Lenny had a few hours before he was going to meet up with Samantha. He needed a shower and a shave. He drove to a local motel and rented a room. It was seedier than he remembered, but the shower was relatively clean. He knew this from his previous experiences in this motel. Five years ago, when Jake and Lenny first started their partnership, he dated Teresa, a wonderfully naïve and buxom girl. Lenny liked her because she was pretty and a great girl to bring around to his friends, what some people might call a trophy girlfriend. In those days, Lenny was often strapped for cash. Teresa, who did not work and came from affluent parents, helped him make ends meet at home, and particularly in the business. If it was not for Teresa’s donations during a couple of particularly tight weeks, Lenny and Jake would have probably been evicted from the small office space they were working out of.

While Lenny liked looking at Teresa, and was thankful for her (or at least her parents’) financial support, he grew apart from her. Lenny enjoyed smart, sophisticated women, and Teresa was neither. She was abnormally funny for such a dense girl, but her humor ran thin when he realized that she was good at making fun of people, but her biting humor was repetitive. After she found something funny, she would repeat it incessantly, eventually driving whoever she was talking to away from her screaming and waving their hands over their heads—well, that, as far as Lenny knew, never happened, but that is what he felt like doing when she started in on making fun of somebody’s name or something they said.

During the long hours that Lenny worked while he tried to get his business off the ground, he met often with Janice, an account executive for his only client at the time. She worked for a vegetarian frankfurter distributor who was looking to expand into the California market and was looking for an advertising firm. Janice was the exact opposite of Teresa. She was homely, a little on the chubby side, serious, absolutely brilliant, and with barely a nickel to her name, since she had invested all of her time and money with the distributor. He spent hours with Janice in his office designing the marketing schemes. As you can probably guess where this is going, Lenny and Janice’s relationship took a slight detour from the bounds of professionalism and they started combining their working time with more pleasurable pursuits. Since the frankfurter distributor was still a nascent business, all of the work Lenny did for Janice was billed but not paid. As soon as the advertising scheme was developed, Janice convinced Lenny, the vegetarian frankfurter business would take off and the distributor would pay back all of Lenny’s bills, plus a small interest in the frankfurter business. It was all in the contract.

While Lenny thought that this was a good deal (Jake had his doubts), his business was still strapped for cash, and that’s where Teresa came in. He spent every night with her in her apartment—after he decided that it was best to give up his apartment and use what he would have paid for rent to subsidize the business. While Lenny still thought Teresa was pretty, her thick personality began to wear on him. He wanted to end the relationship, but knew that if he did so, he put his business at risk. Jake put it to him this way: “if you kill the cow that gives you milk, you’ll have stringy beef and hungry children.”

When Janice grew tired of the office’s less than comfortable surroundings, Lenny would take her to this motel during the day to continue their work. As love triangles off end, this one ended poorly. Janice’s vegetarian frankfurter distributor folded before they were able to complete the advertising campaign, and Janice moved on to other businesses that did not involve Lenny. Much to Lenny’s chagrin, after she closed her account, leaving him with no money to show for his six months of work, she never called him again. He grew to like her, and had thoughts about leaving Teresa. Lenny realized afterwards that he had been just a work-time fling for her. As luck would have it, Teresa walked in on them in the office not exactly working. When he chased her to her house, he found all of his belongings tossed out on her perfectly manicured front lawn. Lenny still dreamed about the four bedrooms and six bathrooms house he had once stayed at with the view of the ocean.

Lenny felt guilty returning to the scene of many of his crimes, but he knew the motel well and it was on the way to the restaurant. He thought back to the times he had when he first started work, and remembered the excitement of the job, the challenges it presented and the fears of failing that he ran into every day. The one thing he did not miss was his more bachelor-oriented days. Looking back, he tried to remember how exciting it was to be with two women, but the only thing he could remember was the aggravation and fear it caused. Lenny missed Samantha terribly. She was the best parts of Janice and Teresa put together.

He turned on the shower and let the hot water run for a while. The bathtub was lined with brown gunk and Lenny rolled the plastic bath mat over it, which did not improve anything, since the mat was dirtier than the tub. He manipulated the shower controls until the water was the right temperature, and stripped off his clothes. He again hesitated when it came time to take off his sweater. The last few days, he had showered with the sweater on, fearful that if he took it off, someone would take it. That fear made its way down his throat and into his stomach and he decided not to risk it; particularly since he was in a seedy motel with who knows who running around the halls. He entered the shower and started soaping himself, cleaning under the sweater.

