T'Challa, Howard, and The Frog by Stefan Tosheff
Here Is A Very Literal Story My Dad Told Me
It was during the time he was in the hospital for the third time of a total of four extended stays during the year of 2002. He told me a small altercation he had in the bathroom that, as a story, has forever stayed with me. It’s not even a story, just an image yet it’s something I mentally reference at least once a day. I was visiting him during my lunch break from school, which was walking distance away. He was wearing his bathrobe from home, instead of a hospital gown. The pattern on the robe is a collage of random patterns. My brother still has the robe — it looks like an assemblage of rejected Cosby sweaters just kinda smashed together. He was mostly bald at this point but he never lost all his hair. His head was patchy, is how I’ve always described it. He would never commit to the idea of shaving his head because he liked talking to our hairdresser.
I asked him how it was going and he mentioned he was having trouble shaving in the bathroom. His three bladed razor wasn’t cutting it so he assumed they were dull. He said it wasn’t shaving close enough for his taste and he tossed them in the trash. He popped-open a fresh three bladed razor and tried shaving his face. Those razors were worse. They were doing an even shittier job at making his face smooth. They were also the only other blades he had so he came to the conclusion that the old razors were actually better. He then fished his arm through the trash to find them. The image is always my dad in the crudly-cobbled-cosby robe with his arm shoulder deep in a hospital bathroom garbage looking for not-sharp but sharp enough razor blades to shave his misshapen by radiation face. At the time, I was not of face-shaving age, so a good amount of this was lost on me.
My fear has always been that the image, for me, has come to embody the concept of “the lesser of two shitty options/two evils” when it comes to making choices. It already affects a lot of my thought process, at least when faced with things that can easily be put into a binary comparison. Or to put that in a less sociopathic way: I’m okay with things (experiences, products, whatever etc) being kinda crappy because I know/assume the alternative is worse. I’ll admit, this isn’t the healthiest thought to have pass your mind everyday, which is why I try not to give it too much credence. Also, the idea that an alternative to anything is the only/final alternative is super weird.
I never think of the image during existential crises or panic attacks or what have you. I think of the image when I am literally about to throw something in the garbage, usually while in a bathroom. This is why it takes me forever to throw away my blades after shaving. I make those fuckers last a month. Maybe it’s the reason why I have a beard. I highly doubt it. I have a beard because I know the alternative is a worse look for me.
Pink Water Bottle
A man, whose name we’ll never know, searched through his backyard with a stressed diligences that suggested he was drowning something out. He was a tall but not overly tall red-headed man who just remembered that one time he equated a girlfriend’s friend’s baby with a dog.
“It was supposed to be funny,” he said out loud, through cringing teeth. He lifted a lawn chair by its seat, tilting the plastic furniture slightly to observe what lied underneath. “Nothing.” He did this to three more chairs and a large wooden outdoor table that was built by some family member. He doesn’t remember which one, only that it was only one generation old and no one wanted it. “Fuck.” His muted tone echoed slightly under the emptiness of the table.
The man looked for his water bottle. A pink recycled plastic reuseable water bottle that was the last of the 4-pack he bought. He had lost the other three.
“Where the fuck did I put it?”
You had it when you drove home.
He looked at the garage where his car was and visually traced his steps, looking at the usual walking path he would have walked from the garage. He couldn’t find any hint of pink. “Fuck.”
He walked inside and closed the door behind him but he never stopped moving through the rooms of his house.
Inside then. It’s probably inside somewhere. Check the freezer. You leave shit in there. Did you go to the freezer yet. No you didn’t. You got home, got inside, then went to the bathroom. Maybe in the bathroom. God, I hope you didn’t leave it in the bathroom again.
“I gotta stop doing that.” The moment the lights flashed on in the bathroom he could tell it wasn’t there. He knew it wasn’t there but he felt like checking.
Good. You didn’t act like a dirty fucker and bring it into the bathroom.
“Then where is it?”
He was going to kill himself once he got home. He had everything planned. He didn’t have a large list of things to prepare. He wasn’t picky. Just before he was about to do it he noticed his water bottle wasn’t on the table. He thought he had put it down on the table but apparently no, he didn’t.
Lila Leeds in 1949 exploitation film, She Shoulda Said ‘No’! (also known as The Devil’s Weed). Like Reefer Madness, the film was a cautionary tale about the dangers of drugs.
