Tales of Whoa

TALES OF WHOA

LIKE LIKE ZINES

Jimmy and The Sea It was a misunderstanding. That’s how he put it anyway. Jimmy, when nobody else would, made frequent visits to the convalescent home where his grandmama was being held captive. For those of you fools who don’t know what a convalescent home is, it’s a building encased in urine stench, rotting olds and more than a few careless nurses whose only jobs are to keep the living alive, drugged, fed and quiet until death. And the sooner their deaths, the better. They’d then go home with their minimum wage in hand and maybe sit in various chairs and perhaps call up a friend. And I can assure you, it’s people like these who twirl the phone line around their fingers as they ramble on about the most common, mundane issues. Issues that could in all honesty barely be considered issues.

So yeah, Jimmy would visit his grandmama often. You see, the boy didn’t have much else. He was twelve, had a shit job and felt inadequate compared to the other twelve-year-olds on his block: The ones in suits who’d squeeze the juice out of the world, the ones who’d bring home the big bucks, get drunk and have their way with ravishing street whores. But nope, not Jimmy. Our boy Jimmy had holes in his shoes, talked with a stutter and made passionate love only to his left hand on those raving Wednesday nights.

Getting on with the story. It was last November when Jimmy was at the home entertaining his paraplegic grandmama. The Jimmy Show was going on as normal. He was pulling apples from behind her ear and performing an array of those boring, god-forsaken card tricks. It was right in the middle of his CPR act that something unnatural began to stir. The paraplegic bag sat up in her bed and whispered into his ear, “Jimmy! Jimmy, my boy. Take me to the ocean.” He looked into her eyes, those pleading, puppy dog, schoolgirl eyes. Eyes that were just enough to make him feel erect and naughty.

The boy nodded violently, despite his knowing that removing an old from a home could be punishable by death. He shoved her gurney through the doorway and began pushing it through the narrow hallways. With an admirable expression she looked upon her hero’s ear-to-ear smile and his deeply sunken eyes, eyes that shouted out volumes of pure childish joy. As the two raced through the halls, an unacknowledged old lady and her walker took the worst of it.

Her fragile skin and bones were smashed by the gurney as she crossed the hall. The screech of pain she bellowed out while being run down under the rubber wheels never even caught the boy’s attention. He just looked down at his smiling grandmama.

“Look Grandma! Look!” he exclaimed. “We’re making it! We’re really making it!!” The gurney pounded through the front doors and burst into the freedom that had long been denied to Jimmy’s grandmama. The warm light of the sun and the chill of the air graced the old woman’s flesh for the first time in decades.

“Wooooo, Jimmy. It sure is cold out here,” she muttered in delight. He smacked her lightly on the side of the head. “Shut the fuck up, bitch.” Both released a string of tiny cackles.

Grandmama shrieked in delight as they reached the shoreline. Her old and decrepit finger Pointed out to the current. “Jimmy! Look at that!”

He released a long whistle. “It is pretty, Grandma. Mega pretty.”

The boy and his grandmother quickly fell into a silence. She was overtaken by a view she HAD thought she WOULD HAVE never seeN AGAIN and Jimmy, well, he just had nothing to say.

“Jimmy?” she asked, looking up to him.

“Yes, Grandma?”

“Dump me into the water. Why, I tell ya my old body wants to feel nothing more than the ocean’s current.”

He nodded and began wading through the wild current, pushing the gurney ahead of him. When the water hit waist-level, he sat the gurney up and let his grandmama’s tiny body flop into the green sea. He looked on with glee as the current consumed her.

“Woooooooo,” she said in excitement.

Jimmy walked back to the shoreline and kept a good eye on her as the wild ocean swallowed up the tiny woman and vomited her out. His lips moved lightly as he became transfixed on the great pacific. “Grandma. Grandma. Grandma. Grandma. Grandma.” He repeated the name over and over with no stop.

The ocean finally tossed the tiny woman to his feet. She looked up at him from down in the sand with a likewise zoned-out expression. “Jimmy, I love you. Jimmy, I love you. Jimmy, I love you.

Jimmy, I love you. Jimmy, I love you.”

They both repeated their kind statements in unison. Multiple times the ocean pulled her in and spit her out, but no matter where she landed she would repeat those same words in the exact same tone.

“Jimmy, I love you.” If she landed face down she would speak it to the sand. Jimmy continued looking at the exact same spot on the sea, repeating, “Grandma.” Even when the hours passed through the day and into the night and his Grandma stopped speaking, our good brave Jimmy still stood there repeating her name.

Doppel Days I was getting my fifth refill of soda at Panera when Robet finally arrived (yes, Robet, not Robert). Anyways, he arrived looking extremely shaken up as the stench of his disgusting sweat immediately surrounded our vicinity. Daniel pushed up his glasses and we looked at each other, both of us trying to figure out what to make of this ridiculous spectacle of a man.

“What happened?” I asked.

“You’re not going to believe it. You’re totally not-going-to-fucking-believeit.”

“What if we promise to believe you?” Daniel offered.

Robet took my drink and began to aggressively slurp up my soda from the straw. After he finished, I gazed at him in horror as I saw a line of saliva stretch from between his lips and my straw as he put the cup down.

“I saw my doppelganger,” he declared. “There I was, driving my truck to meet you guys when I hit a red light. And for some reason, I just looked to my left. Ya know, to see who was beside me. And it was a truck that was the same as mine.

“I thought it was pretty cool at first. But then I quickly noticed that the truck looked TOO MUCH like mine, from the faded red to having the same scratches and stuff. It even had the same side-dent and all the same stickers as mine. And when my eyes rolled up the driver, I just totally fucking freaked out inside. It was ME. I was staring at my fucking self. He was wearing the same shirt and hat and everything.”

