The Off Season
The off season is a kind of war between you and corrosion. You sit in the boardwalk bar and you wait for some kind of revelation and when that doesn’t come you ask the old woman in the tube top at the end of the bar what she’s drinking and she tells you. You’ll have that. At your house there’s still the bill from the exterminator and there’s the pile of magazines on the kitchen table that you haven’t read and the old lady from the bar says she thinks it’s a nice place, really. And you excuse yourself to go to the bathroom and sit on the closed toilet lid with the door shut and ask yourself if you’re really going through with this. Are you sure, you ask yourself. Are you? The old lady asks from the other side of the door if you’re talking to her. Then she starts banging on the door and asking are you all right, are you all right. You don’t say anything. Maybe she’ll leave. Maybe the weather will clear up. Maybe there will come a light down from the heavens and lift you bodily from this toilet seat and shake you back to sobriety and shine itself in your face and ask if you’d like a shave. Yes, you’ll say. And you’ll sit in God’s own chair and he will take the blade and warm it under some hot water and ask how you’re getting on and you’ll say, oh, you know.
