My father moved in a whore and her son when I was at work.
My clothes were folded behind the couch. I saw their suitcases. They were in the kitchen talking. I walked into my room, sat on the bed and looked around at his things. My father walked by and looked at me. I asked him what had happened. He threw me disgust. I walked into the kitchen where they stood. She was a fat brunette, high hair and a glittering dress, her fat feet crammed into pumps. Her face was whiskey and batter and trade. Her son was a skinny, long hair in the back and wired on speed. My father walked in, “Jeff. This is your new family. Billie and Brett.” She gave me a slimy nod. Her son tilted his head back and stared me down. I looked at my hands, walked into the bathroom and ran the water. My palms were bloodied from a spill on my bike riding home from work, working double shifts to save for a car. My father rushed in and slammed the door. In the mirror he asked me why I was being so rude. I kept washing my hands. He asked me again. Through the mirror I could see that he had been up for days. I could see that he had just met her at the bar, and I could see him moving their suitcases up the staircase into our apartment. To my left on the counter I saw a clear vanity bag containing make-up, hair brushes and a small glass pipe. I looked back to the sink. He caught the side of my head with a solid right. It echoed in my skull and left my ear ringing. The hit knocked me into the wall. I resumed washing my hands. He told me that this is the way life was, that if I didn’t like it, to pack my shit and get out. He closed the door quietly. I collapsed to the floor and held my ear with both hands, coming up with blood on my palm. The pain was incredible. I washed the ear, walked back into the bedroom and sat on the bed. It occurred to me that this would be the way it was. I walked into the bathroom and grabbed up my things. In the living room I saw her chopping lines of cocaine on the coffee table. They watched the blade and nothing else. I sat back on the bed and began putting the things my father had missed into one of my pillowcases.
I heard the whore whisper to her son to come talk to me. He walked in and stood over me while I sat on the bed. He nodded down to me and curled his lip back, “What the fuck are you doing in here?” He was sweaty junk. His lower jaw was orbited his skull, and his eyes were disgusting. My father and the whore appeared in the doorway, and my father smiled. In his smile I saw terrible things. The whore yelled at her kid, “Brett! That is no way to treat your new brother!” He ignored her and twitched, “I asked you a question, faggot.” I looked at my father. He told me I had to fight my own battles. Her son nudged my shin with the toe of his sneaker, “Get out of my room.” My father laughed. He said that if he were me he’d get out of the room before Brett taught me a lesson. I asked him if he’d lost his mind. He was unresponsive. Her son flipped his fingertips against my sore ear and told me to get out again. I stood up and punched him in the teeth. A few slipped back. He fell into the closet doors, and they fell off their tracks. It was loud. My father came for me. I ducked him and her son was up, hand over bloody mouth. He had tears in his eyes. My father had fallen behind the side of the bed. He was grumbling threats, and trying to stand.
I caught her son with a left this time, in the throat. He fell back into the closet and screamed like a girl. His mother came at me in a blind rage. I kicked her hard in the crotch. She stumbled back and dropped in the hallway. I felt a hand on my shoulder spin me around, a flash of meaty knuckles and my lights were turned out.
I woke up hours later. My head was pounding. It was dark in my room. I was under the covers with my shoes off. It occurred to me in the dark that I had turned seventeen the day before. I sat up and walked into the bathroom. The place was pitch black. I flipped the light on.
The whole area above my eyebrows and down to the center of my nose was dark blue and kidney shaped, like a dark birthmark. My neck was stiff. I touched the bruise. Shockwaves of pain rolled around my head. There was the clear vanity bag to my left. In a cup in the medicine cabinet sat a plastic cup with dentures at the bottom. I walked into my room and put my shoes on.
Through the bathroom light I could hear them passed out in the living room, down from days of speed. I watched the room from the doorway. My belongings were no longer packed behind the couch. In the bathroom I lifted the dentures from the cup and crushed them under my heel, returning the crumbs back into the cup. They floated there. I closed the medicine cabinet.
I came back and sat at the table. I nodded to the empty table where the couples were. “Cops take off?” Dave smiled, “You caught that.” “It’s that snarky vibe, also the tension of never being fully relaxed. The haircuts didn’t help.” Tom shook his head, “Suburban cops. Brain-dead and blissful. But even those dullards have to hit the city once in a while, have a night out like everyone else. They left a ten spot on the table. Gave it to Mikey.”
