Continued from Novacaine.

Remember when you held me tight
And you kissed me all through the night
Think of all that we’ve been through
Breaking up is hard to do - Neil Sedaka ‘Breaking Up is Hard to Do’

I remember getting back to the house, but I don’t really remember getting in bed. That’s probably because of the beer. I don’t remember taking off my clothes, and the reason for that becomes obvious as soon as I pull back the sheets. I unbutton my wrinkled clothes and start to kick them out from under the covers, savor the blank slate feeling of a good drunk night. But as sleep fades from my head, the creeping flavor of… I don’t know what. Burned cat shit? Road tar and asparagus? … starts crawling up my throat and coating my tongue. I stare at the ceiling. I should shower. I should brush my teeth. I should get a real job. I should have a drivers license. I should have married her when I had the chance. There’s the old magic. The doubts of the day begin to pile up and I heave off the bed like it’s going to do any good.

I immediately stub my toe on something blurry and heavy. More careful this time, I start again and pick my way toward the sink. ‘The maid died.’ That’s what I tell people. It used to be funny, I’m not sure why. Now they just stare. I wipe my face and stare at my bloodshot eyes in the mirror. Looking good. Looking good. I step on something sharp and I’m off balance again. Staggering around in the mess, I start to play back my evening. The barking dogs, the flashing lights… I pick up my toothbrush and get to work on those pearly whites. The kids in the park. Lola… I pick an errant glob out of the corner of one eye. I’m having a hard time remembering it all straight. Then it flashes. The envelope. Panic spreads up and down me. Toothpaste foam drips out of my mouth, and I bound around naked, searching. The toothbrush drops from my mouth and lands in a dirty bowl as I frantically pat my clothes down for the envelope.

All I really have in this world is that I know people. I connect them. And when people set up a tail to follow you around, and give you an envelope, they want you to connect them with somebody else. When they don’t come say ‘hello’, there are implications. When they drive around American cars and pull spooky shit while you’re eating, there are two specific implications. There’s an implied payment for success, and implied punishment for failure. I should have come straight home and checked it out. I shouldn’t have been drinking at noon. I shouldn’t have been blasted by dinner. I should have waited out the tail and not let them punk me like this. I shouldn’t have lost this envelope.

*knock knock*

There’s not an expletive strong enough for this situation.

*knock knock*

You don’t want your prospective employers to think you’ve goofed up before you even had a proper sit down. If you do, they’ll usually just deal out the punishment now and find some other loser to do the job. I grab the .25 from under my bed and stick it in the back of my underwear, walking toward the door.

I grab the door knob and yank hard. I’m just hoping at this point that the underpants and surprise will let me roll over anybody who might be out there. The cold wedge of steel in my buttcrack is the center of my universe, my hand floating above the grip. Looking casual there, champ. I catch the yellow stain on the front flap. Feeling fit and ready to go.

My brain is prepped for bad news, so it takes a while to cycle through all the worst case scenarios. Cop, FBI, drug dealer, wannabe, has been, vato, meth fiend, and my heart is fluttering so fast I can watch the door opening one degree at a time. This time it’s Special Agent Ortega. This time it’s an enforcer for the Angelos. This time it’s a man with a dirty needle full of drain cleaner, ready to stick me as punishment for some past crime. This time it’s… my aunt.

She smiles at me, looking down at my dirty underpants and gives a little chuckle. She has an envelope in her hand - The envelope.

“Robert, you left this up in my mailbox last night, with a note that said to give it to you when you woke up.”

Always thinking, I am.

“You look like hell young man. Can I come in?”

“No, it’s a mess in here… The maid died.”

She just stares.

Her smile is still there, but I realize it’s not at me, it’s about me. It’s over me and through me. It’s about all of this, the room, the underwear, the gun warming slowly in the small of my back. Mortified, I grab the envelope in her hand and maybe she can hear the “thanks” over the door slamming in her face. My embarassment colors over the panic and I sit down on the edge of the bed, staring down at my bad decisions.

I tear the envelope open and dump it out on the bed.

Continued from Nebulizer:

I made the bus with time to spare, not bad for a chubby little thing like me. The driver gives me a smile and I decide to sit up front so we can gossip a little. There’s almost nobody on the bus in the afternoons and I know she gets lonely.

_{Maybe I could ask her for help.}

We chat a little about the weather, the traffic, the smelly bum who gets on at fourth and rides until his transfer is up. She looks over and asks me if I’m working out. I tell her just in the kitchen, and we laugh about it a little.

_{She has that look in her eye that fucking look don’t just fucking look sad help me HELP ME}

I give her a little hug when it’s time to head into Albertsons, and head in to get some dinner and take care of some girl stuff at the pharmacy.

_{Cunt pharmacy bitch slut just fucking admit it’s wrong}

The meat all looks a little old, and it makes me a little sick to smell. I think we’ll have breakfast for dinner! Some bacon and some eggs, a potato to make hash browns. A twelve pack of Icehouse, some sandwich fixings for lunch tomorrow.

