Badbadbad

by Jesus Angel Garcia

  When we sat down to cereal and instant coffee, she said, “I feel juicy.”

  “You should,” I told her. “You been pumping the sludge outta me like Roto Rooter.” We chomped on our corn flakes.

  As the sun poured into the room through the gray pane, I avoided looking at her directly. When I did glance up, her eyes were tearing. “What is it?” I caressed her hand.

  “It’s truth what I wrote online. About my daddy and the church and all.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” I said as she wiped her nose with the hem of her GANGSTA BEEYATCH T-shirt.

  “Ya not from round here.”

  “I’m from all round,” I said. “But not here, no. Not till lately.”

  “Ya don’t know,” she sipped her coffee. “Southern hospitality’s a joke.” I touched her hand again. “Ya don’t wanna know.”

  “I’m here, ain’t I?” I watched her knees bounce beneath the tray table.

  “Southern manners, the Old South, it’s all dead. Niggas don’t care about no one no more.”

  “Niggas?”

  “Everybody. The town, the hood, family. Everythin’s for shit. When I was little, me and my friends could go everywhere. Tommy or Bett’s house was my house too, and vice versa. If we got wild wild, they moms was just as likely to swat my ass as my own. But now?” She spooned more sugar into her coffee. “Parents fraid to discipline they own kids, let alone the wild childs from down the street. It’s scary out here.”

  “You’ll be alright,” I said, crunching my corn flakes.

  “They fear the law, social services, child abuse prosecution and such. I mean, the abuse is real. I had it firsthand.” She brought the steaming cup to her chapped lips and blew. “But there’s a big difference from whackin a lil bitch who punched his moms and beatin the snot out a child for droppin a bowl uh oatmeal.” She swallowed a mouthful of eye-opener. “Every female I know and nearly all the men have suffered abuse of some sort. Mind fucks mostly, but the other kinds as well.” I bowed my head. “And the church don’t do a damn thing. They profess to be the voice uh God but that’s boosie.”

  We burned the day playing her favorite video game (American Dream Gods), gossiping on blurbs we’d read to each other from her celebrity rags, zoning out in front of the TV for a couple of talk shows and a soap opera. She explained how she was on SSI for PTSD and a bipolar condition she managed with premium meds and a ritual dosing of self-prescribed drugs and drink, the combination of which got her through the day. She hadn’t worked in years.

  Out of courtesy, I slotted into her routine. As I recall, her schedule had two limits: no smoke before noon, no drinks before five. Otherwise, it was freedom time. She was living the American Dream.

  We didn’t do again what I’d come here for until after we drained the bottle I’d brought last night. There wasn’t enough for but a couple glasses each. This sufficed for a rise when she took me into her mouth, but my heart wasn’t in it. Not that I didn’t care about this girl. I wanted her to feel again. It wasn’t her fault, the sickness she’d suffered. But to finish the job, I found myself conjuring images I hadn’t called on since high school.

  First, I summoned Alanis Morissette to the mattress. I pictured her going down on me in a theater, head over feet, horse lips slurping my hot-trotter, saddled up and stiff, waiting for the kick of her spurs. But that didn’t do it. I’d seen too many blog photos of her in her modern womyn’s coif, a far cry from the lush tresses of youth.

  I moved on to Samantha Fox, the British diva with ice-blond wings who taught me naughty girls need love too. I passed many a night mooning over her calendar pics on the door of my bedroom. Not even in my teens yet. She may have been my first. I’d heard she’d come out in later years as a Born Again who made no apologies for her “God-given body, which seems to bring joy to so many boys,” and then as a lesbian, abandoning an entire gender she’d once beckoned with bedroom eyes. Recalling this betrayal, I turned to Courtney Love.

  Pulp-fiction lips and tits, red-rimmed eyes, nasty mouth, legs spread wide, crotchless panties. Then I saw the genital warts and scabs and couldn’t shake the whiskey-sour voice from my head. This wasn’t going to bring me off. Too close to home. So-called Love was just a hole. Plus, we all know she killed Kurt, or didn’t give him reason to live. Same difference. A high crime against Music. She deserved to be strung up.

