A tollbooth worker on the GW Bridge whiles away his days handing over change and watching the cars and the people in them pass him by. Life, it seems, is doing the same, until this story takes a sharp turn that would make any driver tighten their hold on the wheel.
Fasten your seatbelt,
The Editors
Programming note: We'll see you August 1 after our usual early-summer break.
“Is this what you’re going to do with the rest of your life?” Mustang with the ‘Ayatollah Assahola’ sticker in his rear window asks me.
“God willing sir, God willing,” me and my smile answer back to him.
Collecting tolls is a good, steady job with a future. Meaning the need to drive and charge people for crossing the George Washington Bridge will outlive me for sure. Mustang wanted to insult me, it’s been like this since Moses wore short pants, but worse since the hostage crisis, the gas lines, and price spikes. People don’t see a human in this booth for some reason. I am like a dog chained to a fence who can’t defend itself. The one that you can throw rocks at risk-free. So I choose to eliminate the need for any defense. Now Mr. Mustang is the one with the wounds. He hates, he suffers. That much was clear before he spoke, from the scowl that rolled up and appeared just before his brave, pasted attack on the Ayatollah. Now that he has failed to wound me he feels frustration, he feels shame too. I feel good, better than before he rolled into my life, and I was pretty good then.
One guy gave me a $10 bill for the $1.50 toll, and it was smeared with what I hoped was chocolate. It was not. Man’s inhumanity to man continues unabated. How one must suffer to take the time to feces up a perfectly good $10. Did he do it on the move, or at home? How did he store it before he gifted it to me? Did he catch a glimpse of himself in the bathroom mirror with his pants down, ass out, and maybe for a fleeting instant wonder what his resting mother would think of the once beautiful boy she beamed down on so long ago? Maybe someone hurt him first, with the shit $10, and he is paying it forward. I gave him back not just clean money, but I picked out the very most crisp and clean bills, like what you see on TV, banded in a briefcase and exchanged between ambitious high-end hoods when one offers the other the opportunity to count it and the other hood graciously explains there is no need to count money between gentlemen.
Rage palpitates up here on the GWB, and sometimes it smells. My booth is paradise compared to what’s just outside. Yet many outside degrade or pity me all day long. I sometimes see myself as sibling to those divers submerged in the shark cages, keeping composure as massive sea monsters thrust at their protected world.
The other guys, the Black and Hispanic guys, get called terrible things all day long and it makes them into worse versions of the people who abuse and disrespect them. I made the mistake one time of telling Rufus how to react, and he pushed me right over the bench in the locker room and stormed off, I think to prevent himself from punching me. Lesson learned. The ladies have it worse. All day long they hear shit. Scary stuff. Sometimes. Magdalena started getting heavier last year, I asked her if she was pregnant, like as in ‘congratulations.’ After I apologized she explained that she was binging on Twinkies to become less attractive to the driveby eye rapists.
The gas crisis coincided with another more local crisis, right there in my little shark cage. Constant cramps. Then pus. Then blood. Colitis. At first I could usually get someone to cover for me, while I evacuated the booth and then myself. But it got worse, as untended problems will. In off hours, or at less busy crossings, you can throw up a cone in your lane and run to the can. But not on the GWB. You put a cone up during rush and when you get back it will be like Lord of the Flies right there on the bridge. So diapers it is. “For my mother,” I tell the clerk at Genovese. I’m just thirty-seven so no one wants to believe I need diapers. Which I don’t. The job with me in it needs the diapers. Anywhere else you can go to the can as much as you need. I see at my wife’s place half the office is out front smoking every twenty minutes. If I worked there I could manage my problem differently. Hey, some people can’t even afford diapers. I make enough to live and save some from every check.
She’s fucking. Around. Behind my back. I can live with it. She is more good than bad as far as it affects me. My mother likes her, my wife helps out taking her to doctor appointments and so forth. She listens to me…she does me the courtesy of appearing to listen to me actually. But that’s a form of caring and respect because pretending takes effort. Believe me I know because I spend the day experiencing the opposite. I am called ‘transactional’ by her, and ‘Mr. Glass Half Full,’ said as if it’s a title, or something I should get on my license plate. I know she means it to be a negative, but in 1979 America I choose to take it as a positive. I am surrounded by people less happy than me, even though I have my share of shit. More than my share. Literally. Sometimes. Most of the time.
Here comes a station wagon, full of kids and two pressed up against the back window like they are suctioned to it. Tourists I bet and that means they are going to let the kids roll down that back window and attempt to give me the money. A toll booth on the GW Bridge is like the Statue of Liberty when you stare at corn your whole life. Yep, Indiana. Chicago was much closer, but they chose us instead. That means I have a sacred duty to ensure they didn’t make a mistake. But the kid has arms too short to reach me, so I lean way out with a comical, exaggerated face and gesture stretching to complete a transaction and their memory. I guess they are visiting the Big Apple, gas prices be fucked. The lady in the passenger seat has just a couple wispy hairs so maybe they are running out of her time to do this as a family. I like the idea of a place so simple and happy that they let the kids hand the money over. New York and New Jersey people would never do that, they know that the cars behind them will beep and yell “Move ya fuggin’ joik awfs” while looking right at the kids transacting with me. As is the case now.
