“Real Love is a Sphere,” my boyfriend texts to me, haiku-style, today. “The center is everywhere/Circumference, nowhere.” I’m inclined to agree with him, since this is a man who fashioned a bed out of three air mattresses duct-taped on top of one another and thinks a viable meal consists of heated Ragu straight out the pot, consumed while huddled over the stove armed with no better utensil than a plastic ladle. While some girlfriends would insist on a bed frame and some actual dishes, I find him unflaggingly endearing and rife with illimitable charm.
We had been planning a trip to the Pizza Hut buffet for several weeks, and decided that yesterday, Tuesday, would be perfect. We discussed the impending meal at length, both of us harvesting memories of several trips to Pizza Hut Buffet with our respective fathers, and we were very excited about it. There was much planning involved. We were to get up early on Tuesday, and he was to go give my little bar a thorough cleaning while I was tying up loose ends at my day job, then we would converge at noon sharp, giving us one precious hour to turboload at the Buffet before running several other errands. Since the Buffet ends at 2, everything would have to work out perfectly, time-wise. So at 1pm, we met at our house and piled into my car and we were off. It was raining so hard I could barely see ten feet ahead of the car. We had to pass by the bar on our way to Pizza Hut, and when we did, I noticed the door looked to be slightly ajar, so I stopped in the middle of the street while he jumped out to slam it shut. Since I was about to be holding up traffic, he ran full speed back to my car and promptly opened the door into his forehead and split that shit but good, an almost 2-inch gash immediately forming above his right eye.
Even before the blood started, I really began to panic, and he found an old, dusty roll of paper towels in my car and used some to stop the bleeding while I drove erratically, hyperventilating with fear and concern. He clearly needed stitches. Never in my life have I been so sick with worry and panic over someone else’s injury, and this new feeling almost propelled me into a tree and several other cars in the vicious storm.
“We HAVE to go home you are BLEEDING,” I gasped.
“NO!! TO PIZZA HUBUFFAY,” he insisted, pressing the paper towel that was quickly becoming saturated with his blood and what I imagined to be bits of his brilliant brain matter.
“NO. WE ARE GOING TO THE HOSPITAL!”
“NOOOO I AM FINE I’M APPLYING PRESSURE!”
“FINE THEN! FUCK PIZZA HUT, WE ARE GOING TO THE GROCERY STORE and you will BUY SOME THINGS TO CLEAN YOURSELF,” I said, knowing there to be a store around the corner from where we were. My mistake was in forgetting that the Pizza Hut was very close to this grocery store, and though I tried to slip past it very quickly, hoping the rain would shield it from my now-half-blind boyfriend, he saw it anyway.
“THAT IS TH’ PIZZAHUBUFFAY GO THERE IT IS 1:17,” he yelled.
“We are NOT GOING we are going to the FIRST AID AISLE of the ROSE’S,” yet while I was admonishing him for neglecting to put his stitches before his precious Buffet, I was simultaneously turning into the Pizza Hut parking lot anyway because, when it comes down to it, I really just want him to have what he wants at all times.
I wasn’t even finished taking the key out of the ignition before he starts bounding up to the door of the Pizza Hut, already soaking wet and holding this ridiculous paper towel to his head to keep his brains in. I thought I was going to cry. I followed him into the restaurant and was put face-to-face with the coldest, emptiest, most pizza-devoid stainless steel buffet I had ever seen.
“Where, we. . .um. . .we need the Lunch Buffet?” He said, confused and on the verge of crestfallen.
“Oh we don’t do no buffet no more,” the woman nonchalantly explained over her shoulder as she lumbered over to the lone, beleaguered table of patrons in the corner of the grimy, burnt-orange dining room. Jedd Evan looked at me, defeated, but I didn’t know what to say, so we left.
All that for nothing but disappointment. I put him back in the car and we headed to the adjacent mall containing a Rose’s which, for those of you not blessed with a Rose’s in your town, is sort of like a poor-man’s discount K-Mart, if the K-Mart was built in a shanty, super-trashy, constantly going out of business, staffed with a combination of middle-aged, divorced, obese women with teased hair and dubiously-behaving socially-retarded teenagers, and sold plus-size underwears out of a giant bin for one dollar, tax included. I love Rose’s and knew they had a small first aid aisle, and what’s more, there was a Chic-Fil-A in that mall, too. Score.
I left Jedd Evan in the first aid aisle and went off to the clothing area in search of a hoodie. It took me about ten minutes but I located a gray one for six dollars and headed back to the grocery section. I found Jedd Evan calmly surveying the shampoo situation while he continued to fold his bloody paper towel into eighths and sixteenths and thirtyseconds. He was manning a basket full of canned soup, Band-Aids, Peroxide, A-1 Sauce, tiny superglue, more canned soup, a sweater, a pack of t-shirts and other unrelated items. This was not supposed to be a shopping trip. This was supposed to be a ghetto hospital replacement.
We finally made it to the check-out, and of course the cashier knew something was wrong with Jedd Evan’s face and immediately offered the Rose’s fitting rooms as a substitute triage. He agreed to fix himself there, so we bought all our things and he selected his tools from the pile. Band-Aids, check. Peroxide, check. Superglue, check. Wait. WHAT? But he was already gone. I really took issue with the introduction of Superglue into his surgical repertoire, but I was silent as I watched him head for the fitting rooms.
But he did not go to the fitting rooms. No. Instead, he plopped down in the middle of the Homewares section and used Rose’s collection of $5 full-length plastic-framed mirrors as a suitable place to patch up. Almost immediately, the intercom sounded with a plea for security to tend to “Section E, Area 4, Code Blue,” which I could only interpret as the code for, “A Wet, Bleeding Man is Currently Repairing his Gaping Head Wound with Our Discount Adhesives in Bedroom Décor.”
With a resigned sigh I settled into an armchair in the mall and waited. He emerged, smiling and bandaged, and we ate the shit outta some Chik-Fil-A.
Though I really did not want his wound to become infected and cause him more, very expensive trouble, I knew it was the only way I would be proven right in being so concerned and panicked. But I, too, am wrong every once in a great while, and in this instance, I was. It has been over 24 hours and his head looks perfectly fine, the gash reduced to a scab under an inch long. Apparently Superglue is okay to use in lieu of actual medical attention, and he knew it. Combined with my newfound knowledge that I am capable of going completely crazy with worry and anxiety over the well-being of another human, I consider this a successful schooling. Real love is a sphere, he said, and he’s right. I cannot change the way I feel even long enough to trust in his guerilla medicine, but I should have. Instead he charms me into losing my mind over petty scratches.
Now all we have to do is find a Pizza Hut with an actual buffet.
