Looking
My boyfriend Dude and I are living together in a small, messy apartment. The TV is on, lots of magazines laying around. Commercials of movie previews are all that blares from the tube. Some seem interesting - one film is about an Asian man and his dog, how they help each other through life and all their poignant, amusing experiences. For some reason, we decide to see the movie at the Mann cinema in my hometown. We buy our tickets for "A Man with a Dog." I decide to get some popcorn while my boyfriend waits impatiently. I already have a soda, but I want another one fiendishly, so I order a large cherry cola and popcorn. Dude asks if I want "hotmelt" butter. He says that it is actually eggs. I say yes and he pours buttery chunks on the popcorn. I pay for it and he tells me, "I'm outta here," seemingly disgusted by my eating habits.
The lobby is empty. I start walking around, tripping on my pant legs, and I worry that I am missing the movie. My hands are full with a jacket, popcorn and two sodas. I begin to enter theaters, but not one is showing the film I paid to see. Perplexed, I walk along the hallways, the walls of which are screens for projected experimental videos. One is a circular projection of a woman discussing the notion of scissors with herself. I continue with no luck, so I ascend a flight of red velvet stairs to find more unfruitful theater doors, as well as a fancy shindig for senior citizens that extends out onto a lavishly decorated roof; its centerpiece is a large olympic pool filled with senior citizens wearing spandex swimsuits and bathing caps.
More than slightly curious, I see a butler suffering from severe ennui. I try to get some information out of him, but he does not seem prone to conversation at the moment so I ask him where theater 5 is located. As he brushes a mud-colored lint ball from his feathered coif, he tells me that it is past the swimming pool. All of the older people look in my direction and wave to me, inviting me to take a dip before I go on my way. Feeling very dehydrated and scummy, I decide to accept their generous offer and, at first, find the pool very refreshing. However, there are so many senior citizens in the pool, I can barely swim. I bump into them, kicking and flapping to no avail. I try to come up for air, to get out of the pool, but three frail older men in speedos and yellow bathing caps scold me and push my head back underwater. I push on, keeping my eyes open under the chlorinated water, looking at old flesh and rears and hips draped with sagging, brightly-colored spandex.
I make it across without being eaten alive and to my pleasant surprise, I feel like a sock fresh out from the drier. I also feel like the lost sock that is still stuck in the drier since I have no clue as to where I am going. As soon as I begin to walk away, the skies begin to rumble, rain clouds form, and my bladder claws at me. I see a sign for a public rest room on the wall of a condemned building on a deserted street. The building is a ghost mall, a once gleaming striptease for penniless shoppers now a destitute rat motel.
Upon entering the decrepit cube, I see a coworker of mine standing on a ladder. He is fixing some electrical wiring so the top half of his body is cropped by the cheap ceiling boards, but by my unflinching intuition, I can tell this is him. I laugh at him and walk into the rest room which is actually quite clean all things considered.
After I sit down to go to the bathroom, my coworker walks into the rest room. He looks in the mirror, slicks his hair back, and leaves without saying anything to me to avoid an even more awkward situation. After washing my hands, I saunter over the hospital pink tile, laugh at his lower body again, and exit the building.
As the sky's stomach grumbles above me, I walk on a deserted street, heading back to the theater. At this point, I do not care that I have missed the movie, rather I am happy that I had such bizarre experiences that could not compare to the relationship between a man and his dog. I see Dude coming out of the complex looking confused and sallow. He says that I did not miss anything but a crappy movie that should never have been made. He asks me where the bathroom is and suddenly, it is sunny again.