“You scored, Mikey,” I said. He was lost in The Matrix. He’d seen it in the theater something like 18 times. Mikey obsessed like that, though. Dave once told me that Mikey had read Blade Runner repeatedly for a year, after he’d seen the movie, which Tom had on VHS, but that Tom got pissed when they watched Apocalypse Now together at the shop, because Mikey didn’t get the brilliance of it, the perfection.
Christine woke me up with my cock in her mouth. I stiffened my torso and shot. She came up and kissed me on the neck. I took her out for breakfast, we came back, ran Lucy around the park, and I wrote Rick a check. Rick was alright. He was supposed to be an apartment manager, the way a P.E. coach was born for the job and no other. Rick had a short haircut and an angular face, round wire glasses and a thin build. Nasally and reasonably intelligent, he would probably own his one building one day. He was a perfect warden for the free. He stood on my stoop and held the check at his side. “Fuck, man. I’m sorry. Roger’s a huge dildo.” “Don’t worry about it.” “But it’s not like you’ve been any kind of trouble. I told his ass that you’re quiet, no mess or problems whatsoever making rent. In fact you’re the only one here who hasn’t incurred a late fee.” “Rick, it’s honestly no big deal” He shook his head at the ground, histrionic yet sincere. He lingered there and threw some gossip around about the other tenants, like the old crazy fucker across the courtyard and upstairs who tried to fake a nervous breakdown to avoid a late fee. Then there were the ones he called Lethal Weapon, black and white roommates in their mid-twenties who left their empties scattered on their stoop and blasted rap at 4 a.m. until the cops had to show up and squash it, the cute Japanese student across the courtyard and to the left who works out naked, not that he’d meant to see it, and if I’d heard some banging above me late last night it was because he’d met a girl and brought her home. I hadn’t heard anything. My phone rang. Christine held it up in the window. I said later to Rick and stepped in. She hung it up. “Called from my cell. I could tell you were getting lost at sea.” “I was in the seductive throes of schizophrenia, interracial cohabitation, voyeurism, and Rick’s red hot night of silent fucking.” “Awesome.” I sat on the couch next to her. Lucy barked at the sound of people on the porch. Billy and Amanda. I waved them in. Lucy ran up and met them. He had a six pack of Becks. He handed me a bottle. “Thought we’d drop by and hang out. Sorry I didn’t call first, but−” “But you’re not gay?” I took the bottle. He laughed. Amanda sat next to Christine. Billy took the loveseat. Christine drank her beer, “Wait, who’s at The Alley?”
−Excerpt from Flotsam for Jetsam, out this winter.
I took a detour and drove into Hollywood, around the cul de sac, and looked at the building where my studio apartment had been. It was still there of course, but I wasn’t walking out of it with no car, to a job that paid less than six dollars an hour. I sat there in the air conditioning of the 2012 Chevy, and looked up at the stairs that ran up past the manager quarters. The carpet was blue now, not the blood-red it had been back in my mid-twenties. I was there, in that car, 41, a paid author, under contract for Lolly this time, my stomach full with good food and expensive coffee. I nodded at the front door and remembered back to walking out the same door, quiet as a ninja, so the landlord wouldn’t hear me and hit me up for past rent. I remembered the crazy Mexican woman who thought that she was a Native American. She used to bang on her ceiling with a broomstick at two in the morning when my typewriter was keeping her awake. She simply called me “boy.”
And I’d walked the streets of Los Angeles as a younger man, blind with passion and hungry for living. The pimps that nodded good morning and called me brother, the jack rollers and hustlers, the plastic bodies pumped with greed under the heat on the boulevards, all of it was within me, then, the hunger for the word, mad with compulsion, the sun bleeding down upon the homeless, the sweat running down the necks of taxi drivers and vagrants with too many clothes but nowhere to put them. The bitter market owners with their children hiding around corners watching me browse the shelves; even they knew that I was poor, shaggy-haired and running with the dream, walking the streets while the rooming houses watched me like statues with eyes that moved. But I had the fire of the word, I had the sentences running down my arms with the sweat while I walked the city and waited for the room to cool down.
