Jimmy pays to get tasered in an Arby’s parking lot. It does not go well.
PREVIOUSLY ON SUNDAY NIGHT LIGHTS.
Jimmy dreamed again of his dead father and when he woke up, he met with Dr. Hezekiah Bramblewood, AKA, the man he is competing to replace.
🎉 Start at the beginning 🎉
NOTE FROM KNOX
In a lot of ways, Billy is the mirror image of Jimmy; someone adrift in the world and trying to figure himself out. Like Jimmy, he has no family or father-figure, and like Jimmy, Billy is involved with Chapel in some way. The key difference is that Jimmy’s like has been charmed and made much easier by his father, but Billy represents someone where the opposite is true. Which is why I like bringing these two together so much; they are easily bonded by both their extreme similarities AND differences.
As always, I hope you like this chapter and would love to hear your thoughts in the comments!
Chapter 16
Jimmy arrived early, parking where he could watch the lot, and waited.
He’d discovered the format by accident, months ago, when a late-night search for “how much does it hurt to get tased” led him down a rabbit hole of forums, videos, and, eventually, the realization that there was a small but reliable economy of people willing to demonstrate pain mechanisms for money.
He’d left his own taser at home, but was delighted when a taser had been included in the weapons box T. Bob and Matthew Mark had provided for all the contestants. He wondered if this had been a coincidence or just dumb luck.
The Craigslist listing gave him cover; he was just a guy seeking a tutorial, but he’d found that once the agreed-upon cash was doubled and no witnesses were around, most people quickly moved beyond their concerns about the pivot from demonstration to participation.
At 10:40, a man strolled up, not rushed, not hurried, like he wasn’t late because he was usually never on time to begin with. There was something familiar about his gait, loose-limbed and unconcerned, like a man who had long since stopped caring about punctuality or what anyone thought about his lack of it.
Jimmy felt a flicker of recognition but couldn’t place it, which was annoying and the first fly in the ointment. Because if this guy worked at First Church or knew someone who did, or maintained even the slightest association with the congregation, it could be curtains for Jimmy before he made it to the first episode.
Still, he needed the hurt more than he feared the risk. He grabbed a medical mask, pulled it up, and stepped out.
“What’s with the mask?” the man asked, eyeing it as Jimmy approached.
“Uh, might be catching that thing going around,” Jimmy explained with a performative but thin cough.
The man nodded like he wasn’t buying it, but also wasn’t about to argue.
“Don’t wear it on my account. I’ve successfully contracted and defeated every strain of COVID there’s been.”
Jimmy didn’t know if this was a brag or a cry for help.
“Billy,” he said, sticking out a hand.
Billy. The name landed like a small stone in still water. The Subway. The Walmart parking lot. Billy Crystal Meth himself. How had Jimmy not immediately recognized him? Of all the people to respond to his Craigslist ad, it had to be the guy whose life Jimmy kept accidentally intersecting with at the strangest possible moments. And now, the universe seemed to want to return the favor so Billy could bear witness to one of Jimmy’s strange moments. For a second, he considered calling the whole thing off, but then again, Billy had already proven himself discreet about his own chaos; maybe he’d extend the same courtesy to Jimmy.
“Jim—” he began before catching himself. “Timothy,” he said, shaking Billy’s hand and praying he wasn’t appearing as sketchy as he felt.
Billy squinted. “Jim-Timothy?”
“Yep, that’s right. Family name. German, I think,” Jimmy said, casual and absurd, as if German families were famous for hyphenating first names.
“You look familiar. Do I know you from somewhere?”
“I don’t think so,” Jimmy lied, grateful for the mask.
“Huh. You just got one of them faces, I guess.” Billy shrugged and moved on. “Anyway, thanks for doing this. I usually just get contacted by people who wanna pay to taze me for footage on YouTube prank channels or whatever. You’re the first guy who actually wanted a tutorial.”
“I usually just watch YouTube tutorials,” Jimmy said, “but for something like this, I wanted a pro.”
Billy shrugged. “Not sure ‘pro’ is the word. But I been tased enough to know my way around a zap.”
Jimmy filed this away as both useful and deeply concerning.
Billy gave him the basics, a show-and-tell Jimmy barely needed but nodded through anyway. He mostly just needed to be sure the guy wouldn’t screw it up. Billy demonstrated proper distance, explained the difference between direct drive-stun and probe deployment, and illustrated his points by tazing an empty container that had previously held curly fries. The cardboard absorbed the current with a small crackle and the faint smell of burned seasoning, and Jimmy found himself oddly impressed by Billy’s pedagogical instincts. If universities ever offered a course in Applied Electrification in Fast Food Parking Lot, Billy could be the dean of studies.
