09-27-2014, 04:09 AM
Willie Has to Buy Stuff in Town
"I spent twenty years being a thin, intelligent, talented, good-looking guy, but I couldn't get a girlfriend where I live, so I said Fuck it, and became an overweight alcoholic," Will was saying to his doctor. He was now proud of this too, when he looked down under his colossal stomach and could still see his dick he felt better than most people to tell the truth.
Still he had to suffer the lonely stuff and didn't feel too well physically. He was seeing a mind doctor now, a psychiatrist. It was a man now, since the woman doctor he'd been seeing until recently had closed her practice.
"How do you feel about your weight and your problem with alcohol?" Dr. Feldman asked.
"I don't feel much different," Willie said, "only I just get a little slower," he said with an honest smile.
"You don't feel uncomfortable with feeling slower?" the doctor said.
"No. I feel as bad as I did before. Just more tired and jaded, I guess, is how I think now."
When Willie crossed his legs he felt his balls twisted around in his scrotum, he was always mid way before or after a hard on when he was walking around in town, and in the doctor's office too because lots of women were sitting in the waiting room looking as desperate as they did inaccessible. He put both of his feet back flat on the floor in front of him and stared in the doctor's face.
"Can you tell me anything that you do feel uncomfortable about?" the doctor asked; since Willie was new to him, Dr. Feldman wasn't familiar yet with him and how troubled he was. There were problems, the doctor knew, but he was still struggling to get to them.
"I usually have to feel uncomfortable with women," Willie said.
"What about women makes you uncomfortable?" the doctor asked.
"What do you think?" Willie smiled and turned a little red, his face looked a lot fatter when he was acting jovial.
"I can see where there can be problems," Dr. Feldman said. "But what is it exactly that troubles you?"
"I saw a girl earlier this week. Around Monday, was when it was. I was walking into Walmart and she was standing out there on the sidewalk smoking. She was just wearing a bikini top, and had a tattoo over her chest that said 'SUCK ME' and on her stomach it said 'FREAK'. So I said, 'Are you a sign?', she said, 'What?", and I said, 'I'll do what you want if you want me.' And she realized what I was talking about, and she said, "You a creep or something?!' "
Willie just looked at the doctor to see if he understood. The doctor wasn't looking at him but his face around his nose looked kind of extended like he was still listening.
"Girls have always been like that with me," Willie said.
"Like what do you mean?" Dr. Feldman asked.
"Like that! They get offended if I show any interest in them. If they seem like they're going out of their way to get attention, like in a sexual way, and I make a comment about whatever they're doing, they act like I'm being weird. A girl wants to stand outside Walmart just wearing a bikini top with big tattoos saying she wants to be sucked by a freak, and if I say something or comment about that, she says I'm a creep. And girls were like that with me even when I wasn't fat, when I was clean and dressed just like everybody else and was nice to them. No matter what I would say or do, they would act like I was weird or doing something creepy. Even if I just walked up to a girl at a music store and said, 'You like so or so band' or whatever I would think to say, and they would act like they were upset and like they were scared I was going to hurt them or something. But I saw other guys go up and say the same kind of thing to them, and they'd smile and go out with them and stuff. And that went on for years, so I just didn't see the reason to try anymore. I just drink now."
"You aren't concerned about relationships anymore?" the doctor asked.
"It don't matter what I care about. It never mattered about anything," Willie said.
"You don't try to be social around women now?"
"It won't work. I see girls all over town, most places I go, wearing these nice, fashionable dresses and things, and when I walk past them they make sure to not look at me and I can feel them hoping I don't come up to them."
"But you don't know that's what they're thinking."
"Anybody knows what they think, when you look at their faces, you can tell."
Dr. Feldman smiled a little bit like he didn't believe that Willie really a hundred percent believed that women felt that way about him. Willie was certain though. He'd approached girls before even when he could tell how they would react, and they reacted just like he expected. That had happened about thirty times over the last ten years.
"I see girls I like. I like them," Willie said. "I like them just by looking at them. I'm attracted to them, yeah, but I can tell that if they just liked me too and were nice I could get along with them. But they don't like me. They never have. Even girls I approached that weren't very good-looking acted that way toward me. So now I just drink."
For the rest of the time he was with the doctor, Willie gave examples of times he'd actually tried to talk to girls, and he told about times when girls would even say Yes but then when he called them they never answered.
"I went up to a girl and said, 'Hey, you like the Flinstoners?', and she said, 'Yeah, I love them! You?', and I said 'Yeah.' She said, 'Cool.' And then I just said, 'You doing anything this weekend?', and she said, 'Uh, I'm not sure yet." So I just said, 'The Flinstoners are going to be in Winston Salem Saturday night.' And she said, 'Oh! For real!' And I said, 'Maybe we could meet down there. Or, if you want, I can get you a ticket, if you want to go with me.' And then she just stopped talking to me. And when I tried to say something else, she just said Excuse me and smiled like we hadn't been talking to each other."
"You didn't ask her what it was you said that upset her?" the doctor asked.
"I already knew," Willie said. "It's always the same."
Then he went on to tell Dr. Feldman about an idea he'd had recently.
"I was in Target the other day, and I had only been in there not even three minutes and I saw fifteen girls I wanted to marry and have children with, and it went on and on."
