The Life and Times of Innis E. Coxman

by R. P. Lester

  I couldn’t crane my head up anymore due to the unspeakable pain. I replied with my face muffled in the bedspread. “Yes, sir.”

  “Good. Now that all that talk of ‘suing’ is over, I don’t have to worry about this affecting me. As for you, I’m not gonna punish you anymore. I figure beating you bloody and getting knocked unconscious by a stop sign is enough. Okay, Son?”

  Muffling, “Okay, Pops. And, you know, thanks for not killing me and stuff. I really appreciate it.”

  He gave a laugh from somewhere deep in his throat and walked over to the bed, rumpling my hair as I laid in panging misery. I could tell he wanted to be sentimental but was looking for the right words. He spoke straight from the heart.

  “Aw hell, Innis. I still wonder if you’re mine sometimes.”

  Coxman’s Log: 11:36 PM

  “Mrs. Hamfist! Oh, Mrs. Hamfist!”

  God—not this product of cheap wine again. “Yes, Innis?”

  “Can I go to the bathroom, please? I promise I’ll leave the lotion this time.”

  “Only if you can say the alphabet, Innis.”

  “Yes, ma’am: A, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, m, n, o.....q, r, s, t, u, v, w, x, y, and z. How’s that, Mrs. Hamfist?”

  “You forgot the ‘p,’ Innis.”

  “No I didn’t. It ran down my leg ‘cause you made me say the alphabet first, Hagatha.”

  “Well! I never! You march straight to Sister Virginia Lee for telling an off-color joke to a teacher!”

  Great. Another trip to the principal.

  I grabbed my shit and started out for Sister Virgeneral Lee’s office.

  Again.

  When I got to the door, I turned and asked, “Mrs. Hamfist, what the fuck does ‘off-color’ mean, anyway?”

  After a heated conversation between the nuns and my parents, it was mutually decided that I would leave Our Lady of Grope and Pucker to pursue my instruction in the wellspring of public education.

  ***

  When my kid came home today, she said that her Science teacher had given her a failing grade on a homework assignment. I inquired about her teacher’s name as I had misplaced it in my font of memory banks.

  “It’s a man named Chunky Hamfist. He looked at my last name and asked who my daddy is. He said he remembers you from when y’all went to school together a long time ago. Then he frowned and gave me a zero on my homework. Did something happen with you two, Daddy? Huh? Did it? Did it?”

  I don’t even live in Louisiana anymore, as I’ve stated.

  What are the odds that Mrs. Hamfist’s son not only became a teacher, but lives in the same state we do, in the same area code, the same city, works at the same school my child attends, and—on top of all that shit—winds up as her fucking Science instructor?.....

  It’s going to be a long year.

  Chapter Two

  Those Who Left Me Weeping

  in the Fetal Position

  Something tells me you have a penis or a vagina. If you have both, that’s fine. I’m not here to judge or call you a drain on our nation’s medical resources.

  I simply find you greedy.

  Whatever. You’re a human being with feelings that make up the human condition, running the gamut from love and forgiveness to savage brutality.

  Since you hold yourself in such high regard with your even-keeled emotions, you’ve probably been in a relationship. I’ll even bet you’ve had intercourse (it counts if she was inflatable). While sailing this sea of love, perhaps you’ve wished your boat would capsize, leaving you perched in a lifeboat and your lover to flummox against the tides, a look of abject terror on their face as you gleefully reel in the rescue float, quietly humming “Another One Bites the Dust.”

  Those dimples in your cheeks tell me you know that fuzzy feeling, good people.

  Come, let us venture into the void of bloody valentines together and I will show you the way. Anything to help you put down that gun.

  Jesus Christ, man, do not redecorate your garage while reading this! When they find my book next to your bloated body it’ll come back on me and I want nothing to do with your poor decision making!

  Have a drink and relax. I promise the first divorce is the hardest. After that it’s rice pudding.