Up at noon. Stretched, ran, worked out, walked Lucy and we were in the ocean. Christine in her bikini was drawing cameras from voyeurs, cell phone pics on the sly, and looks from men at the risk of their women’s repulsion. We passed the water jug and watched the surf. I needed a haircut, or I didn’t. Christine liked the messy mop and sideburns. Her hair was officially long now, and it hung about her cheek bones and perfect lips. Her feet were smooth, tan and arched, cherry red toenails that sweetened the throat with thoughts of sunlight, white t-shirts and cherry slushes, all things good came back to me staring at her. Banana seats and sissy bars, long, thin skateboards and fat rubber wheels, iron-on patches and the toned, half-bare asses of my sister’s friends as they laid in the backyard of our house in Phoenix, sundripped and shiny with oil and sweat on the deck of the pool. All the wonderland of skin across the sex-stunned bones of my adolescence rested pulsing beneath the red string bikini of my wife. The ocean turned over in beats and bass, and the sand moved in the roll of a tongue beneath her stomach and hips, as I and the rest of the beach gazed at her there while her headphones blasted Modern English and other post punk 80s bubblegum resurrections. The smell of Coppertone and Pacific had married above her body and pinned my vision on the horizon behind the top of her perfect ass. I ran my middle finger down her knuckle and she smiled beneath a shroud of wild hair with sweat at the roots.
Back at the house we made it halfway up the stairs before my tongue was up her ass and she was grabbing my hair and thrusting herself into my mouth. Her palms leaned forward and pressed into the carpet while I held her legs off the ground with the grip of my hands on her hips, and I watched her body bounce off our sex while she bucked and came with her hair in her face and her perfect tits hard at the nipples. I arched my back and shot into her and we were frozen there like statues bleeding sweat, my love for her a poem I could never write.
Lunch. More of the same shit. Some form of noodles, a piece of cornbread, a square of pink cake, and cubed carrots which are the exact orange of the jumpsuits. Bates was looking at the table behind us. He reached back, and then set a piece of cake on his tray. He nodded at me. I looked at it. He smiled,
“Score.”
I washed down a bite of the cornbread. He sipped his juice,
“Motherfucker owes me a cake once a day for a week. Up to him which meal it comes from, though. Beat his ass in spades all day yesterday.”
He broke the cake in half and offered it to me. I shook my head at it and thanked him. The deputy called from his seat,
“STANTON! Eat up then go to Booking!”
The whole room jeered. I shrugged at Bates,
“What the fuck?”
“Usually means you’re catching another charge.”
“What else could they possibly fucking charge me with?”
“Washington County, man.”
I didn’t want to finish my tray, but there was no sharing allowed, and the hack was watching me. I kept eating until he turned his head, then slid my tray over. Bates shoveled the noodles onto his tray. I set mine in the empty tray cart and stood by the vestibule.
Walking down toward Booking. Another charge. I couldn’t see where that was possible. Inmates I’d never seen passed me in the hallway, trustees pushing food or laundry carts, a deputy walking like he would actually have a chance in a brawl with one of them in the real world, but mostly the hatred I felt for the inmates sped up my blood. I let another jumpsuit pass and I wondered if animals in the zoo have animosity. The fear of any of these assholes was long gone already. The fear of prison remained sharp, and I imagined that it would. The terror here rested in the hours, the synthetic white of everything, the cold hardness of everything, and it applied to anyone. No regard for taste, no ease of subjectivity. Jail was a torture test. I pressed the button at the Booking door and walked in. The lobby was full of mutants to be processed. Some were sitting up with their eyes closed. I knew it was cold, but I was already used to it. The TV was on, and it played a talk show. It was sickening there. At the desk they made me sit over by the medic room door. I watched the administration workers, and they looked as barely useful as they did when I was booked.
There he was, his flounder face rested beneath a high-and-tight crew cut. His badge and gun sat happily on his hip. Pressed white long sleeve, pressed black pants. His mother probably taught him how to iron in high school. He was talking to one of the administration eunuchs, and they were smiling back and forth, which made sense. He walked over and looked down at me,
“Jonathon.”
I stared at him. He nodded into the medic room, clutching a baggie. I walked in. He sat and I stood. He nodded at my haircut,
“Got your hair cut. Looks good.”
I looked at his hair again. My hair looked almost like his, and it depressed me. He pulled out four long swabs from the baggie, “Go ahead and swipe these under your lip and along your gum for me.”
I didn’t know why any of this was necessary. It had already been established that I’d fucked the whore, and maybe he had, too, by now. But I ran the swabs along my cheek and gum, and he held the baggie open as I put them in. He wanted to talk, it was obvious. I had nothing to say to him. He looked at me, the candy ass, his puffy cheeks and vacant eyes crawled under my skin and tapped on my nerves. He opened his mouth,
“So what’s it like in here?”
“It’s sad.”
He looked around then shrugged at me,
“I wouldn’t want to be in here.”
I watched him with disinterest. He raised his eyebrows,
“You should have come and talked to me when I called. You’d be out right now, walking around.”
“You done?”
