Swinton Pentilus

Swinton Pentilus sits at the bar in Brooklyn, where I make drinks and shoot the shit each Sunday through Wednesday night. Yeah, I got the crummy shifts, so fucking what? Anyway, I feel bad for this guy even though he repulses me. If you saw him, you’d know the type. In his short-sleeved, seersucker shirt, the kind of guy who wears khakis with pleats and orders his wife sweaters from L.L. Bean for Christmas. Only I don’t think Swinton has a wife. His face is smooth from drinking too much milk, as if the milk is stuck on his face, paralyzing his features with a gilded fat-boy promise gone awry and stuffed deep into his gut. All that milk in his gut. Plus, this guy orders a Salty Dog. He disgusts me.

Swinton talks slowly to me as he licks the rim of his glass. Kind of like an unconscious habit of his phlegmatic state. He doesn’t know he’s doing it, pauses a lot as if he is floating hot-air balloon style up over and away from this world. I find out that Swinton is used to working for what comes to him, used to being tested, and used to failing at what the world thinks is important. This sad schmuck talks of his father, the father who made Swinton prove again and again that he could drive the boat before he let him go out alone and free on the open water, where his thoughts could be unrestricted for a moment and he could sail into the middle of the lake, where his mother’s corrosively sweet voice could not reach and he could read his books of poems and dream of a life that wasn’t his own. 

He only allowed himself moments of dreams, knowing well that dreams can soon become expectations, which he thought it not prudent to have. Expectations were for the boys who lived beyond the gated community called “Depression.” He knew it even then. Even as he sat in the boat, wishing he’d flipped his father off as he sailed away. Instead, he lived when he read. Lived other people’s lives and became numb to his own.

Swinton orders another Salty Dog. He never asks my name, but still, I whisper it right into his mouth when I put the drink down.

“Astrid.” I blow so hard he gags.

If he were any kind of normal, he would have kissed me or at least pushed me away. I imagine him grabbing the back of my head, short blond hair tangled hard in his fingers, yanking me close to him, the Salty Dog spilling, the bar digging into my gut. But instead, he doesn’t miss a beat before he tells me how he tried to become a teacher once. How interesting. I used to be a teacher too, with buttoned-up, sideway-glanced colleagues: linen-clad women who hid behind their attempt at political correctness while condescendingly spewing their tidy embrace of a diversity they’d never encountered.

“Remember the time you had to be a student teacher with that bunch of little privileged shits who taunted you with their fancy ski clothes and sushi in their lunch boxes?” the rageaholic father, who thought his introverted son becoming a teacher was a joke, had said. 

“Yeah, Dad, I remember,” Swinton had said, remembering how the parents of those little snot-wads would never sign and acknowledge the bad behavior reports he sent home with them. Bad behavior reports for cursing, spitting, lying, punching, rolling eyes, throwing food, kicking a teacher (Swinton), and the pièce de résistance—peeing in the coat cubbies. The parents of the monsters swore it was just the bad student teacher who elicited this behavior—no classroom management skills. Right.

“Yeah, Dad,” Swinton had felt like saying, “remember how finally, after a year and a half of torture, I became an actual, accredited private school teacher? Good thing I bailed; what a thankless and life-sucking profession that would’ve been. You wanna see the critique of my student teaching, Dad? Huh? Wanna sign it and send it back to those uptight hypocrites at that snotty private school?” 

Yeah, his dad would’ve signed it.

I hate this fuck. All his sob stories. But I raise my Salty Dog to him when he says he’s moving to Baja. How optimistic, I think. Tonight, I’ll cry myself to sleep, though, because I kind of wanted to love him.