4 Minutes

1

At 7:04pm on a Tuesday night, Randolph Carter, Randy to his friends, was sitting on his couch contemplating his next move. Randy was an average man of average height and average weight with a head of average length brown hair that sat atop a head of average size and shape which bore the most average face that ever existed. He lived in a tidy one-bedroom apartment a couple of blocks from the beach on the east coast of Florida and enjoyed the nights when the surf was high and the sound of the waves made it to his bedroom window. He was of an even temperament, rarely given to outbursts whether happy, sad, angry, or any other feeling on the spectrum of human emotion, and was not particularly fond of risk taking, thrill seeking, or anything that posed a possible threat to his physical, mental, or financial well-being. He rarely drank to excess, and somewhat less rarely indulged in an occasional toke on a joint or a special brownie. 

Randy worked in an office in Orlando and made a nice living. He made sound financial decisions, making regular deposits in both a savings and a checking account and kept a 401k that he rolled over from his last job six years ago. He also started an S&P 500 index fund after Warren Buffet won his bet against the hedge funders at the end of 2017. 

His financial stability allowed him to take a two week vacation every year, never anything lavish, but never skimping on the little things either. His palate was refined, though not extravagant. He could enjoy a meatball sandwich just as well as he could a fresh-caught lobster dinner and was just as likely to listen to classic rock as he was classical music. He was partial to well-written, well-acted, and well-directed Oscar-caliber films, but was also a sucker for cheesy 80's comedies. His tastes were eclectic, and he believed that in all genres of art, even ones that might not appeal to many, one can find exemplary samples that justify that genre's existence.

Randy's apartment suited him to a tee. It was smartly furnished with a sectional couch and a matching chair and Ottoman and modestly decorated with inexpensive prints of the French impressionist masters. His bookshelves held a vast array of literature spanning the history of the written word from Plato's Republic to the latest Stephen King novel, and he often proudly pointed out that he had read every last word of all of them. In the northeast corner of his living room, Randy kept a neat, orderly work station featuring a lap-top computer, a laser printer, and a set of speakers, all running to a 60-inch high-definition television that allowed him to see every detail of the New York Mets games he watched during the summer months. 

The kitchen was well organized, well stocked, and well used. Randy preferred to cook his meals himself, having been employed in his first three years in Florida at The Bluefin, a popular seafood restaurant, taking full advantage of the opportunity to hone his culinary skills to a sharp point. He made sure his freezer was always stocked with homemade beef and chicken stock, and he made bi-weekly trips to the local butcher and produce market for fresh meats and vegetables. He rarely went out to eat or ordered take out, believing that he could make anything he wanted, and he could make it better than most restaurants could. Conversely, most Tuesdays he could be found at the local Latin eating establishment indulging in the relatively recent tradition that associates a certain delightful Mexican treat with that particular day of the week.

His bedroom was comfortable, with a memory foam bed flanked by two nightstands with drawers holding myriad odds and ends too numerous to list here and a small dresser on the opposite side of the room containing his vast collection of t-shirts. The walls were more sparsely adorned than the ones in the living room, but the art hanging on them was far more personal to him, having been gifts from his artist friends given to him over the years. In his closet hung a variety of work-appropriate clothes, a suit for weddings, a tuxedo he had yet to wear, and several sports jerseys representing several teams from several sports, and on the shelf above, he kept an assortment of knick-knacks he had accumulated in the various places he had visited. The bedroom was where Randy went when he needed a reminder of how fortunate he was to have the quality of life that he did and the quality of friends he had.

The bathroom was small and utilitarian with a medicine cabinet above the sink, the shower a few feet away, and the commode between the two. All of the fixtures in the bathroom were white, and he kept the color scheme going with his hand towels and ivory in the soap dish. He kept the room he liked to refer to as “the office” impeccably clean, and right now, at 7:04pm on a Tuesday night, with the time to make his decision dwindling away, this was the room that weighed heavily on his mind.

                       2

At first glance, Randolph Carter would appear to be an ordinary, everyday person with a good-natured personality. People who met him in social situations found him charming and witty and considered him excellent company, but they rarely got a glimpse of who Randolph Carter truly is. If someone who had just met Randy happened upon one of his closer acquaintances and mentioned his name, he was sure to hear a few stories that would pique his interest in a second, more in-depth encounter in the future. They inevitably find out the single most interesting thing about him. Inside Randolph Carter’s average-sized head resided a staggering intellect.