He turned and headed toward the door,
“Goodbye, Jonathon.”
I walked to the door at the end of Booking and waited. A deputy reached over and hit a button and the door buzzed, and I walked back down the hall where I waited in the vestibule. I sat and looked around at the pod. Take away the walls and the tile and the insanity, and it could resemble a Motel 6. I thought about the nights on the road with my dogs, waiting until 7 am so when I got a room, so I’d have it until noon the next day. I watched the cell doors and saw some inmates staring down at me from the top tier, cage to cage. Overhead there was a camera on me. The vestibule door rolled open and a tall, bald inmate stepped in. He sat across from me. His cell was on the lower tier, in on a meth charge. He nodded to me,
“What’s up, writer? You catch a new charge?”
“No. I had to deal with a detective. What are you doing?”
“Programs,” he taps his chest pocket, which holds a rolled up booklet, “anger management.”
“Are you managing your anger?”
He shrugged, “Gets me out of my cell for an hour every other day.”
The yard door opened and a deputy walked in, the one from Booking who had photographed my tattoos. She saw us, but did her cell walk first. He watched her and rubbed his cock over his jumpsuit. We stood and he smiled at me while he unsnapped his bottom snap and reached his hand down inside,
“Writer, watch this.”
She hit the button at her desk and the door rolled open. He was in front of me. I didn’t know if he was really that stupid or if he wanted to go to the hole or get some more time. At the desk she pulled the paper from his pocket and told him to turn around. She frisked him, patted down his chest to his stomach then stopped just above his waistband,
“What’s this?”
“Oh, I don’t know.”
She patted around it, then realized what it was. Her face washed with disgust. She told him to have a seat at one of the tables. She looked at me,
“How about you, any surprises for me?”
“I hardly think so.”
She frisked me. I glanced down to him, his arms were folded behind his head and he was smiling at me. He was missing two diagonal teeth, upper right, bottom left. The ones remaining weren’t too proud of themselves. Back in the cell, I looked down to see her on the phone, then in a matter of no time two male deputies had him up and all of his shit packed into his sheet, and they hustled him to the hole.
The boat was rocking so bad you could run up and down the door frames. People like to imagine the ocean as being blue and beautiful. I used to imagine it that way. When you’re that far out at sea the water is black. Day or night it is black and deadly looking, like obsidian in slow motion. Black as far as you could see. The boat was small, anyway. We were going side to side like the boat was plastic. Everyone was grabbing their survival suits. Some were crying and some were scribbling down their wills. I laid in my rack and drank from the flask. Let them fire my corpse. I sat back and thought how it figured that I would end out there. I masturbated one last time, emptied the flask and closed my eyes. If the boat capsized then their survival suits were useless. The boat crashed through the swells and you could hear the waves roaring into the sides. My last thought before I made myself sleep was her.
It was calm and dark. I didn’t know what to expect. There was no light or movement. I heard nothing. I reached out and pulled the curtain back and stood in the dark. Then I felt it, a gentle rocking beneath my feet. I walked to the door and went outside.
It was warm out there. I was shirtless. The Sun sat dark red on the horizon and it was huge. You could look right at it. The black water stretched out far to reach it. I breathed in and held the handrail, watched the horizon melt around the Sun. How small we were against the grace of the heavens. Our petty dreams, our need for self. Our weak assurances.
I was the only one out there. I saw a whale emerge from the water and twist out there in front of the red. It hung there upside down in front of the Sun, it hung there careless and lazy, totally oblivious to us, to the human refuse of the boat, sacrificing our luck and lives for a goddamned dollar. It went back through and my heart swelled in my chest so fast that it cracked my bones. Something happened to me which I could not understand. I wept. I stood there and wept at the beauty of what I saw. I wept when I thought that the moment was meant for me and me alone, as I so badly wanted it to be that way. I so badly wanted to be chosen by God there, to be pulled out amongst the clean cold blackness of the water, to stand naked on the back of a whale before the harmlessness of a sun which was now trained for damage. I wanted that scene, I wanted to be transcended into that scene forever. I wanted everything to be beautiful again. I wanted to be beautiful again.