The doctor smiled, picking up more on Willie's sense of humor.
"I see endless amounts of girls every time I go there that I want. They have three bathrooms there; one is a Family Restroom to take your kids in. I think they should have a Fuck Room, if you see a girl you want you can go up to her and ask her if she'll go to the Fuck Room with you. If it becomes a common thing, it'll be easier. It'll become as simple as asking what time it is. Some won't want to, some won't have time. But there are so many gorgeous girls walking around in there every day. A Fuck Room would do a lot of good."
"And what do you think a girl would say if she heard you say that?"
"They would think I was a creep. But like I said, if it caught on, and became like a normal thing, it would just be something else people do; like how they walk around half naked at the beach and swimming pools, and like when they go on online dating sites and go out and meet strangers."
"Have you met anyone on an online dating site, or used something like that to meet girls?" the doctor asked.
"No," Willie said.
It was the end of the session now, and Dr. Feldman got up from his chair and told Willie to come out and schedule his appointment for the next week. Willie did, but he had to go to the restroom so he went back down the hallway after he was done at the desk. He used the toilet and looked down at his pants as he stood in front of the sink mirror. There was some piss he could see on his pants since they were a light color. Some piss that had dripped out while he was zipping his zipper. He rubbed the wet areas a few times with a paper towel, but it didn't do any good, so he just pulled his shirt down in the front and held it like that until he had left the building.
Outside he had to go catch a bus back to the part of town where the stores were. He had a few things to pick up while he was still out. As he passed the window of the room where he'd been sitting with Dr. Feldman he could hear the doctor talking to someone. Dr. Feldman had forgotten about Willie now, and he was on the phone with one of his friends between appointments. Willie walked to the bus stop and only had to wait a few minutes and the bus was there.
He burped a few times sitting there on the bus, they were inside burps he just made explode in his throat so no one would hear him, but he threw up in his mouth a little each time from acid reflux. Not only had he gained a lot of weight over the last two years, but it was becoming harder for him to move around too. When he stood his knees would feel like buckling under him, and every moment that he wasn't lying flat on his back on his bed or on a couch felt like what he imagined it would feel like to have just done a hundred sit-ups and then walked four miles with a stomach full of a fifth of liquor. It hurt when he ate too. Whatever he put in his mouth went down and felt like a brick dropping into his stomach; and whenever he even smelled food, even if he hadn't eaten for hours, he would start to get gassy. Now he was having at least three bowel movements a day. He'd feel an urgent need to go after the first bite of all the three major meals of the day. One spoonful of Life cereal in the morning would have his stomach bubbling and pulsating with the need to relieve his bowels as soon as possible; and one bite off a sandwich at lunch would do the same.
Before he got off the bus he had started feeling hungry, he was noticing it, though he was hungry all the time, but it came as fast as one of his urgent needs for a bowel movement as he stepped off the bus and smelled food cooking in the restaurants around the area. First he wanted to pick up the things he'd come to town for. After he ate he would have to be in the restroom a while, so he wanted to get these other things done first.
He crossed the street and cut between two of the old buildings from before the city had been remodelled years ago. They were stone buildings, with a lot fewer windows than the newer places that people shopped and ate and went to appointments in now. Nothing was in these buildings, like most of the similar places that still stood here and there around town, they were empty and rundown. Every once in a while something would open up in one of the old buildings, but nothing that was around for long. A few times people had tried to open artsy type places or places where local bands could have a place to give concerts, but nothing that ever lasted a full year.
Willie made his way past the gas stations and used car lots that lined the side of the highway he was still to cross before he made it to the area where most of the stores were. Once he crossed the highway, he would have to walk a ways down a part of the highway that went the direction he was headed. It made him anxious, it was hard enough to walk, but since there were no sidewalks and there were roads on all sides of him, he would have to constantly be looking in all directions at once before he could take a step. There was a grassy island in the center of the intersection but that was still a long ways up.
It was hot out, there were oil stains and puddles of water along the sides of the street that made it feel more humid and reflected the sun back up into his face. He burped again as he was approaching the island in the middle of the wide street. It was so much that came up this time, and felt so biley, that he didn't want to have to swallow it. He looked around and saw cars jetting past him endlessly going one way or the other depending on which side they were on and cars stopped waiting at the top of the side roads. He just swallowed the stuff in his mouth and stepped up onto the curb of the middle island with such force that he felt a jolt of pain shoot through his leg and then could hardly bend his knee as he kept trying to walk.
He stood in the sun feeling it reflecting off the back of his head and listened to the cars zoom by in front and behind him. He was feeling so hungry now that he was getting sick and weak. Lightheaded. As he was waiting for the stream of cars in front of him to slow down he wondered if his leg would work good enough to get him to the other side of the street. Putting most of his weight on his other leg made that leg start to feel like it was about to give way. He couldn't tell if he was sweating on his chin or if breathing as hard as he was was forcing saliva out of his mouth. It took five minutes for the light to change up the street so that the traffic could stop for about a minute. He limped across the street and when he got to the pavement on the other side he had to stop and rest on his feet. A truck was pulling up behind him trying to get into the parking lot and Willie turned and looked at the man driving it. He limped as far as he could out of the truck's way then had to stop again and he rubbed his leg to let anyone like the man in the truck that he might have inconvenienced see that he was hurt.
