It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time

“You deserve this”

It sat there in black and white beyond appeal.

He’d always hated his own handwriting. It looked like that of a child. He wouldn’t admit it to anyone, but he tried really hard to make it neat and clean and it still looked like scribbles.

It was just like him: messy.

He’s brought back to signing himself out of the clink - an act which is embarrassing enough on its own. All your shit in a little bag. They make you use a pen chained to the counter like you might steal even that. And then to have to sign ROBERT WILLIAMS in big kid letters.

Scrawled on his palm with black magic marker, he stares at the reminder.

The chime of glasses pulls him back into the chic restaurant. A thousand faces. None of them are familiar. People are strange when you’re a stranger — which feels unfair, considering the effort he’s putting in.

A thousand little independent plays running side by side, all ignorant of one another. Ignorant of him and his problems. No, they had their own main characters, and in this dapper place, many of them weren’t even tragedies.

But, not ours.

Ours is Rob Williams.

Lucky us.

What would this play be called?

It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time.

The game of comparing your insides to other peoples’ outsides is always a loss, but it’s one of Rob’s favorites. As he tries to stay tangentially anchored in his dinner, he can’t help but notice those around him.

A couple sharing what must be their first date, the fire still burning bright in their eyes. Another sharing a piece of cake for their anniversary. A group of friends sharing drinks and stories. Someone smiling as they wipe cream from their lips.

They all get to be carefree. Have a few drinks and laughs, maybe splurge on dessert. It makes Rob unnaturally angry.

Yet, here smack dab in the middle of them all, he sits upon his throne of lies. Wearing a white suit, no less. Only Charlotte could talk him into wearing something like that.

If they only knew who was wearing that suit.

The waiters swirl to and fro in a precise dance, refilling drinks and kissing ass. Every order is a great choice and all of the wines are from very good years.

Charlotte sits across from Rob. The years haven’t changed how her curves fill out a tight, black dress. She catches his admiring eye and shoots him a wink.

And John sits beside Rob. Well, he’s wheeled up to the table next to Rob. He may be out of the woods for the most part, but the trauma has left him wheelchair bound.

Heat crawls up his neck.

Looking around at all of the bright eyes at the other tables, Rob bets none of them know how tiring it is keeping track of who you told what lie and when. Can’t let the wires cross, lest they all know you’re a fraud. They might know you’re charging some poor kid three grand a week to teach him to be a man.

They probably know anyway.

His foot taps in sync with some imagined rhythm of the motion around him.

The waves of laughter splash over him as he paints that practiced smile on his face. Remember Rob, if it’s dressed in white and smiles real pretty, no one will look under the covers.

Yeah, that jives.

Rob slams down a big swallow from his two-finger pour of something dark. Maybe that’ll keep the darkness at bay.

“To Rob,” John Gordon holds up his glass of water. He’s still on the wagon, even now, even in his wheelchair. “My best friend. You finally got the tag titles and now you’re booked against JCH, a former Universal Champ. You have really done it, bud.”

Rob feels his nose twitch. Bud. That’s what John called him right before…

“To Rob,” Charlotte cuts through the darkness. She smiles as her wine glass meets John’s and leans across the table toward Rob.

Her lipstick leaves a perfect impression on his cheek.

He leaves it there.

So much love. His heart is racing, head floating away like a hot air balloon. What did that haughty-toughty therapist say?

The five senses.

Hear: The endless drivel. It all blends together to assault his eardrums. See: Every wrinkle in Charlotte’s face when she smiles. Time is so unfair. Smell: Whatever lavender bullshit they have diffused throughout this place. Taste: The remnants of a three-hundred dollar entree that he couldn’t pronounce. Feel: Like he’s living behind a plate glass window.

No, that didn’t help. Here comes the darkness.

You deserve this.

“Stop, you two. Please.” Rob lets out softly in more of a plea than true modesty.

Suddenly the senses are at a fever pitch. Rob catches bits and pieces from the cacophony. Stocks are up, someone is being invaded, they cheated on their spouse. His throat feels like it’s closing.

“No, Rob - seriously. You are getting everything you deserve.” John says, toasting in the air towards Rob.

The room swirls and swells and threatens to swallow Rob whole.

