The Curse of Bulls and Spiders

When the spider crawled out of the front vent of my car, that’s when I knew I was cursed. A half an hour before that I would have said there was no such thing as a curse, but, as a man of science and reason, I was humble enough to let new inputs react with the stodgy old synapses in my brain and produce new beliefs. I was cursed.

The spider was small and unthreatening by any objective standard, but this was a spider we were talking about. Objective standards didn’t apply. If it crawled its hairy little legs across the dashboard and onto the steering column and then dropped itself onto my lap, I would have been shattering in some indefinable way that I can’t justify or conceive of consciously. It’s gross. It’s wrong. It’s unnatural. First, I tried to slide my book across the dashboard and squish it, but it was a hardcover, maybe four hundred pages, and all that I achieved was to wedge the book between the black matte of the dashboard and the clear glass of the windshield. Now the spider had a hiding place. I had strengthened its position in our war of wits.

No other poking device presented itself, so I searched my mind for other implements with which to defeat my foe. Why I thought to take off my belt and whip it, buckle first, at the windshield, I couldn’t tell you. Now the jingle for Safelite filled my head, like military bands in days of yore.

Did I mention I was actively driving during this series of very wise choices? And that breaking a windshield with the whip of a belt is not conducive to driving? And that curbs, when presented with properly inflated tires at high enough speeds, prove themselves quite immovable? I recall this as I put on my spare tire, in the loose gravel beside US 24 in Colorado Springs. A curious prairie dog watches my progress from a nearby field. He knows nothing of curses. When it’s a warm day he suns himself. When he sees a hawk, he dives back into his hole. It’s a simple life that I admire, with my blackened hands working a tire iron. Neither of us has AAA, but he is less affected. Asshole.

I am a good person. Just ask me, amirite? But for real. It’s not that I am built with an especially firm and hearty moral character, but more that I fear consequences. Even divorced from the legal system, I doubt that I would murder or anything else quite so ostentatiously evil. But if I thought I could get away with it, I’d lie and cheat and steal and drive too fast and eat cheeseburgers for breakfast and pee in my neighbor’s bushes. I’m just afraid that my neighbor will come out mid-stream and start yelling at me, while I try to pinch the pee off and fail at least a little and dribble something warm into my jeans. Fear of the rattlesnake keeps me on the hiking trail.

Sometimes during the workday, I run out to the King Soopers down the road to grab a few things that we need for the house. We were out of dryer sheets, B-vitamins, paper towels, cilantro and a handful of other odds and ends. I collected the items throughout the store, accumulating half an apple pie, a Red Bull and some French onion dip somehow in the process and then found myself at the self-checkout. Plastic bags are illegal in Colorado, to my never-ending frustration, so I brought in my reusable bags like a good environmentalist and set them in the bagging area. Each one I set down caused an alert noise on the checkout screen and a pop-up window that asked if I had placed a bag in the bagging area. Each time I needed to select “yes.” Their camera system was good enough to notice if I held a can of corn too close to the bagging area before scanning it, but God forbid it saw me set down a bag. I grumbled to myself as I went through the process of scanning and bagging, cursing the useless paper bags that necessitated my floppy blue reusables and the failures on the scanner to recognize the barcodes as I passed them over the laser. I used the hand-scanner on the paper towels and needed to get them out of the way, so I set them up in the child-seat area of the cart.

The Red Bull was in the child seat and was now obscured from the camera and God and the teenager on duty by the bulk of the paper towels. It started as an accident, but that quickly turned into a little tickle of justice in the back of my mind. Didn’t the grocery store owe me a Red Bull for all of this? They of the worthless paper bags and the surly teenagers who don’t even ask if they can help you, and the expectation of my free labor every time I check out? Is a five-dollar energy beverage really too much to ask? It wouldn’t balance the scales entirely, but it felt like my right. It wasn’t theft as much as redistribution from the wicked to the good.

I finished scanning and “forgot” the Red Bull. I followed the process to pay for my lighter-than-expected order, certain the surly teen would appear to remind me of my oversight. “Oh no!” I would huff. “I can’t believe I missed that. Let me rectify that immediately!” I would announce my goodness to the store with the pious voice of a country preacher.

But no one came. I put my full reusable bags in the cart and started to wheel my way to the theft sensors at the perimeter of the store. There was a security guard in full uniform -- with a gun for some reason beyond my ken – manning the door. Never in my life had I walked past an armed officer of the law while knowing that I deserved their wrath. I deserved for the sensors to go off and to be tackled to the ground and threatened with annihilation, but none of it happened. I rolled out with my spoils like any other day. No one followed me to my car or whispered excitedly while surreptitiously pointing me out to a person in authority. I was triumphant, but invisible. I had done wrong, but in a way that caused no reaction and could have been easily explained without consequence. It was disappointingly anticlimactic. I felt like lukewarm soup, on the edge between becoming trash and getting consumed begrudgingly.

