family is overrated anyhow. Every step I take just gets more complicated than the one previous. Things are supposed to get better, right? Well, with each new day I wait for that gestalt, and each new day I am thwarted.”
“Well, maybe you just need to settle down. Find a man,” Evan said in a sober tone.
“That’s just what I want, settling down to a nice long life of domesticity and prescription dependency, clipping pizza coupons from the phonebook because I am too exhausted to cook, racing home each day in my late model European family sports sedan, chocolate lab drooling out the passenger window, two kids drooling and shitting in the backseat. Then, in nine months, I can squeeze another mouth to feed out of my crotch. No, I’ll have them slice my stomach open in order to more quickly populate the earth. I can buy crayons with colors like Prozac Purple and Ritalin Red, instilling pre-produced morals into my freshly born litter via Barnes and Noble’s Oprah-teaches-you-to-parent section. Then, follow my husband (a marriage of convenience, prearranged because of mutual skin color and tax brackets) into a protestant church to pray that our silly little lives don’t get any worse. And if they do, that He will whisk us off to heaven, rubbing elbows with Sinatra, my grandmother, and River Phoenix. The hereafter’s just a collection of famous drug users anyhow. I can pretend each night that I really want to sleep in the same bed with this out of shape idiot, stuck with that hairy, flabby, homely visage each new day. After ten years we can try to stoke the long-gone-out embers of our relationship by retreating to corporate created bastions of instant gratification—Disney-owned, most likely. I can fill my time with hour after hour of sitcoms that will help to create a more moral character, Danny Tanner’s monologue to Michelle about how you shouldn’t hide your sister’s diary in the refrigerator, while commercials for the latest drive-thru creation flash incessantly, inviting us to ‘savor’ the new steak filled bacon wrap guacamole burger, deep fried in fish oil and brazed with pork drippings, causing our thighs to expand quicker than the great wide west that we raped and stole from the Native American. Yeah, I guess you could say I am looking forward to settling down.”
Evan said nothing and opted instead to take a long drink from his bottle of beer.
“I’m sorry, I’m just stoned. I didn’t mean to chew your ear off.”
“No worries, I understand what you’re saying. I was in a domestic situation back home,” Evan answered.
“You mind taking me home, I’ve got some paperwork to finish,” Janelle seemed suddenly worn out, voice solemn and sterile.
Evan paid the bill with cash, another one hundred percent tip, and walked with Janelle, arm in arm to the car. He felt quite comfortable with her, not in a sexual way, but in an amicable, friendly sense—one increasingly hard to establish between heterosexual men and women.
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Back at Janelle’s, she immediately turned on the stereo, Tom Petty’s American Girl, and pulled out some ingredients for cocktails. Quartering a lime, she filled two sixteen ounce tumblers with ice and three fourths of Bombay Gin. She squeezed the lime and tossed the rind into the glass, then dashed a bit of tonic water in each and topped them off with a splash of cranberry juice, refusing to stir.
“Where’s your roommate?” inquired Evan.
“I don’t have one,” was Janelle’s retort, sipping liberally from her glass while handing Evan his.
“Uh, isn’t January your roommate?”
“Nope, I live alone,” she spoke in the opposite direction heading toward her bedroom. “I’ve got something for you, Mr. Chance. You mind if I call you that? Mr. Chance?”
Evan, drink sweating in his left hand, responded, “But, she took me to her room. I, I…”
Returning from the room, Janelle lightly grabbed Evan’s jaw and opened it. “Try these; they’re like candy for grown-ups. Jolly Rancher, behind the counter.”
She dropped three round pills into Evan’s mouth and offered him her drink, straw to mouth.
Evan awoke on the couch to a flashing television set. His head felt tight and swollen. Angelo had just finished his seven day forecast when Evan came to. The newsflash on the bottom of the screen read one dead in south east Fresno. Margot Kim, an Asian anchor, said in a non-colloquial, non-regional dialect that a local coffee shop employee from the Revue, known only as Kevin, had died after ingesting a spinach wrap. The killer in this case, E. coli. Evan felt nauseous.