“I HAVE TO PISS!” Rob nearly shouts as he shoots from his seat, knocking the chair down behind him before nearly breaking into a full sprint toward the bathroom.

All that and he didn’t even notice the joint had finally quieted down.

The door shuts behind him.

White tile.

Not chic white - hospital white. The stuff bought in closeouts and overcharged in change orders.

When the text came through from Charlotte, Rob had felt like everything had narrowed into a single, unbearable certainty. It all seemed clear.

He’d spent weeks piling stones into the hull - press conferences, deflections, borrowed blame - all of it sinking him inch by inch.

Coming clean would be his life raft.

He moved fast, past nurses and patients, rehearsing words he’d been carrying since the night it happened.

It was me. I did this.

“Are you sure about that, Robert?”

The Father stood in the hallway like he’d been there the whole time.

Rob refused to stop, to even look at him.

The Father. This was all his goddamn fault.

“This is all your goddamn fault,” Rob told him. No matter how hard he tried to walk past him, it seemed like The Father was always in front of him.

Had the hallway been this long before?

He isn’t going to let The Father stop him. No silly parables or fables. Take the wisdom and shove it.

“Robert, you have been blessed with free will. This is all of your own doing.”

Blessed or cursed?

A gorgeous blonde nurse with green eyes walks past the two men, oblivious to their ongoing disagreement.

“No. No, you put these fucking ideas in my head. Told me to blame Max and Rose and RIA. All of this horse shit.”

“Yes, I did. To protect them.”

That stopped Rob in his tracks.

“For who?”

“Why, for Charlotte and John, Rob. For The Whoresmen. For the few fans that do love you. The greater good. Sacrifice.”

The red in Rob’s cheeks matched his internal temperature. On a dime he whirled to face The Father.

“What the fuck are you talking about? This is a fucking terrible, god awful situation - especially for all of them. Everyone thinks I was a goddamn bystander to John getting brained.”

“Yes, you did. And that was… terrible.”

Tripwire. Instinct. Rob blinked and suddenly he was holding The Father by the throat.

“So get the fuck out of my way and let me go tell them.”

The Father smiled at him. Not condescendingly, not snarky, but with mercy. Which, consequently, cut Rob even deeper. Like a pinball bouncing around the machine aimlessly, Rob reared back to redecorate the old man’s teeth.

“You don’t get to save your skin at their expense, Robert,” The Father choked out.

No punch had ever hit Rob so hard.

He let go, the old man slid down the wall. Rob stared down at him, “Fuck you, man.”

Rob turned and began walking down the hallway to John’s room.

“You cannot undo your own hurt by passing it on to another, Robert. And you know this.”

Internally, Rob used every trick up his sleeve to rationalize and justify why he needed to unload his burden as he continued down the never ending hallway. He cursed The Father. What did that man know of penance?

Was that the same blonde nurse walking by?

The PA announced someone was coding in another part of the hospital, but all Rob heard it say was, “You can’t save your own skin at their expense.”

He thinks of the fans DM’ing him about standing tall and delivering Justice. The flashing cameras in the press conference. That feeling of a room full of people eating from the palm of his fucking hand.

So what if they were lies he fed them? Did that feel any less good?

Some men paid for instruction. Others learned by surviving.

The longest hallway ever abruptly ended at John’s open door.

He paused before crossing the threshold. In his head he practiced, rehearsed, oblivious to the odd looks from passersby, watching Rob have an entire dialogue with himself but never say a word.

It was me. 

I hurt you. 

You deserved it.

No, not yet.

Coward.

He pushed his graying hair back with his calloused hands, trying to decide who was going to walk through the threshold. The animal? The man? The monster?

None of them would make it through this one.

The smell was the first thing to hit him. He felt the skin under his chin tighten and his saliva grow thick. What was that goddamn smell?

It wasn’t antiseptic. It was something dark and ancient. It wasn’t even external. It moved inside Rob. Like energy it had always existed and Rob couldn’t seem to destroy it.

Groggy, but awake, John looked up at Rob with that same Doofy smile he used to at football practice. Like they had a secret the rest of the world couldn’t know. Usually it was just because he’d farted.

Doofy. That was John’s nickname in football. Rob can’t help but smirk remembering that.

They both had spent so many years running.

And life still brought them back here to each other.

Suddenly Rob was small again.

