But I didn’t. I didn’t drive down to Xonoca to open my bar called Taco’s Bell. I decided against that whole life because I had to go to work and face my motherfucking fears. To prove the point to myself, I turned on the stereo again and put in Celine Dion’s cover of “All By Myself” and sat at the stop light, waiting for it to turn green. “Allllll byyyyyyyy myyyyyyyyyysellllllllllllf,” I sang forlornly. “Don’t wanna be, allllllll byyyyy—” And then I realized my windows were down again and the same woman from yesterday was sitting next to me. Except this time, she wasn’t singing along, but rather staring at me with tears streaming down her face, her nose running. She looked positively wrecked.
“I don’t want you to be all by yourself!” she cried at me when she saw me watching her. “You go get yourself a man! You deserve it so much!”
“I’m trying!” I shouted back, above Celine. “The motherfucker kissed me yesterday!” It felt good to share that.
“Where?” she called back.
“In the supply closet!”
“No! I meant where on your body?”
“What?”
“Did! He! Kiss! Your! Penis!” she screamed as she sobbed.
I gaped at her.
“Hey, move it, assholes!” A horn started to honk behind me. And it was the same motherfucking guy in the truck from yesterday. This time, I did flip him off because I wanted to continue the conversation with the strange lady in the car next to me to find out why her first thought would be that I got kissed on the cock instead of the mouth? But she had already pulled away, and Celine Dion was starting to grate on my nerves, and I was kind of worried the guy in the truck would follow me and rip off my testes, so I drove away rather quickly, trying to speed around a few cars to put some distance between me and the truck driver.
Twenty minutes later, after dealing with the police officer who pulled me over for speeding and weaving in and out of traffic to the point where the first thing he asked me was, “Sir, if you’re drunk this early, then you’ve got a drinking problem,” I pulled into my parking space on the side of the street. My hands were sweating, and I was breathing heavily. I looked myself in the rearview mirror, and my eyes were so wide, I’m pretty sure you could see parts of my brain poking through. “Calm down,” I whispered hoarsely. “Just calm the fuck down, and everything will be okay. You’ve already had his tongue in your mouth. You can do this.”
So without looking, I opened my car door.
And it was about that time that Vince Taylor was riding his bike past my car. Physics teaches us that when a moving force meets an immovable object, bad shit happens to hot people. I think Sir Isaac Newton said that. Or Sir Elton John. I don’t know. I get my “Sirs” confused sometimes.
But, regardless, the moving force of Vince and his bike met the immoveable object of my opened car door. I heard him say, “Oh bananas,” and then he crashed into the inside of the door, flipped up and over it, and landed on his back on the pavement on the other side. The front tire of his bike crumpled before the whole thing fell over onto the ground next to my car with a metallic clang.
Then it got really quiet.
I just stared.
I thought about closing the car door and just driving away, but knowing my luck, I would have run him over in the process, and I’d already had one brush with the law today. Plus, I worked for a car insurance company, and that sort of thing is frowned upon.
My next thought was I was happy he was at least wearing a helmet.
My third thought was how awful I was going to look in prison orange if he was dead.
My fourth thought was how sad I’d be if he was dead, and why didn’t I just let him kiss my cock in the storage closet?
My fifth thought was that I had to save him, just like he saved me the day before. He was the one who sort of caused me to choke on spinach, and now I was sort of (read: completely) the reason he probably had splenic lacerations and contusions on his pretty, pretty behind.
I jumped out of the car and tried to close the door, but part of his bike got caught in it and I ended up closing the door on my leg. This caused me to trip over the bent tire and I fell, skinning my hands and a knee on the asphalt. I gritted my teeth against the sharp pain, realizing that whatever I was feeling, Vince had flipped over my fucking car, so I couldn’t be bitchy about scrapes on my hands and dirty khakis (even though I was already bitching in my head).
Once I was able to disentangle myself from the stupid bike and got my leg out of my stupid car, I rushed around the door and saw Vince sprawled out near the front tire, on his back, eyes closed. He didn’t move except to ooze little driblets of blood from his right arm and left leg. Little flecks of gravel were stuck in the blood trails.
Of course, to me, it looked like he was dead, and I was sure that I’d killed him, so I rushed over to him, trying to remember back to my Baywatch days and how they gave mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. I didn’t even check to see if he was breathing, because I was convinced he wasn’t. I figured that this was real life, so I probably shouldn’t go in slow motion like they did on Baywatch. David Hasselhoff could save people, and so could I.
So I got down on my knees next to him, ignoring the obvious gaping flesh wound on my leg. I thought about chest compressions, but I didn’t want to break any more of his ribs, and I was pretty sure his clavicle was probably already going to be pushing through his skin, and I really didn’t want to see that. So I ignored the chest compressions and tilted his head back (something about avoid tongue blockage or some bullshit) and pressed my lips against his and gave him the gift of life.
“Breathe, dammit!” I whispered fiercely, taking another breath and pushing it into him. “Live, I say! Live!”
It took two or three breaths into him before I realized a tongue that was not my own was in my mouth each time I went back down, and that for all intents and purposes, I was making out with a man I’d hit with my car. Okay, well, semantics, it really should be that he hit my car, but whatever. When this hit me, I froze a little bit, my breath caught halfway between him and me, and then he brought the arm that wasn’t bloody and gross up behind me, pressing the back of my head, holding me in place while he tangled his tongue over mine. He pulled away slightly to nibble on my bottom lip and groaned, though from pain or what, I don’t know.
I opened my eyes to find his inches from my own. “Totally worth it,” he whispered with a grin. Then he passed out.
It took me almost a full minute to call 911 because I just sat there, his taste still in my mouth.
“HELLO?” I said to the pretty black woman at the front desk at the hospital a couple hours later. I couldn’t help but think that if this were a TV show, she’d be the sassy black nurse that always had something funny to say before dispensing pearls of wisdom.