  ***

  Women have always fascinated me. The curvature of their bodies; the way a pair of breasts jiggle under a blouse, a t-shirt, or the dim glow of my forty-watt bedroom lamp; their ability to transform the most sagacious Joe into a stuttering pile of ignorance; and the enticing manner of thick, beautiful thighs beckoning a man to dive betwixt their cavernous mounds of flesh, enveloping his ogreish head like balloons coated with vinegar and sweat.

  In different stages of my life, it’s made me question why I was born with a dick, for I would’ve been one hell of a lesbian.

  I’ve never been what you would call a “lady’s man.” There were many years when I couldn’t have gotten laid in a morgue with a Benjamin hanging from my zipper. I suppose it had a lot to do with being a rotund, socially-repellant douche, although most of it was my wobbly conversational skills, attempting to draw the petticoats into topics ranging from the new Run-DMC album to the differences between homemade biscuits and the Pillsbury brand.

  Thank maturity, times change.

  As I grew to become more fluent with my tongue—insert double entendre now—I was slapped with the truth that’s plagued scared little boys since the beginning of time: women are just as scared, nervous, and unsure of themselves as men are. For all the young men reading, it does get better, sirs. If no one’s ever told you this, then let me be the Wizard to your Cowardly Lion.....

  Chicks are clueless, too, okay?

  ***

  We all need love. It’s right there on your computer. The internet has shown us what a healthy, meaningful relationship is supposed to emulate and obviously it’s a Bill Clinton imitator bending a Lewinski look-alike over a couch before coating her teeth.

  But that is the rarest of crap shoots.

  The emotional dice you throw on the table will likely roll snake eyes, culminating with psychotic stares shooting across the room as one of you wraps your lacerated forearm with a towel after the other has ripped it to shreds with the nearest kitchen knife (tattoos have obscured the scars).

  You’re about to get slapped with a bitter shitsack filled with some of the women I’ve known and one relationship in particular I was fortunate enough to drop like an infected rubber. Just so you’re aware, your tongue may wither from the salt being poured on your ice cream.

  And your head will explode.

  ***

  One disclaimer I must bring to your attention before we go any further: I’m not a misogynist, no matter how this may appear. I was much different when I was younger, and I acknowledge that some of the hens who rode my rooster had good souls. I’ve been with some really cool women in my life who had my best interests at heart and only wanted to see me succeed. I just fucked them over so bad that the damage had been irrevocably done. I’ll also cede that some of this happened with flighty little girls and we’ve all matured since then and blah blah blah you owe me therapy money blah blah fuckity blah.

  But for the womenfolk who were good to me, who truly did want better for me and who truly did help me in various ways—I’m forever sorry. I’ll always hope you can find it in your hearts to forgive me. I suppose we weren’t ready for each other. Then again, maybe it was me who wasn’t ready.

  As for the rest of you bitches, find some shelter.

  Because it’s open season on all of you.

  Black Magic Woman

  Being kicked in the nuts by a little girl with high heels hurts like a goddamn sonofabitch. For you to buckle under the weight of that statement, allow me to apply a bit of context:

  The typical ten-year old boy isn’t aware of the phrases “blunt force trauma” or “OH GOD MY BALLS ARE IN MY THROAT!” And to be dealt such a sack-crushing blow by a floozy in a parochial school uniform was either a cra
sh course in self-preservation, or a crystal ball foreshadowing my experiences with women for the next twenty years.

  Jury’s still out.

  Let’s kick it old school like Spuds Mackenzie and Trapper Keepers. Back to a time when Perfect Strangers ruled the airwaves and Alf was the brother I never had.

  ***

  I was the chunkiest, cutest little motherfucker you were ever lucky enough to run out of your fridge. My cheeks were as red as a baboon’s ass, my hair so curly it rivaled Screech’s pubes, and the girlies were on me like a twelve-step pin on Rick James.

  That is to say, I was a rather unpopular kid.

