I.
I’ve been learning lots from going through old people’s homes, destroying their things, and cleaning out their fridges. Their fridges especially. Open any old person’s fridge and get honest with yourself. See the food growing hair in the dark. Smell the sour milk. Know someone too old and tired to care is drinking it anyway and then, a little later, puking it back up.
The next-of-kin who contract this work out to me are horrified by fridges. But I can throw out anything. I throw out baby pictures, wedding albums, books someone meant to read when they had the time, and it’s all whatever.
But then the sobbing sneaks up on me while I’m shredding totally superfluous documents from law firms with names like “Sweeney, Knopfler, Nitro, & Beastmaster” and I realize the pink thing failing to navigate bread and butter at the breakfast nook used to be Beastmaster.
Beastmaster: he’s got a Joe Pesci build, rugged Pesci charm, Pesci handsomeness, and I bet prosecutors shit themselves whenever Beastmaster went full Pesci on their fascist, sculpted-by-Jazzercise asses.
This job, man. Some days you’re the janitor for a grand building from a gilded past, and some days you find yourself hoping Joe Pesci’s inevitable death will be sudden and violent. You imagine Joe Pesci stumbling off a subway platform or wrecking a small aircraft. You see him get shot in back of the head while admiring a mounted swordfish in a faux-wood paneled man cave.
However he goes, I hope there’s no warning or waiting. I hope his loved ones don’t even get to say goodbye. I hope they don’t have to hire me.
II.
I find “My Cousin Vinny” while throwing out Beastmaster’s VHS collection!
III.
Purpose re-enters Beastmaster’s life. He marshalls me like I’m a janitor-turned-paralegal with raw natural ability and a disdain for protocol that reminds him of his younger self: “Buy a VCR at Sharper Image! I’ve got coupons!”
So I take the coupons for my wall of tacked-up bric-a-brac back home, and I trawl a few thrift stores.
The winner is from Singapore and weighs 35 lbs. We need to unplug the living room lamp to free up an outlet, and then we need an adaptor or else the VCR won’t talk with Beastmaster’s TV, and then Beastmaster needs his evening bread and butter, and then suddenly the sun has gone down and Beastmaster’s cooled on the whole enterprise. He’s re-forgotten being a lawyer. He’s utterly incurious about Marisa Tomei’s Academy Award-winning performance. With no joy in my heart, I turn on the VCR so he can be babysat while I throw out his Naval papers.
But then it’s just one of those moments.
And we are both surprised by a tape someone forgot to eject from the VCR, an old home movie of little kids at soccer practice.
These kids! Offscreen coaches implore them to pass, but they’re the kind of little where a 4-4-2 is unimplementable and confusion reigns supreme. You can’t even see the ball most of the time. Strikers, sweepers, and middies all bunch and clump into schools of red and yellow pinnies, goldfish yet to be bagged for the fair.
“What is this,” Beastmaster asks. His generation was not raised alongside this sport. “What are they doing. Who are they.”
And I’m like, “I don’t know.”
Beastmaster points at the pinnies onscreen. “Ketchup and mustard.”
And I’m like, “Yes, I suppose.”
“There was still some ketchup and mustard in my fridge yesterday. Not today, though. Only butter today. Can you believe that? A fridge of only butter. I bet tomorrow the butter will disappear, too.”
And I’m like, “Hmm,” and I keep my eyes on the screen and wait for a jump ahead in time on the VHS to a birthday party or Christmas, or even to halftime and kids eating oranges on the sideline. But the jump never comes. The moment never ends. The soccer is unremarkable. We never get a goal. So I start watching Beastmaster watch the kids. He’s looking pretty Pesci in this moment. Then he leans forward and squints and vaults Pesci entirely.
He goes post-Pesci.
He looks like Pesci’s immortal soul as it will appear forever after the bodies we clumsily labeled “Beastmaster” and “Joe Pesci” are dead and gone.
When a ketchup pinny kid loses a cleat but keeps on running after the scrum, I watch Beastmaster smile.
“Sure looks like fun,” he says.
And we watch together, but only once—rewind button’s broken.
John Pinto is a film lab tech living in Philadelphia. His work has appeared in HAD, Rejection Letters, and The Second Bullshit Anthology.
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