the last joke

It was a few hours before we broke up, standing in the front room of my apartment surrounded by weird odds and ends and things that aren’t easy or fun to deal with. Broken furniture and boxes and random collections of things—an oven mitt, a handful of nails, three flathead screwdrivers. We stand over a shoe rack that he made for me many years ago, back when I lived with ZigZag. It was his second attempt at making such a thing, and it wasn’t very good. 

"What are we going to do with this?" I ask him. "I can’t take it to my new place." I already have another shoe rack that he made me when I first moved to my apartment, a much better attempt that he named The Abode. 

He has always done this—named things. It’s something he has a knack for. They just pour out of him and some of them are better than others, but they are all better than anything I could come up with. The shoe rack in question he has dubbed The City Hooker because of its terrible design and the hooks on each side of it.

"The City Hooker," he says gently, running his hand across the top of it. "Maybe it would be good at the cabin." 

He picks it up and spins it around, examining it from all angles. "I don’t know," he says finally, putting it back on the ground.

"Well, I don’t have room for it anymore," I tell him. 

"But I made it for you," he tells me. 

"I know, I know. But I have The Abode already, and I just can’t take it," I tell him. 

"But you love the City Hooker," he tells me.

"No, you love the City Hooker. That’s why this is hard," I say back.

We run through our options—him taking it home and deconstructing it to possibly build another shoe rack out of it, donating it to Salvation Army, busting it apart and throwing it in a dumpster somewhere. 

Finally, he looks at me and says, "Why don’t we put it on the corner?" 

And with that, I am doubled over, literally clutching my stomach with peals of laughter. The City Hooker. On the corner. After such a long and delirious day, it is too much for me. 

"You have to admit, it seems appropriate," he says. 

I am laughing so hard I can’t talk, tears are running down my cheeks. 

"Calm down, babe, you’re geeking out," he tells me. But I can’t stop.