wasted lucky

“Wrong side!”

My mouth is dry.

The skin of my cheeks sticks to my gums and those were the first words I’d spoken in hours. 

Wrong side.

When you’re in the dark, lost in thought, and your fingers place a stog between your lips with the dried tobacco side open in your mouth, you don’t notice at first.

You don’t notice, still, when your thumb’s holding the gas down on a lighter a little too long… the metal heating up against your skin. 

You might let it burn until that terrible taste of the melting filter violates you from the inside. 

There’s really no going back from that. That cigarette is done for. It wouldn’t matter so much if that wasn’t our last, our lucky. 

When we open a new pack of stogs, we flip one in the pack and that’s the last one we smoke. Superstition says, if we make it to that one alive, we’re lucky.

Cal throws the wasted cigarette into a puddle of oil left from some old beater that used to be parked there. 

Used to be parked. Some sweaty drunken hippie got in and clumsily sped away from the lot last night. That was the last car before the lot became empty. That had to be hours ago…

Just me and Cal left sitting on a curb in an empty parking lot.

Just me and Cal and a pack of Marlboro shorts. 

We meet here every night after I get off work at the club. We’d watch the college kids come in groups with their too-tight outfits, dancing out of their Camry’s and middle-aged men, always on a serious phone call, before they opened the door to Sirens night club.

Last night I got off at 12:31 am. I put my hoodie on over my embarrassing cocktail slut uniform, hair frizzy, mascara under my eyes. I walked out of the club and Cal was waiting for me in the parking lot. I went for a kiss. That first kiss after work is my saving grace, my salvation after a long shift serving Cosmos to groupies that don’t speak english. But when I expected my lips to be met with his usual, safe, comforting peck…

It didn’t come.

His lips were hard. Rigid. The muscles in his mouth were stiff. I looked up at him, our eyes two inches apart. He looked down and away, as if something on the ground was more interesting.

“What’s up? Everything okay, babe?”

Still, his mouth remained a flat line above his dimpled chin. The curl on his forehead matted with sweat. 

I’d seen him look like that before. I’d known that meant he hadn’t showered today, probably hadn’t eaten, probably ran off cigarettes and sink water again.

This happens every season. Cal will be cracking jokes and cooking every meal and singing with the speakers on full blast; and then one day it’ll be like a scratch in the record. He’ll just…stop. I can tell he was due for an episode like this, it’d been a few months.

“Maya, I don’t feel too good again,” he almost whispered.

I've been working a lot. I hadn’t had a day off in weeks and I needed to pay off student loan debt from my failed attempts at being a bioengineer, and then a writer, and then a business degree that I never even started to finish. I got a job at a club, and I knew we both hated that, but I felt like I had no other options. It was supposed to be temporary, but everyday I would get off, I would get a little- okay a lot, drunk, and I’d lay in bed until I couldn’t hold my pee anymore. I had a lot of dreams, and it started to become apparent that there was no way to fund them. I was gonna make art, I was gonna write a book, I was gonna become famous. But every time I tried to start, I would put it off. Days turned into months and after awhile, I didn’t think to do anything but live paycheck to paycheck, drink until I fell asleep, and hope that I’d start my dream tomorrow. Tomorrow never comes.

Cal was a bit older than me. He worked in sales for some tech company, I think…

He worked from home at our desk and he had a lot of Zoom meetings and he was always on the computer from the time I woke up to the time I left for work, that’s about all I knew about his job.

I knew he wasn’t happy with that. I knew he had dreams of opening a restaurant one day or a record store but ended up tired and stoned by the time I saw him at the end of the day. He’d pick me up from the club at 12:30pm, we’d hold hands and listen to the newest album he was obsessed with on the way home. I'd be excited to start the night, he’d insist it was time for bed. 

Rinse, wash, repeat.

“Maya, I can’t keep living like this anymore.”

I snapped out of it. I reentered my body and I could feel his deadness. I could feel that it was heavier than it’s been before. It was silent for a while, and he sat on the curb, his knees falling open and his back hunched over. He picked up a twig from the asphalt and tore off pieces from itself slowly, methodically, quietly drowning in a deep sea of nothingness.

I was still standing, frozen in place, fear-stricken because I never handled this well. I once tried to get him to come into the club and dance with me, but it just annoyed him. I once lectured him about the power of positive thinking, and he groaned loud and buried his head in his hands. 

This time, my body knew I was done too. I stayed frozen in place, wordless. My lips were slightly parted, as if to try to say something. I sat down next to him. We sat on that curb, frozen in time and space as people passed us. We stayed there, numb to the world and stuck, lighting cigarettes until the lucky was lit on the wrong side.