Early on, it was evident that Randy was special. At four months, he could recognize “mama,” at one year old, he could clearly identify and request specific items, and at eighteen months, he was beginning to link words together into rudimentary sentences. By the time he was two, he had the vocabulary of a six-year old. At the age of eight, he read the encyclopedia Britannica. He sped through grades K-12, and graduated high school at age fourteen. He was then shuffled off to the MIT physics department where he maintained a perfect grade point average as an undergraduate student and started working on his masters. Then, three weeks into the first semester of his PhD, on his eighteenth birthday, he abruptly left school, returned to his parents’ house to pack up his belongings, and drove to Florida where he began looking for work. 

Fifteen years later, he doesn’t talk much about his past, preferring to avoid topics like his childhood and college days, but people who know him well, and those are a scant few, are allowed occasional glimpses of what lies behind those average brown eyes, inside that incredible mind. One of the easiest ways to catch one of those glimpses is to come over to that little apartment near the beach on a weeknight right around 7pm and watch Jeopardy! with him, and at 7:04pm on this Tuesday night, as the first commercial break was approaching, Randy Carter really had to pee.

                                                                       3

Normally, the need to take a whiz wouldn’t pose a problem because there is a solid four minutes between the first commercial break and the resumption of gameplay, two minutes for commercials and two for the contestant interviews, which Randy didn’t much care for unless there was an attractive young lady competing, but tonight was different. 

Being a Tuesday, he had a hankering for some tacos. He had to stay late at work that evening and couldn’t sit Charro’s bar to eat andl make it home in time to catch the beginning of the show, so he decided to call in an order and pick it up on the way home. He arrived home with enough time to transfer his tacos onto a plate, sit down on the couch, and eat his meal while watching David Muir tell him all the horrible things that had happened that day on the ABC news. Randy was finishing his last taco as the opening sequence began, and as Alex came walking out on the stage to greet the audience, he pushed his plate away, and with a satisfied belch, sat back to enjoy the beginning of Jeopardy!

A few minutes later, glancing at the used plate sitting in front of him, he cursed himself, knowing that he couldn’t leave that plate sitting there in his tidy little apartment for the duration of the show. That just wouldn’t do. He would have to take care of it before heading to the bathroom to relieve the pressure on his bladder that was increasing with every passing moment, but by his reckoning, he still had plenty of time to wash the dish, use the lavatory, and make it back in time for the conclusion of the first round.

With only four clues now remaining until half the board was gone, the point at which play pauses for the first round of advertisements, Randy reached to his left for his cup of water to wash away the last lingering effects of the hot sauce he had applied to the tacos, and was dismayed to find it almost empty. Draining the cup, he amended his plan to include a stop by the fridge on the way to the latrine for a refill when he remembered that his Brita water pitcher was almost as empty as his cup. He would definitely have to fill it after he washed the dish. “No worries,” he thought. “I’ll still have plenty of time.”

All these thoughts of filling pitchers and washing dishes and the mental image of water running out of the faucet had an unfortunate effect on Randy. The need to urinate took on an immediate and sudden urgency. He wondered if he would even make it to the commercial break with three clues remaining until the stoppage of play, and if one was a Daily Double, that would increase the time before he could make it to the bathroom by at least another fifteen seconds. Randy began to squirm in his seat.

The last three clues chosen were in the category Baseball Stadiums, a category that Randy particularly enjoyed partly because of his love of the game and partly because Jeopardy! contestants are notorious for performing poorly in sports categories, and he found it amusing. His interest in the subject matter helped ease the discomfort he was experiencing below the belt momentarily, and he had no problem identifying Atlanta Fulton County Stadium and Coors Field as the correct responses to the first two clues. The last clue was the sole Daily Double of the first round. “All of it,” he said aloud to Alex when he asked for a wager. “$100,” said the pastry chef. Randy immediately knew the answer was Dodger Stadium. The pastry chef did not. 

 4

Before the words, “What is Yankee Stadium?” had the time to leave the pastry chef’s lips, Randy was on his feet with his cup in his left hand and the plate in his right. He started feeling confident in his ability not only to wash the dish and fill his cup, but maybe even prepare himself a bowl of ice cream for the next segment before heading to the loo. He could serve up a few scoops of the Publix Bear Claw he had in the freezer, set it on the counter while he went to do his business, and by the time he came back, it would already have begun to melt around the outside edges where it was exposed to the air, creating the silky-smooth, chocolatey goodness that he considered the best part. He might even let it sit for a few minutes just so it would melt a little more. That’s what he woul……..”OWWWWWW!”