Rob moved into the room afraid to touch anything. Afraid to breathe. If he shrunk enough, no one would even know he was there.

Charlotte sat in a chair scooted up to the edge of the bed. She held John’s hand and met Rob with a sympathetic smile. She nodded toward the detective standing in the corner.

Cold sweat trickled in all the most uncomfortable places as the detective’s eyes met with Rob’s. He looked like he was cut right from a shitty pulp crime novel: stained yellow button up, thick red tie tied six inches above the wasteland, and a scruffy red beard.

“Mr. Williams - we’ve been waiting for you.”

Oh fuck, do they already know? My god that would be a mercy.

Mercy. A mercy would be jumping out the window so he couldn’t hurt any of these people anymore. A mercy would be not having to carry this weight anymore.

You deserve this.

Rob swallows hard, takes a deep breath, and looks John right in the eyes.

This wasn’t a story for boys who had never had to decide which lie will keep the lights on. Do you cut the red wire or the blue wire?

Sometimes you just had to let the fucking bomb go off.

“I ne-” Rob began, but was instantly cut off.

“Rob!” John called out. “I’m so glad you’re here. I was just telling the detective about that night.”

Here it comes.

“Right, that nigh-”

“Yeah, I don’t remember a thing.”

Fuck.

“Mr. Williams,” the detective interjects,”I’d ask what you remember from that night, but after your weeks of hurling accusations at your opponents, I can’t quite count you as credible. I’m sure you understand, Legend.”

The detective ran his upper teeth over the hair below his bottom lip in frustration before closing his little black notepad.

“My card is on the table, Mr. Gordon. If you think of anything else, please let me know.”

He slinks by Rob and out the door.

The door shut behind him.

WHACK

“You deserve this.”

WHACK, WHACK, WHACK, WHACK

“Get it together, Rob. Fucking lock it down, man. Come on.”

This is not the first time The Legend has been in a bathroom punching himself in the head on the verge of tears. It is, however, the nicest bathroom he’s ever done it in.

No, this was like slipping on your favorite pajamas. How many times had he done this in PRIME bathrooms? At the very least after Winters… and Jiles… and on and on.

“Fucking hell, come on.” Rob squeezes his balled fists against his closed eyes, pushing harder and harder like there may be a pressure level that will just pop his head off.

The world is full of those little silver gnats when he opens his eyes. Squinting and breathing heavy, his long gray hair disheveled, he meets the eyes of the bathroom attendant. The look of terror in the shriveled old man’s eyes is sobering.

“Aw, what the fuck.”

Rob lifts his leg to set a snakeskin cowboy boot on the white marble sink top. A wad of cash large enough to choke a horse comes out and he tosses two or three bills at the terrified older man. To Rob that seems like a ton, but this guy made that in a few hours offering white labeled mouthwash and cologne to the patrons.

Still, it seemed to keep him quiet.

Rob looked in the mirror - not in his eyes, mind you, but at his features. His skin was like leather. When the fuck did he get this old?

A trickle of blood dances down the rolling landscape of wrinkles that his forehead has become. One of those whacks must’ve opened an old wound.

Cold water. Rob cups his hands under the faucet and tosses cold water over his face. Looking at himself in the mirror one more time, with that trickle of blood refusing to stop, he can’t help but smile.

This is what the fucking pay me for.

Still not enough to get him out that door.

“Nope.”

This bathroom could be on fire and Rob Williams wouldn’t be leaving it.

He clears his throat and snorts real loud and shakes his head to psych himself up. It doesn’t work.

“Ok then, plan b.”

He moves to a stall as the bathroom attendant quietly folds hand towels pretending he doesn’t see the hulking man having a nervous breakdown in his workspace.

The door opens and closes. Rob can make out the squeaking of wheelchair wheels on the fancy, white tile floors.

“Aw, fuck,” he whispers to himself, lifting his feet up to hide himself inside the stall. It probably isn’t even someone looking for him, but he is all he ever thinks about.

I bet JCH has never had to hide in a bathroom. 

“Rob?”

Fuck.

A broken clock is right twice a day.

He scans the bathroom in a panic.

There is but a small window high above the black toilet. What kind of pretentious asshole installs a black toilet? No time for that now.

“Rob, you in here, bud?”

