Just before the war with the... Danes?!
I.
“Don´t look now but the GDP from Denmark´s just walked in and they´re looking at you as if you were a dead cat”.
I look over my shoulder and there´s like four, five people sitting at the table next to ours, all tall, all blonde, with girls you only get to see with Internet p*rn, their watches alone probably being worth more than my apartment—and me, I´m the guy in a bloodstained t-shirt and dirty bermuda shorts, come to haunt wherever fancy restaurants the Danes dine in.
But it´s not my fault, not really: ****´d actually found me wandering the streets that Saturday evening and told me he was gonna meet the guys at this fancy Portuguese restaurant and since when I told him all I had in my pockets were two hundred bucks he said it´d do because they´d be refraining from the champagne that night anyway, I never really paid attention to my clothes and pretty much followed him into the taxicab.
When I asked if I wouldn´t be too underdressed for the occasion, he said, “I just hope to hell those are not actual bloodstains on your t-shirt...” but I lied anyhow and told him no, those were chocolate stains.
“As if you really cared,” he added.
II.
It got me thinking of this girl. I have not idea why it got me thinking of her but— Ginnie Mannox— she´s a fictional girl, this character from this J.D. Salinger short tale I read once. That Ginne, what a gal: That whole thing about the taxi fare after playing tennis, then meeting her friend´s brother and...
But you wouldn´t know, would you? I mean, regardless of your being like a thousand times more well-read than me I can´t really see you with a, say, The Catcher in the Rye in your hands. Salinger´s always felt like a strictly-masculine author to me.
But I digress.
I don´t know.
I´m just a sucker for open endings like that: Whatever happened to Ginnie Mannox anyhow? — Sometimes I lie in bed late at night and ask myself those things: Whatever happens to guys like Holden Caulfield after the story ends?
III.
Having refrained from the champagne and therefore actually arriving home clear-headed later that Saturday night, I sat on the couch and turned on the TV: Jackass 2 was on and I watched for a few minutes: Johnny Knoxville kills me every time, I´m not kidding: There was this bit in which he and some friends took some rubber ball-bearings from an anti-personnel mine on their stomachs... I just killed me: That´s gotta be like, the best job in the world, being paid to get hurt some and bleed just a little...
But I got sort of bored after the part with the leeches and turned off the TV: I took the chair to the bedroom and climbed over it so as to reach the upper part of the wardrobe, where I keep my books: I eventually found my copy of Salinger´s Nine Stories , its pages starting to go yellow, and noted the damndest thing:
There was a little note inside see, it was one of those little pieces of paper from this maritime shipping company I used to work in: It bore the company´s old logo before they traded up, it was part of their stationery circa ´01.
The note said, in my own handwriting, even though I have no idea why, “He´s probably the last guy on Earth to have his own spaceship”.
Now how about that for an open ending...
“Don´t look now but the GDP from Denmark´s just walked in and they´re looking at you as if you were a dead cat”.
I look over my shoulder and there´s like four, five people sitting at the table next to ours, all tall, all blonde, with girls you only get to see with Internet p*rn, their watches alone probably being worth more than my apartment—and me, I´m the guy in a bloodstained t-shirt and dirty bermuda shorts, come to haunt wherever fancy restaurants the Danes dine in.
But it´s not my fault, not really: ****´d actually found me wandering the streets that Saturday evening and told me he was gonna meet the guys at this fancy Portuguese restaurant and since when I told him all I had in my pockets were two hundred bucks he said it´d do because they´d be refraining from the champagne that night anyway, I never really paid attention to my clothes and pretty much followed him into the taxicab.
When I asked if I wouldn´t be too underdressed for the occasion, he said, “I just hope to hell those are not actual bloodstains on your t-shirt...” but I lied anyhow and told him no, those were chocolate stains.
“As if you really cared,” he added.
II.
It got me thinking of this girl. I have not idea why it got me thinking of her but— Ginnie Mannox— she´s a fictional girl, this character from this J.D. Salinger short tale I read once. That Ginne, what a gal: That whole thing about the taxi fare after playing tennis, then meeting her friend´s brother and...
But you wouldn´t know, would you? I mean, regardless of your being like a thousand times more well-read than me I can´t really see you with a, say, The Catcher in the Rye in your hands. Salinger´s always felt like a strictly-masculine author to me.
But I digress.
I don´t know.
I´m just a sucker for open endings like that: Whatever happened to Ginnie Mannox anyhow? — Sometimes I lie in bed late at night and ask myself those things: Whatever happens to guys like Holden Caulfield after the story ends?
III.
Having refrained from the champagne and therefore actually arriving home clear-headed later that Saturday night, I sat on the couch and turned on the TV: Jackass 2 was on and I watched for a few minutes: Johnny Knoxville kills me every time, I´m not kidding: There was this bit in which he and some friends took some rubber ball-bearings from an anti-personnel mine on their stomachs... I just killed me: That´s gotta be like, the best job in the world, being paid to get hurt some and bleed just a little...
But I got sort of bored after the part with the leeches and turned off the TV: I took the chair to the bedroom and climbed over it so as to reach the upper part of the wardrobe, where I keep my books: I eventually found my copy of Salinger´s Nine Stories , its pages starting to go yellow, and noted the damndest thing:
There was a little note inside see, it was one of those little pieces of paper from this maritime shipping company I used to work in: It bore the company´s old logo before they traded up, it was part of their stationery circa ´01.
The note said, in my own handwriting, even though I have no idea why, “He´s probably the last guy on Earth to have his own spaceship”.
Now how about that for an open ending...
posted by 186282mps at 11:12 PM
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