Stubble Face

There you were at the bus station again. The bus pass you had paid entirely too much money for was clasped in your tight, little fingers like a child holds onto their favorite baseball card. You didn’t bring your wallet, and losing your pass would either sentence you to a future of a wet footed walk in the snow, or an extended stay in the less than luxurious accommodations the station offered you while you waited for your friend to pick you up. The smell of urine, dirty feet, and those little rubber things they put in the bottom of urinals that advertise that they are sanitary all over them, but don’t really do a god damn thing permeated the air in an invisible cloud that teased you like a cartoon where a cherry pie sat in a window taunting someone, only the scent they represented was inviting you to a premature death more than it was the promise of a tasty snack. You wondered if there was a grey moustached janitor with a key for everything and a worn out uniform who should have been taking care of the place. His name was Sven. It had to be.

The stench was making your eyes water, but not enough to blur out a disgusting spot on the wall you had had the poor fortune of noticing the week before. Exactly what it was remained a mystery to you. It looked something like mayonnaise and goober grape jelly, possibly containing some degree of red and green holiday gelatin. It appeared the mass had been smeared with a defiant finger. In the center lay a hard peanut looking thing. There was a hair protruding from the side. If there was no telling what it was, you resolved there was a forty nine percent chance it was boogers, or something that had once been inside the nose of the trench coat wearing pervert who you reckoned had very little or nothing beneath his trenchcoat. You had seen him before.

Perhaps Ken Burns could have done a documentary on the history of the little mass. Discuss it’s possible genesis with some high falutin doctors and possibly analyze its effects on society with a learned social professor or ponder the psychological aspects of its existence on the people who had come into contact with it. There would be opposing viewpoints. Some would say society is a better place because a sloppy mess existed, causing people to confront issues regarding how to deal with such an enigma. How it would better improve communications in relationships. Perhaps a wife would feel more comfortable approaching the topic of her husband’s booger wall after a conversation about the little mess. How it could serve as social currency as people discussed its existence at the workplace water cooler. Others would say it represents the very worst society has to offer and choose to focus on how the perpetrator was sticking up his middle finger to society and how this was going to be an ongoing problem in the twenty first century as people resented the technological age. Toward the end of the documentary, as the author ran out of ideas and needed a time filler, there would be a section about how the war on terrorism needed to keep these kinds of things in mind as they stay vigilant. You would giggle to yourself and wonder whether you were the only person who realized the war against terror spelled T>W>A>T. There would be a closet homosexual Republican with a crisp tie and an American flag on his lapel explaining that the defense sector needs increased funding. The business interests he represents would applaud him, and he would return to his lover at home and shed tears because he had sold himself out. For the evening he would agree to change, but he would already know the next day promised more of the same for him. His lover would hem and haw about whether he should leave him or not. He would resolve to stay, but decide to plant a leak regarding their relationship to the media. He wouldn’t know that he was effectively ending the relationship. It was alright for a Republican to admit to a lapse in faith, but his supporters would surely send him off to a church rehab group that promised to rehabilitate him. He would sweep the next election, and his lover would be forced to watch the coverage of the acceptance speech with teary eyes from a grainy image on an a dilapidated television screen in his apartment on the North side of town while he ate his microwaved Banquet pot pie that would have been better in the oven, but he was watching his figure and had starved himself to a point where he couldn’t wait the half hour for it to cook properly in the oven. You had seen the whole thing before, but you admitted to yourself you would probably watch if it was on.