CRASH!!!

The plan fell apart immediately. 

Randy was distracted, as he sometimes is, by premium frozen desserts, and in his haste, he took the left turn into the kitchen a little tight. He stubbed the holy hell out of the last two toes of his left foot on the leg of the chair and crumbled to the floor, trailing obscenities behind him the entire way down. The pain was immediate and excruciating. His first thought was, “I don’t want to look at my toes. They must be smashed to pieces.” His second thought was, “Jeopardy!”

The second thought cleared his head a little. After a few seconds, he took a reluctant look down, and, relieved to see that all of his piggies were still intact, he was encouraged to make an effort to regain his feet. He took a few painful, limping steps around his apartment and as he turned to face his kitchen, the pain in his toes suddenly disappeared. It was replaced by a feeling of dismay as the result of the crash which had barely registered in his ears unfolded before his eyes. 

The good news was that he no longer needed to wash the dish. The other good news was that he had made a quick recovery from the fall, he had his wits about him, and he was wearing flip flops. With his feet protected from the broken shards of ceramic scattered across the tiles, he shuffled across the kitchen, careful not to put any air between his soles and the floor. If something were to embed itself in the bottom of his footwear, it could become dislodged elsewhere in his home, becoming a danger to his well-being. He shuffled to the kitchen closet to grab the broom and dustpan and began thoroughly sweeping the floor, being careful to get under the cabinets and in the corners where the sharp little bits hide. 

Now, for the first time since he hit the floor, Jeopardy! popped into Randy’s head, and he began to think about how much time his ungainliness had cost him. Clearly, ice cream was out of the question at this point. He had no time for disappointment, though, and did a few calculations, figuring he had lost about a minute and fifteen seconds. “Not too bad,” he said to his freshly swept kitchen floor, and reached for his cup. “Shit.”

5

Randy had a vague recollection of hearing the plastic tumbler tumble across the tile ahead of him, but he couldn’t say for sure if it had passed to the right or the left of the island separating the kitchen from the living room. He paused for a moment to heave an exasperated sigh, then began scanning the floor in the kitchen, working his way from the stove to the refrigerator with no success. Moving around the island, being careful to give the corner a wide berth lest he smash his toes again, he continued looking around for his preferred drinking vessel to no avail when his original reason for getting off the couch once again shot to the forefront of his most pressing affairs.

And pressing it was…against the walls of his painfully distended bladder. He sped down the short hall to the privy, and, with the skill of one who had done this exact thing several times a day his entire life, he let forth a mighty stream of water strong enough to blow up the balloon sitting atop a clown’s head at the carnival. The relief was immediate and overwhelming. He gave a long groan of pleasure as the pressure in his nether region lessened and lessened. It seemed to go on forever, and he became relaxed as the urgency washed away into the porcelain bowl. 

As time passed by, he became increasingly aware that time was passing by. A lot of time, and he was still going strong with no signs of slowing. He felt that he was fast approaching the three minute mark with probably another ten seconds before he even got to the shake. The handwashing would have to be perfunctory at best, and he was beginning to wonder about that water refill too. 

Finally, he squeezed the last drop, put away the equipment, washed, and began to make his way back to the living room when he caught something out of the corner of his eye. Veering off course, he noticed something green behind the broom he had so recently put back in the utility closet. It was the cup. Unnoticed in his eagerness to put things back in order, he had blindly pushed the cup almost completely out of sight. He grabbed the cup and grunted in disgust at the dust sprinkled over its entirety. As he crossed to the sink to wash it, he could hear the pastry chef prating mindlessly about how she had hiked the Appalachian trail between her sophomore and junior year of high school, and he knew he had no more than twenty seconds before play resumed. 

He washed the cup as best he could, opened the refrigerator door, grabbed the water pitcher, and poured himself the last of the icy refreshment contained within. He removed the pitcher’s lid to refill it, and opened the faucet, feeling each second pass in excruciating slow motion as Alex moved on to the champ, asking about the time he met Jay Leno at a car show in San Fransisco. Randy replaced the lid as soon as the pitcher was full and nearly threw it back into the fridge before grabbing his cup, sidestepping the island, and settling back into his seat on the couch as the pastry chef made her next selection.

6

The tax lawyer from Wisconsin won, finishing with $24,201 for a three-day total of $72,401, and Randy fixed himself a heaping bowl of ice cream after the game.