One's Company

by Ashley Hutson

After I won the lottery, a lot of strangers showed up to tell me what a piece of trash I was. Then they would ask me for money.

“It’s so nice that someone like you won the lottery, Bonnie,” they’d say in a half-joking tone verging on a sneer.

Back then I never shared my plans or preferences, my ambitions or desires. I never gave away the things I loved. I knew better. Other people can ruin a dream just by knowing it.

I was on my way to a blessing, and every blessing required sacrifice. If I died, well, that would be another kind of blessing.

My plan, my dream, the thing I feared saying aloud in the presence of another human, was this: I would buy property somewhere remote, on a mountain or deep in forested country, and on it I would build a replica of the Three’s Company apartment building. I would live in an identical re-creation of Jack, Janet, and Chrissy’s apartment where I would wake and eat, and bathe and sleep, and around the apartment building I would build the world seen on the show—the Regal Beagle bar, the Arcade Florists flower shop, Jack’s Bistro, Nurse Terri’s hospital waiting room, secretary Chrissy’s office building. It would be a small city. And I planned on living the lives of each character in succession, one after another, until the years ran out.

That’s when I realized what money can really get a person: respect they didn’t earn. I briefly felt disgusting, then free.

I finally knew what it was like to love something sacred and deep, to own an appreciation so big that its gravity felt like returned love.

I didn’t dare wear any of the shirts out of the house, though. I didn’t want anyone commenting on them and breaking the spell.

I didn’t want to meet anyone like me. I needed to believe that my peculiar fixation was mine and mine alone.

People who research anything, who deep-dive anything, understand that solitude is never loneliness when you have your subject. The subject looms before you like a bright city on the horizon, beckoning you forward. And you’re forever living in it, or going toward it.

The California I wanted was gone, anyway. The California most people want is gone.

and upon arriving home in my dark, chilly trailer I immediately ordered my first set of Three’s Company DVDs. I played them so much I worried I would ruin them, so after a few weeks I bought an extra set. After that I bought another DVD player, and another set of the DVDs. After that I bought a third player just in case the first two broke (you never know), and one more set of DVDs.

If I let you ram me like a dead pig carcass, if I yodeled on your dick until I choked, on a scale of one to ten, how worried about me would you still be?

I understood the instinctual contempt toward people with money—even now that I had money I still resented rich people, because I could not think of myself as rich, only as having more to lose.

Love was a sickness. It had poisoned me. People lie when they say misery or loneliness kills; it’s love. Love is the lethal agent. The more you have to live for, the more can be taken away.

Overall, I felt new. Lobotomized.

That’s the beauty of anything set firmly in the past, especially a past time that was never one’s present—you know how it ends.

Joy was a contagion I needn’t catch at that late stage.

When I was around him there was no inkling of a past or future, only the present. I was grateful.

The world felt large and doomed, yet everyone seemed destined to carry on normally.

“Geannie and Jim hated you.” The Elvis record ended and clicked off. We stood facing each other in silence, my surprise at her statement so large that, for a wild second, I thought the force of it had turned off the music.

Just a bad night, I told myself as I brushed my hair in front of the mirror and looked into my brown eyes. Janet was only human, after all.

And that supreme desolation—that realization that I had been abandoned by my own certainty of how the world worked—gave me the reckless freedom to do something truly wild. I started believing in myself.

When it came time to leave, he folded the shopping bag neatly and placed it under his flanneled arm. “My ray of sunshine,” I said softly, squeezing his hand, and he smiled at me. We both knew it was probably the last time we’d be seeing each other.