Scab earned his name after his father opened his bedroom door and caught him jacking off to a magazine called Chicks With Dicks. He tried to toss the mag and zip up, but he caught his dick in his zipper and his father had to cut his pants with scissors to build pressure for the zipper to pop open. But the zipper had a hold on him, and his father had to rip it away. It left a scab that was constantly broken because Scab couldn’t stop jacking off. He told a few of us the story after he was kicked out of the house. His father was a lifer in the Air Force, and he was already apprehensive about Scab because Scab played the cello. Scab’s mother sneaked him money when she could. He was juggled between the families of friends, then he was allowed back in the house until the day he graduated, but by then his father was dead. His mother followed two years after. He stayed with me for awhile, then with somebody else after I left Arizona, then he eventually met a girl and lived with her, until she discovered that he also liked men. He literally closed his eyes one day and pointed to the map. He had set his finger on Philly, quit his job and moved. His little brother was living with him. I hadn’t seen him since he was shipped off to live with their grandmother in Tulsa after their mother died. He stood in the kitchen and ran his mouth about his new punk band, about how it went against the mainstream and underground, how it was against anything stock or ordinary, as well as false and forced for trend.
“Alright. So what’s the fucking band called?”
“Wreckedge, as in wrecking the fucking edges: straight edge, emo, rap metal, gangster, R&B, hip-hop; destroying all that bullshit. Even taking it beyond the realm of thrash.”
“You got a lot of balls to be able to say that.”
“Fuck you. You’ll see.”
“You’re standing there with an eyebrow ring and eyeliner, telling me that you’re part of something astonishing. You’re an idiot.”
“No,” he paused and acted like he was scratching his balls, “Maybe I’m doing this on purpose to reach everybody and help re-educate them.”
“Talk about bullshit.”
“You’re a hopeless cynic. I understand why you’re a writer. But your perception of music is retarded.”
I sat there and drank my coffee. He lit a smoke and walked out of the kitchen. I cracked my neck and rolled a sheet through. I started a letter to Emily, telling her about Philadelphia. Right now she was getting ready for work. Blitz walked back in and put a tape in the cassette player,
“What are you writing?”
“A letter to my girlfriend.”
“Check this shit out. This is Wreckedge.”
He hit play. It was awful. Blitz played rhythm guitar and sang. The band was out of key and the lyrics were laughable, something about burning down the world and how they were the chosen few, a lot of shit like that. I reached over and hit stop. He looked at me,
“Why’d you stop it?”
“It sounds like everything else. Only worse.”
He gave me a hurt look. I tilted my cup at him,
“I’m just being honest.”
He stood up and ejected the tape. He held it in his hand,
“You’re a dick. You have no ear for the original.”
I nodded to the tape in his hand,
“Likewise.”
He punched the wall and walked out. Scab walked through in his boxers. He brewed a new pot and waited by the counter. It was useless to talk to him before he tasted coffee. He pulled the pot off the heater and held his cup under the drip. He walked past the hit on the wall and sat down. He drank his coffee and rolled his eyes at me,
“You saw my little brother, huh?”
“We had a conversation about his God complex.”
“I heard.”
“I didn’t mean to fuck with him.”
“Don’t worry about it. We go round and round over that shit.”
The doorbell rang. Nobody got up. There was a wait, another ring and the door opened. A young girl walked in. Scab and I stared at her. She was there for Blitz. She was barely dressed. Her body was great to the point where it was cruel for us to look at it. I lit a smoke. She stood in the kitchen and stared at us,
“Where’s Blitz?”
Scab looked into his cup,
“He’s on the shitter.”
Blitz screamed from his room,
“No I’m not! Shut the fuck up!”
I walked over and poured a coffee. She looked at Scab,
“So, I take it you’re Craig?”
“Right. This here’s my buddy John from Portland.”
“Maine?”
“Oregon.”
“Oh.”
Scab looked at me and smiled. I shook my head at him. He nodded at me,
“John’s a writer.”
“Oh? For a living?”
“That’s right,” he said. “Novels published and everything.”
I poured the sugar in,
“Don’t listen to him.”
She cocked her head at me. I was in town to do a reading. I had to read that afternoon.
“What’s your last name?”
Scab told her. She laughed,
“Oh my god! Wait, you guys are fucking with me.”
“That’s right. I told you not to listen to him.”
She ran over and pulled my wallet from my pocket. She read my license.
I sat down. She walked over and gave me my wallet,
“Can I please give you a hug?”
Scab smiled at me. I stood up. I wasn’t wearing a shirt, and I could feel her navel ring and tits press into me.
“I’m Jenny.”
“Of course,” I said. Scab laughed.
I sat back down. Jenny sat next to me at the table.
“I never do this. I never geek out like this. I had no idea you were so young.”
I pulled the letter out and flipped it over, “Young my ass.”
“How old are you?”
“I could be your father.”
“I doubt it.”
“How old are you, Jenny?”
“Twenty-three.”