The goddamn Red Bull exploded.

As I picked it up, it got slit by some dormant bit of jaggedness waiting for an outlet for its violence. The spray hit my shirt and then started to go in my trunk when I turned the can away. The bright idea to pop the tab and chug it before the whole thing emptied proved ineffective, as popping the tab only made the flow through the slit faster. I put my mouth to the slit, slurping the medicinal-tasting liquid like it was a water fountain in an elementary school. It ran down my beard and some shot into my eye. Finally, I set it on the ground to spurt its last while I loaded the rest of my groceries into the car.

The idea that I was experiencing the first fits of a curse occurred to me in the moment, but the corollary that the punishment already fit the crime gave me an undue confidence. I tried to steal a Red Bull and was then assaulted by same. The scales were in balance. The old lady died and the baby was born, like the radio so often sang in the 90’s.

Then the spider appeared and my tire exploded against the curb and now we’re all caught up. I’m cursed.

Communing with the prairie dog and the tire iron and the lug nuts gave me time for denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, and then some more time to circle back around to bargaining. The solution was so clear and so easy: pay King Soopers for their Red Bull. My first thought was to buy one at the nearby Walgreens, shove it in the waistband of my pants and then sneak it into place in the King Soopers, but I realized that sneaking merchandise into a store might be some mirror universe version of a crime, and I didn’t want to compound my situation. I decided on simplicity: go back inside, limping into the parking lot on my spare tire and walking to the refrigerated section with the sticky smell of taurine on my bespoiled shirt, and buy a new drink. The kicker was that this time, instead of scanning the drink zero times I would scan it twice, causing me to pay double for it, thus indirectly paying for the first one.

On the way in I averted my eyes from the security guard. It made me look suspicious, I have no doubt, but the alternative was for my heart to explode out of my chest and shoot sticky blood all over his tidy uniform, so I made that trade. I couldn’t find the exact size and type of Red Bull that I had stolen, but I saw that the sugar free version was the same price, so I figured that would cover the moral price tag. There was a short line for the self-checkout, but I found myself fittingly back at the same register soon enough. A different person was working the self-checkout area now. She was older and gave off the glow of an aging Disney princess winning at life outside the enchanted forest. Her smile shot joyful shrapnel in all directions. It felt like she really saw me as a human with a soul, which meant that she also saw me in the less grand way wherein my actions were visible to her. I was a wreck of nervousness, much worse than my first brush with crime.

I scanned the Red Bull, waited a moment and then scanned it again. The light above the register began flashing and a cheery voice emitted from the screen. “Someone will be with you shortly.” I did not want someone to be with me shortly, or ever for that matter. Fleeing felt appropriate, but before I could tell my legs, the princess was there beside me. She scanned her badge on the screen and it brought up an administrator menu. She selected a video playback option and watched me scan the same item twice. She looked at it in my hand, just the one item, and then looked in the bagging area to verify that there wasn’t a second item anywhere.

“Sir, it looks like you made a little whoopsie and scanned that twice,” she chirped. Her fingers flew through a series of clicks on the touchscreen. “There you go,” she said. “I removed the extra item.” She began to step away.

“No!” I said, too loud.

She cocked her head, curious.

“Excuse me, sir?” she asked, really wanting to understand, meaning every word and tone that escaped her. Caring, bright.

“I’m sorry, thank you,” I stammered and she stepped away.

I looked around, expecting everyone to be watching me, but no one was. Not even the uniformed man with the gun hunting for me at the front of the story seemed piqued in any way.

Not knowing what to do, I scanned the drink again and, sure enough, the light began flashing.

“For fuck’s sake” I whispered under my breath, not wanting the princess to hear my vulgarity. I had no way to explain. No one was as stupid as I must have looked in that moment.

She scanned her badge again and viewed the video again. The fingers did their practiced dance, but this time there was something new on the screen. Everything was cleared, as if starting a new session on the scanner.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with this thing,” she lied, generously. “I went ahead and cleared it. You know what? I’m gonna ask you to just go right ahead and take that home for free to make up for the inconvenience. I’m so sorry you had to deal with this silly machine.”

I couldn’t speak. I walked away holding the evidence, lugging my burden past the guard and through the sensors. I was stricken, frightened, cursed beyond measure.

Now I sit, on the raised median by the traffic light at the exit of the plaza, holding out the light-blue, sugar-free Red Bull to every car that passes. I pan-handle in reverse, begging to be freed of my indecency. A spider crawls up the curb near my outstretched leg and I welcome it.