Hold My Horses-Chris Bower

This was text that I read for P. Fanatics at Cole’s Bar in Logan Square.

I spent 20 minutes on the phone last 4th of July trying to explain to this Japanese restaurant that they forgot the sauce for my Shrimp Tempura and their argument was that they didn’t forget; that  I had put “Gluten Free” on the special instructions and that they didn’t send the sauce because it wasn’t Gluten Free.  During all of this, my vodka filled wife crashed her $90,000 car into our garage door, “ because it just wouldn’t open” and our American born nanny responded to the combination of my yelling at the Japanese restaurant and the car crashing into the garage door by shaking our 3 month old baby girl until she stopped crying and died. We had no idea Caitlin had PTSD because of her last job; teaching poor drug addicted mothers about Shaking Baby Syndrome.

I’m just kidding.

I’m not a cartoon character.  

Who can afford an American born nanny?

Who would even want one?

Imagine trying to get them to work on the 4th of July!  Imagine trying them trying to explain to you that their wedding anniversary is on the same day as the Neiman Marcus customer appreciation fashion show!

I’m just kidding.

I’m not a cartoon character.

Who would even want a family these days?

Kids?

And a wife too?

I can’t even afford a housekeeper that will put up with my hoarding problem.  I didn’t even know I had a problem until I discovered I couldn’t afford cable and while talking about cable at work, one of my co-workers told me about a show called Hoarders.  


I have been collecting dart boards since I was a little kid and now I have over 12,000 dart boards.  My dad gave me my first dart board for Christmas and set it up in the living room in-between two amazingly similar but different oil paintings of tangerines.  My mom sang to us that we better be careful that we didn’t hit the paintings because, “One of them is valuable and we don’t know which one.”
 
My Dad told her she was worrying over nothing and told her to close her eyes while I threw my first dart.   While I pulled my arm back, my Dad saw my Mom peeking and told me to stop and I barely caught myself.  “Would have been a bulls-eye,” I said and rubbed my arm as I readjusted my fingers around the dart.  I didn’t want to say anything as Dad moved right behind Mom and held her close and put his hands over her eyes, but I really wanted to say something because it was really weird.. She squirmed and giggled and I remember thinking that it had been so long since I had seen them so happy.  When they both smiled, I cocked my arm.  When they both gasped,  I threw!

And missed.


Dad probably should have paid more attention to me because I didn’t really understand the game.  

I didn’t aim between the tangerines.  

Caitlin’s forehead was the bulls-eye.

She was in a crib; a crib with bars that I knew well because it was my crib when I was an only child. I steadied my hand and threw.  I thought I had a clear shot, but out of nowhere, Caitlin sneezed, dipped her head and my dart quietly landed in the soft bedding an inch above .   

My parents did not wake up out of their rare moment of affection and both yell out, “Her first sneeze!” Instead, they undressed and climbed all over each other and in the beginning, they both counted up in prime numbers back and forth and things got hotter and heavier up until # 997 and after that, everything started to calm down.  In between breaths, they both admitted that all their knowledge was from memorization, not an intellectual understanding of mathematical patterns.  They both admitted they were frauds, frauds who memorized 168 separate numbers that followed a pattern they couldn’t even begin understanding.  But they both memorized all the numbers anyway even though it would have probably been easier just to learn the pattern.

168 numbers?

I still had 2 darts left but I was so dizzy and confused about what I had seen that I missed my sister completely and ended up hitting the center of both tangerines. Two throws, two pieces of painted citrus pierced. At least 1 fortune lost.

But what an amazing smell.

Paintings are never just paintings.

That would be the storybook ending for me, where everything comes out OK for me,  but in fact, I ended up hitting Caitlin in the left eye, right below the pupil with my very first throw. When Dad approached me all and sad and strange, I said, “It’s not white now, but it was. It turned red and swollen because that’s what injuries do.  They age.  They improve.  Things get white. Then pink. Then they start moving away and the farther they go, the less we notice and that’s when we start to forget.”

Dad said, “You should really be a writer when you grow up.” and then he started punching me, over and over again, alternating blows between my balls and forehead.

I’m not kidding.


I am a first world problem.

Without incubation, I never would have survived and before that, if my mother hadn’t have aborted my older brother, she probably wouldn’t have had me and before that, she probably wouldn’t have even had sex with my dad because she would have been married and pregnant when she was 13 instead of 28.  And my Dad, he would have died when his appendix burst when he was 11 and being anemic wouldn’t have kept him out of the military where he surely would have died because he was claustrophobic and would have easily been convinced to surrender or be smoked out of fox holes and caves. But had he not been raised in a 1st world country, he probably wouldn’t have been claustrophobic because he would have lived in a room with 8 siblings and wouldn’t really understand the importance of “personal space.”  Also, he would have probably gotten over his fear of cramped spaces due to his work in diamond mines or working as a child prostitute who was forced to sleep in working chimnies to appeal to European men who liked, “freshly sooted boys”  Or maybe he would have had a loving family, been raised well, feared God or Gods and had kids of his own who were not spoiled fat slobs who complain about being too good for Internet dating and whose perverse habits of sticking their vibrating cell phones up their asses and calling themselves from landlines gave them a previously unknown strain of both cancer and something called Cellular AIDS.


When I was 10, I contracted Scarlet Fever because I hid my step throat and thought it was really awesome that all the skin started falling off my hands.  I striped off skin and added them to teetering piles in my desk until my teacher noticed that my hands were pink and bleeding.  If I hadn’t have been born where I was, I wouldn’t be told by doctors that this was the first case of Scarlet Fever they had seen in 50 years.  They would have put me  in a room full of other kids who were scared to death instead of being impressed with themselves for hiding being so obviously sick for so long.

I’m just kidding.

I feel great about myself.

I’m just kidding.

I’m miserably lonely, just like everyone else who doesn’t have any real problems.