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ZOMBIE TALES
PRIMROSE COURT
APT. 502
By
Robert DeCoteau
A
ZOMBIE TALES PRESS
Publication
APT. 502
Tommy slammed the door behind him with a hard thrust. He tossed his backpack on the floor next to the broken down, coat rack that his mother had forced him to haul home from a garage sale years before. The thing was chipped and dented, two of the four hanging pegs were missing, and it canted to the side like a drunken sailor, leaning against the wall for support.
“Mom, it’s all busted up,” Tommy had told her.
“I know Thomas, but that is part of its charm,” she had replied with a little smile, never taking her eyes off the ancient varnish.
He should have seen it then. All the early warning signs were there. Tommy hadn’t realized it at the time, but his mother had been slowly slipping away from reality, even back then. What sane person buys a busted up coat rack for ten dollars and then makes an eleven year old kid lug it fifteen blocks and five stories up to prop it in the corner?
“Is that you, Thomas?” his mother called from the living room.
“Yeah, Ma,” Tommy yelled on his way to his bedroom. He knew if he didn’t answer, she would just keep asking. She would slip into a loop, like a broken record.
Is that you, Thomas?
Thomas, is that you?
Thomas?
Is that you, Thomas?
Thomas, is that you?
Thomas?
Tommy kicked off his Giovanni dress shoes, letting them sail into the closet to be lost in the pile of miscellaneous junk there. He yanked off his pale blue, Comdex work shirt and added that to the pile as well. He wouldn’t need that shirt anymore. He wouldn’t ever need that shirt again, fuck Julio.
“We need to talk,” Julio had told him that morning.
Tommy had followed his boss into the little closet sized office next to the sorting room.
“Close the door,” Julio had said, moving around the rickety desk and planting his ass in a worn office chair.
Tommy had been forced to stand. There wasn’t room for another chair in the little office. Tommy tried not to breathe in the awful stench of cologne, hair gel, and body odor. He let his eyes wander the room, pretending to be interested in the décor so he wouldn’t have to look his boss in the eyes.
“We got the results of your UA back,” Julio had stated with a smirk.
Julio had always hated Tommy, since his first day in the mailroom nine months earlier; Julio had been looking for any reason to can him. His boss had developed a reputation as a ladies’ man and it was common knowledge that he only kept enough men on the mailroom staff to keep the Comdex mail moving. The rest of the employees were attractive, young women. Julio worked diligently to get each one of those women on his staff. If a girl was willing to put out occasionally, she could glide through the work week in the pharmaceutical company mailroom without licking so much as a single stamp.
“The results were positive for THC,” Julio had said, leaning back in his chair, “You a stoner, Tom?
“No, sir,” Tommy had replied, he had been anticipating this moment and had prepared a response in advance, but all that had gone out the window, “It’s my mom. She’s real sick, she has a prescription card.”
Tommy pulled out his wallet and began to shuffle through it.
“Look, Tom,” Julio leaned forward and laced his fingers together. “Comdex has a very strict no tolerance policy. You can claim whatever you like, but the fact of the matter is, you tested positive for drugs and that means I get to issue you your walking papers.”
“I’m not a pothead, Mr. Garcia,” Tommy had protested, he hated the job, but he needed the paycheck, “My mother has medical issues and needs it for pain.”
“Turn your ID badge into Barry at the security desk,” Julio had instructed, rising from his chair, “We will send your last check to the address we have on file. After you leave here this morning, you are not allowed back on the premises, understand?”
All Tommy could do was nod.
Tommy pulled his black, Nirvana tee-shirt over his head and pulled his hair tie out. He flipped his head around until his stringy, black hair hung loosely over his shoulders. Tommy stomped across the room and punched the wall next to his vintage Black Sabbath poster. His fist went through the drywall with a dull thud and he growled like a rabid pit bull on a playground.
Julio was such a smarmy piece of shit. Who did he think he was, using the mailroom as his own personal meat market? Fuck him.
Fuck Barry too. That fat bastard had been a prick from the beginning, eyeballing Tommy every morning like he was a drug dealer or mass murderer or something, always inspecting his ID badge intently like he had never seen it before. Well, Barry had the ID now and he could shove it up his ass for all Tommy cared.
Tommy pulled his fist out of the wall and inspected the damage; he would have to rearrange his posters again, before the next property management inspection. Tommy shook his head and plodded off towards the kitchen.
“Thomas, there’s lunch on the stove,” his mother told him as he crossed through the living room, “I know you don’t like tomato soup, but it goes so well with grilled cheese. If you eat it all, I’ll give you a treat.”
It was 9:53 according to the clock next to the microwave; too early for lunch. Tommy could hear Neil Patrick Harris trading witty banter with Kelly Ripa on his mother’s old Zenith. Regis was gone now, why they hadn’t changed the name yet Tommy couldn’t say. If they planned to keep the name, they might as well change it back to Regis and Cathy Lee.
There was no lunch on the stove, Tommy knew. The old bat was living in some obscure day in the distant past. There couldn’t be lunch waiting for him because, before he had left the apartment that morning, he had pulled the stove out and jerked the large, three prong plug from the wall. In her state of mind, she couldn’t be trusted to use the stove, the oven, or even the microwave.
Tommy couldn’t remember a time when she had actually made him tomato soup and grilled cheese, but it must have been an important day for his mother, she re-lived it about three days a week. Usually she informed him of the meal when he was helping her into her nightgown or getting her bath ready.
Tommy kicked his stepping stool across the linoleum floor. He slid it up against the fridge with one foot and stood up on his toes to reach the cupboard above the refrigerator. He found his little cigar box with his finger tips and pulled it down. After transferring it to his free hand, he carefully extracted his bong.
