Chad Lutz

Automated Tell(h)er

by Chad W. Lutz

She needed thirty-five bucks to remove the boot. That’s it. Thirty-five measly dollars. Jessica ran to me that night holding her face and sobbing. I don’t know what to do, she kept telling me over and over. I don’t know what to do. I did, but I wasn’t going to. I’d already made up my mind.

I’d been living at College Towers Apartments in Kent, Ohio, while studying English as an undergrad. I wasn’t poor, but I wasn’t making much working at an environmental firm washing lab dishes twice a week, either. What money I did have went toward three things: food, booze, and drugs.

Following high school, I’d had a steady penchant for drugs, a lust really, one that mostly stemmed mostly from my parents and society telling me I shouldn’t. Telling me not to do something makes me want to do whatever it is I’ve been told to abstain from all the more. Turning twenty-one earlier in the semester only fueled my chemically adventurous behavior further. Jessica, on the other hand, was dying a very long and pronounced death.

At the age of seven, Jessica was diagnosed with Cystic Fibrosis, which carries a terminal sentence. The world for me at twenty-one was as wide and expansive as a great river valley. For her, it was a narrowing gap made smaller every day she survived. She was majoring in business, and would sometimes come over to my place for dinner on Thursdays after class. Because of her illness, her father, who was actually a great guy but could be a little on the over-protective side, never allowed her stay the night. His big thing was having all of his assets accounted for at the end of the evening whenever it was he decided to go to bed. Both Jessica and her car, which her father owned one way or another, fell directly into that category as Assets No. 1 and No. 2. The jury is still out on which is which.

Jessica and I had been dating over two years the night I lied to her. It was April. The trees were beginning to shake off the frigid Midwest touch of winter and were already showing signs of white and yellow and pink buds popping out of their lushing green pistols. Students and faculty sneezed through hay fever, girls’ outfits shrank, guys’ clothing disappeared. Those graduating or moving on in their careers couldn’t be bothered to even care about that. For everyone else, Jessica and myself included, finals were looming and pressing down on the general student populous like an added layer of gravity.

For people like me, the end of April signals something else: the 420 holiday; something I’d been looking forward to ever since moving out of my parents’ house for the first time that prior fall. Jessica, being vehemently opposed to my drug taking, was never made the wiser.

She came over that Thursday, like any other Thursday, but forgot to get a parking permit from the administrative office downstairs. Management were sticklers about that sort of thing — parking in their shitty, beat up parking lot — and weren’t shy about calling the impound to have vehicles towed. She never needed reminders, and we never had issues.

One night, Jessica forgets, and blissfully walks her way up to the door to bid me hello. She’s dancing around and squealing with glee in her usual, signature way, before we eventually make our way to the balcony for celebratory wine as supper cooks.

We were celebrating ourselves. Not a very admirable milestone, but ourselves nonetheless. Jessica had recently found out I cheated on her the summer before with a girl she’s suspected all along an accusation I continuously and repeatedly lied about. Jessica intercepted text messages and phones calls and emails, and still, I denied everything. I think the main reason I denied everything was because, at that point, this girl, Salma, who Jessica had dubbed, “The Bitch,” she and I hadn’t done anything physical together. In my mind, that was somehow still OK, even though a lot of the things Jessica was intercepting were naked photos of my erections and pictures of Salma’s fingers spreading her pussy, with captions like, “I can’t wait for you to feel how warm and wet I am right now,” followed by another photo of her licking her fingers, face propped in a coy, sexy smile.

The guilt and shame eventually caught up to me, and on a day as random as the Tow Truck Tuesday, I spilled the beans to her in the turnaround of my driveway, while my family idled in their car behind us, waiting for Jessica and me to lead the way to the restaurant for my younger brother’s nineteenth birthday celebration. We never made it to dinner. I never left the driveway. She ended up leaving. I ended up with several well-deserved bruises on my face.

