Nothing funny about lice. Not the first time you get them and not the second. You don’t learn anything from lice. There’s not a lot to extrapolate. Nothing. And this is the third time I’ve caught lice. I wonder.

Each time it’s been the curse of a stranger. In grammar school it was a girl named Roberta. She was new. She was the first new girl. It was fourth grade in a small town, and we’d never had a new girl before.

Second time was my freshman year at college. A guy named Alan Linde. He only lasted two weeks before he dropped out.

This time I can’t be sure. I have a few theories. But nothing for sure.

I know the cure. The only cure. The shampoo they prescribe will kill the lice and their eggs. But to really get rid of lice, you have to give them to somebody else. You have to pass them on.

I know how that sounds.

+

They kept telling me to get ready for the party.

“Either wash your hair or put a cap on,” Mark Allen said.

I was having trouble lifting myself from the couch. My head was burning. And itching.

Then people started appearing. People we know. Friends. Tina. Joel. Sue and Ann. Then there were more people, singles arriving in dribs and drabs. Roger. Rob. Timmy Mayhew. Jennifer.

They were guests arriving. The party was at our place.

Nobody told me.

It was in honor of our latest fourth housemate, Jeff Hector. A magazine in Wyoming that’s been publishing his short stories had decided to devote an entire issue to him. Good for him.

I’ll say it now: I don’t like Jeff Hector.

Things haven’t been going good for me since he moved in three months ago. He serves his purpose. He fills the extra room. He pays his rent. But something’s wrong about him.

He leaves the apartment three times a day, and comes back with his food. He makes fast to his room. He eats at his desk. Mostly he gets soup. He’s big on soup. He’s a soup man. And he slurps his soup. I hear him in his room, slurping his soup.

His typing is non-stop. He’s got an old IBM electric typewriter that whirrs loud when he switches it on. It’s big. It makes a banging noise with each letter typed, and the little desk he keeps it on squeaks every time the carriage returns.

His fiction, which I’ve yet to read, has been characterized by both Mark and Gerald Allen as belonging to the loner-guy genre. He’s got one about a loner-guy travelling. One about a loner-guy thinking about travelling. One about a loner-guy who just finished travelling.

And he can’t piss straight. Since he’s moved in there’s piss on the floor beside the hopper and on the rim. That’s not good.

+

I was always a sensitive boy. I’m not digressing. I feel it’s important to get that out. I always wanted to be writer. I used to watch The Wa1tons every Thursday night to see John Boy Walton sitting at his desk at the end of the show, writing a story about his family in his tablet.

That’s what a young writer should be like, John Boy Walton. I don’t have a tablet. I bounce around on my computer, switching screens from one incomplete story to another. Fixing things. Adding things. Deleting things.

Jeff Hector closes the door behind him, sits at his little desk and types away. He writes without a shirt on, bare-chested. If he gets stuck, which is rare, he paces the room, lifting his weights.

+

As I predicted, Jeff Hector didn’t show for his party. I tried to get some resentment brewing when it became apparent that he wasn’t coming. But no dice. Everybody’s having too much fun, and some of them seem to actually like him.

Gerald Allen begins proposing a toast to Jeff Hector, which I felt compelled to interrupt.

“To hell with Jeff Hector,” I said. “He doesn’t deserve a party. I’m not celebrating him. We’re all writers here. Practitioners of the contemporary short story. Let’s just celebrate the contemporary short story. “

I am literally booed.

Then a rhythmic clapping begins. And then a chant of Jeff Hector’s last name. “Hec-tor. Hec-tor. Hec-tor.”

+

Around midnight I discovered that if I wore my cap backwards, catcher’s style, my head itched less. And when I stayed still, the lice moved less. So I wedged myself between the refrigerator and the kitchen table. I could see the party fine, and I could talk to people when they came for beer.

The truth is I was looking for someone to give the lice to. Of course, everybody knew I had the lice and they were ostracizing me.

When Missy Dean came into the kitchen to visit me. I stopped thinking about my lice. And Jeff Hector.

Missy is taking the semester off for financial reasons. She’s working as a nanny for lesbian couple who had babies at the same time, nine days apart. The babies have the same father, an anonymous donor. The babies, two boys, have the same father. They are related by blood, half brothers.

Missy pointed at my backwards cap. “Hey,” she said. “Johnny Bench.”

She snatches the cap off my head and puts it on before I can stop her.