He got home late. Really late Terrence realized as he looked at the microwave clock. He only had 4 hours until the morning shift. He wasn’t tired though. Not yet. He could stay up the rest of the night if he wanted to. But it would hit him, oh, three hours into his shift at the warehouse, and he couldn’t take another day like that. Not another one. He looked into the fridge. He wasn’t hungry, but he grabbed a thing of ice cream and set it down on the table anyway. He tried to remember when was the last time he had cleaned the table. Weeks ago probably. Pipes, papers, cereal bowls, and now a carton of ice cream. He hadn’t meant to be at Glory’s all night. He had told her that he had the early shift at the warehouse. Sometimes he wondered if she heard a single thing he said.
He didn’t taste the ice cream, didn’t know what flavor it was, but he felt it, cold, going down his throat spoonful after spoonful. He thought about a time not that long ago when his dad would take him to the zoo. He loved to watch the tigers. The power in those beasts behind the bars was miraculous to a boy his age. If he could have been anything in the whole world it would be a zookeeper. He figured he would just go out and buy a tiger and get started as soon as he could. Growing up hadn’t been simple though. His dreams didn’t hold up nearly so well after twenty years of wearing down, wearing down. He could have come up with any number of other things to do with his life, but he didn’t have any dreams anymore. Maybe that’s why he was in a rundown apartment on the wrong side of the tracks running with a girl who had a reputation for destroying decent men and smoking who-knows-what. Glory had stuck something in his lipstonight and he had puffed on it till it was dry. Maybe that’s how she got him into bed. He didn’t remember. He didn’t remember much of the last coupla months.
He remembered meeting Glory. She had drug him into some bar and convinced him to buy her drinks. He hadn’t wanted much to do with her, but she gave him attention when nobody else would and he guessed that tonight he found out why. It wasn’t at all like everybody makes it look. He felt like the world had been putting on some kind of act his whole life and now the curtain had been torn away and there wasn’t really anything behind it worth mentioning. Maybe the second time. Maybe the third time. Maybe eventually there isn’t any shame in the thing and it starts to mean something.
He looked outside and saw men going around gouging each other’s eyes out and now he could join their ranks. He squared up his twenty years of shoulders and wondered if sheer determination could get him out of the rest of his life unscathed. He wondered if anybody ever actually reached their dreams before real life set in and spoiled everything. He wondered briefly if Glory had ever wanted to be a zookeeper, but he couldn’t stand the thought.
He decided to take a shower. He felt like throwing up or crying or something, but he didn’t. He just washed his hair and let the hot water run over him as if it could wash away all the years that he was caked in. He toweled off and realized he didn’t know what clothes he wanted to put on. Three hours until he had to go to work. Was it worth trying to sleep? He thought about his father. What would he think to see his son like this?
Terrence made a decision, put on one of his nicer shirts and a pair of jeans. He wasn’t going to sleep and he wasn’t going to work and he wasn’t ever going to come back to this piece-of-crap apartment. He locked the door behind him and walked. Moving on. Again. Maybe this time for good. He closed his eyes and thought that there wasn’t a single person in the world who loved him.
