John Jodzio
There was a pile of swords and nunchucks sitting on the curb by a house in my neighborhood. There was a sign by the pile that said, “Free Ninja Stuff”. I was staring at the sign when a woman yelled down from her porch.
“Please take all of Larry’s ninja shit,” she said. “Please, please, please.”
“Did Larry quit ninjaing?” I asked.
I’d quit ninjaing a few months before and had been adrift and unhappy ever since. My gums wouldn’t stop bleeding and I’d gained 15 pounds, mostly from eating Oreos.
“Larry didn’t quit ninjaing,” the woman told me, “I quit Larry.”
***
“What’s all this?” my girlfriend Tina asked when I dropped the duffel bag of swords and nunchucks onto our living room floor.
“I couldn’t pass it up,” I said.
Tina hated our neighborhood. She hated that any furniture left on the curb was broken or worthless. She wanted to live in a place where people threw things away because they were redecorating, not because they’d been evicted and their hatchback was too full to fit anything else.
“You said you were done ninjaing,” Tina said. “You said you were committed to a nunchuckless life with me.”
While she talked, I laid the swords on our rug from shortest to longest. I organized the nunchucks from most leathery to least leathery. Larry had written his name on the handles of everything and I started to scratch them off.
“What if I ninjaed only on weekends?” I asked.
Tina was bigger and stronger than I was. She was also still mad at me because in the last month I’d lost both my sandwich artist jobs, one at Quiznos and one at Subway. She picked up a smaller sword off the floor and chucked it at the wall – her form was terrible, but the results were excellent, the sword sliced through the drywall and stuck there.
“This is not what we agreed on,” she said as she walked into our bedroom and slammed the door.
***
I’d gotten fired from my sandwich artist job at Quiznos because I was always late coming from my sandwich artist job at Subway. I’d gotten fired from my sandwich artist job at Subway because I’d accidentally sliced off a little bit of my co-worker’s ear lobe and the teensy bit of his pinky while I was cutting a Cold Cut Combo with one of my ninja swords.
Luckily, I’d gotten a part time job working for this guy named Allen. Allen was a rich guy who was missing a foot. He’d lost his foot because of an accident with one of those electric scooters that everyone in the city rode around on. Allen hated those scooters and paid me ten bucks for each one I chucked into the river. At first, I was chucking about 25 scooters into the river every day, but because Allen was so angry about his missing foot, he’d hired another ten people to do this same job. Now all of us were racing around town competing to throw scooters into the river. There were hardly any scooters left in our town, which was an awesome thing for Allen, but not an awesome thing for me.
Even though there weren’t any scooters left to throw into the river, I still told Tina I was going to work. Instead of chucking scooters, I started getting back in ninja shape. I put on my ninja clothes and parkoured over fences and then secretly followed random people around town.
Tina worked as a nurse, but she’d stolen some drugs from a hospital a few years before and now they only let her work with the people who were the angriest and the closest to death. Usually, these people were very paranoid that the nurses were going to steal their jewelry or their gold teeth. Tina was always in a bad mood when she came home.
“How many scooters today?” she asked.
“Three,” I told her.
“Three?” she said. “I want to get out of this hellhole neighborhood and three scooters isn’t enough scooters to make that happen.”
***
The next morning while Tina was sleeping, I went looking for scooters. I couldn’t find any, so I practiced my swordplay in the park. While I was there a man wearing a work shirt with a name patch that said “Larry” snuck up on me and put me in a headlock. I knew his name patch said “Larry” because my face was pressed into his name patch in a very uncomfortable and hard to breathe way.
“Where did you get that sword?” he asked.
I wanted to lie to him, but there were still a couple of swords that I hadn’t scratched his name off yet and I knew that if he’d even gone to a halfway decent ninja school, he’d already seen that.
“A woman told me to take them,” I said.
I heard a car skid to a stop near us and then a car door slammed, and I heard Tina ask Larry why I was in a headlock.
“He stole my ninja stuff,” Larry told her.
Tina got out of the car and walked toward us. I could feel the way that Larry moved his arm that he was looking Tina up and down. I could tell from the way he clenched his cheek muscles he was smiling in a flirting manner. I could hear his heart beating in an excited way. I wanted to say something about how Tina was my girlfriend and Larry should back the hell off but he shifted his forearm into the crook of my neck in such a way that I couldn’t make a sound.
“Are you Tina?” he asked her.
“How did you know that?” she said.
“It’s my job to know,” he said and even though my eyes were blurring because of the lack of oxygen, I saw Tina blush because she liked confident and mysterious all-knowing men who liked putting other men in headlocks were the person being headlocked couldn’t speak so she walked up to Larry and he shook her hand with his free hand and told her it was wonderful to meet her. I ended up passing out right about then and woke up on the ground with Tina staring down at me like she was disappointed in me and disappointed in the world we lived in, and all my swords, even the ones that were not Larry’s, were gone.
***
I went back to work and an hour or so later, I saw a scooter sitting in a park. Unfortunately, it was a bait scooter that the cops had set up to catch whoever was doing this and when I chucked it into the river I was arrested. Since the police hadn’t caught anyone else, I went to jail for all of the scooter throwing. I was charged with grand theft and denied bail because the corporation that ran the scooter company was very powerful.
“I wasn’t the only one who chucked the scooters in the river,” I explained to the judge, but he did not think that was a good excuse and sentenced me to six months in the county workhouse. Tina came to visit me once the first week I was there but didn’t come to visit me after that. She wasn’t there to pick me up when I was released. I took a bus back to our apartment and when I got there, I saw a garage sale sign out front. There were a bunch of tables in the yard and all of my things were sitting on these tables. Larry was wearing one of my flannel shirts and a pair of my flip flops and talking to some of the people who were pawing through my things. I tried to sneak up behind Larry, but when I got close, he spun around and put me in a headlock.
“Oh hey,” he said. “It’s… you.”
I could tell by the way he said the last part that he’d forgotten my name.
“I need to talk to Tina,” I said.
“She is super exhausted from all the incredibly acrobatic sex we’ve been having,” he said. “She isn’t taking visitors.”
A man grabbed a hammer from one of the tables and handed Larry five dollars. I was about to tell the man that the hammer wasn’t for sale, that it was mine, but Larry tightened his forearm around my throat in that way where I could not say a thing about what was mine and what was not.
“You should go,” Larry told me. “And not come back.”
I nodded okay and Larry let me out of the headlock. Before I walked off, he turned his back and it was then that I could have grabbed some of my things and ran, but when I surveyed what was sitting on the tables, I saw there was nothing good. At this point, everything left was going to end up in a cardboard box and it would get tossed out on the curb and seasons would change and years would pass and no one would ever take any of it.
#
John Jodzio’s work has been featured in a variety of places including This American Life, McSweeney’s, and New York Magazine. He’s the author of the short story collections, Knockout, Get In If You Want To Live, and If You Lived Here You’d Already Be Home. He lives in Minneapolis.