  What did the trick, you won’t believe: Amy Grant. You remember the Christian chanteuse who went pop princess with her “Baby Baby” ode, not to a lover, as her video suggested, but to her daughter? Oh, it’s about the singer, though, not the song. Amy’s hair was heavy metal, her face clear and bright like a sun-kissed day, and her body . . . a sweeter MILF never goosed God’s green Earth. Imagining her tender love raining down on me, her wholesome devotion, always and forever, amen, I gave my everything to ticktockclock. When she later said she may have felt something, I was touched.

  I rolled off her, breathless, grimy with sweat, itchy from the dander of an invisible kitty. I needed to clean up.

  Soaping myself in the shower, I nearly got hard again. Amy Fucking Grant. I wonder if she’s still God-blessed.

  “You ever listen to Amy Grant?” I hollered, toweling off in the bathroom.

  “The Bible-thumping hypocrite? Hell no, she’s a beeyatch. Divorced the daddy of her kids, shacked up with some country duck, talks big Jesus but she don’t live the life. A disgrace to her race.”

  “How’s that? She’s as white bread as they come.”

  “Her Christian race, duh,” she said. “Where you from?”

  I didn’t have the energy to right how she was wrong, and yet I couldn’t hold back a retaliatory strike. “So you’re racist?”

  “Sheeeit, nigga,” she said. “I got no beef with nobody. My philosophy is y’all can do whatever the fuck y’all want. Just don’t fuck with me and we’ll get along fine.” Naked and clean, I faced her in the other room. “Hell, that’s the way it is all across these parts,” she said, not looking my way, blazing up another smoke. “The problems ain’t the white folks. Blacks, Mexicans, they segregate of they own accord.” She coughed as she exhaled. “I went to school with all the black kids. They used to close ranks against us. They’d sit in they own places in class and the lunchroom and woe betide the white boy, or girl, who’d enter their territory.”

  “Folks do what they think they should to survive,” I said, pulling on jeans and a clean T-shirt.

  “Survive?”

  “Institutionalized slavery. Four hundred years of oppression.”

  “Honey,” she said, rolling her eyes with a deep drag, “if it’s oppression to be guaranteed a college education for bein poor, black and male, I should be so oppressed. I got friends who can’t get a job round here because they white and everybody wants to hire coloreds to prove how non-racist they be.”

  “You got a free ride,” I fired back. “What do you care?”

  “Oh, I care.” Her hands were shaking.

  “You a wigga anyhow,” I said. “Wannabe black.”

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  “I’m the non-white muthafucker goin out to buy more whiskey with my affirmative-action bankroll so I can lay your cold-fish ass.”

  She slumped on the raggedy sofa bed, streaming smoke out her nostrils, bouncing her knees like a varmint in a vise. I hadn’t assaulted anyone with such venom since epic throwdowns with the ex. So much for non-judgment.

  TWENTY-ONE

  I screamed through her neighborhood in the F150, windows down, decibels on ear-bleed. Death metal, hardcore punk, unlistenable on any normal day, but I was way past normal. I tore through stop signs, raged over speedbumps, cut corners on two tires, it seemed like, rubber screeching like a weasel, me howling my throat raw. Once I’d had my fill, I switched back to the lo-fi mix from the drive up. The lonesome moan of “Man of Constant Sorrow” gave me strength to finish what I’d started. I felt bad for the name-calling and hoped to make it up to her, if I could find my way bac
k to her place.

  I turned into the parking lot of a roadside dive, squeezing between the pickups, muscle cars and jacked-up boats. Out front there was a sandwich board in hand-painted letters splashed with silver and gold stars: Where the Rock Rolls. I’d get directions here, and a bottle of bourbon, some carryout—an act of contrition.

