Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 28-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.
I’m standing in her kitchen, the knife she just bragged about having had 30 years is in three pieces in my hands. Fuck. I am such an idiot. She’s going to walk back in here and yell at me. Unless, maybe if I stand near the sink and hide the knife by turning sideways, and then when she starts blabbing about what she thought about while she took a piss, she’ll take the hint that something’s wrong. Nice and slow. Give me some time to think. Maybe, I can hide the fucking thing under the sink, in the garbage.
She’ll know I’m hiding something. She’ll ask, and I’ll say, “Nothing, hun.” Or maybe I won’t say anything at all and turn a little bit more, and then she’ll see what I’m hiding: her knife, broken.
I wish she’d take the hint about a lot of things. Doesn’t she notice that every time we go to a thrift store I always look at knives? Every time she comes to find me with a sweater she wants me to try on, I’m standing there turning a knife in my hands. She sees me, but she doesn’t say anything about it. She tells me about the sweater, how it’s lambswool or cashmere, or she’s got some shirt she wants to see me in or something for my kitchen, a cheese grater or a salad spinner.
She’s not the dumbest broad I’ve ever met, and I’ve met a few, damned straight, but I can’t think of any dumber. Smart about some things, but stupid when it comes to men. How she got to be her age and not get the big picture, I’ll never know. I practically spelled it out for her, but in the meantime, she kept putting out like there was no problem. With most chicks, that’s the first thing to go. Then you move to the bargaining stage, and they start cranking the whole thing up, wanting to be taken out for fancy dinners or needing you to buy them things they don’t even want, just so they don’t feel like they’re giving it away for free.
“Does there have to be a real me?” I said to her after the hockey game that she’d ignored on the TV over our heads while she seemed happy enough to let me buy her spring rolls and pho. OK, so that’s laying it on pretty thick—asking if there has to be a real me—and it didn’t last much longer after that. She’d already tried to get me to dance with her on the sidewalk in front of her building while she sang in my ear. What the hell was that supposed to mean? Not like a real song with words that I could understand. She was in a good mood, but why did she have to try and dance with me and make up a song without words?
So what if I acted like I was into hockey when the cook at the Vietnamese joint came out of the kitchen to catch the last few minutes of the game? Big deal. Maybe, I shouldn’t have told her that I hate hockey as soon as we stepped outside. That’s when she asked me which was it: Did I like hockey or not? Which was the real me? That’s what she wanted to know, and she seemed like the kind of woman who might actually know or maybe that wasn’t why. OK, that wasn’t why. I was trying to scare her off.
“Does there have to be a real me?” I asked her.
I only saw her once more after that.
