By the time Logan ended up on my couch he had been a cook, rent-a-cop, mailman, zoo keeper, janitor and, my favorite, a professional wrestler. When I would come out in the morning, reeking of mouth wash and superiority, he would be lying on the couch sporting one of his collection of uniforms. This morning he had settled on his cherry red wrestling trunks. He had paired them with his leather boots which were laced up to his scarred knees and hung over the side of the couch like sleepy dog heads. I was letting Logan inhabit my couch because he was a friend of my older brother’s. There is a picture on the desk at my  brother’s law firm of him and Logan taken at their graduation. Logan has an arm wrapped around Stewart’s shoulders another wrapped around a bottle of champagne and a big, crooked toothed grin on his face.  I couldn’t help but notice that his sides were pushing like freshly popped dough over the sides of the spandex. He sat up as I walked in and I could see the waffle pattern the couch had imprinted on his back. “Where you off to today?” he said. He asked me this same question everyday, whether I was wearing a suit or gym shorts. Today I was wearing my favorite suit. “Goin’ to work with the rest of the stiffs,” I said. When he had first moved in and I was still vaguely amused I would try to come up with different answers each morning, contemplating as I brushed my teeth. I tried the circus, Las Vegas, Mount Kilimanjaro, Cleveland, or a tea party with Alice and the Mad Hatter. I received weak smiles and the occasional eye rolls for my efforts. Two days before Logan’s unemployment check had arrived in the mail and the coffee table was littered with his bad habits, empty pizza boxes, beer bottles, a partially drunk gallon bottle of gin and tall stacks of dirty magazines and DVD’s. I feared for my couch. “Work huh? Sounds interesting, but didn’t you go there yesterday and the day before too?  Seems like you might be getting into a bit of a rut.” Logan went to great pains to piss me off every morning. Maybe he really wanted me to throw him out. “What are you up to today big guy? What’s the plan?” I had learned that the best defense was a good offense. “Well the price is right is on at 10. I’m warming up for that now. Then I have some brochures on underwater welding and TV/VCR repair to look over. Then a 3 o’clock with Donald Trump. I’m free after that if you want to get together,” he said. Logan was a pain in my ass. Most days I would arrive at the office and call my brother before I had taken my jacket off, threatening to throw him out. So far he had managed to talk me out of it, barely. I would put him on speaker phone while he conducted these increasingly frequent pep rally’s and straighten my desk while he droned on. When my desk was perfect I would unfold paper clips and put them into a pile next to the still folded clips. “How about a 3:30 with the bottle of 409, some trash bags and the living room. It’s starting to smell gross in here.” I said. He ignored me and kept his eyes focused on the TV. How did he manage to make me feel like a nagging little girlfriend in my own house? My eyes wandered to the pinnacle of his mountain of porn, “Gang Bang in Outer Space”. I imagined a line of hairy, skinny men wearing nothing but black socks and space helmets while awaiting their turns. Though I didn’t feel like eating I headed to the kitchen to make my breakfast.  I could hear him yelling in the living room.“That’s a pretty cool suit. It’s almost like a uniform.” “Thanks,” I said and felt a little bad for hating him. While I waited for my bran flakes to soften, I poured two classes of OJ, stirring wheat germ into mine. I set one down in front of Logan, between a magazine called “Asian Sluts” and a half empty bottle of beer. “How about some vitamins to fortify your day?” I said.  “You put my wrestling trunks in the dryer and now they’re too tight,” he said, glancing down at himself. The dryer huh, I thought, not your training regime of pizza and porn? “Feel free to do your own laundry if you don’t like the way I do it. I didn’t notice any laundering instructions inside,” “That’s because they’re custom made. Just for me, you know?” He rolled over and faced me. “Your brother really never showed you any tapes of my matches?  I had 26 televised between ‘92 and ‘95.”Stewart had shown me, and my younger brother Jack, tapes of Logan wrestling. Logan had begun to twitch on the couch, his big feet jabbing back and fourth in the air as he thought about his glory days. He bounced up and danced from side to side and with a swoop of his arm flipped over the coffee table. The bottles, glasses, old food containers and porn were launched in a slow motion arc. There was a moment of silence. Logan looked down at the wreckage. “What the ****? Are you insane?” I tried to yell. He raised both his hands and started bouncing again, skipping around the table. “Lock and Loag baby! Lock and Loag!” He dropped to his knees, raising his arms above his head like he was having a religious experience.The carpet was a deep pile called “Rustic Oatmeal”. My designer had encouraged scotch guarding, but I had declined. Logan was doing rapid fire push ups, his too tight trunks impinged between his ass cheeks. That’s when I noticed the jug of cheap red wine, its cap lying nearby like a blown off army helmet. The stain was spreading like a hideous purple genie onto the carpet. A rod of rage went through my gut. I ran at him just as he was rising from his push ups. He crouched and slid to the left as I lunged past, landing in a tangled heap on the couch, my head wedged between the cushions.  I smelled sweat and corn chips. I bounced back up and went after him again, this time trying to stay lower. Once again he side stepped me and I slammed into the back wall. My wrists screamed upon impact. I pushed off anyway and turned just in time to see him launching off the couch, using the spring of the cushions like wrestling ring ropes to propel himself toward me. His right arm seemed miles ahead of the rest of him and the butt of his hand rammed into the soft spot in the center of my chest. I was impaled and landed back of the head first in the wet spot. My eyes opened to see Logan towering above me looking like a worried father whose toddler is standing near the edge of a pool. “Now that wasn’t a very good idea, as it?” I tried to breathe and not listen to the sound of my own gasping. “You sure can take a punch man. Impressive,” he slapped me on the back and started doing push ups again. As I tried to leave the second time, I saw that Logan had dragged the outdoor trash can inside and was tossing bottles into. He had donned his chef’s hat for the occasion and looked vaguely French. “Be home for dinner?” he asked. I ignored him and slammed the door behind me.I was called out of my sales presentation at quarter to three and greeted by a police detective. I had led him into my office where he talk talking and I was attempting to refold the pile of paper clips, “How did he do it?” I asked. “A handgun in his mouth, in the shower,” he answered. “which makes for an easy clean up if your concerned about that sort of thing.” “Well the rest of the house is trashed anyway, so it doesn’t really matter,” I replied. “It didn’t look trashed to me. It looked spic and span, ready for a Better Homes and Garden’s photo shoot,” He questioned me about my relationship to the deceased. “So you weren’t close?” “No, not at all.” “How long had he been with you?” I did the math in my head and was shocked. “Going on six months” I told him all the reasons I knew that Logan might not want to live and he wrote some of them down on his little pad. He gave me his card and a list of cleaning companies. “It’s really not that bad, but it never hurts to have some professional help.” 

Copyright 2007 Heather Robinson
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