Now his knee wouldn't bend and he couldn't put any weight on that leg without feeling so much pain that he worried he might fall down. His stomach started to burn the more nervous he got standing there. He felt like he had to use a restroom and he could smell the food cooking at the restaurants that were right up the street from where he was. He leaned over and rubbed both his knees; the longer he stayed leaning forward like that the better his stomach felt. But it was hard to stand that way with his leg hurting so bad.
He sensed a car pulling in behind him and looked at it out of the corner of his eye. Luckily it went to the other side of the parking lot as the truck had. He tried to walk some more but couldn't. The sun made his stomach burn worse, and he felt nauseous too.
The hungrier he got the more he felt like he had to burp. He burped a couple times but nothing came up. He was sweating so much now that he felt like he was being rained on. The dampness didn't cool him down any, if anything it had him feeling more nauseous. It felt like he was feverish, and soaked in a feverish sweat. It was the heat and the humidity and his hunger that caused the nausea. That and his nerves. Rubbing his knee was making it feel a little better. He kept doing that and looking around to watch for cars pulling in or leaving the parking lot. Cars passed on the highway and he heard radios and voices of people zipping through the air and then vanishing from the air around him.
Soon though he was able to walk, and he continued over the rest of the parking lot and the grass area next to it and over a few more paved areas till he was on the little street that turned into the parking lot of the shopping center where Target was. He used the restroom when he got inside Target; there was no one else in the restroom so he took his time and relaxed and rested his aching legs.
Out in the store he passed the registers and cut through the clothes aisles to the part in the back where they sold magazines. He passed three attractive girls between leaving the clothes aisles and reaching the magazines, each of the girls were smartly dressed and looked college age. He cut through the DVD and video game aisles and along the back wall he saw a huge stand holding probably about at least fifty copies of the movie Midnight in Paris. He thought about how he'd heard these young stylish girls one time referring to Target as Targey, or like how it would be pronounced with a silent t at the end, and thought that maybe that was why they had so many copies of a movie like that. But as he was thinking this, and right when he was seeing the side of the magazine aisle, his stomach started rumbling again, not from hunger, though he was still very hungry, but because he had to go to the bathroom again. And he had to go bad.
He tore back up the far side of the store and made it to the restroom again. There was someone else in the stall next to his this time. There were only two stalls. He heard them passing gas and dropping stuff into the toilet. It took him a while after he sat down to start going, but then it just exploded out of him. Unlike the first time, now it was wet and felt like it usually did when he had been nervous and had got a stomach ache.
The other person was finished and left. Willie sat for ten minutes almost going nonstop. He was glad that he was going so much, thinking that maybe he would be able to make it out of town, and even have a meal at a restaurant, before having to go again.
Back in the magazine section he stood reading the latest Rolling Stone. There was a review of a new movie about a Nazi that came to America and set up a drug lab for some weird kind of drug that made people see themselves in their dreams as people from the past, usually celebrities; and he thought that though that movie probably wouldn't come to town, he still wanted to see it. And there was a review of a new album by a band he liked but hadn't heard anything from in a while called The Banshee Syndicate. It was an all girl band except for the lead singer, who wrote all the songs, and who was a former heroin addict that now, the reviewer said, had regressed back to childhood and, with this new album, had produced some of the most movingly nostalgic and haunting vibrations on a modern album that the writer had heard in decades. Willie grew excited after reading that, and went over to see if they had that CD in the store. He remembered reading that it had been released near the end of last month.
He didn't see it though. And he went back and looked over the magazines to see if there was anything else to look at. When he was done there, he went to the other side of the store and cut through the grocery section up to the aisles where they sold plates and cups and things like that. There was a girl stocking each of the aisles as far as he could see back toward where the registers started. There was one girl over in the make-up area, and a girl on the card aisle, there was a girl working on each aisle he passed or went down.
They all wore red shirts and tight tan pants. The one girl that was stocking the aisle of mirrors and picture frames he was standing next to was bending over to pick things out of a box that set on the floor at the beginning of the aisle and he could see her asscrack at the top of her pants. And she was a young and attractive girl too. They all were. They all looked between seventeen and twenty, they were the kind of clean, shiny white girls that went to college and were only working here to pay their way. They each had the bright, smooth faces of girls that could do better and were doing better than anything Willie had to offer them.
Willie was only twenty-eight years old himself. When he'd said to the doctor that he'd spent twenty years as a thin, intelligent and good-looking guy, he'd counted when he was a kid; because he was a thin, good-looking kid. He'd been a decent looking guy until recently; a couple of years ago he'd agreed to start some antidepressant medication, and had found himself seventy pounds heavier little more than a year later. He stopped taking the pills; but the damage had been done, as far as he could tell. He couldn't walk around town like he used to. His body hurt, and he felt so out of shape that when he stood over the table in the kitchen fixing a sandwich he would start to feel like he had ran a mile by the time he was done. And after he'd eaten he would feel so bloated and disgusting that he would feel too depressed to stay awake any longer, and he would just go to sleep a little while after every meal. After he woke, he'd have to use the bathroom so bad he could barely make it to the toilet.
But Willie hadn't been depressed. Not really depressed; it was more that he was disappointed. Disappointed because he got turned down so much by the girls he liked. He'd like someone, and he would have his sights on her for weeks, then he would make an attempt and fail, then he would suffer for months and sometimes years. He didn't take rejection well. And it was all he had ever had.
