THE DVD'S

“WHAT’S WRONG WITH you?” she asked

“I’m cursed” I replied. You see, Vicki was this girl who’d drive around unannounced and want to know things. I didn’t have any answers but I guess I said a lot of things if there was booze in front of me, and perhaps she considered those remarks as answers or insights but really it was all just mumbo jumbo with me.

“You’re not cursed, you’re just lazy”

“Same thing” I replied and rolled over on the couch clutching my head.

“Can I tell you something?” She asked.

“Yeah sure why not”

“I’m seeing somebody, we can’t do this anymore”

I didn’t know what this was but replied

“Ok”

“See, you don’t even care, you don’t even care to fight for me; do you feel anything?”

“Sometimes I wonder if I feel too much” I replied “the truth is this will hit me in two months or so and then you’ll wonder why I didn’t call you; and the truth to that is that I’m cursed with fear. I fear everyone and every thing.

“You’re so dramatic”

I didn’t have anything more to add. Vicki left and I remained on the couch wondering about LIFE. That seemed to take up a lot of my time. It was the real reason I’ve never been able to hold down a job.

You see, when you don’t have a job, you’re not really of value to a potential partner. All the things you’ve done in the past don’t seem to matter anymore. If you’re in employment then a partner doesn’t see you as a liability to them and maybe there’s something there for them. Old Walt Disney fucked up the idea of love for everyone. There is no golden lamps or princes in castles with riches who suffer from mental trauma for people to find; they just don’t exist. There’s actually just a whole bunch of people walking around scratching their heads wondering about LIFE whether they think about it or not. Thinking about it is probably a bad approach but when you’re cursed like me it’s all you’ve got.

I heard from Vicki once or twice more. Maybe she was checking in to see whether I’d kill myself or something but it hadn’t happened yet. After a while I guess people feel comfortable enough to just leave you be.

Funnily enough though, there’s usually something that comes along to fill the void for a while. It’s funny how our mind works like that. It works especially well when you’re avoiding everything that you might do to relieve yourself of some pain, like doing the washing up or taking out the trash. I mean, a guy picks up trash from the side of the road here and takes it off somewhere so the world stays a little cleaner, while the cursed just sit around wondering why.

I got up and started walking around the streets. I do that. I just walk around aimlessly. But, sometimes you find an aim along the way. You never know what life is going to present to you if you just walk around.

On this particular occasion I came by a box of old DVD’s sitting on the pavement; somebody's trash. Nobody much uses them anymore. They all had $30, $50, REDUCED TO CLEAR $9.99 stickers and such on them. Now they had no value at all to the person who put them there. I picked up the whole box and walked it home.

I didn’t plan to watch any of them but this guy I’d met one day a year or so ago at a storage shed had told me that if you take a DVD to the CASH CONVERTERS pawn shop and it’s in good condition they’ll give you two bucks for it. I had fifty, so I figured there’s a good bet I’ll get somewhere close to 200 bucks for somebody’s trash they left out on the street for someone else to take away and relieve them of the hell of looking at them taking up space in their house.

THE NEXT DAY was the same as always, I stay up at night; all night. Things feel nicer when everyone else is asleep. I have things to say about the fear of Sunday nights too. In a city, even when you’re not working and they rent IS paid, you still feel the same sense of fear that everybody else feels on that Sunday night when they’re dreading going back to work the next day.

It was noon and I looked at my ugly face in the mirror, tripped over an empty bottle, and then the heater, and lay on the floor for a while looking at the cobwebs on the ceiling. It took fifteen minutes to get back up again and, being that I was still in the same clothes from the day before and couldn’t think of a good reason to get undressed and clean myself I picked up the box of DVD’s and caught a bus to the CASHIES, as they call it.

There was grafitti all over every wall in every alleyway and up and down the streets. Down with this, up with that. QUIT YOUR JOB and all the rest. Some just simply said FUCK! It was the voices of the masses hard at work making the town beautiful, always, diligently. Wisdom to be found on the walls and gold to be found in the streets, I thought while I carried my box of treasure.

The room for pawning things was small and painted baby blue. Three guys with greasy faces and fat stomachs and out of style sideburns stood at counters while people stood around in the room and others took up the three available seats. It must have been one of those busy days or maybe it was always like this.

A lady who’d wheeled a whole shopping trolley of junk into the room was being served. One of the fat guys was inspecting something she wanted to sell. It was a sculpture of three musicians made out of aluminium cans. The guy was getting bored and gave her three dollars to leave.

Now it was my time to shine. I plonked the box on the desk. The man looked at me and I looked back at him. The bottom button of his shirt was missing and he wore a singlet underneath with tomato sauce stains on it, as predictable as that sounds.

“I heard you pay two bucks for DVD’s down here” I asked.

“If they’re not scratched” he replied and opened the box. He yelled out to one of the other staff that he’d be a while inspecting the goods. He pulled out each DVD one by one and began opening the boxes and holding the discs up to the light and then putting them in piles.

It was taking a while so I tried to strike up some conversation, as you do.

“So, you get many of these?”

“Sometimes. People around here buy them by the shopping bag – I don’t know exactly what it is about this suburb but we’re the only ones that can flog them off easy”

“Is that so. Sorry I’ve got so many” I thought I ought to apologise for taking up the man’s time. I mean, when there’s money involved you’re inclined to give a little to get a little so to speak.