“All clear?” Billy asked after wrapping up.
Jimmy nodded.
“Well, you got me for at least fifteen more minutes, so you wanna take a crack at it or something? Practice your stance?”
Jimmy considered the question for its opportunity rather than its face value. This was the opening he’d been waiting for.
“Actually, I’d like to feel it. Get the real experience, so I know what I’m dealing with.”
Billy squinted. “You’re saying… You wanna get tased?”
Jimmy nodded again.
Billy whistled low. “Brother, this ain’t a laser tag gun. You sure you’re sure?”
Jimmy didn’t hesitate and took out double the amount promised in the original listing.
“Well, shit,” Billy said. “At least hit the bathroom first. Trust me.”
“I’m good,” Jimmy said, quietly thrilled at how easily he’d managed to turn the interaction toward his actual intent.
“Look,” Billy pressed, “take it from someone who has experienced the jolt a time or two: the first thing that happens is you piss anything you got in there to piss. The human body, when confronted with electricity, becomes shockingly honest about what’s in the bladder.”
Jimmy weighed his bladder on the scale of possibility and found it mostly empty.
“I promise, I’m good to go,” he assured Billy.
Two minutes later, Jimmy was lying flat on the concrete, pants soaked.
“Come on, man,” Billy hissed, hopping from foot to foot with nervous energy. “We gotta move. You’re lying here like one of the Wet Bandits from Home Alone, and I can’t be seen making any trouble for anyone. My probation officer already thinks I have a death wish.”
Jimmy tore his mask off, breathing fresh air like he hadn’t in weeks. The world felt sharp-edged and immediate in a way it hadn’t for months. Pain had a clarifying quality to it—not pleasant, exactly, but honest. Simple. The opposite of grief, which was murky and endless and refused to stay in one place. For a brief and beautiful moment, the hollow feeling was gone, replaced by the loud, dumb reality of having just been electrocuted behind an Arby’s.
He knew somewhere beneath the relief that this wasn’t useful or important much to his dream ghost father’s chagrin. The feeling he had now was just loud. But loud was enough for now; loud had been enough for months, and he wasn’t in a position to negotiate with his own wiring.
“Hey, wait!” Billy peered closer, recognition dawning. “I do know you from somewhere.”
The sense of relief flooding Jimmy turned to panic and shame, but before he could manufacture a lie, a car pulled up.
“Billy? Everything okay?”
Jimmy squinted at the voice and recognized her instantly.
Inconveniently and unbelievably, it was Chapel.
“Shitttttt,” he hissed as he scrambled to get the mask back onto his face.
Of course, it was Chapel. Because he could apparently only encounter this woman at the absolute nadir of his dignity. First screaming like Mrs. Doubtfire, and now lying in his own urine behind a fast food restaurant. If he wasn’t actively doubting his faith, he would see these coincidences as proof of a God with a wickedly playful sense of humor. As it stood, he was just starting to suspect the universe had a very specific fetish for humiliating him.
Chapel got out, her car idling behind her, a Honda Accord appearing old enough to both vote and drink, its paint sun-faded to a color that could only be described as “formerly green.” She looked both concerned and unsurprised, as if she were used to finding Billy in unusual situations. There was something almost maternal in how she scanned the scene: Billy first, then Jimmy, then the ground between them, reading the situation the way a parent reads a room full of suspiciously quiet children.
“Oh, uh, Hey Chapel!” Billy yelled with aggressive cheerfulness as he tried to pick Jimmy up. “Oh yeah, we’re great here.”
The amusement on Chapel’s face quickly changed to concern.
“Billy, please tell me that you’re not…”
Billy seemed to sense the accusation coming from a mile away. “No, no, absolutely not. It’s actually a funny story, my friend here, uh…” He paused, trying to think of the fake name.
“Jim-Timothy,” Jimmy supplied from the ground, even as Billy struggled to hoist him upright, the two of them moving with the coordination of a three-legged race team that had never met.
“My friend Jim-Timothy just had a little mishap with a Dasani bottle and his legs are still a little wobbly.”
“Jim-Timothy?” Chapel asked.
“Yep, my close and good friend, Jim-Timothy. It’s a family name, I’m told.”
“German in origin,” Jimmy slurred, trying to assist Billy in the effort of making him vertical. “Guten Tag, Fräulein,” he said in Chapel’s direction, trying to play it cool, but realizing that his motor skills and speech were still a bit electrified, despite his commitment to the German bit.
“Did you hear that?” Billy said. “High German origin, actually.”
Chapel stared at both men.
“The good Germans, though. He’s a distant cousin of the Von Trapps, I think.”
Chapel continued staring, wondering how much to poke at this artifice of an explanation.
