They stink.  Every portable toilet I have ever been to has stunk like excrement and that pink urinal cake smell.  I'm serious when I say this: Hubert Wriggly smelled just like this.  I would sneak looks at him in the cafeteria to see if he would snack on one after eating some meatloaf or something.  I never caught him.

            This kid was nuts.  You know that type that ran everywhere and got nowhere?  That's Hubert.  Imagine the anguish his distant relatives must have felt when they realized their nephew or grandchild had been named “Hubert.” It should be a crime to name a child something socially awkward, a misdemeanor at least.

            At any rate this kid reeked and well, making friends really does not come easy after offending olfactories.  Hey guys what's up?  Jesus Christ, take a bath, you faggot.  An ironic insult to a kid whose father left him for a younger man and whose mother moved them into a trailer so she could smoke meth with her Hispanic boyfriend, José, who I hear cooked a mean bean burrito when he was actually hungry.

            Anyway, this kid stank and was nuts and that usually makes for interesting stories.  This isn't one of those.  Really it is quite boring and you are wasting your time.  Go outside or something.

            Hubert ended up working at McDonald's after graduating.  He was the type that gets “pushed” through, though he was dirty and not violent.

            They would not let him work counter on account of his filth.  It's a wonder they let him work at all.

            The sky was black and the bugs were humming and Hubert had just left the restaurant with his red cap pulled down low, the greasy ends of his black hair shooting out from the back.  Hubert's eyes always kinda bugged out but for whatever reason he didn't see the group of kids stoned or drunk that were bored enough to mess with him.  And here comes Hubert with his hands shoved far down in his turquoise windbreaker and his red cap tucked way down and I'm sure stinking like all high heaven and these kids think he needs more trouble than he already has.

            Stop.

            This isn't working.

            One day Billy Franchise walked to school.  Billy attended 7^th grade at Hurst Middle School.

            Okay so Hubert “wakes” up and there's this pre-pubescent punk poking him with a stick, clearly amused/bewildered at this bloody/dirty McDonald's employee curled into a fetal position in some dirt near some bushes.

            Hey mister.  What.  Hurt?  No shit.  Coughing blood tasting iron and can't move my arm.  I'll go get help. 

            By help Billy meant getting his friend Jimmy and a longer stick.

            When “help” finally did arrive Hubert was quite pale and foul smelling and he had been crying so his bug eyes were redder than usual.  They almost matched his cap.  And when he was in the hospital his mother or father or even José did not come or call because his father was on a cruise with his new boyfriend and the trailer did not have a telephone (Hubert wondered if it would have mattered).

            And they washed him.  That sponge never saw it coming.  No, Hubert didn't either, though he didn't resist (Hubert with his turquoise windbreaker, his black hair, and his red cap).

            Relatively clean, relatively unnoticed Hubert walked back to the trailer in his windbreaker with his arm in a cast and eyes dry now and still that cap with the black, black hair and wondered what he would say when he got back to his mother and José tweaking or trying to tweak or having sex.  He met a mix of those and did not end up saying anything just going to his “room” and laid on his cot and looked at the paneled ceiling and would have counted the little nips on the faux-stucco but could not count that high on account of his lack of ability.

            The night was long.  He could not sleep.  He could hear moaning.  Then he heard crying.  He was crying.  The night was hot and then cold and then hot again.  Time passed as it always did and he sunk his face into the foam of the small lump he called a pillow and smelled the grease from his black hair and the burgers he cooked.  He wanted to vomit.  If he could get it all out: the memories, the smells, the turquoise windbreaker maybe he could reach some sense of normalcy.

            He never quite did.
            He could be cooking your food, though.  He could decrypt the symbols from the monitor that you don't always see in the back of the restaurant and upon doing that remove the pickles from your number one.  He probably does not abuse your food the way that he has been abused, ignored.  It is all routine now: the pace of the fast food industry is too quick for emotion.

            What he will do is move into a trailer next to his mother's where he can hear her tweaking or having sex or eating bean burritos.  He will furnish that trailer with rented furniture and a shapeless wife that he will feed food from his restaurant.  She will bear him two daughters that gauge their happiness depending on the prize from their Happy Meal.

This is the life of a man.  If only there were more to him, like how at one time when he was four, before he fell out of his loft, he wanted to go to space and jump on the moon.  Ironic, though, then, how he rooted himself so deep to the earth and the cows and the dirt and the turquoise windbreaker that he never saw the time slip him by and by and by his daughters left him for their Josés and Huberts and he and his shapeless wife would lay at night watching fuzzy television and finishing their Filet-O-Fish or Chicken McNuggets and try and wonder: What next?

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