This One Time

"Well," I said more to myself than to Steve, "this must be it. This’s gotta be the place.”

Steve just looked at me kinda funny as we pulled to the curb, then he looked away and said, “Yeah.”

The car stopped shaking, just like a beat up vibrating bed in some shitty Reno motel room.

All alone when your quarter runs out.

And somehow I just knew: it was all gonna happen today.

It would start the second I got out of the car and walked up the stained cement stairs to the chipped black and tan door. As soon as I rang the doorbell.

Steve was looking at me again, measuring me really, but trying to make it look like he was popping a zit in the mirror, or rearranging his greasy dark hair under his stained and smashed out black felt hat.

It was no use, I knew. Call it a gut feeling. Intuition. Fucking unavoidable. Whatever.

“So, you coming?” I asked him, even though I knew there was no way he would.

He looked at me for real. Just for a second.

“Why?” he mumbled, moving his eyes quickly to his fumbling hands at the bottom of the steering wheel, “You know these people, right? You've dealt with them before, ri-i-ight?”

“Yeah-- okay, okay,” I said, cutting him off. “I hear you, I hear you! You just wait here then and keep thinkin’ those good thoughts.”

Then, all in one motion, I leaned my body hard to the right, yanked hard on the door handle, and as the door creaked and flew open, leaned my way out of the car.

"Here we go."

In just a few short steps my hand will be reaching out for the cracked off-white plastic button of their dangling, rusty doorbell.

It reminded me of a snail’s eye hanging there. A fucked up, drooping snail’s eye.

Broken. Dangling.

One, two, three. Up the weather-beaten steps, two steps at a time, in my beat-up K-Mart™ winos.

There's the snail's eye. Hanging, red and white wires creeping out of a jaggedly cut hole in the lumpy stucco frosting of the porch.

I could hear Steve starting the car up. Pumping the gas pedal before turning the key repeatedly. The engine whining to life finally as I rang their doorbell.

"This is it," I kept thinking. "This is it."

I could hear footsteps behind the door, getting closer. Muffled.
Then a sound. A small kid shouting in another room--the TV-- what was that?

“Hey... it’s me,” I said through the door.

“Gary? Hey, Gary,” I muttered, rapping lazily on the
door with the back of my hand.

The floorboards made that distinctive creak: a human weight
on the other side of the door.

I could almost feel it under my feet, through the warped, stained floorboards of the porch, through the worn out doormat.

"Maybe they’re looking at me right now," I thought, staring directly at the dark
domed glass of the peephole.

“Come on you guys, come on…”

I rubbed the palms of my hands up and down the sides of my
burgundy corduroy pant legs.

Wait--was that sound the chain lock slowly being undone?

What the hell was taking so long?