  It took loads of healthy introspection, but at length I embraced the solitude, it enabling me to discover the joys of hip hop, rock ‘n’ roll, and pornography. Still, it vexed me that I could never figure out the source of my social quarantine, for I had so much to offer any child inhabiting my play space: my G. I. Joes were regally poised in block formation, I’d sanctioned the invasion of Castle Grayskull by the He-Man hordes, and that little bitch down the street said I was so plump I popped her Pogo Ball.

  Meaning she wasn’t coming around anymore so that left me ample time to contemplate my place in the world.

  Add Motley Crue teaching me that girls, girls, girls rode something called a crazy horse in Paris, France and you would’ve thought that Vince Neil spoke through me whenever I flapped my besoiled braces.

  What about me just wasn’t adorable?

  As you may have guessed, there was a little angel wishing to bring my faults to light.

  As it happened one bright, sunshiny day one horrible, crotch-searing day, I was by the jungle gym performing research on the effects of wailing guitars in a juvenile setting, charging my classmates as unwilling test subjects (my handheld blasted speed metal so loud as to be heard across the playground).

  It was Halloween and the principal had let the students wear their costumes to school. By then my interest in going door-to-door begging for cavities had waned so I didn’t participate. My needs for the day were as simple as they were irritating: I sought to bedevil the living shit out of everyone with music spun on Bottom 40 radio. No one had complained thus far.

  Except a witch named Trashley Sexneeder who wanted me to know exactly what she thought of my swinging, metallic tunes.

  ***

  Trashley Sexneeder was surly, violent, and hit harder than an alcoholic foster parent. Her stringy, unkempt hair and spaghetti-thin frame gave her the appearance of a lonely child searching for a meaningful friendship. Or a wayward lass from an afterschool special in desperate need of a strict but loving authority figure. It was a perfect mask to hide the bloodthirsty mongoose lurking within.

  That venomous bitch was so God-awful that Mother Teresa would’ve prayed for her crib death.

  The first time I ever met Trashley was in kindergarten when I was waylaid for using her crayons. We were engaged in free time after a day spent prepping for lives of Guilt and Regret—benchmarks of a Catholic education. My fat body shook the light-blue uniform shirt ferociously as I was taint deep in an Inspector Gadget coloring book completing a stunning likeness of Dr. Claw, Gadget’s faceless and diabolical rival. It was nearing completion and I was driving on zeal alone. I reached over to my box of crayons to discover I was missing the color needed to finalize his enviable gauntlets.

  Trashley was prostrate on the floor next to me, her colors abandoned as she was heavily engrossed in fashioning a shank from a cafeteria spoon. She was really getting in there, too, beet-faced and grunting, applying pressure on the lime carpet to sharpen her weapon (I remember thinking how the poor girl was never going to achieve her goal because fucking carpet). Not wanting to disturb her, I wordlessly grabbed the one color required to finish my project from her Crayola box. I’d no sooner lifted “grey” from the top column than I was met with knuckles befitting an unlicensed cage match.

  The force of the punch snapped my head back. I regained my composure and looked up to see Trashley kneeling, the oversized black-and-white checkered school dress hanging like a potato sack with her nose scrunched in indignation. Her fists were clenched into wads of steel. I scrambled to my knees, eye-level with my attacker. I put a hand over my bleeding bottom lip.

  “Why did you do that?”

  Her eyebrows furrowed and she jabbed her finger into my flabby chest when she spoke. “Fuck you, Innis! These are my colors! Don’t you ever touch my colors, Cockman!”

  I was aghast. No one had ever spoken to me so harshly in my entire life, much less hit me without provocation (marriage later raised the bar). It dawned on me that I should’ve asked to borrow her crayons like I’d been taught, despite the fact they were lying unused.

  Why, I wasn’t exercising good manners!

  I sought to end our quarrel and asked permission to use her chromatic supplies. “I’m sorry, Trashley. That was very presumptuous of me. If you don’t mind, may I please use your crayons to finish color-” She bashed me in the nose with a flaming right cross that opened the floodgates in my eyes. I was shocked, bleeding, blinded by tears. I didn’t know what sin I had committed but obviously it was a whopper of a fuck-up.

