Descriptive Essay: The Death Of Arby

I absently look at the time on my watch, “Sure. I’ll meet you around eight or so. Stub and Herbs?”
“Stay strong,” he salutes with a fist.
“Army strong, Sergeant,” I smile and continue walking toward the Arby’s down the street.
I check the time on my phone, class started fifteen minutes ago.
May as well make a few bucks to get by, I shrug.
I cross the Arby’s parking lot and walk next door where a gaggle of crackheads, homeless and welfare check recipients all chain smoke in front of the small office building entryway. The glass front door is reinforced with duct tape in a long “X-shape” over a spider-webbed crack.
Inside, I put my name on the sign-in roster and take a seat on a plastic chair in the crowded waiting area.
The remake of
King Kong plays on a small, outdated television hanging from brackets in the ceiling. Forty-five minutes pass before my name’s called.
I’m instructed to go to a small interview room where a technician in a lab coat is seated across a small desk with a computer monitor, blood pressure machine and a small oral thermometer.
“Have you had any contact with anyone who could be considered high-risk,” they ask, “drug addicts, prostitutes?”
“No,” I answer.
“Have you gotten a tattoo or visited any of the countries listed on this form?” they ask as they show me a sheet covered in plastic with a list of selected countries.
“No.”
“Have you used intravenous drugs in the past twelve months or ingested any alcohol in the past forty eight hours?” they continue.
“No,” I lean back in the chair.
They cover the thermometer in a thin plastic film and hand it to me, “Please give me your left arm,” they ask.
They wrap the blood pressure sleeve around my arm and release the nozzle. I feel the sleeve tighten around my skin like a python until the blood thumps heavily in my bicep. They release the nozzle and the air hisses slightly. The alarm for the thermometer beeps. They outstretch their hand and I remove the thermometer and hand it to them.
“Okay, everything looks good,” they nod and hand me a small plastic receipt, “Go ‘round the corner and one of our technicians will be with you shortly.”
I’d been donating blood to ZLB plasma for the past few months, ever since I’d left Lana and the luxury of Kenwood for this small one bedroom apartment in Stadium Village.
Twice a week I would come here, less than a block from the apartment that Chris had let me use while he was deployed in Iraq.
He was just a young boot-ass then, always getting in trouble for directing snide comments toward an un-amused Lieutenant Brumm or Sergeant Landsverk. For half the deployment, when I wasn’t shuffled from the Tactical Operations Center (TOC) to the Company Commander’s Personal Security Detail (PSD), I was with Brumm and his squad: Chris, Cox, Landsverk and the rest.
With his close friend, Cox, dead, I wondered if Chris didn’t feel sorry for me or maybe he simply related to me, my own brother’s death, when he’d offered to let me stay in his place.
The technician greets me wearing a white lab coat and plastic safety glasses, “Bed number thirty four is ready for you. Let’s get you all set up and on your way,” they nod as they check a handful of boxes of their clipboard.
We pass a long row of people laying back on examination tables with tubes leading from their arms to plastic medical bags at various degrees of fullness: thick yellow liquid bloating the bag as pinkish liquid courses back to the arm in the tube.
The paper sheet crinkles atop my designated bed as I lay down with my arm outstretched. The technician swabs a cotton ball soaked in alcohol against the inside of my arm and wraps the rubber tourniquet tightly against my bicep. The vein throbs underneath. I look away then feel the sharp stab against my skin of the needle into my arm.
“How do you guys train for this, anyway?” I ask as I study the tube flowing out form my arm.
“We have to puncture a balloon without popping it,” the technician nods while they pull the tourniquet from my arm and place a small piece of tape over the neck of the
needle.
On the small screen of the television set hanging from the ceiling in the blood draw area, Jack Black sweeps his hand across the stage and presents an angry King Kong to a shocked onscreen audience. A blonde woman, panicked, hands tied to posts, whimpers gracefully for the camera. “Save me,” her eyes cry silently.
Denver, I think back. My eyelids feel heavy. Fucking blondes.
“Dakota, I have a feeling that it’s better that you don’t come,” the text message from Kristen stated on the tiny screen of my phone.
My stomach felt heavy as I stood on the sidewalk outside Whitey’s Pub.
“Uh, the plane leaves in four hours,” I slowly entered into my phone with my right-hand thumb, “And I didn’t get insurance for the ticket.”
I open the side door back inside the bar and order three lowballs of whiskey.
The weekend before, Kristen had been in Minneapolis, frustrated-ly pulling her rolling luggage through downtown Minneapolis while we search for appropriate accommodations.
I hadn’t wanted to bring her back to Chris’s place in Stadium Village, so I’d hoped she might pay for a hotel room downtown where we could lay about and enjoy each other. She’d been under the impression that I should have taken care of such considerations before she’d arrived. Maybe so, I wondered, but would she have done the same for me?
It wasn’t my idea, at all, for her to visit, but she insisted. Now, here she was, blaming me for not having it all together at her convenience. We sat at three in the morning in a pizza shop near the downtown light rail station as I finished a three-meat calzone. We waited for a room to open at Saloon Hotel, the cheapest and only available room we could find this morning.
Taking the light rail back downtown from the MSP airport where I’d met her, I’d been written a ticket for not purchasing the requisite fare for the ride.
True love, I thought to myself as I reread her texts, this was not, but it could be fun and I’d never been to Denver.
I’d awoken at the end of that weekend in Denver inside Remy’s apartment. It was dim, quiet, empty. Kristen and her two gay friends had said something about grabbing something to eat. I lazily rolled out of bed. I heard the front door close. A cacophony of mingling voices echoed through the walls.
I sat forlorn on a bare mattress in the middle of the barren living room floor as Kristen scowled contemptuously at me.
“I need to get fucked,” she simmered as she waved Remy toward her.
She got on her hands and knees and started making the hump-hump shake with her ass like she was getting pounded by a varsity high school football team.
“God, I can’t wait to get to my big bag back home,” she sighed suggesting her arsenal of dildos.
I looked at my watch. I should be thanking her right now, I think to myself. This is making this so much easier. The switch that gets flipped that allows me to take or leave anything, that can dangle a litter of puppies over a fiery volcano, the conscienceless-ness, it was flipped as easily as that. Drive past a montage of dead baby parts outside the wreckage of the short bus. I couldn’t care less.
Before any of this happened, I sat in Whitey’s waiting for a taxi to take me to Minneapolis/St. Paul airport and I bullshitted with the bartender.
I called James to let him know I’d be heading to Denver for the weekend.
Drunk.
I told him about her weekend in Minneapolis, her grandmother passing away, her ex-boyfriend.