Boredom

“Gotta cigarette by chance?” my new neighbor asks as he sit down on the sidewalk’s edge, a few feet from me.

“Sorry, no I don’t,” I answer.

“’Bout to have myself a nicotine fit if the wife doesn’t hurry up home soon.”

I think about asking him if he has a beer, as a joke, but then I think better of it.

A pearl white Escalade cruises by. The woman behind the wheel acts as if she doesn’t see us as we get all neighborly by waving at her.

From the other direction comes a woman walking her dog; a Bull Mastiff. She guides him off the sidewalk, not wanting to deal with us two lumps of humanity or perhaps knowing that her dog will either want to make friend’s or rip our faces off.

Half right. The dog takes a shine to me, licking my face and begging for a belly rub, but only after he growls brutishly at my neighbor.

“Don’t take it hard,” I say to him, “Little kids and dogs love me. It’s women who find me unattractive.”

The woman pulls hard at her dog’s leash and leads him away without a word.

“Did I say something wrong?” I asked.

“Damned if I know, buddy,” he answers.

We both laugh. But the chuckles end quickly as his wife wheels into the drive and he goes into their house behind her without a word.

I smell my right arm pit, then my left, wondering if it’s me.

Then I have a wonderful idea. I race into the house to search the freezer for a hidden bottle of Sangria that I find tucked behind the ice cream sandwiches, a bag of mixed vegetables and an ice-encrusted box of fish sticks purchased last year.

Once outside, I return to my spot on the sidewalk, twist off the bottle’s cap and take a healthy gulp. No sooner had the mouthful reached my stomach, a cop slows to a stop, rolls down his window and commands, “No open containers in public.”

Quickly, I retreat ten feet backwards into my yard of dormant winter grass. The cop roll his window up and continues to move down the road.

My mind drifts to the idea of laying back and falling asleep. Instead, I take another couple of gulps from the bottle.

Here comes the cop again, this time from the opposite direction. The glare he gives me as he passes tells me how badly he wants to stop, provoke me into doing something stupid, so he can put his nickle-plated bracelets on me and race me to jail.

I raise my bottle in salute to him and watch as he slips beyond the parked cars lining the street.

Another couple of mouthfuls and I put the cap back on. I then lay back and close my eyes, allowing the warmth of the alcohol course its way through my entire body.

When I awake, it’s raining and must have been for sometime as I’m soaked clean through to my skin. I get up and go inside the house.

“I can be jus’ as bored in here as out there,” I say as if the world were listening, “And I can do it while dry and warm.”