3rd
Anyone Can Do This, part 1
The pants had been doomed from the start. I bought them cheap, during the once-a-year megasale around Christmas, the only time it’s legal in France to have sales. They were olive green and linen, with buttons that looked like they had been carved from a fallen tree with a pocket knife. I love linen pants, and these were the coolest looking pair I’d ever seen.
There were problems from the outset. Linen is exceptional in my fashion tastes because it lacks military-grade durability; its fragility requires careful attention when washing, and the weather forecast dictates when you can wear it. If Bordeaux knows how to do anything besides wine, it’s rain, and it doesn’t stop until May. Also, the buttons were constantly falling off, and I am but a humble apprentice in the craft of sewing them back on. My repairs don’t normally last, so wearing the pants also required a heightened sensitivity to the sound of renegade buttons hitting the floor.
Finally though, summer did come. It was a Sunday morning and the sun was roasting everything in my dorm room through my big windows, which fast east and were open as far as possible. I was going downtown to the market on the river bank with some friends. As I stood at the window, soaking up the heat, I decided it was a perfect day to wear the linen pants.
I hadn’t had them on very long when I found an old pen in my guitar case. It was a fountain pen, the kind I used religiously before I ran out of them and couldn’t find replacements here. I uncapped it and noticed it had exploded a little.
Wouldn’t it be funny if I got black ink on my pants, I thought, and ruined them after only a few wears? That would totally be my style.
Of course I wasn’t going to let that happen, so I grabbed a tissue and started wiping the pen down very carefully, gently placing the tissue in the trash when the pen was dry and generally handling the stuff like uranium. I tested the pen out in a journal. It seemed to be working.
I glanced at my lap for a moment. Impossible. There were three freckles of black ink on my upper left thigh, and even a spot of it on the bottom edge of my button shirt. I oscillated between rage and despair for a few minutes as I tried to dab it out with water and a sponge. No dice. I emptied my pockets, the only contents of which had been my keys and change purse, where I keep my credit card, student ID and transit pass along with coin currency. Then I took off the pants, filled my sink with water and detergent and threw in the clothes to soak.
Somewhere in the middle of that, I realized I was still holding my wallet and that I needed both hands. I leaned back from the sink so I could see my desk around the small wall that divides the sink and the bed, and tossed the wallet toward my desk, which is up against the wall with the windows. As it reached the top of its arc, I wondered if I hadn’t thrown it a little too hard and what the odds were of it overshooting the desk entirely and flying out the window just behind it, and what the odds would be of someone being in the yard eight stories below, and what the odds would be of it hitting him or her, and what the odds might be of it knocking him or her out cold. I held my breath.
It went out the window.
I winced.
I heard a weird squeal. I stood there next to the sink a minute, still in my underwear and poised for action, my legs spread a bit and my hands outstretched like a lineman ready to run the ball, trying to decide what to do.
[part 2]
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