“It doesn’t matter, this is my last day for two weeks – I’m taking time off”

“Where ya going?”

“To Phillip Island”

“Cool. I’ve never been”

“It’s great mate, you should”

“Maybe I will”

“We have to take the kids out of school for it but it is what it is”

“School isn’t a place for smart people” I replied.

“That’s good, I like that” he said. We were getting somewhere. Building a rapport is important in these kinds of high end business transactions.

“Alright” he said “You’ve got 47” three are no good to us

“Ya wanna take ‘em anyway?” I asked.

“Look mate, you can chuck ‘em in the bin or I will but I’d prefer you did it”

“Ok”

He opened the cash register and handed me 94 dollars. I looked at it.

“Hey man, that’s half right?”

“No, two bucks a DVD – you have 47 – that's 94 dollars – now sign this form to say you didn’t steal them”

Math had never been my strong point and I’m prone to delusions of grandeur. His calculation seemed more correct than mine after he explained it to me. This is why I’m not a betting man. The numbers just don’t make much sense to me.

“I didn’t steal them, I found them”

“Whatever man – just sign the form”

I signed the form and wondered if this would affect my dole payment. Selling things you find in the gutter is not considered income I deliberated and that was the end of it. A man ran through the room wearing a singlet, holding a can of beer and a rag in the other and shouted “YOU NEVER FUCKING LOVED ME!” to the back of the store. A lady in a thin dress walked out the front. The fat guys behind the counter looked up but didn’t brace themselves.

“Happens” said the guy at the counter to me. He handed me back my copy of the form and I was on my way.

I stared out the bus window, looked across from myself. Old people and lost people were sitting in their seats looking agitated. A man looked at me and called me fucker and then waved his hand at me to shoo me away and then looked out the window and back at me again, got up, walked to front of the bus and started doing the same thing at the street through the windshield. Apparently the road was fucker too.

I always feel a little better when there’s some money in my pocket. Things don’t seem so bleak and I hate that that’s the way things are. What about the sunshine and what have you. But I guess that sun being out isn’t going to pay your bills no matter how beautiful it looks and feels to be in.

When I got home I picked up a dirty old guitar that sits on the floor, tuned it up and walked to the bottle store. The guys there will let me borrow a bottle crate from inside when I play out the front. I sat down and started plucking away as people walked past. Children liked to stop and stare and their mothers would do the same for a while before tugging their arms and getting back to whatever it was they were doing. Sometimes I’d just strum any old damn thing and say whatever words came to my head first and it didn’t really matter because the guitar was in tune and you couldn’t hear it all that well over the traffic racing up the street anyway.

I looked up at one point after someone said my name.

“Hey, whatcha doing?” It was Emma. She was still in her work clothes. Very formal stuff.

“Well…I’m…”

“Yeah sure, of course. Cool. I’m drinking inside and reading this book, if you get bored come and have a seat”

“Will do” I replied and went back into whatever it was I was saying to go with the strumming. It was probably something about love lost or found or lost again. It always seems to be that way with it. But you put things in between to break it up a little and maybe tell a joke in the song if you think you can get away with it. The good thing about busking is that when you lose your place it doesn’t matter because you’re not a performer – you’re more seen as a beggar in the eyes of those who walk past, so anything goes. You can really make an ass of yourself without consequence. Nobody has bought you and you’re not for sale. I was doing it on the street because I assume it tends to annoy the neighbours if you plonk out chords inside all afternoon and they’ve returned home to watch their shows about lives they’ll never have after a day working at a life they never wanted.

The sun had gone down and dusk was falling over the street. Lights got turned on and the traffic got lighter, and people rushed into the bottle store and out again with cartons of beer or whatever they felt inclined to use for the evening.

A lady came out of a restaurant and asked me what I liked to drink.

“Really? What do you mean?”

“We’ve been listening to you play from that restaurant next door for the last hour. It’s our 27th wedding anniversary and you made our night. We want to buy you a bottle of wine”

“Well, I mean, sure, I can’t say no; anything red is fine by me”

She came back with a bottle and a fifty dollar note and stuffed it into my hat on the pavement so nobody could see.

“I can’t believe it” I said.

“Enjoy” said the lady and she walked off just like that with her husband.

I felt the work was done and I didn’t really have anything left to say to the street while holding a guitar so I gave the crate back to the bottle store guys and found Emma.

“Hey whassap” I said and put my guitar down

“Luke, how do you do it?”

“What?”

“You just… I don’t know. I hate my life Luke, I hate it; I hate my job, I can’t even read this book.”

The book was five inches thick, I didn’t bothering enquiring about which book it was.

“I’m going to study philosophy” Emma said.

“I hear there’s a good market for that” I replied

She took a long sip of her drink and sparked up a cigarette.

“What’s wrong with me?” she asked

“Nothing” I replied, and I meant it.

“I just want to be happy”

“Don’t we all” I said, and we both sipped at our drinks in the moonlight surrounded by little lights in glass bowls hanging from the ceiling. It wouldn’t be until tomorrow that the pain would come back again and it was worth it to keep going at the drinks in that moment.