“Okay, sorry, this just looked very relapsey when I drove up.”
“No ma’am, no relapse here. Not this close to the end of my probation. I’m sober as an old goat,” Billy said, still propping up Jimmy.
“Well, that’s good. In other news, though, I think your friend Herr Jim-Timothy pissed himself,” Chapel said, phrasing it as a question but delivering it as a verdict. She stood over Jimmy now, hands on her hips, like a disappointed parent surveying the aftermath of a particularly ill-advised science experiment.
Both Jimmy and Billy immediately launched into competing denials, and Jimmy felt a surge of gratitude for Billy’s discretion regarding the thoroughness and volume of his urinary situation.
“No, uh, Chapel, he was actually, you know what it was?” Billy scrambled for a story with the frantic energy of a man who had clearly never successfully lied in his entire life. “We were having a rock-throwing competition and Jimmy here…”
“Jim-Timothy!” Jimmy corrected.
“Right, sorry, Jim-Timothy, here hit a Dasani bottle dead center and it exploded, and the water went everywhere.”
Chapel bought exactly none of it.
“So he hit the Dasani bottle with a rock? Hard enough to make it explode?”
“That’s right,” Jimmy said, now sitting up. “I pitched in Double A for a few years. Live arm, basically.”
“There’s minor league baseball in Germany?” Chapel asked.
“Uhhh yeah, there’s minor league baseball everywhere,” Jimmy said.
“Where did you play?”
Jimmy racked his still crispy brain for any German city to say. Sensing Jimmy’s inability to answer, Billy spoke up, leading to them both answering differently at the exact same time.
“Genovia,” Billy said.
“Genovia,” Jimmy said.
They shared a mischievous look of wonder in reverence to this synchronized serendipity of stupidity.
“Interesting,” Chapel replied. “You’re both either stupid in the exact same way because Genovia is a fictional country from The Princess Diaries movies, or it’s some weird German minor league baseball thing.”
“Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction, Chapel,” Billy replied.
“But back to the rock hitting the Dasani bottle, to get that kind of speed, you’d have to be pretty far away, right?”
“Yep, but luckily he’s very accurate,” Billy said, trying to force this aspect of the conversation to turn the corner.
“Well then, the question becomes, if he was so far away, how did the water from the Dasani bottle get specifically and expertly on his crotch?”
Jimmy died a little inside, their idiotic story undone by such tedious concepts as physics, time, and space.
“Oh well, see, now that’s because when he hit it, I squeezed my Dasani bottle out of surprise and excitement, which explains the wet crotch.”
“I see,” Chapel replied evenly. “However, where are these, now, two Dasani bottles you speak of? I currently see no bottles of water anywhere.”
Billy looked around for the nonexistent evidence. “Uhhhhh, wind got em, I think? Climate change…tradewinds…probably a little continental drift responsible for it as well.”
Jimmy, now slightly irked at her observational thoroughness, chimed in from his supine position. “What is this, Law and Order: SVU? Do you have a warrant for the Dasani bottle?”
Chapel looked at Jimmy to respond, but before she spoke, a spark of recognition lit her eyes. “Wait, don’t I know you from somewhere?” Chapel asked, her interrogation shifting into genuine curiosity. She tilted her head, studying him.
Jimmy watched closely as her eyes scanned her memory. He wondered if she remembered him as vividly as he remembered her, but he didn’t know why he was so invested in this remembrance, especially given that he was currently sitting in a puddle of very much not Dasani. But it felt like a referendum on his essential being in some weird way.
Since breaking up with Bunny, he hadn’t felt like this about anyone, much less a stranger, but a strange and formidable feeling had taken residence in his chest about the possibility of a woman like Chapel not only remembering him but also being willing to acknowledge it. All in all, it didn’t mean much, but men have launched military campaigns and created empires on less. Jimmy’s heart clenched. He wanted, needed, her to remember him as something other than a wet, screaming disaster.
Her brow furrowed, then cleared. She reached down and pulled Jimmy’s mask from his face.
“Yeah! You’re the guy who screamed like Mrs. Doubtfire at the parking lot.”
Their eyes met.
“The Until When guy,” she said, just a little quieter.
For a moment, Jimmy forgot he was soaked in his own urine behind an Arby’s. Some things just transcended circumstance like that.
Having been helped to the bathroom, Jimmy frantically tried to dry his pants using a combination of paper towels and the hand dryer, the latter of which seemed to have been calibrated for the express purpose of being useless. His head still felt wobbly, and his stomach hurt where he’d felt the current of the taser, but otherwise, he was coming back to life.
