The Thing

“Motherfucking, cock sucking son of an itinerant whore. It was just here.”

The thing! Where was the fucking thing? I couldn’t do the meeting without the thing and I just had the fucking thing and now it is fucking missing. Fuck me!

Right pocket, left pocket, side pocket, watch pocket. Jacket pocket, shirt pocket, aw fuck it. This is ridiculous. I had exactly 37 minutes to meet the guy at the place to give him the thing and I couldn’t give him the thing without the thing and the thing was missing.

I retraced my steps. I had the thing when I came out of the place where the girl told me about the time she and the other girl went to the show and then met the two guys backstage. I had to have it then or else I couldn’t have written down her number. Wait a minute. Did I leave the thing on the counter?

I raced back to the place, which I remember where it was because it was across the street from that funny statue of that famous guy. I walked in the door. The girl was still there.

She says she didn’t see the thing. Was she lying? I’ll bet she’d like to get her hands on it. That thing in the wrong hands could cause some powerful bad mojo. Then again, she might have been afraid of the thing and given it to someone just to get rid of it. I asked her. She told me to leave or she would call the guy from the back to do his thing and that I wouldn’t like it very much.

So I left.

Then I thought about where I originally got the thing. It was an Asian market down on the lower east side, which wasn’t too far. I could get another thing and still make my meeting. No taxis in sight, so I hot-footed it down Broadway to 47^th street and then across Martin Luther King Boulevard past the good dim sum place to where I bought the thing. They were closed. What a time for Chinese New Year?

I checked my fucking pockets again. Wait a minute, what’s this? There’s a hole in my pocket. The goddamned thing must have fallen through the hole. If that’s the case, it should be on the sidewalk between the place with the girl and the guy in the back and where I was originally looking for the thing.

Twenty-two minutes to go. I scoured the sidewalk like a bloodhound looking for one of those escapey guys. I couldn’t find it. So, I went to the meeting with the guy at the place.

He immediately asked for the thing. I hemmed and hawed and he became agitated. I told him I knew how important it was to take care of the thing because it was the only thing that mattered to the girl in charge of the whole shebang. He said no duh, so what happened?

I told him about the hole in my pocket and he thought I made the hole on purpose so I could play pocket pool with my thing. I told him I didn’t need to do that because I could get it anytime I wanted. He scoffed at my hubris.

Without the thing there was no point in the meeting, so he left but not before telling me I should expect some repercussions from the girl. You remember the girl. She runs the whole shebang.

Repercussions? I mean what could she do? She was a little girl, not as in young but as in small and as far as I knew she didn’t know any martial arts or wasn’t trained in weapons or things like that. I wasn’t worried about repercussions. I was worried about being classified as a fuck-up.

I knew plenty of fuck-ups in my day and I didn’t want to be put in the same whatchamacallit as them. Once you’re in the fuck-up bin you never get out, no matter what you do. I wracked my brain and then I remembered. I left the thing in the public toilet at the place beside the other place where I get my coffee. The place I get my coffee doesn’t have a toilet, at least they don’t broadcast it, so sometimes I take my dump next door. I didn’t want the thing to fall out of my pants on the floor so I set it on the thingy that holds the stuff to clean your hooey.

I raced back to the toilet in the place beside the place where I get my coffee but doesn’t have a toilet and I see the thing still sitting right where I left it. Huzzah! I grabbed it and ran back to where I met the guy to talk about the thing but he wasn’t there. The only person there was the girl. The little girl who ran the whole shebang.

I hear you lost the thing, she said. I said I did, but now I found it and here it is. She took the thing and told me that they had stopped using this brand of thing two years ago and that this thing wouldn’t work for her shebang, which relied on a very particular type of thing to interface with her other thing. I told her nobody told me anything about a different kind of thing, but it didn’t matter to her. She snapped her fingers and two bent nose guys came out of the shadows.

I figured I was done for, all over a simple misunderstanding. The two guys approached me and I thought about running but my legs didn’t work. Just then the first guy came in and told everybody to hold it. Said he didn’t tell me about the new kind of thing and that it was all his fault. Said he’d been having a hard time at home and his mind wasn’t in his work so if they wanted to blame anybody, they should blame him.

So they shot him.

You can go, the little girl told me, but don’t go telling anybody about this thing that happened here. I told her I wouldn’t and left and got another coffee. I sat there and looked around while I waited. Turns out they do have a toilet.