Gimme my hundred fucking bucks
(for Sabrina)
I’m not a man easily confounded. I used to boast about it. Nothing surprises me, I’m ready for anything, and nothing takes me aback. That’s the kind of thing I used to say after a few drinks. What I actually meant was that I was complacent. Your every day hubristic man.
I hate work. I hate it tremendously, with an acid fervor aggravated by the fact that I go each and every fucking day. Conversely, I’m just as passionate about my free time and tend to become very caught up in it, especially when it involves alcohol. It almost always does involve alcohol.
So I’m in the bar I’m most often in, one night. It’s a nasty little place where no one I know goes, which is why I like it.
I sit at the bar and watch TV, whatever channel, whatever crap is on that channel. If they change it I watch that. I look at the changing images, I don’t watch the show. It’s hypnotic and after awhile I loosen up and I can be civil to people again.
So this kid comes in and sits at the bar next to me. I need a hundred fucking bucks, the kid says.
What the fuck, I said, and you’re asking me?
Yeah.
Fuck off, kid.
No wait, he said. Listen. I got a way I can make you pay me a hundred fucking bucks.
So I got up and looked at him and said It don’t pay to threaten people here.
I ain’t threatening you. But I got a way to make you pay me a hundred fucking bucks. It’s a bet and you’ll lose and I know you won’t refuse.
Why won’t I refuse?
You can’t he said, because you’ll think you can win.
What do I get if I win?
Nothing extra. But everything stays the same.
And if you win you get a hundred bucks? No deal. And then I hesitated and said, What’s the bet?
That by this time tomorrow you will have been confounded.
I laughed aloud. Ok Kid.
I got a call from the office. Some preacher was going to pray over the brain dead kid in the hospital, see if God could be persuaded to kickstart him before they turned the machines off. They were doing it early to avoid the press. If I got my ass there I could cover it.
So I got my ass there.
The parents wanted privacy, no media, and I couldn’t get into the kid’s room, but I spoke to an orderly I knew who had been there and this is what happened.
The preacher came in and without a word knelt down by the boy’s bed. He prayed aloud one short prayer (but the orderly said it was like a last pebble on top of a mountain of praying) and then he bent over the boys face and blew once into the boy’s mouth and once into his nostrils. He took the boy by the shoulder and shook him a little. Then he said Awake.
The kid woke up. His eyes snapped open and they were bright, alert, and plainly terrified. He jerked his arms and legs, and then the doctors were all over him.
There was a news conference later. The boy had made an unexpected return to consciousness and was aware, alert, and as fully himself as he had been before the head injury. What had changed, someone asked. With apparent indifference the doctor said, the boy’s brain can now support motor function, comprehension, identity, where before it could not. Then he stopped.
The preacher was there. I stood two feet from him. He was a round, pink, sweaty little man in his twenties, already balding and sporting a comb over. He looked utterly astounded.
Well someone sure was confounded, I thought. But it ain’t me Kid and I guess I can be grateful that everything is going to stay the same.
Then I thought of what shit staying the same actually meant and I wasn’t so sure I’d won after all. But at least I got to keep the hundred bucks.
So I’m back in the bar that night and right on cue the kid is on the stool next to me.
I win he said.
You win? I won, I said.
And right then, right on the fucking minute, the round sweaty pink preacher was sat there beside me and not the kid at all. It was the same man, down to the smell of cheap cologne over acrid sweat.
The brain dead kid will stay fixed, the preacher said. Well, kinda fixed. You might want to watch him.
And then the kid was back.
Like I said, I win. Now gimme my hundred fucking bucks.