Daniel laughed. “Did he see you?”

“I think you mean to ask, ‘Did you see you?’” I said with a smirk.

“Good point,” Daniel replied with a nod, raising his coffee mug towards me.

“It’s not funny,” Robet said. “Yes, he did see me. And from his face, he was freaking out as much as I was. He looked terrified. The light turned green and the car behind him immediately began to honk at our hesitation. He immediately began driving on. I tried to keep up but we got separated by other cars and shit. I pulled over and waited for like six minutes, hoping he would come back and we could figure it out.”

At that point Robet put his hands in his face and began to sob furiously.

“What the fuck is happening?”

Daniel and I were extremely uncomfortable. A grown man weeping in public was pretty embarrassing and need I say, pathetic.

“Stop your crying,” Daniel said. “Geez.”

“This is some fucked up shit,” Robet protested, wiping eyes. “Me! I saw me! Like what the fuck!”

“Okay, first of all, there is no such shit as doppelgangers,” Daniel said.

“Well, okay, I don’t know. But you probably did not see yours.”

“Why do you say that?” I asked.

“Because Robet #2 was wearing the exact same clothes as Robet #1. Driving in the same direction. The only difference between them was that they were driving in different lanes. Seeing your doppelganger is one thing but seeing your doppelganger wearing your exact outfit and driving the same vehicle is impossible. Obviously this was a case of two parallel universes intermingling for some reason. In that universe, everything was the same except that Robet #2 was driving on the right.”

“Fucking aye,” Robet exclaimed. “That makes total sense! But why do I have to be Robet #2?”

Daniel shrugged in satisfaction and took a sip of his coffee.

A middle-aged woman approached our table. “Excuse me. I heard what you just said. ‘Effing aye.’ My little Jimmy just heard that. Keep the language clean in a public place, yeah?”

Daniel put down his cup, obviously annoyed, and screamed at her to get fucked.

After we got banned from Panera, we started hanging out at the local Coffee Bean, which didn’t offer free refills on anything.

Burn Yesterday I found out that the woman I had been secretly in love with for the past six years was in love with a latino man named Armando. The girl isn’t American but for the sake anonymity, I’ll call her Pam from Florida. I saw that they had been writing to each other publicly on Twitter about how much they wanted to see each other again, obviously being two lovers separated by thousands of miles of small towns and aimless lives. As I read each other their messages, my heart sank lower and lower into despair.

You know when it feels like the universe is just twisting a knife into your heart deeper and deeper? That’s what I felt like the next day, just a horrible aching in the chest. I don’t know whether it was heartbreak or the spicy dinner I had at Chili Ned’s the night before. And to top it off, I looked awful when I had looked into the mirror that morning. They say men get better looking as they age but I felt like every month I was falling apart more and more.

I went back to Chili Ned’s around lunchtime to give Ned a piece of my mind about my heartburn. After I gave him a few choice words, he broke down in tears and threatened to drown himself to death by waterboarding himself into his own pot of chili. His waiter then told me that Ned’s wife had just left him an hour prior via text message. Apparently she had met someone else.

I consoled Ned and told him suicide was too risky. What if he came back as a ghost with the ability to watch his wife make love to her new suitor whenever he pleased? His misery would be ten times fold and of course, he wouldn’t be able to kill himself twice. Ned shot back that he would never bother checking up on his wife. It would destroy him, first of all. And secondly, he said as a ghost, he would also likely have the ability to explore the universe.

He then banned me from his restaurant for two weeks on the grounds of causing a ruckus, which was bad news for me because I hadn’t had lunch yet.

When I am most hungry, I can’t ever decide where to eat. How could I eat? I was depressed. I loved Pam despite knowing it would never work out between us. We were too different and I would have been miserable living in Florida. I never understood how Florida was the glorious goal in Midnight Cowboy. I was sure Miami was a fun place but I doubted it could have erased one’s troubles. If anything, a drive anywhere within one hundred miles of the spoiled, screaming children of Disney World would no doubt have caused my anxiety attacks to finally do me in once and for all.

My heart immediately started to race. Yep, it was my anxiety. Even just thinking about it could make it act up. I would have had another public breakdown right then and there if Ned hadn’t suddenly found me. He ecstatically told me that his wife had changed her mind and invited me to celebrate with him at his favorite bar, The Cove. Though I knew his marriage would still ultimately be doomed, I agreed to go for a couple beers. When we arrived at the bar, the bartender introduced himself as Armando and offered us a drink. This day could not get any worse. I angrily smashed a glass onto the floor and told Ned about how Armando had seduced the woman I loved.

Obviously understanding my predicament, he helped me tear apart the bar.

Armando’s other regulars tried to stop us but Chili Ned and I fought them off back-to-back, now brothers in heartbreak.

As we rode home that night in the back of the police car, Ned suddenly asked me if Armando the bartender was the same Armando who I had sought vengeance against. I really didn’t know what to say. Ned was now up against a giant lawsuit because of me, one that would no doubt put him out of business. Though in the end, it served him right. I was still having horrible heartburn at that point and I knew for a fact that I had specified for my chili to be served mild.

Credits “Jimmy and the Sea” by Michael Roque (wordsfromfloor4.tumblr.com) “Doppel Days” and “Burn” by Vince Roque (REWINDTAPES.COM) COVER PHOTO BY VINCE ROQUE PAGES 1 AND 5 Story photos by Pei-Jeane Chen (Pei-Jeane.COM) PAGE 8 story photo photographer unknown, found in Istanbul by Michael Roque Tales of Whoa is a bastard sibling of Like Like, this one other zine out there. likelikezine@gmail.com likelikezine.tumblr.com