There wasn't much of anything unusual about him; unless his hypersensitivity and his tendency to focus on certain girls for long periods of time are unusual things. Mainly it was that he had these weaknesses, that he let them drag him so far down. On most occasions he would confront a girl at awkward times; when she had just entered a new relationship after a painful one, when she had just had a breakup and needed some time to regroup, when she was in a bad mood, when she was nervous and didn't want strangers approaching her. But his longtime obsessions cast a dire shadow over all his attempts. He failed, he suffered for months, he acted awkwardly and desperately and half-heartedly during his weeks of raging despair which turned girls off. It's true that he often looked so desperate and reckless as he approached that girls were afraid of what he might do. He looked like someone that had been through a lot and that wouldn't be someone that they should get involved with. He talked and looked shattered, as if all of life depended on what happened in this moment, and this girl that had never set eyes on him before was his ticket either to love and marriage by the weekend or suicide by early evening. So nothing that he needed could work out; and the pills worked surprisingly quick. Next thing he knew after a little while taking them was that he was now far worse off than he'd been before. Now he was a nervous, desperate wreck and an overweight, sloppy-looking jester of a man.
None of the girls stocking the aisles looked at him as he passed or stood looking at things. His belt was tight around his waist; it was funny, he thought, about how the fatter he got the harder it was to keep his pants from sliding down. He assumed his waist in the front, under his stomach, stayed pretty much the same size, and his gut and his lower body were just slopes, and nothing but a tightly worn belt could hold even the smallest sized pants up on him.
He didn't think about talking to the doctor as he stood looking at things on the aisles and turning every so often to see if the girls were in positions where he could study them without them knowing or if they were looking at him or would look at him if he looked at them. He didn't have any of the semicomical thoughts like he talked about to the doctor. He took what he was doing seriously, shopping; and the girls around him seriously, as women he could see himself starting a new life with. And he knew that no life was going to happen with any of these girls. He felt more fat the longer he stood there. He'd wanted to find some glasses that he could set on the table or something at his house to put change in, because he didn't like having change in his pockets, and didn't know where to put it except in a piggy bank or big bowl or jar or some glasses or something. He thought that some wine glasses or something like that would work and be nice to set on his table and put all his change he got in. But being around these girls was distracting him, and making him feel that his idea and his looking at the glasses was kind of silly. Almost too silly to be realistic. And if that's all he was walking around and standing around in that part of the store for, other than because he liked the girls there, he was most likely giving off the vibe of being creepy. He felt creepy, and like the girls could notice it about him. And now his stomach was hurting again. He had a brief thought about a vampire movie he had seen a few nights ago, and he wondered that girls weren't into those subjects, and he felt a worse pain in his stomach and left the aisle he was on and started going toward the front of the store where the restrooms were. He was cursing to himself because he was feeling sick because he had had to think too much when he was on the aisles. It made him mad. And he walked to the restroom and went inside to use it. He didn't even feel hungry anymore, and worse than losing his appetite after he'd thought he'd been doing so well, he felt like he might not ever be able to eat again. He felt sick, and as he sat on the toilet he was constipated, and like he was going to throw up, and if he did throw up, in his imagination as he sat there unable to go, that it would be a full turd that would come out his mouth. And he thought about talking to the doctor now, and what he had said, and he felt sick.
He was in the restroom fifteen minutes; and to him, he didn't know if it had been ten minutes or twenty. He felt raw inside, like he sometimes did when he ate breakfast food at fast food places; like biscuits and hashbrowns and stuff. Sometimes when he passed gas it took a while to smell it; and sometimes he smelled it before he was finished letting it out. All these things were worrying him a lot now; like really worrying him about his health, and his ability to understand things. He thought about talking to his doctor about things like this; but knowing how embarrassed most everything he talked to his doctors about was, he decided he was just going to have to deal with these things himself, and if nobody else noticed anything he would just try to leave things in the past.
When he was washing his hands at the sink, and no one else was in the room, he thought best not to go back over to where he was looking at the glasses and kitchen things. Each of the girls had been the equivalent of girls he'd seen before and thought he'd never see the likes and quality of again. Yet he had, and, he had to insist to himself, he would again. To just not spend any money, then he'd have all the more, more when, if he needed some money to spend if he had to spend something on some girl he met and said she wanted to go out with him somewhere.
When Denzel Washington talks; when you hear Denzel Washington talk, it's hard to disagree with anything he says: Willie was thinking, imagining the kind of movie review he'd write if he wrote reviews for a magazine, as he left Target. He didn't buy anything, and didn't stop at any restaurants, he just went back to catch the bus back out of town. When he got home he ate a frozen meat loaf dinner he had in his freezer. He didn't need to use the bathroom the rest of the day, but when he woke up the next morning he had to run to the bathroom, and it came spilling out as soon as he pulled his pants down over the toilet. As he sat up against the wall that night, he had watched a movie that was a remake of the vampire movie he'd seen a few nights ago.
He knew that if the first movie he'd seen was popular enough to have a remake made of it, it was a good and moving movie. It had moved him. And it felt good when he watched the remake. As much as he liked the original, the remake was what gave him hope. For a few minutes before he went to sleep he thought it would be funny to make a remake of himself, that it would be better that way. He didn't believe it.
