Wino and I Have a Chat

“Have you applied to any jobs yet?” I ask. I’m fooling around with my guitar, plucking the same power chords you hear in any so-called commercial “punk” song. Those chords, they’ve been used about a million times, and everybody keeps listening to them.

Wino, he’s kind of milling around the room in his filthy Homer Simpson slippers. Homer’s mouth is eating each of his feet as he does. He’s carrying the only wine glass he owns; he’s been drinking his grapey red again from bottles with no labels. He corked it himself at the liquor store for only three bucks a bottle. There are spigots on the wall down there, a wine buffet stretching to the back of the store, and a man with alcoholic designs can get anything he needs.

“Would you like a sample, sir?” the attendant had asked, offering him a plastic cup at the taps.

“Don’t mind if I do,” Wino had said, accepting the cup. His eyes had the desperate gleam of a man about to get what he wants for a very low price. “And, actually -- I’ll take a few of these, my good man!” he waved the attendant away. Shoo, fly. He reckoned his stack of cups would allow him to try each variety of the reds…or he would die trying.

He swirls his glass around now. “Not really…but I applied to be a bus driver though. I was talking to the guy on the bus, and I think it would suit me. I can take lots of shit without caring, really.”

I hear an old tune in my head and play the chords some more. “Sounds all right…and the money is good too,” I say.

“Yeah,” he says, sipping the wine. I can smell it from here. “Did you see what I did to the tree?”

“No, what?”

“I put up some decorations,” he says.

I look out the window, and sure enough, a half-dozen bagels are hanging from the tree outside, thrown up there in the branches in the same way a kid would heave a pair of tied-up sneakers over a power line. It’s bait, you see. We need them to come closer. They’re getting wise.

Wino smiles at his handiwork. “Now…they won’t be able to resist. All those bagels, just hanging there…they’ll come. And when they do…” he trails off, looking to the corner where our rifles are. He doesn’t need to finish the thought for me. Yes, they’ll come…and when those fat, hairy bastards begin to gnaw on our bagels…they’ll get the surprise of their lifetimes. The guns, they are always loaded, leaning on the frame beside the window.

Wino finishes his glass. “Do you think I should take ‘paperboy’ off my resume?” he asks.