4.

Marty had been fired in his time from many jobs. But the most absurd reason he ever lost a job was because of a zit. He’d been working as a prep cook in a dinner restaurant kitchen--chopping veggies into salsa, cracking eggs, marinating meats, that sort of thing.

One day during this time--this was probably a decade ago--he was with a friend on a winding mountain road in the Rockies. They were tripping acid, tripping hard--four hits apiece, and strong hits at that. They roamed around the summer woods till (as far as Marty could recall) they got an irrational fear of either a forest fire or bears. Marty sometimes thought it had been a fire--they saw flickers here and there on the horizon under the brightest stars he’d ever seen--but then as he remembered it at other times they had been certain a black bear was tracking them. In any case their fear got them back to the car, and Marty’s friend drove them down the winding road, trying to get back to I-70. On their ride down his friend (Paul) grew from being extremely careful because of driving on so much acid to being completely overconfident and wild because of driving on so much acid. The car slid around turns and cut away just in time from tumbling down mountains. Marty sat awed into silence by his complete terror. Suddenly Paul reached across him and hit the door handle and Marty’s unlocked door swung wide open. He was wearing his seatbelt but now he stared down a steep forested slope--completely exposed--that tumbled incomprehensible distances straight down. Paul laughed and looked at him, expecting him to move and scream. He didn’t. For the first time in his life Marty had the body of a paralyzed man. He could not so much as part his lips.

It was the Fourth of July weekend and once they were back in Denver they came up to a roadside checkpoint. The cops were checking for drunk drivers. Marty told him again and again--“Just go through, go on through.” Paul grew mortified as they drew up closer to the cops. Marty wanted to explain that these things were a scam, and they didn’t test anyone for being drunk or on drugs. It was just a scare tactic--they went after any cars that turned around when they saw the roadside check, and let everyone else on by without a problem. But he couldn’t quite get the full explanation out, and kept repeating, “Just go on through,” while Paul trembled and swore. Finally Paul reached into his coat pocket where he had five hits of acid left over, and swallowed them all. He suddenly declared that he’d never go to prison now, not unless they searched his stomach. By the time they drew up to the roadside checkpoint his skin was blotchy and he could hardly see a thing that was really there. But the cop abstractedly shined a light in Paul’s face and waved him past, at which point he hit the gas pretty damn hard. Too hard. Marty looked back. The cops weren’t following.

Now Paul sped on down the street, a wild man. They found themselves on side streets as Paul gazed about on all sides, certain the Swat Team was right on their tail. When he slammed on the brakes at a stop sign (which halts seemed to be happening at random), Marty promptly opened up the door and jumped out. He jogged away from the car and never looked back. It took him three hours to walk home from there, once he figured out where in hell in the city he was.

But the next day he had the biggest zit he’d ever seen on the side of his nose--it was a massive thing, with enough pus to weigh at least a gram. He popped it and in a loud splat a thousand tiny balls of pus poured out. He was horrified. It was the nastiest thing he’d ever seen. It couldn’t have been worse to see a maggot come out, as he dreaded these days with his fear of bot flies.

When he showed up to work he was fired for being unsanitary. Basically it was that zit. You could still see little balls of pus in the cavity, and the flesh was red and swollen. The cavity the zit had made when he’d popped it was hardly smaller than his nostrils.

There he was--fired for a zit. They called it a violation of sanitary practices. Because he’d been irresponsible enough to grow a massive zit on himself. They say you look back on stuff like that and laugh, but whenever he thought of it, he felt bitter. These days the scar from that zit was still visible.