"I spent twenty years being a thin, intelligent, talented, good-looking guy, but I couldn't get a girlfriend where I live, so I said Fuck it, and became an overweight alcoholic," Will was saying to his doctor. He was now proud of this too, when he looked down under his colossal stomach and could still see his dick he felt better than most people to tell the truth.
Still he had to suffer the lonely stuff and didn't feel too well physically. He was seeing a mind doctor now, a psychiatrist. It was a man now, since the woman doctor he'd been seeing until recently had closed her practice.
"How do you feel about your weight and your problem with alcohol?" Dr. Feldman asked.
"I don't feel much different," Willie said, "only I just get a little slower," he said with an honest smile.
"You don't feel uncomfortable with feeling slower?" the doctor said.
"No. I feel as bad as I did before. Just more tired and jaded, I guess, is how I think now."
When Willie crossed his legs he felt his balls twisted around in his scrotum, he was always mid way before or after a hard on when he was walking around in town, and in the doctor's office too because lots of women were sitting in the waiting room looking as desperate as they did inaccessible. He put both of his feet back flat on the floor in front of him and stared in the doctor's face.
"Can you tell me anything that you do feel uncomfortable about?" the doctor asked; since Willie was new to him, Dr. Feldman wasn't familiar yet with him and how troubled he was. There were problems, the doctor knew, but he was still struggling to get to them.
"I usually have to feel uncomfortable with women," Willie said.
"What about women makes you uncomfortable?" the doctor asked.
"What do you think?" Willie smiled and turned a little red, his face looked a lot fatter when he was acting jovial.
"I can see where there can be problems," Dr. Feldman said. "But what is it exactly that troubles you?"
"I saw a girl earlier this week. Around Monday, was when it was. I was walking into Walmart and she was standing out there on the sidewalk smoking. She was just wearing a bikini top, and had a tattoo over her chest that said 'SUCK ME' and on her stomach it said 'FREAK'. So I said, 'Are you a sign?', she said, 'What?", and I said, 'I'll do what you want if you want me.' And she realized what I was talking about, and she said, "You a creep or something?!' "
Willie just looked at the doctor to see if he understood. The doctor wasn't looking at him but his face around his nose looked kind of extended like he was still listening.
"Girls have always been like that with me," Willie said.
"Like what do you mean?" Dr. Feldman asked.
"Like that! They get offended if I show any interest in them. If they seem like they're going out of their way to get attention, like in a sexual way, and I make a comment about whatever they're doing, they act like I'm being weird. A girl wants to stand outside Walmart just wearing a bikini top with big tattoos saying she wants to be sucked by a freak, and if I say something or comment about that, she says I'm a creep. And girls were like that with me even when I wasn't fat, when I was clean and dressed just like everybody else and was nice to them. No matter what I would say or do, they would act like I was weird or doing something creepy. Even if I just walked up to a girl at a music store and said, 'You like so or so band' or whatever I would think to say, and they would act like they were upset and like they were scared I was going to hurt them or something. But I saw other guys go up and say the same kind of thing to them, and they'd smile and go out with them and stuff. And that went on for years, so I just didn't see the reason to try anymore. I just drink now."
"You aren't concerned about relationships anymore?" the doctor asked.
"It don't matter what I care about. It never mattered about anything," Willie said.
"You don't try to be social around women now?"
"It won't work. I see girls all over town, most places I go, wearing these nice, fashionable dresses and things, and when I walk past them they make sure to not look at me and I can feel them hoping I don't come up to them."
"But you don't know that's what they're thinking."
"Anybody knows what they think, when you look at their faces, you can tell."
Dr. Feldman smiled a little bit like he didn't believe that Willie really a hundred percent believed that women felt that way about him. Willie was certain though. He'd approached girls before even when he could tell how they would react, and they reacted just like he expected. That had happened about thirty times over the last ten years.
"I see girls I like. I like them," Willie said. "I like them just by looking at them. I'm attracted to them, yeah, but I can tell that if they just liked me too and were nice I could get along with them. But they don't like me. They never have. Even girls I approached that weren't very good-looking acted that way toward me. So now I just drink."
For the rest of the time he was with the doctor, Willie gave examples of times he'd actually tried to talk to girls, and he told about times when girls would even say Yes but then when he called them they never answered.
"I went up to a girl and said, 'Hey, you like the Flinstoners?', and she said, 'Yeah, I love them! You?', and I said 'Yeah.' She said, 'Cool.' And then I just said, 'You doing anything this weekend?', and she said, 'Uh, I'm not sure yet." So I just said, 'The Flinstoners are going to be in Winston Salem Saturday night.' And she said, 'Oh! For real!' And I said, 'Maybe we could meet down there. Or, if you want, I can get you a ticket, if you want to go with me.' And then she just stopped talking to me. And when I tried to say something else, she just said Excuse me and smiled like we hadn't been talking to each other."
"You didn't ask her what it was you said that upset her?" the doctor asked.
"I already knew," Willie said. "It's always the same."
Then he went on to tell Dr. Feldman about an idea he'd had recently.
"I was in Target the other day, and I had only been in there not even three minutes and I saw fifteen girls I wanted to marry and have children with, and it went on and on."
The doctor smiled, picking up more on Willie's sense of humor.
