Co-Winky-Dink

This week's writing group topic is "coincidences". 

I walked outta the Kroger with my bags of groceries. In retrospect, I probably should’ve left them in the cart. I had just bought eighty bucks worth of shit that filled about seven bags, plus a ten pound bag of charcoal. I had joked with/scolded the bagger while she put my groceries into the bag, telling her that I wasn’t walking to California and that she didn’t need to put each individual item into its’ own fuckin bag. I only need to get to my car, after all. She smiled the smile of a minimum-wage earner who couldn’t care less as she began cramming as many canned goods into a flimsy little plastic bag as the bag could possibly handle. I understood how she felt. I wouldn’t have given a fuck about me or my stupid cans of whatever I bought either if I was her.

The bag with all the cans in it was beginning to weaken as I reached my station wagon. Plus, the bag of charcoal was slipping out of the back of my armpit and threatened to blop onto the parking lot. That might not’ve been a tragedy but I hurried even faster to avoid looking like the idiot who splattered all his groceries in front of the store. I’m not sure how cool anybody else thought I looked, but I was feeling pretty cool. Dressed in all black with my newest Bathory Tshirt on, the one with the giant white pentagram on it, I was lookin like a bad motherfucker and I didn’t wanna blow my cover by crawling around picking up cans of tomato sauce, etc. I don’t panic, so I know I looked nonchalant as I made it to my Subaru.

I opened the hatchback and gently placed my groceries into the back of the car, though by then my triceps were burning and I realized that maybe I should’ve taken a leak in the store while I was in there. The car smelled somewhat strongly of vanilla with a vague after-smell of cinnamon. My urge to piss had taken over pretty heavily all of a sudden so I didn’t give it much thought, but my car usually smelled like wet dog and empty beer cans. I don’t even really like vanilla all that much. Whatever. God I really had to piss all of a sudden. I shut the far back door of my Subaru, walked in a brisk criss-cross pattern along the side of the car, opened the door, and slid in.

Holy Christ! I reached into the passenger seat and grabbed the nearly-empty Gatorade bottle that was laying on the floor. It had a little bit of blue Gatorade in it. I never drink blue unless I’m hard up and somebody gives it to me. It’s always raspberry flavored. Why the fuck raspberry flavored stuff is always blue just boggles my mind. But man, my eyes were turning yellow I had to piss so bad so I let all these thoughts fly out the window. I also neglected to wonder at the presence of a small harness that might fit a cat or a Chihuahua laying next to the plastic bottle as I snatched it up. I fumbled to unscrew the cap with one hand as I unzipped my pants with the other. I stuck my thing in and let it rip.

Goddam… Good thing it was a quart-sized bottle. I felt like I was nearly floating as I relieved myself. As I peed, I looked up and wondered where the hell the steering wheel had gone. And where was my dashboard? I briefly panicked. ‘WHO THE FUCK STOLE MY DASHBOARD AND STEERING WHEEL WHILE I WAS IN THE STORE?’, my brain shouted at itself.

‘Hold on, dude’, my brain reasoned to itself. ‘Let’s finish pissing and we’ll figure it out’. The wide-mouthed bottle was rapidly warming in my hand and I elected to follow the logic that I should solve the Mystery of the Missing Steering Wheel once my bladder had permitted me to. As I thought this, I detected movement out of the left side of my field of vision. An extremely fat white lady in her mid-50s clad in polka-dot scrubs was walking between my car and the SUV next to mine. She was cradling a Pekingese dog in her left arm and from her left hand a grocery bag dangled. It looked as if she had ran in to pick up some sour cream or maybe some cottage cheese. I looked up at the back of the front seat of the car as she opened the driver’s side door and grunted loudly with her effort to climb in. Her frizzy home-perm was the only thing visible from the top of the driver's seat, looking like a crazed woodchuck preparing to strike.

Her dog emitted a blood-curdling bark/howl as the lady’s and my eyes met in the rearview mirror. I was in mid-piss, the Gatorade bottle’s capacity nearly filled. I attempted to stammer an explanation when she shrieked and whipped her head around and saw me overflowing a bottle with pee onto my hand and all over her seats. The Pekingese continued to bellow shrilly. The woman did her best to evacuate her car and she joined her dog in loudly alerting anybody within a mile that there was an intruder, that she was in danger.

I dropped the pee-bottle on the seat, where it upturned and spilled fresh, warm urine into the crotch of my cool-looking black jeans as I opened the door behind the driver’s seat and scurried out. Other patrons turned their heads in alarm at the woman’s screaming. My penis was still protruding from my unzippered jeans as I ran across the parking lot, though it quickly and wisely had shrunk from view as a turtle withdraws its head from what it knows is certain death. I heard shouts of “HEY!” and “I GOT YOUR PICTURE” from concerned store-goers as I bolted around the side of the store and hopped over the fence into somebody’s back yard.

An hour later, after I had changed clothes and returned on my bicycle to find my car parked where I had left it a few spaces down from the lady who had run out of sour cream, I chucked my bike in the back of my car and drove to a Burger King. I was starving and really had my heart set on a burger and all my food was at some fat broad's house getting fed to Toto or whatever-its-name was.