Booze helps with the colitis, relaxes my interiors for some reason, puts the stabbing goblins down for a nap. I gotta be careful, drinking on the job can get me fired, but so many of us in and out of the break room smell of booze I don’t know how Mr. Jansen could single out any one of us. “Don’t give him an excuse to stop pretending not to notice,” I say to myself. Timing matters. First thing in the morning, take a shot. Vodka smell dissipates by noon when the goblins return to make my innards outards again. But by then I am on lunch and can get to the can. Pain, pus and blood. Holy fucking trinity - am I gonna make it!? But it’s manageable even with the close calls. The anxiety that you might mess yourself is much less so. The feeling about a situation, I tell my wife, is always the thing. Not the situation itself. Annoys the fuck out of her, and I don’t know why. If I knew why maybe I would know a lot more and she wouldn’t be periodically visited by alien dicks.
I guess I have resigned myself to the possibility that I will die from what festers down below as my doctor warned, because I am dragging around a family history of gut cancer, and also because I will not submit to the ass rape required to check it out. My doctor says not to worry, that I will be unconscious…like that’s better! Drugged and violated. “I will have a say in how I die by deciding what I will not do,” I tell Mercy, my staring-out-the-window wife.
She loves me to the extent she is capable of loving anyone. I don’t take her limitations personally, that’s about her, not me. Fucking around is a way of distancing herself. I transact, she self-obviates. I can’t choose to have my wife stop betraying me, but I can choose how I feel about it. I at least have a wife, and periodic sex, and someone to help with my mother, and be in the apartment so that they don’t find me as a fossilized corpse oozing emulsifications out my holes. Alone.
Ok great. Guy just threw a bunch of change in my face. Hits me in the eye and half of it sailed past me out the window on the other side of the booth. He looks familiar. Maybe I did something to him. I know where I know him from! He waits tables at the restaurant around the corner from our apartment. Going to Manhattan midday? From Secaucus? Assuming he lives near the restaurant? Why not take the tunnel? Well, if taking it out on me stops him from taking it out on a wife that’s ok. I got another eye.
This one poor girl. Stripper in the city, living in Leonia. I say that because “Living it up in Leonia!” would be a stupid bumper sticker for her to have otherwise. It’s kind of stupid anyway. Who cares about Leonia? Or even has an opinion? She can make anything cute though. I choose to believe she is being ironic. She loves a daughter, not just has one. I can see it when she has to bring her into the city. The car seat is set up correctly and everything. The kid is happy, well dressed, fed, and too young to know about the hard choices that keep her that way. The mother used to always pay with a $20 bill. Then she stopped and started paying with fake $20s. I want to believe that she is not reduced to counterfeiting, that someone is passing them to her. So two Fridays ago I decided that today is the day I hand her back a note with her change. “This bill you handed me and the last few are fake. Don’t want you to go to jail.” She mouthed me a ‘thank you,’ without eye-contact, but she wasn’t surprised. So I am not surprised that I don’t see her anymore. If she’s caught she will go to jail and be separated from the beautiful little reason I believe she takes the risk in the first place. Most of the world is fucked. More fucked than me in my booth. I got a diaper but if I’m found out there’s no jail time.
Ok the guy from the restaurant just drove by again. I think. I’m pretty sure it was him, but he barely slowed down and didn’t pay. There are signs all over that say the lanes are monitored by camera with fines and up to a year in jail for blowing through without paying. But the cameras don’t usually work, and even when they do the pictures are so low-quality that convictions are supposedly close to impossible. Wait, I made that point a couple weeks ago in the restaurant and maybe he heard it? It’s a small place, and I was a little drunk. Drunk=loud where my mouth is concerned, and the place is tiny. He looked angry too. Now I am remembering him. He also couldn’t stand composure and peace. Mine specifically. He thought that I was acting superior, when he spilled soup all over me. It was on purpose, he didn’t like me for no then-apparent reason. But what he really hated was my reaction. The lack of it. I told him that it didn’t bother me at all and everyone makes mistakes, and I forgave him, though no apology was tendered. I remember his eyes reducing to small slits, with only the most intense anger escaping out from under his lids. I didn’t register it then, being too used for too long to my peace causing distress for another.
He was angry. The next time he not only slowed down, he paid, and then shot me perfectly in the center of my forehead. Why pay? That’s probably not the first question you have. But it’s the only one I have left. After you die the big questions get cleared up, but not the smaller ones of less consequence. My wife. Former wife. Who cheats. Did it with him. He is in love with her, and he thought her emotional vacancy with him would be replaced with warmth if only I was elsewhere. I am now, and I wish I could have told him that it wouldn’t work. For his sake. And mine. By extension.
So much sadness on that planet. I had a good run and I still say I am doing better than the left behind. I am not worried about my mother; she has just months left to live. Two months to be exact. My brother and his wife are moving her up to Springfield. Too bad. On the other hand, her care was my one worry, my one misfortune that hadn’t been cleared up or made irrelevant by the hole. In my head.
I could always control my reactions, my feelings about things. It was a superpower. But also a curse. Other people were always annoyed by my equanimity. I think now that maybe this is why I had no compatriots or confidants. People can’t trust what they can’t understand. Happiness is a strain of leprosy. What other people felt about me didn’t get to me. Until it did. I am just an observer now, floating like a satellite far above the Earth. Maybe I will be reincarnated like Hindus believe. Until I get it right. But I wouldn’t live differently if I were. If they’re right I guess I will continue forever trapped in birth-to-death cycles. Eternal. Like misery.
-30-
Thomas Behan is a writer from Northern Virginia USA and his work has been or will soon be published in many literary journals including Isele Magazine, Radon Journal, Cinnabar Moth Literary Collections, and The Brussels Review, as well as The George Washington University Press. His literary fiction short story “Symbiosis” was published in Secant Publishing's anthology "Best Stories on the Human Impact of Climate Change," and that story is nominated for the Secant Publishing Prize. His collection of short stories, “Life in the Demilitarized Zone,” has been published by Alien Buddha Press.