You scanned the room for the booger perpetrator. You spotted him pacing back and forth the lobby in front of the window. You guessed underneath his trenchcoat were some socks with colored stripes at the top that were pulled up too high. The kind Jack Tripper surely wore. He was probably an expert at the whole not wearing clothing beneath the coat thing. He had done it for years riding the bus undetected. He probably scoped out every woman and rode the bus randomly, making special note of where all the attractive women got on and off the bus. He probably found a bottle of liquor or something in an alley and drank it. That’s when he started getting the weird looking boogers. He felt tired and had one of those headaches that throbs above your temples when your sinuses are stuffed up. He wouldn’t stay home though. He had important scoping work to do. He dug his filthy finger up his hairy nostril and plucked the slimy mess like an apple from a tree. He forgot it was on his finger, put his hand on the wall to steady himself as he pulled his knee high socks tighter, and there that precious nugget sat. It sat for weeks. And the temperature was just right in the lobby next to the heat blaster but not in front of it at the bus station to keep the germs alive and quietly cause an epidemic that no one had quite caught on to yet. No matter. It wasn’t going to be you. You were seated across the room, and though you could see it, you had calculated that the chances you would contract Ebola from it were slim to none. That’s why you had taken all those Algebra classes in college! It might be fun to watch people unexpectedly and inadvertently come into contact with the mass and infect themselves from your vantage point, though. Watch their eyes as the putrid cloud seized hold of their senses. Watch them stop and look around like they didn’t know what it was. Like they were expecting a higher level of cleanliness from their local bus station. They would ponder saying something, but would be too chicken s**t. They would justify their lack of nerve to themselves as not wanting to make waves or a scene. You should probably warn them, you thought. Perhaps put up a big orange hazard cone or crime scene tape and stand in front of it in a Hazmat suit until the proper authorities arrived to take care of the matter. You always remembered the Hazmat team from ET, and the suits gave you the creeps for some reason, and you realized you were just as big of a chickenshit, so you let it go. Not your problem.

You could envision a CDC investigation. The lobby would quarantined. Good looking European doctors would be shipped in. With their fancy accents, they would discuss the safest way to obtain a sample. They would scrape the booger with scalpels. A bearded German man with a briefcase and shaky fingers would have just the right shiny scalpel for the job. He always did. Something stainless steel and sharp. Possibly with some type of motor inside that made noise, but no one other than him could figure out why or for what purpose.

After a lengthy investigation, it would be determined that the particular strain of booger was infected in a Chilean city, but the news wouldn’t report it because of a trade agreement reached with the Chilean government in the Reagan administration that would affect American sprocket sales. The closet homosexual Republican would be safe.

You wondered about that janitor. He was a public servant, but he definitely wasn’t serving the public. Not with the condition you found the station in. You wondered if he could be found criminally or civilly liable if people had gotten sick. You thought about making a phone call or complaining to management but you knew you wouldn’t. This wasn’t the real world. He probably could be liable in the real world, but he obviously knew an alderman or something and he wasn’t going to be found negligent in any case anyway. The alderman was obviously a friend of the mayor. You figured he knew that. That’s why he took his lunches off site. He was probably at Applebee’s having a steak and flirting with the good looking waitress who he thought was flirting back. He didn’t know that based off his uniform, she felt bad for him, and knew she would be getting a piece of s**t tip from him, so she was only humoring him. You would have liked to be flirting with that waitress, but you and your fellow bus riders were forced to wait in front of the giant booger. What a trade. That’s life. If you’ve got connections, use them. Couldn’t blame him, you supposed. If there was a one in a million chance that you could have gotten some sort of scurvy from cleaning that mess off the wall, and you knew you could get away with not doing it, and knew you could flirt with that amply endowed waitress during your lunch break, you knew you would too. Didn’t mean it didn’t piss you off. Didn’t mean he wasn’t a dick.

You watched the booger on the wall for a while. At one point, you thought it blinked at you. You were obviously over tired. You weren’t sleeping well lately. You were having one of those moments where you nod off for a second, and your head starts to droop. Then you were repeatedly waking up startled, and were lost for a moment until you gathered your senses.

There was a woman by the soda machine with a child. One of those kids you wanted to feel bad for because his clothes were dirty and didn’t fit, but you found it difficult because of his s****y attitude. Of course the child wanted a soda and kept pushing the buttons without depositing any money. The chunky mother was going about her chunky business, not paying any mind. You just knew the kid had probably went to the bathroom, surely not washed his hands, and he was setting people up for an unexpected sickness. His dick germs were getting all over everything in the lobby.