  I waited for the dizziness to leave and my vision quickly returned. Seconds passed as Trashley and I remained kneeling, looking down at the blood dripping on my coloring book. Without a word, she snatched it up and ripped it apart, tossing the scraps at me like a woman throwing a drink in a man’s face.

  Our teacher had been sitting on the other side of the room clipping coupons for Preparation H, oblivious to the activity taking place in her class, the rank of Elmer’s Glue and talkative children filling her senses with inattention. The space cadet called for recess and Trashley stood, towering over me. She stuck her goddamn tongue out and stomped away, likely busying herself with the live burial of a classmate in the sandbox.

  I sat back down on the carpet, dumbfounded. I began to feel woozy from blood loss and stumbled to the boys’ bathroom to clot my bleeding, trying to figure out what in the hell just happened, leaving my destroyed, unfinished work lying helplessly on the floor. My dreams of attaining artistic perfection had been dashed upon the rocks. Dr. Claw’s appearance would have to gel another day.

  In the spring of second grade I’d developed a crush on Trashley, the poetic hint of a “young man’s heart turning to fancy” and whatnot. It was a classic case of unrequited love when she shoved me from the top rung of the slide and gave me a fancy plaster cast on my leg.

  As we grew, the child became more hateful and full of spite. I’d managed to avoid her wickedness for the next three years, careful not to come within arm’s reach of her wrathful aura, until the day arrived when the hemlock planted in kindergarten grew to bear poisoned fruit, sprouting on an elementary school playground for all the world to see.

  ***

  Trashley reached the patch of dirt I’d staked, removing her witch’s costume in case a scuffle broke out. Her black cape and pointed hat laid beneath her plastic broom on the ground, the ill-fitting Catholic school uniform hanging on her pathetic body like John Candy’s robe. The black come-fuck-me pumps her mother had bizarrely shoed her with glinted in the afternoon sun, harboring untold trepidation.

  She forcefully told me to tame my theme music with all the tranquility of silverware in a woodchipper. “Hey, fat boy! Nobody likes that shit and we think you’re weird! Turn it down!”

  Oh, but how I loved her sugary voice!

  I never forgot her propensity for chaos. Not wishing another pugilistic sleight of hand to land across my chubby face, I heeded her demand with the appropriate delicacy: “Why don’t you give Roger Rabbit his teeth back, ya bucktoothed bitch?!”

  I just knew my retort would quell the ensuing fray.

  Had I known that hairy-pitted cretin was about to deliver some footwork mastered only by Olympic soccer players I would’ve migrated to another location on the schoolyard post-comeback.

  The Kick of a Thousand Mustangs was so powerful i
t created a dust cloud, landing with the might of a vengeful God raining sulfur upon the wicked. I wouldn’t feel pain like that again until years later when I was trapped between a wall and a Buick in my dealings with another woman.

  I puked everything I’d eaten since breakfast. Such was my distress, I half-expected to see my underdeveloped pellets in the pile of corn dogs and Trix. Instead, when I looked up through watery eyes, I saw a smile across Trashley’s face, her canines tapering into smart points (“Monster Mash” blared from somewhere in the distance). A crowd of children gathered around to see what had transpired. I doubled over and fell on my side to conceal my shame.

  In a twinkle of seconds, the Wicked Bitch of the West had stunted my manhood, turning me into a chick forthwith as red dots speckled my crotch.

  I was curled into the fetal position, pondering the word “sex” and what importance it would have in my adult world. I’d heard about it from some of the other kids but was given only minor details. What I did know was that you needed a video camera and your junk to do it. I panicked when I realized that Trashley had kicked my nuts into my pelvis and that this “sex” thing may be something I’d have to relegate to fantasy like those surgically implanted knuckle spikes I’d always craved. I was in a world of agony, so chagrined that I wanted to stick my head in the Earth like an ostrich.

  But all was not lost, for just as the horny aunt of embarrassment was running over to envelop me into her large, lopsided bosom and marvel at what a big boy I’d become.....