Jablonski

 

Jablonski is sitting there on the couch with a bag of chips and two nickels that he found on the sidewalk this morning.  Crumbs are all over his shirt and an old NASCAR re-run is playing on the television.  He scratches his nuts and swats at a fly that tries to land on his nose.  He hasn’t worked in years.  The government sends him disability checks in the mail: checks that only arrive because of the doctor he’d paid a hundred bucks to for forging an injury report.  An unkempt mullet is sprawled out on his head, self-contained and mercifully short.  Nobody knows how he’s able to pay his bills and support his child on government checks alone, but he’s always laying there on the sofa, wondering when the next motor race will be shown on ESPN2.  He always wears the same tank-top- one that smells of fermented B.O. and oily snacks- but sometimes he changes his sweats from black to a striped 80s acid wash one.  Jablonski is one of those people who lives off the blood and sweat of others, content in his sterilized utopia of motorcycles and beach babe pin-ups. 

He gets up from the sofa to grab a can of soda.  The remote control falls on the floor, causing the channel to switch from ESPN2 to AMC on impact.  Grunting like a weightlifter doing a squat, he bends down to pick it up.  He notices that the batteries have fallen out and after he puts them back in, they no longer work.  Cabaret is the movie playing on AMC.  He can’t change the channel, so he throws the remote back on the couch and lunges off towards the kitchen to get some new batteries and the soda. 

His son Carter is in the kitchen making a grilled omelet sandwich with cheese.  Carter was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome after Jablonksi became concerned that he never came out of his room unless he felt obligated.  His family doctor checked off all the appropriate symptoms and now he takes Ritalin to make his social anxiety go away.  But what his father and doctor don’t realize is that Carter only isolates himself because he was never taught how to engage with others.  Being ignored by his father after all these years has made him impervious to the influence of outside opinions.  And whenever he does talk to him it’s always in this nasally, disinterested tone that makes it seems like he’s continents away when he’s really in the same room.  Sometimes there is a rise in Jablonski’s enthusiasm though, but that only tends to happen when Carter pisses him off for doing something negligent, like writing equations on the walls or leaving pornographic videos on the coffee table.  Carter may be young, but he’s already realized that his blunt expression and lack of a social life is the result of his father’s example; that because his father mopes around all day with that fat gut dragging him down; that because smiling is as rare for him as a woman that makes sense; that because his lethargic lifestyle has polluted his body with the nuggets of sloth, he has become like him in all the wrong ways.  Perhaps his lousy old man should be the one on Ritalin before he contaminates anyone else with his maggotry. 

Liza Minelli is singing at the top of her lungs in the other room.  Carter can’t stand it, nor can he stand being near his father, so he scurries off to his room with the food still on the grill.  Jablonski only has one battery left, instead of the required two.  He chucks it out the window and bangs his fist on the refrigerator.  Ambling into the family room, he reaches down to manually change the channel on the TeeVee set, when an unexpected flash of Liza’s panties makes him jerk away, throwing his back out for good.  He stumbles to the ground, unaware of the fact that all these years of inactivity have made his muscles as fragile as pea soup.  The smell of burnt cheese comes at him from the kitchen, taunting in its untimely rudeness.