The mother just kept fumbling through her oversized purse. And it was an ugly purse. You wanted to get up. You wanted to tell the child to go wash his hands. You wanted to walk up to his mother, point your finger, and say, “You know what? F**k you! That’s what! That’s right! F**k you and your f*****g discount store f*****g purse! Who the f**k carries around a dime store f*****g purse with stripes that’s made of pleather that can barely fit the boxes of Kleenex and tampons that always go unused? F**k. You’ve been knocked up for like the past 15 years, what the f**k do you need tampons for?”

She would probably try to get off her fat a*s, which would take a while in an awkward movement where she had to use the upper half of the chair to lift herself, which would have caused the whole row of seats behind her to tip, the patrons sitting in the chairs to turn their heads and cast disapproving eyes in your direction. She would point at you with her Lee Press on Nail fingers that she had ordered off of QVC. You knew they certainly had last night’s bologna beneath them. She would mutter on and on about how rude you were and she would probably go tell the lady at the desk that you were being rude. Then you would have to deal with her too. You had dealt with her in the past, and for lack of a better term, she was a b***h. She would tell you you had to wait outside because she was doing her best to earn her 8.95 an hour and she thought it would look good in her shift report if she had to separate the two of you. You would be the topic of her text messages and phone calls as she drove her fat a*s home, with pre planned stops at the bakery and deli. She would know there was a special on tuna salad she would order two pounds of as she talked on the phone, making sure she covered the mouthpiece as she ordered so the person on the other end wouldn’t know she was ordering two pounds. She would exaggerate your size and explain to anyone who was too nice to say, “Shut the f**k up, I don’t care,” how she had dealt with a dangerous situation at work. None of that bothered you. It was cold outside and you didn’t feel like waiting outside. So that was that.

Why were you the one who always had to tell people to go to F**k off anyway? Every single person in the bus station was witnessing the same drama unfolding before them. The man with the silly hat continued to read his paper, though he looked up once in a while to express his disapproval when he felt the coast was clear when she wasn’t looking. The cute college girl had made eye contact with you with a look that conveyed to you she definitely did not approve. No one made one single move. Why were they afraid of her? Sure she had pork chop arms, and her forearms were bigger than yours, but f**k, who the Hell was she? Why were you all too afraid to do or say anything? Maybe it was because you were Americans, and deep down inside you knew that people had died for the right to be an annoying b***h in public. Hell, in Russia, she would have found herself in the Gulag, but here she could flaunt her ignorance with no repercussions.

You were yawning. The bus you were waiting for was running late. It was snowing. Maybe they should have just put some chains on the bus tires and mounted a plow on the front. People had to get where they had to go, d****t.

You nodded off. You had one of those dreams that only took a couple of minutes, but felt like hours. You would be a superhero. Your mind worked while you slept, and even in your dreams you knew you didn’t want to be a superhero with any special powers like flying or superhuman strength. Xray vision may come in handy at the mall, though. You wanted to be a regular guy. A regular guy who is there to protect the rights of lesser men and women. No costume. Costumes were stupid. A uniform. A uniform befitting the job you had to do. Nothing fancy like Spiderman. No cape. MIght as well run around in panties if you’re going to wear a cape. And did the cape really help Superman fly anyway? Could he fly without it? Kind of stupid to go through the bother of wearing it if he could. And you wouldn’t need a phonebooth. You wouldn’t need to be a reporter or watch the news to know people needed you.

You would call yourself Stubble Face. Uniform? Your uniform would be the last pair of clothes you done got fucked up in. A flannel and a pair of worn out blue jeans. And when your alarm went off alerting you to your need, you would wake up, scratch your a*s, mumble and cuss, and grow stubble like a chia pet. Instantly. No need for deodorant. You always liked fire station poles, so you would have one of those, even it was unnecessary.