“Well, if we were in Kentucky I could be.”
“How old are you?”
“Thirty-six.”
“That’s not too bad.”
Scab got up and poured another cup. He lit one of my smokes,
“John doesn’t believe in aging.”
She reached over and touched my arm,
“I can’t believe you’re sitting right here. I have so many questions for you. I mean, I’ve read everything of yours I could find.”
I looked at the diamond in her navel. I wanted to fuck her so badly I could barely swallow. But I had Emily, and I couldn’t do that to her. I grabbed a shirt from my suitcase and put it on,
“You can ask me.”
Scab sat down. The phone rang. He held it over to me,
“Emily.”
I answered.
“Hi, beautiful.”
Jenny smiled. Emily was behind the bar getting ready to open.
“I just got to work. How’s Scab doing?”
“He’s good. I started writing you a letter today.”
“Shit, I have to go. Fuckface just got here.”
“I’ll talk to you.”
We hung up. Fuckface was her boss. His real name was Todd. Todd was the bar manager and a real prick. Emily wouldn’t quit her job. She made good money there. Jenny looked at Scab,
“How did you two meet?”
“Grew up together. He went on to become a famous writer and I went on to become a sleeper.”
“Blitz said you played the cello for a living.”
“I scrape by.”
Jenny focused on me again,
“I think your writing is amazing.”
I smiled at her. Scab shook his head,
“He’s one of those queers who can’t take a compliment.”
She laughed and squeezed my arm,
“Oh, he’s just humble.”
Blitz walked in and shot her a cold stare. She walked over to him. Her jeans were loose and low. Scab and I watched her ass cheeks wobble around her thong. It was torture. She hugged Blitz,
“You never told me you knew John Struyveint.”
Blitz shot me a bitter nod,
“This dude’s a dick.”
I put out my smoke, “Thank you, Blitz.”
Jenny laughed. Scab looked into the newspaper,
“He’s just pussyhurt because John doesn’t like Wreckedge.”
Jenny cocked her head at me. She was pigeon-toed and soaked with sex,
“Why don’t you like it?”
“I have go to take a shower.”
Scab laughed. Blitz shook his head,
“Fuck all this. I’m outta here. Jenny, you can stay here and suck his dick. I don’t give a fuck. I’m on a mission.”
He grabbed his guitar from the couch and slammed the front door. Scab smiled into the paper. Jenny looked at me,
“Are you staying here?”
“Two days.”
“I want to talk to you about your writing. I’ll see you later. Bye, Craig.”
“See you, sweetheart.”
She went after Blitz.
I looked at Scab,
“I’ll be hitting the ceiling tonight.”
“Man, fuck that. Emily blows her away.”
“No, she does. And she gives me balance. But still.”
“I hear you.”
“How long has Blitz been here?”
“Oh, fuck. It’s gotta be half a year since he showed up here.”
“Does he have a plan?”
“Of course not. He never has a plan. He gets to one place then shoots to the next. No roots, no address. I expect no less.”
“He’s changed.”
“He’s changed into a little bitch.”
I laughed. Scab nodded at the counter,
“Well, hell, he fits right in here. They think Blitz is a cool nickname he’s earned. They think it’s cool and he lets them think that. I don’t blame him. I wouldn’t want anybody to know that my father was an uber jock and named me after a football play. But he’s let it go to his head.”
I rolled the sheet back through. Scab stretched,
“I heard you tell Blitz you were writing a letter to Emily.”
“I was.”
“You’ll be back before she even gets it.”
“I know.”
Scab told me he had met a girl and he was happy with her. He met her through some personals in a fetish or sex magazine. She was a full-on woman with a cock above her pussy. Scab told me the cock was functional but she couldn’t get off with it. Scab told me he had fought the notion that he was bisexual after the last guy he was with bored him within half an hour. He said he did a week of soul searching and he figured out that he liked the body of a woman, but also a cock, but that having to see a guy’s bare torso or ass to get to the cock was always an obstacle which became too large to hurdle:
“I never thought of myself as bisexual because I never liked to take it up the ass or even give it up the ass. I didn’t even like kissing another guy. I just liked sucking a hard dick. I use to always fantasize that I was sucking some dude’s dick while I fucked his girlfriend or his wife. Now I have it both ways, with the same woman.”
I stared into my cup,
“Fucking freaks.”
“You’ll meet her.”
He got up and poured another cup, started a new pot. He sat back down and opened the paper.
“Just don’t tell her you know she has a dick. She doesn’t think it’s anybody’s business.”
