Here’s the story of how my nose got this way. It started with Denny D., who you could call Dee Dee, if you want a nose like this. (But that’s not how I got this nose.) We were outside of his favorite restaurant which is — I’m not kidding — Denny’s. We used to chide him about how that’s some real masturbatory shit, but then Tina — that’s his Asian girlfriend — would give us this look like “you guys finally understand where I’m coming from,” and it made us all uncomfortable because it made us empathize with her, and “to empathize” means to feel exactly what that person is feeling, and so for a second we all felt like Denny’s girlfriend, and not only is that totally gay, but damn lonely too.
I’m not saying Tina is Denny’s Asian girlfriend because I’m racist or anything, it’s just that Denny has all flavors. I really like Tina, sometimes she visits and I don’t tell her this but I wish she’d come around more. I tried to give her a nickname, but Tina already had another name at the gentleman’s club, because they were poor and because when Denny came back from Iraq, he had all his legs and arms but something else was missing.
But enough about Tina, and Tina’s eyelashes, and Tina’s smell. We were at Denny’s and I ordered a Grand Slam because you know when a meal is named after a baseball play it’s solid. Denny pretended it was his birthday and got the whole wait staff to sing. The slice of cake was so skinny it struggled to support the candle. When they went away, he played with the bubbles in the sticker sign on the window.
“That’s a pretty good tune,” he said.
We stole the coffee mugs, but Denny got greedy and took the salt and pepper shaker too. They weren’t even anything special, not like those ones shaped like bears or pigs that have magnets in their nose and learn to love, they were just plastic cylinders with S and P. Denny never used to do stupid things like that in high school. He started the Charity or Church Club, where the members tried to prove atheists were humans, too.
Our car was the last of them in the parking lot, and this waiter, still wearing his apron, came after us. It was only some shakers but I guess he’d had a bad shift because he was making it into an excuse. Just as he was about to wallop me, a fist came from the other side, and they met in the middle — my nose.
The waiter stepped back but Denny gave me the right hook and once I was on the ground, the steel toe to the eye. He only stopped when my Grand Slam was all over the asphalt.
The waiter stood there with this cartoon expression. Denny laughed and laughed. “You poor little fuck,” he said to the waiter. He pointed at the road sign and laughed. “You work for me!”
The waiter ran back to safety. Denny wiped away the tears. When he shoved me into shotgun and didn’t apologize, I gave him what he deserved: complete and utter forgiveness.
(Click through for more art by Val Ang. Fiction piece composed by pulling random three-word phrases from Jim Shepard’s short story “Boys Town.”)
