By Stephanie K. Hopkins
My friend and I stand outside the bar where I work. It’s been raining, and the air is foggy and damp. A squirrel darts in front of us, freezes, then scoots halfway up a telephone pole and freezes again. “I hate that they don’t know it’s a telephone pole,” she says. We watch as the squirrel makes its way to the jumble of wet wires at the top of the pole, hoping we won’t witness a zap.
Suddenly, a second squirrel jumps from the tree to the pole. Squirrely One high-tails it across the wires as Squirrely Two takes off after it. “Go, Squirrely, go!” I yell. I’m not sure who or what I’m rooting for, or even what’s happening here. It’s a big to-do, with chirping and scuttling noises, but a to-do about what, we don’t know.
Are they playing or fighting? Does Squirrely One want to get caught? Is Squirrely Two lovesick? Or is he mad at Squirrely One? Squirrelly Two is gaining on One, and my friend and I hover breathless in the suspense. Then suddenly, Squirrely One throws himself at a tree, lands, and is safely out of reach.
“What do you think is happening?” I ask my friend. “What if he caught up to him?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “They’d either fight or mate I think.”
If the squirrels knew they were running across potentially dangerous wires, would they still do it? Given what happens in the bar’s own version of squirrelly madness, I’d say that if they were human, they probably would.
On a slow Sunday, Amber snaps a rubber band against Matt’s back. “Do me!” I tell her, and I hold out my hand. As she’s about to snap, I pull my hand away. “Wait,” I say giddily, “I’m not ready.” She cocks the rubber band and waits. I hold my hand out again, palm up, then snatch it back just as she’s about to let it fly. It’s silly; it’s just a rubber band, but now I’ve worked myself up. We do this a few more times as I find my courage. Matt watches and shakes his head. Finally, I keep my hand in place and she snaps. I feel a sharp sting. I’m surprised at how much it hurts. A red mark forms on my palm.
“Wow,” I say. “Again!”
When the bar is slow, the staff pokes each other with toothpicks, then graduates to the metal spike used to stab drink tickets. We hurl wet, balled-up napkins and sticky limes at each other. We surprise each other with no holds-barred butt smacks that make football players seem girly, and which hurt our hands as much as the target.
Sometimes a surprise smack takes flight when the target is talking to a customer on a crowded Friday night, but that’s just wrong of course, so we save it for special occasions. We put ice down each other’s shirts. We hip-check each other. Sometimes we exchange chewed gum. After-hours, we hide behind walls and scare each other. We block the kitchen door with our bodies so whoever’s in there is trapped. We shut the lights off to the walk-in when someone’s inside.
When we’re stressed, we snap at each other. We roll our eyes and scramble for what we need, trying to survive the chaos of a busy night. But when we have a moment, we clear each other’s tables, hunt down forks for each other, share pens, ask one another if there’s anything we need. Then we’ll hurl another wet lime to lighten things up. We fight and play and torture each other.
What happens when we come up against the edge of what we can take, of what feels good and what feels bad, of what we should and shouldn’t do, of where my needs butt up against yours?
We often need to push the edge, challenge it. And somehow we find each other, and ourselves, in the process.
When I was a baby I bit into an electrical cord and zapped myself. I had to be taken to a hospital. I have a scar where the cord sizzled the inside of my mouth. I feel a weird, stupid pride in my wound, like I crossed over a boundary and survived. Or like I did this thing I wasn’t supposed to do and it makes me cool. Yeah, I was one cool baby electrocuting myself like that.
The Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky tells us that humans do irrational, sometimes self-destructive things to affirm that we are free. What seems like idiocy might also be a profound refusal of what is supposed to be the safe edge.
So what appears self-destructive could actually be life-affirming.
I don’t know what the squirrels would do if they knew the wires were live, but we would eagerly race in the rain along the pole, then leap safely into a tree. We want to see what the rubber band will do and know that we can take it. We want to be chased and scared and tortured by each other, but just enough to know who we are and that we are loved.
In the midst of life’s chaos, some of us fight and some of us mate. Some do both, and some don’t know the difference. Either way, we’re all probably nuts.
Stephanie writes short stories, non-fiction, and young adult fiction. She recently finished a young adult novel, "Edge of Seventeen," and is working on a memoir about her adventures as an ex-professor turned bartender. You can reach her at stephaniehop@gmail.com and follow her on Twitter @stephaniehop1.
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