John’s voice was getting closer.

Instinct.

“No,” Rob calls out, instantly banging his head against the stall.

Boy, you could fuck up a shit sandwich.

“Rob, I know that’s you?”

Rob clears his throat, “Yeah, right. Sorry, man I think I had a bit too much to drink. Or the duck isn’t agreeing with me. I don’t fucking know.”

I don’t fucking know.

“Ok. Well, why don’t you come on out and we’ll figure it out together?”

“Uh, yeah, maybe.”

A cornered animal will almost always run.

The toilet lid flying through the window pane broke the silence of the beat. Somehow Rob contorts his body to dive off the top of the toilet and out the window. Shards and brick scrape him all over as he tumbles to the cold, wet concrete below.

Of course it was raining. All of the stink and filth and grease from the dumpsters seem to collect in the pool of water Rob finds himself laying in.

Rob stands and catches a distorted reflection of himself in the puddle he fell in.

His pure white suit is now black and torn to absolute shit.

There will be hell to pay for this. And he’ll have to think of some ludicrous way to explain to John why he hurled himself out a bathroom window. But for now, he just needed to run.

“What the hell, man?” John calls out.

Before John can put two and two together Rob was full sprint away.

Like Forrest Gump he just keeps running until finally his legs fill with lactic acid and he just can't run anymore.

The first break of day finds Rob sitting alone on the curb, shoulders rounded and elbows on his knees. His joint is half ash.

Of course he finally gets everything he wants and he doesn’t even get to enjoy it.

Somewhere JCH was waking up clean. Uncomplicated. Probably even celebrated.

Soon enough Rob’s phone would buzz with that weekly payment from JCH.

The best part of the sunrise? The silence.

"You run pretty fast for a big guy," John calls out.

No rest for the wicked.

That other voice is there, too.

You can keep this up.

Rob didn’t look at him. Couldn’t.

“Yeah,well - at least I’ve got that going for me.”

“Scoot over.”

John pushed his wheelchair to the edge of the curb, edging Rob out of the way. The ash falls on Rob’s nice slacks.

“What’s going on, bud?”

Rob looks up to find that doofy smile on John’s face.

“What’s going on, bud?” John asked.

“Hey, man, I have to tell you something,” Rob begins and stops just short of saying anything incriminating.

The Father was… right.

Rob didn’t deserve salvation at the expense of John’s feelings.

That was something JCH would never understand.

Life wasn’t what a young man thought it was.

Happiness wasn’t a ledger. There were no points to tally. No balance sheet. No clean lines.

“Sure, but, uh,” John giggles as he interrupts, “you remember that time that you made out with that chick under the bleachers? Niki… fuck man what was her name? Niki something…”

“Polada.”

“That’s right. Everybody called her Piggy Polada. Was supposed to just be thirty seconds, but you two about sucked each others’ faces off. Right there in front of Bethany Phillips, who you were madly in love with.”

Rob stifles a giggle.

“Yeah. So fucking what?”

“Aw, man. Whatever you got going on can’t be as bad as that, right?”

They laugh. Together.

Here, you compromised.

“Sorry, what were you saying?”

You did things you knew you shouldn’t to shield the people you loved from the monsters.

Sometimes you were the monster.

“I just… I just missed you, man. And I’m sorry that I got so fucking far out with that Complete Abandon bullshit and everything else. I’m… I’m glad you’re here.”

“Yeah, me too. You sure you’re good?” John said, grabbing the joint from Rob as the first light crept over the rooftops.

Right before John can hit it, Rob rips the joint from his mouth. He wouldn't be the reason John relapsed.

At some point, all you can do is hide that monster.

Rob takes a drag and thinks of The Preacher. The cross. The crowd. He survived that one. He could carry this one.

Fuck it, he was never much good at being happy anyway.

“Nope.”

They sat in silence, watching the sun come up, each of them experiencing it in his own way.

“It’s a good day to not be okay,” John chuckled.

Rob nodded, taking a long drag.

“It sure is, bud.”

If JCH ever grows a pair and stops paying, Rob might have to tell him the truth about this world.

Sitting a little deeper into the cold concrete below, Rob looks down at the ugly, messy scribble on his hand.

This isn’t salvation, nor punishment. It’s just being a man.

You deserve this.