Trick

It's a damp Halloween and you walk before work with dog tugging you along sloshing your coffee and exiting the comfortable circle you initially planned to span carrying your wet head through the brisk breeze cooling the scalp and opening your eyes to see the pretty blue sky and that wonderful gold dome of a Ukrainian catholic church beaming bright in the morning sun with an innocent surface and a brooding center, meanwhile the dog shits and you set your cup down to pick it up and of course she's restless after her shit and she pulls your sleepy arms knocking the cup over spilling its warm strength into the grass and effectively cracking the cup's porcelain shell so it can never hold strength quite the same again and you pick up the lumps of shit and curse the dog stomping to the nearest garbage receptacle and she smiles dumbly, unaware of anything in the world aside from the fact that she's outside and there are loads of bushy squirrels swirling and squirming up trees.   

            And it's a long day at work.  There are files to complete and emails to compose.  You haphazardly plop them onto the screen, unproofed and with no premeditation aside from giving the answer in its rawest, most unelaborated form.  And you eat lunch.  It's a series of processed pastries and fried junk food, which fuels your underfed brain.  You create problems for you to fix the next day.  Plunk.  Plop. Pop.  You pound out the last email and zip your coat up to the throat.  Ten minutes till the next train and your back tire's flat.  And you ride on the rim, trying hard to shift your weight forward, but the cracks in the sidewalk sends jolts through the frame.  You made it in time. And the bike's still together.  It's been a good day at work.

            The first thing you notice when you walk through the door is that the dog needs to shit again and you feel kind of sorry because she's been locked up for eleven hours and you're still tired from the shitty food and staring at that screen, almost falling in at times, but alas you clip on the leash and she's really excited burying her claws in your chest as she stands erect to hug you for the gesture and you're almost out the door and lo and behold it's the noisy Mexican family that lives above you with their two-year-old little daughter who's scared of the dog and is hiding behind her mother's legs and your attempts to calm their fears with the explanation of the dog's bowel schedule and her imprisonment during the day falls on deaf ears because they can't speak a lick of English and probably think that you're a serial killer considering the amount of noise you make to combat their noise during really soggy nights when you've starting filling the trash with Tecate cans.

            Finally out the door and spilling into the purple-orange night you weave through groups of little demons dressed as little demons or sunflowers or cheesy topical things like supermans or princesses and their already high-wired brains are firing rapidly from the fuel of an endless amount of sugar, climbing fences and beating on doors, screaming from the fright of motion-sensor voice recordings of really generic catch phrases and halfway down the street you finally find some solace as the groups have thinned and the dog's taking a piss, you can see her eyes practically roll back in her head.  But, then, as you wait for her to relieve herself you start patting yourself down searching for your life force the one thing in the world that keeps you connected to all the important people, your phone, and it's not there! And you start on the other side feeling in your wool jacket and holy-Mary-mother-of-god you don't have your keys either and those paranoid Mexicans surely locked the door and you know they did, but you have to at least check to see if they did so after dragging the resisting pooch back down the line to her cell she waits as you fumble with the knob, stiff as a frozen car door.

            Now comes the time when you start thinking systematically and logically about all of the options that are left for you to try and for one split second you almost praise and are grateful of your job for enabling your brain to have such a calm and mechanical approach to such a seemingly stressful situation, but that second passes and you try the handle again with a hope that the little Mexican girl slipped out of her apartment sensing your situation and quietly flipped the latch to let you and your nice, pathetic dog back in the fortress and how ridiculous of you to even consider that because her father is probably phoning the polizie under the false pretense of a break in.

            So, you walk back around to the front of the building and finally, a break has gone your way, the heavenly light from your English-speaking front side neighbors is gleaming brightly and you bang on the door and you bang on the door again and there's no movement from inside and you bang again and still, no movement, and a crowd of little demons walk by screaming at your dog and laughing maniacally, still possessed by the IV sugar drip inserted into their tiny purple veins so, finally, you say "fuck it" and take the dog on her normal walk and act like everything is normal so, at least, the dog can take another shit, but she doesn't because she can tell that you are a little worked up and you think that it makes her uneasy. 

            There's garbage everywhere from where the little bastards threw their Reece's wrappers on the ground and the dog is licking the remnant chocolate flakes and you try to keep her away, but they're scattered around like mines on a misty Munich morning so you hold the leash taut keeping her nose in the air tiptoeing at a reasonable speed and, "Welp!" the dog cries, alas, she's been hit by a shred of shrapnel from a broken Cobra 40 oz. bottle probably heaved by some stumbling drunk who sucked at the empty vessel for fifteen minutes before realizing that he'd have to bum another three dollars off of some fresh, wool-wearing walkers and now she's hobbling on three legs pitifully with little dabs of blood painting the sidewalk every few feet. 

            Finally, entering the gate of your impenetrable stronghold, you tie the dog up to the fence and palm her paw feeling over the slice in her pad and she pants excessively just wanting to drink some water and sleep off the pain.  And it's the last option, you have to break into your apartment and you, of course, know which windows aren't locked but after getting the storm window up there's the screen and it's locked and there's the security deposit looming in your mind and you know if you tear the screen out like a raccoon, you'll probably never fix it and the landlord will make you pay seven hundred and eighty dollars for it so, there, a grown man can't break into his own apartment because of a flimsy, weathered grid of shitty screen which didn't even keep the flies out in the summer and you lean against the building, despondently, looking for other ways in but knowing it's all but over.  You'll freeze and the dog will bleed out and through the corridor you see the neighbor across the street staring at you and you know he thinks you're mental because he's seen you go in unabated time after time and now, on Halloween no less, you're the ultimate robber standing on a wobbly cabinet debating whether or not to bust the screen out. 

            So, you come up with a really bright plan of tapping on the neighbors side window and then running around to the front and pounding on the door and then back and forth, back and forth you run and surely the guy has to be loading shotgun shells into his 12-gauge by now and you see his furry little head poke over the curtains in the window checking for hoodlums and you wave frantically and try to smile wide so as not to pose a threat and he smiles when he realizes it's you and it's all just another tally to add to the list of insane things you've done in the past, such as almost burning the apartment down by passing out for three hours with French fries smoking wildly in the oven and the fire alarm ringing followed by fireman kicking in your door and throwing the little charcoals into your sink with the water running wide open.  So he lets you in and explains that he didn't have any candy and he thought you were tricker-treaters, but he is waiting on a pizza and he thought that it may have been them but with his bum leg and the fact that he had only ordered the pizza fifteen minutes prior he didn't want to move and you smile just glad to finally have been granted entrance to your palace.

            Meanwhile, all the kids were home getting caramel stuck in their teeth.