It was on the balcony, a week later, drinking a brand of wine neither of us knew — the smell of grapes and cinnamon and pine nuts rising from our mugs — staring into each other’s eyes as shades of the black eye she’d given me announced our recent troubles like a neat little memento of another time, a signal of what we’d been through; it was right in the middle of this magic moment when the sound of a rusting hydraulic lift echoed across the back parking lot. Curious, we both look over the railing to find a tow truck, and even more so, its sprightly driver hopping from the front passenger tire of Jessica’s silver Pontiac Aztec to the driver side tire with a yellow, metal box in his hand.

A boot.

“Wait!” she yells, as she realizes what’s happening. “Stop!”

The tow truck driver looks up at the balcony and considers the two of us standing there with mugs of wine in our hands. The guy flips a toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other with his tongue and very little interest, and proceeds to initiate the hydraulic lift. He looks right at us as he does it. And even though we’re at a distance, to this day, I’m almost certain he was smiling.

Jessica bolts downstairs. “I have to go!” she shouts. She doesn’t have to, but I know what she means. Moments later the back door of the apartment complex leading to the lobby bursts open and Jessica shoots across the parking lot like she’s been jettisoned from a cannon.

“Stop!” she yells again. “Stop, stop, stop, stop!”

To my complete surprise, the tow truck driver stops. He takes his hand off the boot and turns toward Jessica. Adjusts his belt. What happens next, I’ll never know because of how soft they were speaking and how far the balcony sat from the rear of the parking lot. Five minutes of nodding and grimacing; the tow truck driver rambling on and on and on about what the score was between he and her car. When those five minutes end, Jessica turns, head hung low, and walks toward me on the balcony. Whatever control she’d had over her emotions disappeared the instant we made eye contact.

“Brendan,” she says in a raspy voice, eyes two saline rivers as she looks up, “I need your help.”

“Ok,” I say, ready for just about anything to fall out of her mouth.

“He says he needs thirty-five dollars or he’s going to tow my car.”

I go for my wallet, but she shakes her head.

“No card. He says I need cash.”

“Alright, I’ll just go to the…”

“No,” she says sharply, and by the way her face is twisted I can tell she’s about to lose it…

Any normal boyfriend would have immediately opened their wallet and tossed down the greenbacks without hesitation, especially as lovers of multiple years. But I’d already made up my mind.

The week before I’d put some feelers out for psychedelic mushrooms. 420 was a big deal to me, and seeing as how this was going to be my first 420-proper on my own; no RAs, no parents, no authorities save the dick-lick rent-a-cops that patrolled the apartment complex once every blue moon, I had nothing to worry about and the sky as my only limit. This was it. The culmination of a life pestered by people who didn’t understand the drug culture, who, in turn, didn’t understand me. The feelers came back positive, and I was able to snag a half ounce of mushrooms at an amazing price: eighty-five dollars. You can barely snag a quarter for that price. So, I pounced. The only problem was I had to wait a few days for the order to come through. So, the hookup and I came up with a plan for me to leave my apartment door unlocked and the money in an agreed upon place, and when the order finally came in, the hookup would leave the shrooms in exchange for the money and that would be that.

Hello, Psychedelia.

However, the last three years of my life leading up to Jessica’s run-in with the Tow Truck Man had been marred by not one or two but four trips to jail for drug-related offenses, and a single, not-so-minor incident involving a fire at a college dormitory. My whiteness allowed me to duck and tumble down the cracks allowed for little shits like me to slip through, and so nothing serious ever came of the transgressions. I never once had to carry out a sentence longer than a few days in jail — mostly overnights waiting for the sheriff to approve bail — some court costs and fines, and a handful of hours of community service. In most cases, the sentencing was scrubbed from the record books; however, thanks to a little administrative apathy, and the fact that all of my crimes were committed and tried in different counties, my breaking probation never registered as even a blip on the official radar. To this day, I still owe Wood and Franklin and Portage Counties about thirty days in an orange jumpsuit each. I go to bed with the possibility, and wake with it every morning, that I’ll receive a phone call from a clerk of courts representative asking about case files, or a knock on the door to find police officers with hands on their weapons procedurally asking for me to comply.

