PEOPLE WATCHING by Michael Seidlinger
You aren’t alone even though it still feels that way, long gaps of nothing between discussions that seem to have everything to do with the weekend, which leads you to the assumption that tonight won’t be much. You are with someone familiar, been around, floating along with the same circle since as far back as you’re willing to remember, and you are both searching the shopping mall for the others, convinced that they had told one of you to meet them at the food court.
“Why, I have no fucking clue,” he says.
But that’s really not ever worth considering because you both enjoy people-watching, picking out the men on the prowl, the women and which ones are possible targets, the others not so much because, as he says, “Too fat… Too ugly… One word: herpes.”
You listen to him string together a situation where the men on the prowl meet the women and how it’ll end up on the nightly news, or not, but it’ll still be something that probably happens, and happens a lot. You tend to agree. The funniest part of his mostly nonsensical scenario has to do with the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. Inevitable, you think. You ask him what it would take to fuck a girl with gonorrhea but before he can answer, you change the subject, asking him, “Hungry?”
He’s like, “I could eat.”
And so you go to some fast food restaurant and both get huge burritos that neither of you have any interest in finishing. Between gorging on big bites of the burrito, you count the seconds it takes for him to swallow and then he does the same. When you watch him swallow, you think only of empty calories and stomach flab and throwing up the burrito once you’ve had enough. He watches you swallow and thinks of ejaculate.
Really?
It is what it is, what else do you want? Shall I continue?
You end up fingering the area between table and wall anxiously, digging out dark matter from previous meals, while waiting for him to hand you the flask so that you can add rum to your soda. And then you drink it down in bigger gulps than before, counting calories, anticipating when the buzz wears off so that when you stick your fingers down your throat.
He jokes and asks, “What else have you choked on?”
You laugh along, the liquor kicking in, making the washed out light of the food court blinding to your eyes. You squint, wishing you had sunglasses but that doesn’t seem like something you’d wear unless it was ironic.
He stares at the half-eaten burrito without blinking, and then leaves the table without a word. You stare at your own burrito, certain that you didn’t eat all of it.
You start counting calories. You think of the sour cream, the cheese, the beef, the brown rice, you think about how many calories are in the tortilla, but when he returns, he smells vaguely of vomit and you get hungry.
Then you lose count. Start eating his leftovers, drinking more rum than soda, and then, when it’s your turn, he goes with you in the stall.