Читать книгу Attention. Deficit. Disorder. - Brad Listi - Страница 27

In mid-May, I finally made my exit from Fatty Jay’s. After much deliberation, I decided to ditch Boulder and go traveling for a spell. The timing seemed right for an adventure. I figured I would willfully disorient myself in hopes that it might help me to discover some kind of valuable new perspective.

A few weeks earlier, I’d purchased a ticket to Cancún, where I would be attending the wedding of my good friends A.B. and Jenny. They were getting hitched on the beach in Playa del Carmen, a picturesque village on the Mayan Riviera.

A.B. was four years older than I was, a friend I’d made during college, and he had asked me to be a groomsman. Naturally, I’d accepted.

Cancún, I had decided, seemed like a logical starting point for my wanderings. After the wedding, I planned to fly to Havana, Cuba.

After that, I didn’t know what I was going to do.

It was up in the air.

My mentor at Fatty Jay’s was a guy named Jim Hogan. Hogan was the owner and general manager. He was a large man in his midforties, twice divorced, misogynistic, and bitter. He had a potbelly and a mullet. He didn’t flinch when I told him I was quitting. He was used to this kind of thing. The pizza business tends to see a lot of turnover.

Hogan knew all about my recent travails, all about Amanda and the funeral and the aborted child. I’d told him the whole story one night after closing up shop. We were in the walk-in freezer at 3:00 a.m., shivering and smoking pot. At that point, he was the only person I had confided in.

A few days before my departure, Hogan insisted on taking me out for drinks at the Bust Stop, a strip club at the north end of Boulder, one of his favorite local hangouts. He was adamant about it.

“You need some naked girls in your life,” he reasoned. “You’ve had a shitty run of luck with chicks. No reason for it. No good explanation. Sometimes you just need to go out and say ‘fuck it.’”

One of Hogan’s ex-wives was a stripper. Her stage name was Evangeline. Her real name was Margaret. She had divorced him in 1984. Packed up her things and left, with very little explanation.

In 1989, she died in a boating accident in Tampa Bay.