Valentine's Day Installment

I'm good looking and bright—
I wanna see life after ten at night...

Joe Jackson, "Down to London"

—————

For the first time in many years, I had a huge Valentine's Day planned with someone very special. Of course, Citizen Jim's uncanny ability to lift his nose in the air and smell my impending happiness brought him to my door at the speed of light.

Once again, he'd failed to dress for the weather, and stumbled into my livingroom covered in snow, the thick hair on his legs and arms matted and stiff with ice.

"You've got to move away from here!" he yelled, flicking icicles from the end of his nose and off his earlobes. "This is not right!"

I hated to tell him, but I was on my way out the door.

"Bullshit! I'm here, now, so you just make me a cup of hot chocolate and sit down there and let me look at you for a minute!"

I insisted that I needed to go, but Citizen Jim would have none of it.

"What about the Valentine's Day promise you made back in January?" he asked. "I guess you've forgotten all about that!"

When I told him I didn't remember making any kind of promise about Valentine's Day, he got really, really angry, and threatened to snap my neck like a piece of dry spaghetti.

"You said that if we were both going to be alone on Valentine's Day, we should try to be together," Jim said.

I rolled my eyes. "But I'm not going to be alone on Valentine's Day. I have a big date, with—"

"Well, I'm alone, and that's all that matters," Jim said. "I was supposed to—"

"But—"

"Shut up! I was supposed to have me a date with that Phyllissssthpbt at the grocery store," he went on, "but she called me at the very last second and said she had to study for that damned ACT she's taking tomorrow morning."

"Well, I guess that's what you get for dating high school girls," I said.

"I'll tell you what you're gonna get if you don't shut up and cancel whatever plans you think you have tonight," Jim said, making a fist and coming at me. He stopped and handed me his cell phone. "Here. You cancel your date, and I'll make the hot chocolate."

I took the phone and called the police.

Jim struggled and spat and kicked as the policemen carried him downstairs and shoved him into their cruiser like a rolled up piece of carpet.

But I had a change of heart and asked them to leave him.

Then I called my date and told her I'd had an emergency come up and that we'd have to cancel. She said that was fine, as she'd just met someone earlier that day who she wanted to go to dinner with instead. This left all the time in the world for Citizen Jim and me to swap horror stories about bad women.

It was a perfect Valentine's Day, and every time he pinched me, I wondered why our love had never blossomed beyond the platonic...

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