I heard him yelling at her, calling her a cunt. I heard him tell her that he was coming back for me. From the corner of the curtain I watched them out there. I was not afraid to fight him but I knew he would take me because he was right. I started getting ready for it. She took off running, and he looked to the room and stalled. He was on her heels in no time. Then they were gone. I coasted my bike out and opened the van, threw it in with the rest of my things and got the hell out of there. I found a rest stop about 45 miles up the freeway and pulled over and slept.
The Sun found a slit in the curtains and sent two yellow arrows directly into my forehead. I opened my eyes. My chest was heavy. I was sweating. I was lying in an oven. I unlatched the backdoors and crawled out. Out there it was hot. The men were walking shirtless next to their wives and kids. It was refreshing to me, almost cold. My skin rose then fell back across my bones. My eyes were burning with sweat. I looked around the desert.
I drove into Flagstaff and ordered a soda. I thought about her. I thought about her selfishness. That big flank of live meat could have killed me, and he would have. All she saw was new skin, vanity. I wondered why I hadn’t told the cops that he was in the bathroom. I decided cops were worse than women.
The mountains of Flagstaff were clean and cool. I parked at an overlook and waited off my fever. On the couch in back I fell asleep with the windows opened. I awoke to see the sunset. It was brighter than usual, and colder, because it was a sunrise. I had slept for nearly a day. I drove back to the same place and read the map. Albuquerque looked decent. A young and vicious college girl came into the diner and sat in a booth across from mine. She smiled. I got up and left.
I stopped inside of New Mexico. Never had I seen such a disgusting, dirty, wormed over town. It was horrible. It was a deceased Tijuana in the middle of nowhere. At a gas station I found a drinking fountain that turned out a copper arc. I bought a small bottle of water and a coffee.
The city took forever. I didn’t like the look it had. I found a byway going south, and I drove through the Southwest, the impossible mesas, the red plateaus painted far back atop a beautiful brown, deadly, lazy scheme. For the first time in weeks I felt peace. I drove on, listening to an old country station, the songs taking me back to the coffee table of my childhood, to my father drinking coffee and smoking, talking to my mother before the Sun came out and he had to leave to roof houses. I was six or seven years old. My mother would sometimes stand behind him in her bathrobe and pop the heat blisters across his back. I remembered his tattoos. He had done time. The ink was deep green. He explained to me then it was India ink, the kind they had in prison. One on his forearm was an unfinished dagger, another was my mother’s name across his knuckles. I never thought he’d come to blows with me the way he did when I was seventeen, or that I would knock him on his back at nineteen, but then I never thought I would be nineteen and driving aimlessly across the desert, my mother in her coffin, my father completely wasted, a junkie dying away to dust on the streets of west Phoenix.
I drove on for a few hours, cutting through back roads and access roads. For the sheer hell of it, I turned around and took the same roads north, going further up state. I had no plan. I was flying in youth, totally free. A mile outside of a town called Farmington the van died. I jumped out and checked the oil. It was fine. I tried to start it again and it kicked over, made it a few more blocks then started smoking. It rattled and bucked into a gas station on the outskirts. The Sun was fading early. I parked on the side of the station and popped the hood. I was as much a mechanic as I was a jet pilot.
An old Navajo walked out of the station eating an orange. I nodded to him and smiled. He said nothing. He stood next to me under the hood,
“What is it?” His voice was angered, aggravated and aggravating.
“I don’t know.”
“What happened?”
I told him. He walked away slowly and came back with another. He got behind the wheel and cranked it. His buddy stayed under the hood. I walked inside the station and bought a drink.
They were standing over the engine, laughing. His buddy had one tooth in his head. I asked the first one what was wrong with it. He wiped his hands down his shirt and shook his head, smiling,
“It’s very bad.”
I stared at his friend. He nodded and smiled. I looked at his tooth,
“How bad?”
The other one answered. He was the boss.
“Head gasket’s blown. Much money.”
“How much money?”
“We’ll do it for nine hundred.”
I only had six hundred on me. I told him.
“Nope. Fix it here or we tow it to the junkyard.”
I had the extra key in my wallet.
“Alright. Fix it here.”
I asked him how long it would take. One solid day. I took my bike out and rode into town, into that place.
The car lots there were useless. They either had nothing I could afford or anything I would trust. I rode back. They had the van on the lift in the garage. I found the boss again,
“Listen. I really only have six hundred dollars. Can’t we do something here, I mean, we’re both people.”
He scowled,
“You’re not my people. Nine hundred dollars. That’s a good deal. Somewhere else you’d pay twice as much.”