The most recent of those crimes, Possession of a Schedule I Narcotic (Marijuana), had been committed and tried just a year and a month beforehand, in March of 2006. Jessica, her parents, my parents, my friends, my neighbors, my neighbors’ neighbors; everyone knew who this big bad Renegade was that kept running into the brick wall called The Law and losing and apparently not giving a single fuck about it. I was barred from hanging out with certain people, but did anyway. I wasn’t allowed a key to my own home. I had my cellphone, which my parents paid for, taken away. My car was taken away. I was allowed to go to class, go to work, and go home, and that was about it. But even those dire restraints couldn’t stop my penchant for drugs, and Jessica became one of the biggest casualties in that futile and ongoing war.

After several hard conversations spanning several equally hard days, Jessica and I agreed that we would stay together, despite the hole I’d dug us into, but on one condition: no more smoking. Even the slightest infraction and she’d walk. The same went for my parents and pretty much everyone but the group of drug dealers I ran around with. I had one chance, and that was it.

Unfortunately, I never cared. When faced with a choice between drugs or people, even those that meant the most to me, I always chose the drugs.

The same eighty-five dollars I had set aside for the felony I was trying to acquire was sitting in the top drawer of my bedroom dresser the night Jessica plead for her car’s life on the grassy lawn below my second-story balcony. Hot, smoky tears clouded up the eyes I always found so beautiful and arresting, and the skin around them, usually so vibrant and full of life, despite her terminal illness, was pulled, puffy, and red, taut from the stress and anxiety.

I thought about nothing but the party I’d spent months planning, the two other friends that had thrown down on the half ounce with me, how disappointed they’d be if the deal didn’t go through, or, at least, how disappointed I thought they’d be if it didn’t. I looked down at Jessica, someone I’d shared such beautiful intimate moments with — nights spent naked and in each other’s arms, watching cartoons and massaging one another; taking her virginity at our shared age of nineteen; helping her remember her medications; encouraging her to work out and develop healthier eating habits — and with a sorry-excuse for a lump clawing its way into my mouth, one that I’d learned to suppress with a youthful, foul-mouthed rage, I somehow managed to tell her, “I don’t have any cash.”

I looked her right in the eye as I said it.

The rest of the story is simple. The Tow Truck Man hoisted the jack, engaged the lift, and towed the Pontiac Aztec to the local impound, where it cost Jessica two hundred and eighty-five dollars to process and reclaim. Tears gushed down her face as we walked the two miles from my apartment to the impound lot, all the while coughing from the walk. Eventually, the tears streaming from her eyes looked less the product of an obvious sadness, but something that looked more automatic, as if that’s the way things always had been for her. The way they no doubt had.

It’s hard to know why people do the things they do. Sometimes we say we love someone, but complain about them day and night, and then trade private, personal information about them with outside parties, information that was sworn to absolute secrecy and sealed with a kiss or round of love making. If faced with the same decision, knowing what I know about myself in situations that require gut reactions, I’d more than likely sell Jessica out all over again. Drugs are easier to understand than people, which is why they’re so appealing. Drugs don’t change their minds on you, don’t yell at you for minor behavioral digressions. They’re easy to love. But, drugs can never love you back.

The relationship only lasted a handful of months following that evening, punctuated by an emotional distance that grew like a canyon between us. Eventually, we took separate paths, instigated by my increased drug use and her health becoming an even greater factor. Like so many other things in life, I couldn’t handle the pressures of adult responsibility, especially toward other people, ones I loved, and fell deeper and deeper down a tiny hole inside myself, like a slick drain pipe, impossible to climb back out of.

Instead of confessing my crime, I stood silently by, chewing on the lump in my throat that, as it turns out, was a huge, steaming pile of guilt. There was no way I could reveal to Jessica I’d lied about not having any money. The wounds from The Bitch were still too fresh. It was because I knew I’d lose her; not later, not in a few days, but right then and there, and forever. It happened anyway; I’m pretty sure I knew that much, too. I was selfish, but I did it anyway, and to this day, Jessica has no idea the extent of which I’d let her down. That’s why I’m writing this, even if it is just a routine exercise in too little too late.

Chad W. Lutz is an herbivore born in Akron, Ohio, in 1986 and raised in the neighboring suburb of Stow. They graduated from Kent State University’s English program in 2008 and attend Mills College in Oakland, California, in pursuit of their MFA in Creative Writing. They also run.