At the small kitchen table, Tommy flipped open the box and began to sort through its contents. Under the Zig-Zag rolling papers, he found his three small roaches. Not nearly enough, he thought, I’ll have to get Grinder to front me some more.
Tommy jammed the little, scorched leftovers into the bowl of his water pipe and sparked up his Bic. His bong gargled and he sucked in the sweet smoke, holding it until his face was red and he thought his eyes might pop.
Celie, from The Color Purple, was spewing her gibberish in a deep baritone from the Zenith. The View was next in his mother’s daytime programming.
Tommy exhaled with a huffing cough and leaned back in the tattered, vinyl covered chair. He huffed again and used a toothpick to poke at the ashes in the bowl, it was spent.
“You shouldn’t smoke in the house, John,” his mother said from the recliner parked in front of the TV, “we have the baby now. It’s not good for the baby.”
John was the piece of crap, junky, guitar player who had knocked Tommy’s mother up. He had skipped town with his band when Tommy was three. John C. Taylor thought that one day he would make it big and play for sold out crowds. In the tradition of all the Rock and Roll legends, he delved deep into drugs, looking for his inspiration and his own unique sound.
The problem was, Johnny C. was far better at cooking a hit of heroin and finding a vein that he ever had been at strumming his guitar. Someone finally found him overdosed in a stall of a rest area men’s room. The medical examiner said he had been dead for two days. The police found the rest of his band three towns over, in a dive motel room. They were brought in for questioning, but no charges were ever filed.
Tommy stared at the bong sitting on the table in front of him and waited for the effects of the weed to kick in. One hit just wasn’t going to do it. He thought about scraping the resin from his pipe and the stem of the bong, but knew he wouldn’t get enough out of them for more than one more toke.
Iris hated that he got high every day, but she put up with it because he was a decent guy and a good boyfriend. He held down a job and that was more than any of her other boyfriends had ever accomplished. Well, he had held down a job anyway.
Iris was fond of saying that they were like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, a happy couple with the world by the balls, showing up at parties like they owned the place and rubbing their happiness in the faces of all those losers who would never find love. He didn’t know how he was going to break it to Iris that he was unemployed again.
Tommy wasn’t high. The three roaches hadn’t even been enough to make him a little fuzzy. He looked up at the clock again, 10:14. Grinder would throw a fit if he called this early. Selling a twenty sack wasn’t nearly a good enough reason for the drug dealer to get out of bed before noon. Still, Tommy needed to take the edge off if he was going to have to face Iris later. Maybe he would wait a while.
“Did you finish your soup, Thomas?” his mother asked.
“Yeah, Ma, it was good,” Tommy replied absently.
“Good boy, now you can have your treat. Go ahead and get yourself two cookies from the jar on the counter.”
There hadn’t been a cookie jar on the counter for about ten years; not since Tommy had dropped it during a late night foray with a serious case of the munchies.
“Thanks, Ma,” Tommy said, fished his pack of Camel Lights from his pocket and crossing to the living room window. Flipping the top open he saw that there were only seven left, he would have to remember to grab a pack later when he went to see Grinder.
He produced a small key from his pocket and worked the Master lock holding the window closed. He wasn’t worried about his mother jumping. She was crazy as a loon, but she wasn’t suicidal; she just liked to set her house plants out in the sunlight when it managed to break through the dreary Seattle clouds. Every now and then, one of the large pots would plummet five stories to the concrete courtyard below. Once she missed hitting another of the tenants by inches.
Tommy plopped down on the window sill and leaned out as he lit his cigarette. He wasn’t supposed to smoke in the apartment, it was in their rental agreement, but he hated walking down all those stairs to suck down a cancer stick and then walk all the way back up. Sure, he had signed the contract when he was granted power of attorney over his mother and became responsible for the lease, but Tommy and the property managers had an understanding; they didn’t complain about his smoking in the apartment and he didn’t to them about how the elevator hadn’t worked in four years.
There was shouting from the courtyard below and Tommy leaned out over the ledge to investigate. Mrs. Grimly, from the second floor, was standing far below with her hands on her hips. She had that odd way of weaving her head back and forth, as she cussed out her husband in Spanish. Tommy wondered if that attitude was genetic or if Mexican mothers pulled their little girls off to the side and gave them lessons in secret.
Mr. Grimly was standing in front of her with his hands spread wide, palms up, placating. The top of his balding head looked shiny from this angle. He had his hands full, Tommy knew. That young Hispanic diva had the body of a goddess and the mouth of a truck driver. Anything she wanted, she got. Marrying a stripper probably seemed like a dream come true when Mr. Grimly proposed, but the wedding had come and gone two years ago and Mr. Grimly still hadn’t been able to convince Mrs. Grimly to hang up her eight-inch, transparent stilettos.
Now he got to deal with his wife going off and rubbing her firm tits in the face of creepy dudes while she tried not to grind too hard on the bulge in their sweatpants. It didn’t sound like marital bliss to Tommy, and judging from the irate, ranting down in the courtyard, it didn’t sound like marital bliss to the rest of their neighbors either.
Tommy watched the middle-aged Mr. Grimly struggle to defuse the situation. He cooed soft, apologetic words at his young wife, too soft for Tommy to make them out. Mrs. Grimly chattered back with her thick Spanish accent at such a speed that Tommy couldn’t follow her words either, something about a whore and money from what he could tell.
Tommy took one last drag from his cigarette and stamped the butt out in the ashtray he kept on the ledge. Looked like today was a rough day for a lot of people.