Finally it’s time to head for the Pharmacy _bitch to see about another _{just one more please a real one this time}. She sees me coming and she dials something on the phone. I walk up and try to just keep calm, no problems here. Nothing big. Just need another test, the last one was tampered with. We can’t go off half cocked here, can we? We have to have accurate data.

_{dickheadmanagercomeswalkinguplikei’mgoingtomakeascenefuckingsmallpeckershithead}

No, there’s no problem here at all, you just need to give me a new test, because this one was wrong, it was bad, it wasn’t real it was tampered with. He’s giving me some ma’am-don’t-make-a-scene line like I’m at fault here! Don’t tell me who needs to go see a doctor, you’re just a cashier who puts pills in a bottle, you silly little thing. No I wasn’t threatening, no, I’m calm, everything is fine, nothing is the matter. It’s fine, I don’t even need a refund, I’ll pay for the new one it won’t be a problem. I just need a new one and no I just want to explain it to her closer, just between us girls and no don’t pull me out of the window we’re just going to get to talk between the two of us. Let go of my bag, I will call the police if you don’t let me go I have something I need to do and I don’t care how many I’ve bought over the past week because who fucking cares you fucking WHORE WHORE WHORE WHORE WHORE YOU FUCKING WHORE I’LL FUCKING KILL YOU JUST SAY IT’S NOT FUCKING POSITIVE. IT’S MY MONEY AND I KNOW MY RIGHTS YOU FUCKING WHORE I’LL FUCKING KILL YOU KILL YOU

_{Please kill me}

And for a while, it all goes black.

_{Maybe I should just have gotten the pork roast}

When I come back around, here we sit, with the manager and the security guard on my arms, watching the eggs drip out of the cart and onto the floor, and nobody listens when I say they should mop it up. I don’t want to just wait for the police to get here, there’s no sense in it. There could be salmonella out there! A kid could get sick! _{a baby a baby} And the silly thing is the mop is just right there, if they’d just let me go I could go grab it and maybe they could get some Pinesol and it’d all be fine.

And then the crew cut policeman walks in and smiles at everybody and asks what the problem is. Everybody is mad, but he’s just so smooth and seems so bright and happy that it makes me laugh. I feel them loosen the grips on my arms and everything is gonna be just fine.

_{As long as they get the eggs mopped up}

Sometimes, life is good.

Most of the time it’s a frantic belly crawl across hot broken glass to wallow in a puddle of piss. The joke here is that the piss-pool is a reward, because at least wallowing is easy.

But sometimes. Sometimes, life is good.

The car smolders, bits of melty plastic dribbling down onto the pavement. It burned so hot you could walk over and sink a screw driver down into the asphalt like it was made of caramel. I know, because I did. I thought about taking a picture of it, but it’s the feel of the steel sinking down into the road that is so… Well. so good.

The heat waves rising up from the whole wreck rise up and make a wavy oilsmear mess of the moon.

One down, two to go.

Continued from Marrowbone :

We got justification for wealth and greed:
Amber waves of grain and bathtub speed.
Now we even got Starbucks - What else you need? - James McMurtry ‘Out Here in the Middle’

If he just hits me one more time I’m going to leave. Just one more time.

It’s my mantra. I’ve been saying it for five years. He doesn’t hit me anymore, not really. Our first neighbor saw me before I put the makeup on one day and called the cops the next time she heard yelling. They came in while my nose was still bleeding and took him away to sober up. No charges, but it convinced him that black eyes and nosebleeds were bad news.

Now he pinches.

I reach down and massage the sore area above my hip, right where the belt hits. My “chub”, he calls it, when he’s being cute about it. My “fat useless ass” when he’s not. It doesn’t bruise up like other places. You would think that pinching would kill the nerves or stop hurting eventually, but it doesn’t. It hurts more every time. But pinching isn’t hitting and the promise I made myself says hitting.

Maybe he’ll die. Fall into a machine at work and die.

The upside of the pinching is less makeup. It’s cheaper, no more clogged pores! I’ve gotten a little tan on my face now, it’s pretty. I have lots of sundresses so I don’t have to wear a belt.

My fat ass will need the room.

I spend most of the day when he’s at work outside. I trim the front yard, I do the hedges, the edging. I have a little spot picked out in the back yard where I like to lay down and pretend I’m dead. I think I’d like to be buried out here, underneath the pecan tree, in the sugar sumac. I think I’m going to plant some lillies.

I am getting my dress all dirty again. Need to change before he gets back.

I don’t think the neighbors would complain, as long as I kept the front yard clean. That seems to be pretty important to them. We got a $10 fine for letting some oranges sit under the tree out front for a week. I clean them up first thing in the morning now.

There was blood in my pee for a week. He just kept yelling about the fine and he wouldn’t stop and I thought he would kill me. I hoped he would just kill me.

A little more time laying out under the sumac and then it’s three and I guess I better start on dinner. If it’s not ready to go when he gets home he gets started drinking, and then sometimes we don’t eat at all, we get started on the entertainment early. If I can get him fed, he’ll probably just go to sleep, and then I can watch some TV with the sound off.