He studied his face in the bathroom mirror and noticed that he looked haggard. He was too young yet to look so old, and while addressing this issue required a consistency and enclave of serums and creams not currently available at this Southeastern Tennessee Arby’s, he instead tried to tame his hair so he didn’t look like he’d just been tased and pissed himself in the process. He was aiming for “tired but dignified” and landing somewhere around “recently electrocuted but trying his best.”
Hearing loud voices, Jimmy walked out to find Billy screaming at the Arby’s cashier.
“Andre, you act like you’re so cool because you work at a place that has the meats, but everyone knows you’re a clown.”
“Ask your mom what she thinks about my meats,” Andre replied, and enraging Billy in the process.
“First of all, you know my mom is dead. Secondly, I think the fact that Arby’s says it so much sounds suspicious. No one thought they didn’t have the meats. What are they hiding?”
“Subway would know a thing or two about hiding. Member how they hid all the molesting their boy Jared was doing?”
Somewhat shockingly to Jimmy, this animated Billy in a way he had not anticipated. Billy rose to Subway’s defense with the impassioned fury of a man whose honor had been personally besmirched, which was notable given that Subway had fired him and Billy had, by his own admission, stolen cookies and Chipotle Ranch from the establishment for weeks. It was, Jimmy thought, not entirely unlike defending a faith you weren’t sure you believed in anymore; loyalty to something you loved despite overwhelming evidence that it didn’t love you back was complicated.
“Those revelations came to light after his contract with Subway was not renewed, and you goddamn know it, Andre!”
“I’m sorry,” Chapel interrupted. “Are y’all beefing over fast food restaurants?”
“Billy’s all uppity because Subway is fast casual, and now he thinks he’s better than us,” Andre explained.
“Jokes on you, pecker breath: I don’t work there anymore.” Billy looked around self-consciously, now realizing that this indicated he’d most likely been fired from Subway, which Andre immediately pounced on.
“Bet I know what happened. Billy Crystal Meth strikes again.”
Chapel turned to Billy and, under her breath, asked, “Hold up, you got fired from Subway?”
“Actually, I left to pursue more freelancing opportunities,” Billy clarified for everyone’s benefit, gesturing vaguely at Jimmy as if to demonstrate his current freelance portfolio.
Andre thoughtfully considered this.
“Sure do wish your mama was still alive so she could enjoy my freelancing!” Andre said while returning to his subtle art of crotch self-grabbing.
Chapel held Billy back while Andre added the thrusting of his hips to what, Jimmy had to admit, was a mesmerizing poetry of gyration. The man had the commitment level of an Olympic figure skater: total-body engagement, unbroken eye contact, and rhythmic precision that suggested hours of private rehearsal. Jimmy found himself unable to look away, not out of admiration exactly, but out of the same impulse that makes you watch a nature documentary about a bird doing an elaborate mating dance: you know it’s absurd, but you also can’t help but respect the biological dedication.
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After thanking Chapel for her help and seeing her off (she had somewhere to be, people who needed her, a whole life happening that didn’t revolve around Jimmy’s humiliations), Billy helped Jimmy to his car.
“You want a ride?” Jimmy asked.
“Nah, my car is just a few blocks down,” Billy lied.
“Dude, I gave you a ride the other night.”
Billy looked pained and self-conscious, as if the extreme weight of needing anything from anyone was a physical discomfort he could feel in his teeth.
“Look, man, I pissed my pants in front of you earlier. I’m not exactly in an ivory tower of judgment right now.”
They both looked up at a graying sky growing more colorless by the minute. The clouds had that heavy, sagging quality that suggested they were thinking very seriously about committing to something.
Billy clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth and looked at the sky and the road again. Then back at Jimmy. Then at his own feet. The internal calculus of pride versus precipitation played out across his face in real time.
“Yeah, okay,” Billy finally said. “I don’t normally take rides with pant-pissers, but a ride would be nice.”
Jimmy unlocked the Fiat, and Billy folded himself into the passenger seat with the resigned energy of a man climbing into a clown car.
As they pulled onto the road, fat drops of rain began to smack against the windshield. Jimmy vacantly looked at them as he checked the status of the hollow feeling that had been plaguing him just hours ago. While it had retreated, he knew it wouldn’t last, just like how you know an anaesthetic always wears off eventually. The taser had done its job, but Jimmy also could sense that it wasn’t just the pain chasing it away this time. It was how Chapel had remembered him and how Billy now sat beside him, quiet and stubborn and human, letting Jimmy help without turning it into a joke. He knew none of these things meant he was healed, but he did feel back on the map for the first time in a long time.
NEXT TIME ON SUNDAY NIGHT LIGHTS…
Jimmy gets to know his new friend Billy Crystal Meth a little bit and he prepares for the first episode of the competition.
