by Ken O'Steen
“What’s called for,” I told myself, “ after that,” as I trekked away, “is marijuana.” I could only fantasize about the improvement to my shaken psyche, and to my overly exerted body that smoke from a few fragrant green buds piled into the bowl of a sturdy pipe would afford. Alas, all I did have was a shrimpy roach somewhere far down inside my pack, which, nevertheless, I would use during my next available “down time.” Parts of the recent dream recurred. As before, with the earlier dream, when I reflected on it at a safer distance, I found it to be a decided comfort: much as a familiar song is comforting anytime it’s played. Consequently, as I robotically put one foot in front of the other, occasionally I would call up the dream as a balmy distraction from the harshness of the current travail.
In truth, my zombie-fied trudging was something of a forced march at the hands of over-zealous security guards and bored cops, for whom my appropriations of shelter were the bane of their sluggish third shifts. During the march there was little attention to surroundings, other than keeping a lookout for the next haphazard, ephemeral domicile. Such inattention was terminated with rude alacrity when a beige BMW screeching on two wheels rounded a corner out of a cross street and came within a foot of putting me into orbit. Being, as they say, speechless, I flipped off my would-be assassin as he sped away. And then the car slowed. The driver raggedly jammed it in reverse and aimed it in my direction. I scoured the pavement, the gutter and the sidewalk behind me, and saw nothing readily useful as a weapon. As the BMW came swerving up to me, I scampered across the street and snapped the antenna off an Explorer parked in front of an apartment building. The driver slammed on the brakes so hard the car nearly stood on its front end. Three husky, affluent post-adolescents sprang out the doors. They came around and stood between the car and the curb to face me. I was whipping the car antenna back and forth in the air like Zorro. It made a whooshing noise as it displaced the air. The one on the right said, “Let’s see you give us the finger again.”
I gave them the finger again. To the one who had spoken, I asked, “Whose rich daddy owns the car, lunkhead?”
“Up yours,” the one on the left grunted.
“What are you going to do with that?” the one on the right asked.
“I’m going to tear your face open with it, dumbshit.”
“Yeah?” answered the one on the left, following this with a curt, faux laugh.
“Yeah?” repeated the one in the middle, perfectly duplicating the curt, faux laugh he’d heard.
“BMW’s are so gay, “ I answered back.
“Yeah?” answered the one on the right, expanding on it significantly when he added, “Say your prayers dick.”
“Your daddies never made it out of B movies,” I told them.
“What?” replied the one in the middle with a genuinely puzzled expression.
“Huh?” said the one beside him.
“Your sisters are all flat-chested,” I told them.
“Fuck you, you crazy fuck, “ said the one on the left.
I answered, “You’re too fucking fat to surf, Buddha.”
“What?”
The one to his right, who also was the one in the middle, moved toward me slightly. The others then followed his lead, a phalanx of jewelry, male breasts and concentrate of cologne coming at me.
Flinging the antenna with quickened malice back and forth in front of their faces, I assailed them with, “Your mommies acted in soft porn.”
“I’m gonna bust your head wide open, asshole,” blurted the one on the left, pushed to the point now he was ready to charge me like a bull.
A few blocks up, a car slowly turned from a side street and in our direction. The car turned out to be a huge, black truck, when it pulled to a stop just before the bumper of the BMW. The truck’s headlights threw us into the spotlight. A man about forty climbed down from the cab, put his hands on his hips and asked, “What’s going on?” Getting no answer, and after standing and watching for a minute or two, easily sizing the situation up, he turned around and walked to the back of the truck. He reached into the truck bed; then he came walking toward the three of them carrying an iron chain in one hand, a heavy wrench in the other.
“Yeah, fuck you,” one of them said. The three of them eased closer to the doors of the car, then began to open them.
“Get fucked, assholes,” one of them hollered, as the three of them transformed themselves into a whorled frenzy of serial bird-flipping en masse. Then they slammed the doors; the driver started the engine and the BMW squealed away.
The man in the truck asked if I was okay; then hearing that I was, offered to give me a lift. Inside the truck, he asked me where I lived.
“I’m a free-range citizen at the moment,” I told him. He said he was headed home from work and that his house was at the beach. I told him he could drop me anywhere near there.
“Looked like you pretty much had those punks at a standoff,” he said.
“I think the appearance of insanity, having nothing to lose, and Irish temperament are ninety percent of the battle.”
He was returning home from working an overtime second shift at Technicolor over in the valley, it turned out. His job was keeping some kind of machinery there in working order.
“You have a little trace of…sounds like a southern accent,” he pointed out.
“I lived in the south when I was a kid.”
“Yeah? My grandfather was from the south. Georgia.”
“I wonder what brought him here?”
“I don’t know. I think he worked in some kind of factory there. My father was a bookkeeper his whole life.”
“Mine was like your grandfather; he worked in a factory…a textile mill.”
About a mile from the shore, the man pulled a beer out of a paper bag sitting between us, and opened it up. He pulled a second out to offer to me. As I was stepping down from the cab, carrying my beer, which I told him I wanted to drink later, right before I napped, he asked me to wait. He went around to the truck bed and yanked a heavy blanket up, and asked me if I wanted to take this with me too. I had it almost out of his hand before the word “yes” could get as far as my throat.
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