I can’t even look into the bathroom. It’s still there on the counter where I dropped it, stupid tampered with piece of shit.

Maybe a pork roast! Something a little sweet. Brown sugar and mustard, got those. Need to get a shoulder. Got some red potatoes and asparagus and for the love of Christ make sure we have beer otherwise he’ll go straight for the liquor cabinet.

I just can’t take that right now not right now. I’ll buy another test while I’m there because this one was messed up. They’re all wrong. God it can’t be right.

I grab my coat and some quarters from the change jar. I make sure the porch light is on. I might make the 3:08 if I jog.

I pick up the fucking liying little stick and the worthless broken tampered with box and the receipt and stuff them in the bottom of my purse.

I just had the BEST IDEA! I should get some ice cream, we’ll have banana splits for dessert.

Continued from Marzipan :

Ben extracts the clip and holsters the gun, makes some final mumblings into his radio, and sits down on the bench. Angry Mom number two is gone, the tense cloud of her confusion and anger has left the area.

“Did you seriously have to put bullets in that thing?” I stoop to pull the beers out of the bag.

He laughs, grabbing the bagged can out of my hand. “Force of habit, I don’t point it at somebody unless it’s ready to go. Plus it looked more authentic for the audience.”

“Right, sure. Now I’m terrified one of your fumble finger screwups is gonna kill me.”

He just shrugs. A crisp tear of aluminum follows and we sit in the park drinking. Every now and then the quiet is perforated by a machinegun burst of mumblespeak from Ben’s collarbone. Every time his ears perk up and he stiffens, but relaxes once he’s absorbed the communication. I can’t make out a word of it. I only know it’s language because of his reaction.

He breaks the silence. “You know what bugs me about shit like that?”

“The fact that you aimed a loaded gun at me?”

“No, you pussy. I was reading an article in the paper just the other day about gentrification.”

“What, like when a dude wears dresses?”

He chuckles. “I ain’t talking about your plans for the weekend. No, it’s like… You remember the Stop’n Go?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s gone now. Mr. Collins opened it after he got out of the Army. He ran it for forty years, good guy. Did right by a lot of people.”

“Okay.”

“Well, they put in that Texaco across the street, and he was out of business in three months. Four decades of cutting people breaks on gas when they needed it, loaning people cash when they needed it. And they sold him out to save five cents on a Snickers bar.”

“Plus they sold cigarettes.”

“Yeah, well…” He looks angry now. His cheeks are flushing and it’s not just the evening cool. I shut up and drink my beer.

He starts again. “They wrote about it in the paper. The yuppies who moved in wrote a story about how sad it was in that fucking newspaper.” He points at a newspaper box for the neighborhood rag.

“Yeah, that was nice.”

“No, it wasn’t. It wasn’t honest and it wasn’t fucking nice. Those are the same people who put him out of business. They ate their cheap candy and smoked their cheap cigarettes and just ignored the Stop’n Go until it went out of business. Then they wrote a fucking newspaper article about it to show how concerned they were. A bunch of dumb rich holier-than-thou fuckers move into my neighborhood, they put my neighbor out of business, then they want to sell me a newspaper article about how sad it is that he’s gone. They come in and they call the cops on people who have lived here their whole lives and they tear down old businesses and put in Subways and then they wonder why the neighborhood changed.”

I wait a minute for him to calm down some. “So that’s gentrification?”

“Yeah. It’s when a bunch of assholes look back after years of squatting and grunting and wonder where all the shit came from.”

We sit in the radio-punctuated silence and finish the beers. After one false start trying to stand, I manage to pitch the empties, ignoring the hairy eyeball from Ben. The homeless guys can collect the deposits on these, the last thing I need is to be walking around with beer on my breath and empty cans in a bag - I might run into a real cop. I see the thoughts racing in Ben’s head, his gaze punching a hole in the bench where the bitchmoms held court. The walkie talkie squawks some gibberish, and he shakes it off. He speaks some of the secret codes into the noisebox. When he’s done, he puts on a fake grin, but I can still see the gears running behind his eyes. He stands without a waver, and pops some kind of intensely mint gum into his mouth.

“Stay out of trouble citizen.” He purposefully strides to the car, working the gum with his back teeth.

“Try not to crash into any parked cars, drunky.” I yell after him. “And don’t point loaded guns at me anymore.”

He just smiles and flips me off from the drivers seat, and backs out into the street without hesitating. The lights begin to whirl and he screeches out of the area east, headed into a maze of apartment complexes. Domestic dispute, more likely than not.

I head north out of the park towards where the nosy bitches left. I’m not surprised but still a little disappointed that mom number two isn’t still cowering in shell shock around the corner. It would have been pretty satisfying to belch at her. The streetlights are clicking audibly into life, the sodium lamps slowly warming from their cold mustard glow to something like daylight, as filtered through piss. By the time I get to the end of the block, it’s cold and dark, and the beer is making me feel slow and tense and oily. The envelope shifts in my pocket and the bottom drops out of my mood. Guess it’s time to figure out what this shit is all about. I crane my neck around and make sure I’m not being followed.

Nobody but me and the pools of dirty light.