Reconstructing Geoffery Krawczyk
By Derek Randall
 

What he hated more than anything else was the monotony of it all, the coming home every single day, over and over again, at two o’ clock to pet and feed his dogs and to let them out before making a bowl of the same bland Kellogg’s Corn Flakes with one percent homogenized and pasteurized pure Texas milk and two tablespoons of white C & H pure cane sugar then eating them while sitting in his brown adjustable La-Z-Boy armchair with the sweet spots formed right in the cushions where he placed the cheeks of his butt and the remote control to the television that he’d place in the left of the chair between the armrest and the cushion in his right hand going flick . . . flick . . . flick as he scrolled through channel after channel after channel trying to find something, anything entertaining or interesting or amusing or intriguing on television to watch, and then finding a television show that looked promising that would get his hopes up because he could remotely show a bit of interest in it, only to realize two minutes into the program that he had seen the entire episode before, every minute, top to bottom, multiple times, and he knew what each character wore, what they were going to say, when they said it, who they said it to, even when the laugh track would go off and for how long.  He would sit like this for hours upon hours at end, pausing only to crack his knuckles or stretch his legs or let the dogs into the house or to pick up the phone to talk to Valerie, which wasn’t often because she was at work four to five nights a week plus all day on weekends in order to pay for both her smoking habit and his, while his mother only left him enough money to buy groceries he was expected to smoke off of his money that we would get from winning various writing contests or selling his artwork to different comic book companies, but that was used primarily to help his mother pay the rent.  The highlight of his evening was the autonomy that he enjoyed and the creativity that he demonstrated cooking dinner for himself to eat that night and for his mother to eat when she came home from work later that evening, then after he had sat at the dinner table and eaten his meal, he would clear the table and place all of the food into Tupperware in the refrigerator and clean the dishes before he would return to his flicking and clicking in his La-Z-Boy until he got tired or bored enough to get up from his chair and take his shower, brush and floss his teeth, and change his underwear, and then lay in the middle of his king sized waterbed as either his Metallica Black CD blared out ‘Nothing Else Matters’ into his room at a barely audible level as to let him follow the music while he was awake and not be disturbed while he was asleep or his Pearl Jam Ten CD would reverberate throughout his room, giving him the chance to listen to the lyrics and the turbulent pain of Eddie Vedder and wonder how different his life would be if he was in Seattle rather than Oklahoma while he stared at the posters of scantily-clad women from his Playboy collection that he had subscribed to using a fake name but the correct address because he was the one that checked the mail everyday on his way back home from school and subsequently would be the one who got to the magazine adorned his ceiling and his bedroom walls, while he wondered what exactly was happening to his  early teen years until he would come to the same conclusion night in and night out that would come to him with pristine, crystal clear clarity and the all-encompassing enormity of a Mack truck.
 

Geoffrey Krawacyzk was a loser.

 

Not only was he a loser, he was the worst type of loser: he was the type that knew he was a loser, knew how not to be a loser, and did nothing to change his loser station.   He would sit at school in the cafeteria in his seat at the corner of the room eating his peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich that he had made himself in the morning and drink his Yoo Hoo chocolate drink and he would watch as all the beautiful, radiant, popular kids would crack their beautiful, radiant, popular jokes and everyone would double over in beautiful, radiant, and popular laughter as if someone had just said the funniest beautiful, radiant, and popular joke that was ever said in the history of beautiful, radiant, and popular jokes, when he had seen the same exact joke on MTV at least a month ago on the Real World or on Beavis and Butthead.  It was like they had their own personal laugh track that followed them around, day in and day out, laughing at just the appropriate time when their laughter was elicited.   Quietly sipping through his little straw, he would sit, and watch, and listen, and wait as he would anticipate the exact reply, the exact sentence, the exact phrase, even the exact word that someone would say, how they would say it, and how it would be received by the people around them.  As Geoffrey would scratch himself through his grey hooded sweatshirt and green cargo pants, he would take note of the clothes that people wore that were so much better than his.  He would notice their shoes, how much they paid for them, which shoe store they got them at, and at which mall the store was located in, and exactly how much better they were than his combat boots that were two sizes too large.  And he would notice the mannerisms.  Oh yes, he would notice the mannerisms.  He’d wipe his moppy black hair, the curse of his mother’s side of the family out of his face with his right hand while he would watch as the ‘ballers’ walked around with a stride to their step and a blank look on their faces.  He would watch as they would change their demeanors whenever a girl passed by and he would watch as they got stares and smiles from the opposite sex and he would watch as their vocabulary would change from ‘yo’ and ‘dog’ to words that flowed like milk and honey ever so eloquently whenever they were dealing with either an attractive female or a teacher or a principal or someone in authority.  He would sit, and he would watch, and he would listen, and he would wait, and everyday he would ask himself the same thing, over and over again, like a mantra or a chant:
 

“When are you going to wake up?” Valerie said to him, shaking his arm.  “I don’t understand why you’re so fascinated with those mindless drones,” she said as she took a cigarette out of her purse and placed it in the corner of her mouth and lit it while the school’s security guard stared at her with his arms crossed and the disapprovingly serious patronizing elder look on his face as he shook his head from left to right.  She gave him an equally patronizing smirk back and showed him the finger as she blew smoke his way.  “Well,” she said as she put out her cigarette in disgust on the cafeteria table.  “You can stay in dreamland; I’m going to go to class.  You can finish this if you want.  I’ll call you from work.”
 

Geoff shook his head as he saw the lipstick that she left on the end of the cigarette and waved for her to go.  He took the cigarette and dropped it on the ground before stomping it out as he thought to himself about what she had just said and he stared at the beautifully well-developed buxom cheerleaders that flanked the football team’s table.  If he was in dreamland, he thought to himself, he had to be living a nightmare.  He wondered what it was like to be one of the guys at the table, to be one of the beautiful people, to be radiant, to be popular.  He could only dream of being one of them.  Anything had to be better than this nightmare.  If this was a nightmare, he thought, then when exactly was he going to wake up?
 

*     *     *
 
Page 1 · 2 · 3 · Return


Originally Posted October 14, 2001. Reposted on February 3, 2005.
Copyright 2005, 2001 by the Labyrinth and the United States Naval Academy, http://www.usna.edu. All rights reserved. Unauthorized reproduction or duplication is strictly prohibited. The views expressed on this site are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the US Naval Academy, the Department of Defense, or the US Government.