After showering, he stuffed as many towels as the motel gave him under the sweater, in the hopes that the towels would absorb the water and dry the sweater faster. He plugged in the hairdryer and began blowing the sweater dry. The sweater smelled only a little better after the shower, the yarn giving off a vague wet sheep smell—or, at least, what Lenny imagined wet sheep would smell like. The sweater still dripped when he put on the rest of his clothing. He shaved, managing not to nick himself, but in the process, leaving his prickled with razor burns. The sweater looked ridiculous with the towels stuffed under them. He looked like a large peach. The pink of the sweater seemed to have leached off a bit in the shower. It now looked lighter, almost whitish. He removed the towels and squeezed the bottom of the sweater to release the rest of the water.

Lenny still had time and flipped on the motel television. He could not remember the last time he watched television. He spent most of his evenings lately visiting his aunt and trying to figure out what had gone wrong with his life. The television relaxed him. He flipped from channel to channel with no desire to watch anything, just a desire to control the world, in a small way, around him. The news particularly depressed him. As he watched a segment about a bombing in the Middle East, the names of the dead civilians flashed through his mind. He knew about the bomber, seeing his sad childhood and the way he was manipulated by his handlers. In the end, when the bomber’s resolve gave out and he began thinking about the pain he was going to cause his family, the police had surrounded him, and he detonated himself. He probably would have turned himself in if the trigger had not been so easy to push. More details about the civilians’ families and the bomber’s mother came to Lenny, but he pushed them away and flipped the channel.

Knowing so much and being able to do so little was depressing. What good was all this knowledge if Lenny had no place to apply it? Lenny pushed more thoughts down and tried to silence his brain. He continued to flip, moving faster and faster through the channels as he tried to avoid any knowledge about what he saw. Even during fictional shows, the lives of the actors and writers came to him. He thought about taking off the sweater, but he could not bring himself to do so. Knowing, even when he did not want to know, was addicting. It was like eating desert after you felt your stomach was about to explode. You did not want to do it because you knew you would feel even worse after eating it, but you also can not resist because the chocolate looks too good to pass up.

The thoughts about food made Lenny realize just how hungry he was. He had lost twenty pounds in the last few weeks, even after he had increased his eating. He knew it was the sweater, but he did not know why. He pulled out a candy bar from his luggage. He had saved the candy for Halloween, but after nobody rung his doorbell, he had put it in a cupboard. When he was packing, he found the two bags of candy and placed them in his luggage. Hunger was a constant for him and anything helped.

Lenny finished cleaning up and packed up his belongings. He checked out of the motel and paid for three hours and the towels he used. He placed one of the stolen towels from the motel on his car seat and pulled out of the parking lot. The roads were crowded with rush hour traffic, and Lenny inched his way toward dinner with Samantha.

He arrived ten minutes early at Oysters and parked his car. His sweater was still damp, but nobody would notice. He gave his name and went to the table in the restaurant to wait for Samantha. The restaurant was crowded. He watched a small table of five people and tried to figure out their relationship and eavesdrop on what they were saying. It would have been more fun if he was able to guess the answers, but knowing the answers took away the challenge. He knew that the blonde girl with the buckteeth was meeting her boyfriend’s parents for the first time. She did not look like things were going well. Lenny did not see good things for that couple’s future. In three weeks she would catch him cheating on her with another guy. At least she would not know the guy. Lenny always thought it was worse when someone cheated with someone you knew.

He glanced around the other tables, but the stories were similar: relationships that were just starting, relationships that were on their way to the end, relationships that should end, but because of children or the fear of being alone, would probably go on for a long time creating misery and unhappiness for both parties. There were two birthdays and one anniversary. The waiters were all in a good mood because the manager had called in sick. He was not sick, though. He was sleeping off a terrible hangover from drinking all morning. He would not last the month at Oysters. The owners would find out about his problem and he would lose his job. The next manager would be worse, and many of the now happy waiters would no longer be working at Oysters in six months. The cooks were generally happy, but Lenny knew about too many dropped chicken breasts and unclean hands. This should have destroyed his appetite, but he was hungry enough to ignore the kitchen.

After he finished his second bread basket, Samantha walked into the restaurant. She wore a tight pair of jeans and a loose blouse. Lenny would not have cared if she walked in wearing a moo-moo, she was gorgeous. He motioned for her to join him, and he held out her chair for her to sit down.

Word count: 2,063

Words left: 10,146

Caffeination: tall mocha

Feeling: That’s right, you guessed it, 2k more words today. After a rather terrible, headachy day, I feel pretty good now. The writing was easy today—it sucked, but who cares? Five or so more days and I can start writing something I care about. I just need to figure out a way to end this monstrosity. I’m thinking everyone dies and the sweater takes over the world—I’ll try to work that in. Until tomorrow….