"I see endless amounts of girls every time I go there that I want. They have three bathrooms there; one is a Family Restroom to take your kids in. I think they should have a Fuck Room, if you see a girl you want you can go up to her and ask her if she'll go to the Fuck Room with you. If it becomes a common thing, it'll be easier. It'll become as simple as asking what time it is. Some won't want to, some won't have time. But there are so many gorgeous girls walking around in there every day. A Fuck Room would do a lot of good."
"And what do you think a girl would say if she heard you say that?"
"They would think I was a creep. But like I said, if it caught on, and became like a normal thing, it would just be something else people do; like how they walk around half naked at the beach and swimming pools, and like when they go on online dating sites and go out and meet strangers."
"Have you met anyone on an online dating site, or used something like that to meet girls?" the doctor asked.
"No," Willie said.
It was the end of the session now, and Dr. Feldman got up from his chair and told Willie to come out and schedule his appointment for the next week. Willie did, but he had to go to the restroom so he went back down the hallway after he was done at the desk. He used the toilet and looked down at his pants as he stood in front of the sink mirror. There was some piss he could see on his pants since they were a light color. Some piss that had dripped out while he was zipping his zipper. He rubbed the wet areas a few times with a paper towel, but it didn't do any good, so he just pulled his shirt down in the front and held it like that until he had left the building.
Outside he had to go catch a bus back to the part of town where the stores were. He had a few things to pick up while he was still out. As he passed the window of the room where he'd been sitting with Dr. Feldman he could hear the doctor talking to someone. Dr. Feldman had forgotten about Willie now, and he was on the phone with one of his friends between appointments. Willie walked to the bus stop and only had to wait a few minutes and the bus was there.
He burped a few times sitting there on the bus, they were inside burps he just made explode in his throat so no one would hear him, but he threw up in his mouth a little each time from acid reflux. Not only had he gained a lot of weight over the last two years, but it was becoming harder for him to move around too. When he stood his knees would feel like buckling under him, and every moment that he wasn't lying flat on his back on his bed or on a couch felt like what he imagined it would feel like to have just done a hundred sit-ups and then walked four miles with a stomach full of a fifth of liquor. It hurt when he ate too. Whatever he put in his mouth went down and felt like a brick dropping into his stomach; and whenever he even smelled food, even if he hadn't eaten for hours, he would start to get gassy. Now he was having at least three bowel movements a day. He'd feel an urgent need to go after the first bite of all the three major meals of the day. One spoonful of Life cereal in the morning would have his stomach bubbling and pulsating with the need to relieve his bowels as soon as possible; and one bite off a sandwich at lunch would do the same.
Before he got off the bus he had started feeling hungry, he was noticing it, though he was hungry all the time, but it came as fast as one of his urgent needs for a bowel movement as he stepped off the bus and smelled food cooking in the restaurants around the area. First he wanted to pick up the things he'd come to town for. After he ate he would have to be in the restroom a while, so he wanted to get these other things done first.
He crossed the street and cut between two of the old buildings from before the city had been remodelled years ago. They were stone buildings, with a lot fewer windows than the newer places that people shopped and ate and went to appointments in now. Nothing was in these buildings, like most of the similar places that still stood here and there around town, they were empty and rundown. Every once in a while something would open up in one of the old buildings, but nothing that was around for long. A few times people had tried to open artsy type places or places where local bands could have a place to give concerts, but nothing that ever lasted a full year.
Willie made his way past the gas stations and used car lots that lined the side of the highway he was still to cross before he made it to the area where most of the stores were. Once he crossed the highway, he would have to walk a ways down a part of the highway that went the direction he was headed. It made him anxious, it was hard enough to walk, but since there were no sidewalks and there were roads on all sides of him, he would have to constantly be looking in all directions at once before he could take a step. There was a grassy island in the center of the intersection but that was still a long ways up.
It was hot out, there were oil stains and puddles of water along the sides of the street that made it feel more humid and reflected the sun back up into his face. He burped again as he was approaching the island in the middle of the wide street. It was so much that came up this time, and felt so biley, that he didn't want to have to swallow it. He looked around and saw cars jetting past him endlessly going one way or the other depending on which side they were on and cars stopped waiting at the top of the side roads. He just swallowed the stuff in his mouth and stepped up onto the curb of the middle island with such force that he felt a jolt of pain shoot through his leg and then could hardly bend his knee as he kept trying to walk.
He stood in the sun feeling it reflecting off the back of his head and listened to the cars zoom by in front and behind him. He was feeling so hungry now that he was getting sick and weak. Lightheaded. As he was waiting for the stream of cars in front of him to slow down he wondered if his leg would work good enough to get him to the other side of the street. Putting most of his weight on his other leg made that leg start to feel like it was about to give way. He couldn't tell if he was sweating on his chin or if breathing as hard as he was was forcing saliva out of his mouth. It took five minutes for the light to change up the street so that the traffic could stop for about a minute. He limped across the street and when he got to the pavement on the other side he had to stop and rest on his feet. A truck was pulling up behind him trying to get into the parking lot and Willie turned and looked at the man driving it. He limped as far as he could out of the truck's way then had to stop again and he rubbed his leg to let anyone like the man in the truck that he might have inconvenienced see that he was hurt.
