You Break My Heart!
One day I woke up and Larry was nowhere to be found. We’d had a bit of a disagreement the night before and I thought, “Huh. Maybe he went back to Florida.”
Honestly, I didn’t actually care. He just didn’t interest me anymore.
I waited for a couple of hours, nursing the few beers that were left in the fridge and chain-smoking cigarettes. Finally, Larry strolled in the door, a carton of cigarettes under his arm. “Hey, Baby,” he said with his usual smile.
Larry tossed the cigarettes on the table and snubbed out the one he was smoking, then sat down next to me on our two-person couch.
“Where the fuck have you been?” I glared at him, not sure if we were still fighting. I was running low on beer so I tried not to sound too harsh.
“I got a fuckin’ tattoo!” he said. “Ya wanna see?”
My first thought was: You got a tattoo without asking me?!
My second thought: You got a tattoo without ME?!
But what I said was, “You’re fuckin’ shittin’ me!” which was slang for “Are you kidding?”
“Nope,” he said.
Larry lifted his shirt sleeve to reveal very red skin with an even redder blob in the middle. It looked like someone had torn off Rudolph’s red nose and stepped on it. The squashed circle had a squarish lightning-bolt thing on the right side.
“Ya know what it is?” he asked.
Somehow I didn’t think “Rudolph’s nose” was an accurate guess, so I did not reply.
“It’s a broken heart!” Larry said, without waiting for my guess. “Fuckin’ ripped right down the middle!”
I looked again. Maybe if a kindergartener with no artistic potential had tried to make a valentine, I could see it. Yes, maybe the blob was a heart.
“Only 50 bucks!” he said.
“You spent $50 on this?” I eyed the blob suspiciously.
“I got it for you!” he said, ignoring my rhetorical question. “Because you break my heart! You’re the only chick who ever breaks my heart, so this is for you.”
I did not understand this logic. It seemed ridiculously stupid and immature. But I said “I love you,” because there’s nothing else to say when someone gets a horrible permanent tattoo of a smashed blob to demonstrate how much he was hurt and claim that this ridiculous act of acquiring a terrible tattoo was not only your fault but also a gift.
Then we had sex on the floor, which is how I knew we were no longer fighting, and went to Paul’s Place to get drunk and show everyone Larry’s new tattoo.
My mom once told me, “Before you get a tattoo, imagine what it’s going to look like on your skin when your skin is all wrinkly, because you are stuck with a tattoo for life.”
For life! I thought. It was hard for me to imagine Larry being any older than he already was, but I tried to imagine wrinkly skin and that bright red blob all wrinkled up. It would look like a red pepper after three months in the fridge.
And I knew deep down that I wouldn’t be around to see that aged red-pepper blob when Larry’s skin got that wrinkly.
I just had no idea where I’d be instead.