“Well, I don’t have it.”
He looked me up and down,
“Where do you live?”
I shook my head. He smiled,
“Maybe you can work here for the money.”
“Where?”
He laughed,
“I’ll make the call. Job’s hard. Very hard. Maybe you’ll quit.”
I asked him what it was. He uttered one word: digging. He told me I could sleep in the van until I paid it off, but that he would charge me a little extra for rent. I thought quickly about catching a bus, but there was nowhere I wanted to go. I couldn’t hitch a ride out with my bike and my things. Arizona was not an option. I told him to make the call.
I slept in the van that night in the garage. It was still dark when one of the Indians banged on the door,
“Get up! Time for work!”
I had the sheet of paper with directions and set out on my bike. It was a four mile ride through the dusty roads and paths. I saw the site. A long, long line of Indians on their knees with narrow shovels trenching into the ground, a truck going slowly in reverse with a giant spool of cable they laid carefully into the trench. They were shirtless and moving quickly, and the foremen screamed at them. They were an endless line ripping a tear in the desert, the line of dark red backs and elbows moving like a long machine. I was my soul after death and I was standing at the gates of Hell.
I found the lead foreman and told him who I was.
He yelled,
“YOU’RE LATE!”
I tried to explain. He threw a shovel in my hands,
“Three feet deep and two wide. NOW!”
I squeezed in between two big Indians. The foreman ran up and nudged me with his boot,
“NO! You bring up the FRONT!”
He walked me up to the front of the line. It was a long walk. The Navajos peered at me with my shovel, and they jeered me. At the front of the line the foreman pushed me to the lead. I’d had it with him. I turned and held my shovel as to swing at him. He jumped back and pulled out a long blade. I yelled at him,
“FUCK YOU!”
The line burst into laughter. The foreman laughed with them,
“Just dig, white boy. You’ll quit before an hour.”
He put the knife back in his boot and walked away. I dropped to one knee and saw the ditch. I would work the day then sneak out with the van before the Indians came back to the shop. I began digging. The other workers laughed. Their laughter made me angry. I dug furiously for an hour. I made sure to stay in front of them, to beat them with a widening gap. One of them yelled at me to slow down. I heard his friend,
“Don’t worry. He’ll get tired.”
I thought of all the things that sickened me. I found a reservoir of hatred inside my arms. I dug on. Three or so hours passed. It was time for everyone to drink.
It was a long wait for the water ladle. There was a huge steel trough and we all lined up to drink from that ladle. When my turn came I took two or three gulps then another foreman grabbed it,
“That’s too much, white boy.”
Everybody laughed. They still had ten minutes. They found corners of shade by the trailer and sat. I walked back to the ditch and kept at it. They yelled at me to take a break. The foremen told them to keep quiet, that they were disgusted that a white boy was making them look so bad. I kept digging. I was yards out from them. They had to cut their break short. They were moving as fast as they could, but I had plenty of hatred in me. At one point a foreman blew his whistle and we stopped. He ran over with his tape measure and stuck it in their part of the ditch,
“Too damn shallow!”
A big worker stood up and looked at me. He ran his finger under his throat. I asked him if he was tired, and the line howled. I kept going, faster and faster, delirious from the heat. My skin was burnt.
After the next hour everybody hated me. I didn’t care. I would never see them again. We worked until dusk. At the trailer where I had my bike chained the tires were knifed, and they were watching me. I paid them no mind, picked up my bike and carried it on my shoulder up over the hill where they could not see me. Then I set it down and collapsed. I watched the hot and dead sky turn circles over my body, and I remembered the pier in California. But mostly I remembered nothing, and it was supposed to be dusk but the sky wouldn’t budge. I heard the rumbling of tires coming behind me. I picked up my bike and kept going. They blew by, yelling, hooting, flipping me the bird, leaving me in a cloud of dust. I set it down and walked it. A mile before the station the two mechanics pulled up in an old car. The boss nodded at me,
“We fixed your van.”
I stared ahead and nodded. I felt him look at his buddy and smile, then look back to me,
“See you in the morning.”
I nodded ahead. They wouldn’t see me in the morning. They wouldn’t see me again.
The van wasn’t in the garage windows. I walked around back and dug the key from my wallet. I threw my bike in the side door and sat behind the wheel. I could see the last traces of sunlight crashing into the desert. Then it was dark. I turned the key. It purred. They had done a good job. I crawled in back and laid on the couch. The van had no wheels, they had it set upon jacks.
Jeff Stewart 