Now his knee wouldn't bend and he couldn't put any weight on that leg without feeling so much pain that he worried he might fall down. His stomach started to burn the more nervous he got standing there. He felt like he had to use a restroom and he could smell the food cooking at the restaurants that were right up the street from where he was. He leaned over and rubbed both his knees; the longer he stayed leaning forward like that the better his stomach felt. But it was hard to stand that way with his leg hurting so bad.
He sensed a car pulling in behind him and looked at it out of the corner of his eye. Luckily it went to the other side of the parking lot as the truck had. He tried to walk some more but couldn't. The sun made his stomach burn worse, and he felt nauseous too.
The hungrier he got the more he felt like he had to burp. He burped a couple times but nothing came up. He was sweating so much now that he felt like he was being rained on. The dampness didn't cool him down any, if anything it had him feeling more nauseous. It felt like he was feverish, and soaked in a feverish sweat. It was the heat and the humidity and his hunger that caused the nausea. That and his nerves. Rubbing his knee was making it feel a little better. He kept doing that and looking around to watch for cars pulling in or leaving the parking lot. Cars passed on the highway and he heard radios and voices of people zipping through the air and then vanishing from the air around him.
Soon though he was able to walk, and he continued over the rest of the parking lot and the grass area next to it and over a few more paved areas till he was on the little street that turned into the parking lot of the shopping center where Target was. He used the restroom when he got inside Target; there was no one else in the restroom so he took his time and relaxed and rested his aching legs.
Out in the store he passed the registers and cut through the clothes aisles to the part in the back where they sold magazines. He passed three attractive girls between leaving the clothes aisles and reaching the magazines, each of the girls were smartly dressed and looked college age. He cut through the DVD and video game aisles and along the back wall he saw a huge stand holding probably about at least fifty copies of the movie Midnight in Paris. He thought about how he'd heard these young stylish girls one time referring to Target as Targey, or like how it would be pronounced with a silent t at the end, and thought that maybe that was why they had so many copies of a movie like that. But as he was thinking this, and right when he was seeing the side of the magazine aisle, his stomach started rumbling again, not from hunger, though he was still very hungry, but because he had to go to the bathroom again. And he had to go bad.
He tore back up the far side of the store and made it to the restroom again. There was someone else in the stall next to his this time. There were only two stalls. He heard them passing gas and dropping stuff into the toilet. It took him a while after he sat down to start going, but then it just exploded out of him. Unlike the first time, now it was wet and felt like it usually did when he had been nervous and had got a stomach ache.
The other person was finished and left. Willie sat for ten minutes almost going nonstop. He was glad that he was going so much, thinking that maybe he would be able to make it out of town, and even have a meal at a restaurant, before having to go again.
Back in the magazine section he stood reading the latest Rolling Stone. There was a review of a new movie about a Nazi that came to America and set up a drug lab for some weird kind of drug that made people see themselves in their dreams as people from the past, usually celebrities; and he thought that though that movie probably wouldn't come to town, he still wanted to see it. And there was a review of a new album by a band he liked but hadn't heard anything from in a while called The Banshee Syndicate. It was an all girl band except for the lead singer, who wrote all the songs, and who was a former heroin addict that now, the reviewer said, had regressed back to childhood and, with this new album, had produced some of the most movingly nostalgic and haunting vibrations on a modern album that the writer had heard in decades. Willie grew excited after reading that, and went over to see if they had that CD in the store. He remembered reading that it had been released near the end of last month.
He didn't see it though. And he went back and looked over the magazines to see if there was anything else to look at. When he was done there, he went to the other side of the store and cut through the grocery section up to the aisles where they sold plates and cups and things like that. There was a girl stocking each of the aisles as far as he could see back toward where the registers started. There was one girl over in the make-up area, and a girl on the card aisle, there was a girl working on each aisle he passed or went down.
They all wore red shirts and tight tan pants. The one girl that was stocking the aisle of mirrors and picture frames he was standing next to was bending over to pick things out of a box that set on the floor at the beginning of the aisle and he could see her asscrack at the top of her pants. And she was a young and attractive girl too. They all were. They all looked between seventeen and twenty, they were the kind of clean, shiny white girls that went to college and were only working here to pay their way. They each had the bright, smooth faces of girls that could do better and were doing better than anything Willie had to offer them.
Willie was only twenty-eight years old himself. When he'd said to the doctor that he'd spent twenty years as a thin, intelligent and good-looking guy, he'd counted when he was a kid; because he was a thin, good-looking kid. He'd been a decent looking guy until recently; a couple of years ago he'd agreed to start some antidepressant medication, and had found himself seventy pounds heavier little more than a year later. He stopped taking the pills; but the damage had been done, as far as he could tell. He couldn't walk around town like he used to. His body hurt, and he felt so out of shape that when he stood over the table in the kitchen fixing a sandwich he would start to feel like he had ran a mile by the time he was done. And after he'd eaten he would feel so bloated and disgusting that he would feel too depressed to stay awake any longer, and he would just go to sleep a little while after every meal. After he woke, he'd have to use the bathroom so bad he could barely make it to the toilet.
But Willie hadn't been depressed. Not really depressed; it was more that he was disappointed. Disappointed because he got turned down so much by the girls he liked. He'd like someone, and he would have his sights on her for weeks, then he would make an attempt and fail, then he would suffer for months and sometimes years. He didn't take rejection well. And it was all he had ever had.
