munch magazine

I had a lot of free time and I didn’t always smell like turkey or provolone, so I just started walking a lot during the days. At first I just kind of went up and down the block just to get some exercise, but then I started walking to the Wawa to get cherry Slurpees, and then I didn’t even realize I was heading up by Freehold pretty much every day. I’d be in my head, trying to plan out what I was gonna do when it got colder out and if I should just got to grad school, but for what, and then I’d be walking on sand, out of place amongst the pretty, teenage sunbathers and over enthusiastic joggers.

Since I was living at home, my parents understood that everyone just out of school goes through a transitional phase, or that’s what my mom said, anyway. Greg just kind of stared at me at dinner. “You’ve got a roof over your head, and food on your plate, but that’s all you’ll get from me,” he said. He turned his face down into his microwaved carrots. “And that’s too much.” Some fucking pal. I almost brought up the money thing, but I passive aggressively ate through my paycheck in extra big helpings of baked potatoes and London broil instead. I knew Greg noticed, but he just shook his head and slid his carrots around his fork. It’s shit like this that makes me want to scream right in his fat fucking face. But I do the right thing. I clean off my plate, thank Mom for dinner, and head out the door.

So I started walking with a purpose now, looking for new people, new things- clearing my head of all the supply and demand curves and Chicago-style formatting I used to know, because where did any of that get me? I was twenty two and my life experience fit into three different buildings. I had to find something that wasn’t a five paragraph essay or macaroni salad. When nothing fucking happened in this third rate beach town, I did the next best thing, and forgot the stuff that trapped me here. I walked myself into a blank slate, and with each step, I would erase something. I’d pass that one teal house on Sycamore and bam, there goes JFK and the name of the guy who shot him. I’d circle around the Ocean Grove gated community and I’d forget even the most basic stuff I’d be doing for years, like how to use a slicer. I walked aimlessly and determined for eight hours a day until I was the kind of person who thought inspired things and had significant adventures. I stopped shaving. I cut the sleeves off my t-shirts. I only ate cranberry walnut bread from Trader Joe’s. “You’re fifty years too late,” Greg said one night at dinner, like I was trying to be a hippie or something. Greg was always so fucking irrelevant.

Great American Novel by Matthew Brian Cohen

This is a story about flying on a plane. Nobody involved boards a plane, or wishes to learn to fly a plane, not even Greg. Nobody even wants to go anywhere far, which is a problem, I guess, but this is still a story about flying on a plane. It was my idea when I started writing and I never see anything through. I quit my jazz fusion band. I shaved my beard. I quit slicing meat at the deli fifteen minutes from home. I quit fucking around with Janice, but that one was probably for the best. It’s always been too easy for me to quit and sleep ’til noon and watch old episodes of Saturday Night Live. And I guess I realize this now. I guess Greg always realized this.

I let Greg down when I told him I wasn’t coming in tomorrow. “What kind of world is it,” he said, “where you can’t even expect two week’s notice.” I’d been slicing meat for Greg since five summers ago, and now I had a college degree. It was time to move on. “This is good work, you know. Low stress, decent pay.”

“I’m too old,” I said, handing him my apron. “I gotta find something else to do with my life.”

“Pal,” he said. “I’m forty-nine. There’s no such thing as too old to make a living.”

Greg always thought we were fucking pals, that five years of on and off work made us close, somehow. Or maybe he was just trying to pity me, like that’s the way it was and not the other way around. He looked at me like I was the one stuck in this mess of meat, like I was the one missing out on the larger world that passed us by while we dulled and sharpened blades and refilled hand sanitizer. Neither of us said anything for a good twenty seconds and he was still shaking his head. in the interest of drama and newfound freedom, I tossed my apron on the counter. Greg watched it land, and sighed. The kind of sigh that meant, “where did I screw up? Didn’t this kid learn a work ethic somewhere?” The same fucking sigh he gave when I told him I was gonna have to stay an extra semester because they only offer America and Communism in the fall, and when the I didn’t get the internship at the DA’s office the summer after sophomore year, which I didn’t even want anyway. What did he think he had on me? Patience? Discipline? Old man wisdom that comes from a life of cold-cuts? Whatever it was, it wasn’t some kind of friendship, that’s for sure. Friends don’t stiff friends a day’s pay.