You would show up whenever someone needed to be told to f**k off. For every a*****e in line at the supermarket that quivered over a coupon special that they didn’t understand and were definitely wrong about, and insist that they be given the discount anyway while holding up a long line of people without regard for anyone else’s time concerns, you would be there. You and your scruff, and your worn out blue jeans, and your pissed off, hate the world attitude. You would show up to work with that look of determination on your face that people would understand. Like you knew the college girl disapproved of the Press on Lady without saying a word. You would walk up from the end of the line. Your head would be held high. The people would know you were there to protect their interests. They would clear a path for you and eagerly anticipate the words that would come out of your mouth. A frustrated housewife would mouth out the words she anticipated coming out of your mouth quietly to herself. She would hope no one heard. She would fantasize about you while she read her Harlequin Romance novels. You would inspire her to one day not have dinner ready when her husband came from work. She wouldn’t explain why she didn’t. Just sit there on her couch reading the latest Oprah book of the month club book. She would feel bad later, though as her husband was forced to go to his sister’s for dinner that evening. She would make up for it the next day with a rack of ribs and his favorite coleslaw, but nothing would take away from her the fact that one evening she decided not to make dinner, and she had the courage to follow through with it.

Everything in the grocery store would come to an abrupt halt. The cute girl ringing up another customer’s orange juice in aisle three would stop. Her attention would be drawn to you in anticipation. You would walk the way old, fat, sequined, tacky cape wearing Elvis strutted up to a microphone and silenced a crowd. The crowd would feel your presence. An old man would make the sign of the cross. He hadn’t been to church in a while, but it was time to get back on track. Time to start attending regularly again.

Children would ask their mothers, “Is that Stubble Face?” and they would shoosh them and tuck them behind their portly dresses.

The pain in the a*s patron would look all dumbfounded at you. They had certainly heard of you, but couldn’t imagine why they would be the target of your ire.

“You know what, sir,” you would say. “F**k you! Take your little Nabisco packages and your receipt and get the f**k out of here. You have hassled this young lady long enough, and quite frankly, we all f*****g hate you! The planet would be a better place if you were captured by aliens and repeatedly sodomized with all sorts of metal probes with jagged edges for the remainder of your existence! When God wakes up in the morning, and he oversees all of his creation, you are the one glaring mistake. The one that causes him to drink too much. The one that he would zap out of existence if his new, young, dogooder wife wouldn’t b***h about how he had to be a more loving, accepting God. Back in Old Testament Days, he would have made a real example out of you. But now with all the Touchy Feel Good Bullshit in the universe, his hands are tied. You were a bigger mistake than Whoopi Goldberg! Yes, Miss Goldberg.”

Jaws would drop. You in all your glory would have effectively torn this person apart. Hurt them to their flimsy soul. Finally some justice would be served. You would take him by the ear, and do that thing like they do in the movies where you shove his head, and he flies a ridiculous distance. You would throw his packages at him after plucking a can Pringles from his bag for yourself. He would scurry off. “I am sorry this man troubled you today, young lady”, you would say. You would invite her to take an extra lunch break, and even her silly moustache wearing manager wouldn’t argue or even say a word about it.

Your work would be done. You could go back to your super secret lair, get fucked up, and wait for the next call.

You were still half awake, the woman was talking on her phone about how annoying her children were, the child was still clawing his dick germ fingers at the soda machine, the pervert was hovering around the drinking fountain, and as the corners of your mouth rose up in a smile, you awoke, gathered your senses, and spied the bus out the window. No one had installed chains or a plow on the front, but you didn’t care. It was time to get the f**k out of this hellhole station. You rubbed your chin and felt the growth protruding from your pores. You saw someone you presumed to be from the CDC eyeing the booger glob on the wall. You hoped the pervert and Press on Lady weren’t going the same way, but you knew in your heart how that was going to work out.







Jason Engebos
12/05/2013