There wasn't much of anything unusual about him; unless his hypersensitivity and his tendency to focus on certain girls for long periods of time are unusual things. Mainly it was that he had these weaknesses, that he let them drag him so far down. On most occasions he would confront a girl at awkward times; when she had just entered a new relationship after a painful one, when she had just had a breakup and needed some time to regroup, when she was in a bad mood, when she was nervous and didn't want strangers approaching her. But his longtime obsessions cast a dire shadow over all his attempts. He failed, he suffered for months, he acted awkwardly and desperately and half-heartedly during his weeks of raging despair which turned girls off. It's true that he often looked so desperate and reckless as he approached that girls were afraid of what he might do. He looked like someone that had been through a lot and that wouldn't be someone that they should get involved with. He talked and looked shattered, as if all of life depended on what happened in this moment, and this girl that had never set eyes on him before was his ticket either to love and marriage by the weekend or suicide by early evening. So nothing that he needed could work out; and the pills worked surprisingly quick. Next thing he knew after a little while taking them was that he was now far worse off than he'd been before. Now he was a nervous, desperate wreck and an overweight, sloppy-looking jester of a man.
None of the girls stocking the aisles looked at him as he passed or stood looking at things. His belt was tight around his waist; it was funny, he thought, about how the fatter he got the harder it was to keep his pants from sliding down. He assumed his waist in the front, under his stomach, stayed pretty much the same size, and his gut and his lower body were just slopes, and nothing but a tightly worn belt could hold even the smallest sized pants up on him.
He didn't think about talking to the doctor as he stood looking at things on the aisles and turning every so often to see if the girls were in positions where he could study them without them knowing or if they were looking at him or would look at him if he looked at them. He didn't have any of the semicomical thoughts like he talked about to the doctor. He took what he was doing seriously, shopping; and the girls around him seriously, as women he could see himself starting a new life with. And he knew that no life was going to happen with any of these girls. He felt more fat the longer he stood there. He'd wanted to find some glasses that he could set on the table or something at his house to put change in, because he didn't like having change in his pockets, and didn't know where to put it except in a piggy bank or big bowl or jar or some glasses or something. He thought that some wine glasses or something like that would work and be nice to set on his table and put all his change he got in. But being around these girls was distracting him, and making him feel that his idea and his looking at the glasses was kind of silly. Almost too silly to be realistic. And if that's all he was walking around and standing around in that part of the store for, other than because he liked the girls there, he was most likely giving off the vibe of being creepy. He felt creepy, and like the girls could notice it about him. And now his stomach was hurting again. He had a brief thought about a vampire movie he had seen a few nights ago, and he wondered that girls weren't into those subjects, and he felt a worse pain in his stomach and left the aisle he was on and started going toward the front of the store where the restrooms were. He was cursing to himself because he was feeling sick because he had had to think too much when he was on the aisles. It made him mad. And he walked to the restroom and went inside to use it. He didn't even feel hungry anymore, and worse than losing his appetite after he'd thought he'd been doing so well, he felt like he might not ever be able to eat again. He felt sick, and as he sat on the toilet he was constipated, and like he was going to throw up, and if he did throw up, in his imagination as he sat there unable to go, that it would be a full turd that would come out his mouth. And he thought about talking to the doctor now, and what he had said, and he felt sick.
He was in the restroom fifteen minutes; and to him, he didn't know if it had been ten minutes or twenty. He felt raw inside, like he sometimes did when he ate breakfast food at fast food places; like biscuits and hashbrowns and stuff. Sometimes when he passed gas it took a while to smell it; and sometimes he smelled it before he was finished letting it out. All these things were worrying him a lot now; like really worrying him about his health, and his ability to understand things. He thought about talking to his doctor about things like this; but knowing how embarrassed most everything he talked to his doctors about was, he decided he was just going to have to deal with these things himself, and if nobody else noticed anything he would just try to leave things in the past.
When he was washing his hands at the sink, and no one else was in the room, he thought best not to go back over to where he was looking at the glasses and kitchen things. Each of the girls had been the equivalent of girls he'd seen before and thought he'd never see the likes and quality of again. Yet he had, and, he had to insist to himself, he would again. To just not spend any money, then he'd have all the more, more when, if he needed some money to spend if he had to spend something on some girl he met and said she wanted to go out with him somewhere.
When Denzel Washington talks; when you hear Denzel Washington talk, it's hard to disagree with anything he says: Willie was thinking, imagining the kind of movie review he'd write if he wrote reviews for a magazine, as he left Target. He didn't buy anything, and didn't stop at any restaurants, he just went back to catch the bus back out of town. When he got home he ate a frozen meat loaf dinner he had in his freezer. He didn't need to use the bathroom the rest of the day, but when he woke up the next morning he had to run to the bathroom, and it came spilling out as soon as he pulled his pants down over the toilet. As he sat up against the wall that night, he had watched a movie that was a remake of the vampire movie he'd seen a few nights ago.
He knew that if the first movie he'd seen was popular enough to have a remake made of it, it was a good and moving movie. It had moved him. And it felt good when he watched the remake. As much as he liked the original, the remake was what gave him hope. For a few minutes before he went to sleep he thought it would be funny to make a remake of himself, that it would be better that way. He didn't believe it.