  The Supersuckers anthem, “Rock Your Ass,” varoomed from the speakers inside. The joint was crowded, smoky, segregated: good ole boys on one side around a pool table and a trio of dart boards, vatos on the other, playing cards, Chinese checkers, shuffleboard. A handful of pink-faced girls clung to barstools. No cholitas. Nearly all the guys wore cowboy hats or trucker caps, wife beaters, sleeveless tees. Many had blades attached to their belts. My Swiss Army knife was at ticktockclock’s.

  When the chorus kicked in, one group called out, “Are you ready?!” and the other responded, “Yes, I’m ready!” Then they all sang together: “Grab a drink and chugalug! Have some sex and take some drugs!” Never before had I witnessed such testament to the unifying power of rock ‘n’ roll.

  No one was behind the bar, so I flipped through the playlist on the jukebox, centrally located between the factions in what I imagined was a ceasefire zone. The collection spanned a full half-century of rock goddom, from Chuck Berry’s fifties classic, “Roll Over Beethoven,” to the latest trendy crossover, “Rockstar Smartcar.” Of course, one could challenge the street cred of the Green B-Boyz track versus “Rocker” or “So You Want to Be a Rock ‘n’ Roll Star,” but the inclusiveness of the disc selection was worthy of respect.

  I was still exploring the tunes when someone nudged me from the back. “Where you sittin, puta?” The voice was low, the speech slow.

  I swung around to size up the cholo behind the threatening tone. He was a few inches shorter than me, maybe fifty pounds of muscle heavier. A green-and-red cobra coiled round the stump between his chest and his shaved head. “Here for the carryout.”

  “Then you best be carryin out.” His arms were thick slabs of beef.

  “And directions, I forgot,” I said. “You don’t know where Paradiso Village is—”

  “You tellin me I don’t know?” He gripped his belt buckle with both hands.

  “No, I’m—”

  “Now you callin me a liar?” He stepped right up in my face.

  I chose my next words with care. “Si o no? Which would you like to hear for me to mean no disrespect? Por favor.”

  “Por favor, huh.” He slapped my shoulder and grinned, flashing the metal on his front teeth. “I just fuckin wit ya, puta. It’s all good.”

  He drew me a map on a napkin while I waited for the bartender to bag a bottle of Rare Tennessee Whiskey along with some hot links and Tater Tots. The opening chords of “Rockstar” boomed from the jukebox. Both sides of the room erupted with boot stomps, whoops and whistles.

  “Thanks,” I told the bartender, picking up my sack of contrition. “Gracias,” I said to my new friend, slit-eyed, nodding to the beat. “Man,” I cracked on my way out, “these days with the video games and energy drinks and everyone’s got his own personal soundtrack twenty-four-seven and American Dream Gods everywhere you go, everybody and their grandmas not only wanna be big rockstars, they all think they are.”

  “What the fuck you sayin, bitch?” He poked me in the chest, pushing me backward several feet.

  “Nothing. Nada.” I lowered my eyes.

  “Oh, it’s nada. How’s it nada? You sayin somethin ain’t nothin, puta.”

  “I was just . . .” I couldn’t find the words in that moment to explain how an entire industry had grown up to sell the rockstar fantasy and how this blasphemed what once was a real connect between artist and audience, reduced now to the worship of false idols, corporate-sponsored, even in the underground.

  “Qué, muthafucker?” His eyes bored through me.

  “What the . . .” I gripped the paper bag, balled up my fist. “No thing.” I turned to go.

  “Damn right, white boy.” He grabbed my collar, pulled me close, cutting any leverage I may have had. I saw the pores in his nose, the rings on his thick scarred fingers. He pounded me three times fast, releasing me on the final blow, the force of which sent me reeling out the door onto the gravel lot.

  I’d somehow managed to hang on to the carryout, cushioning the bottle as I hit the ground. Though my head was fogged and I struggled to breathe, tasting blood from my split-open face, I rose to my feet as fast as I could, steeling myself for a bumrush.

  Thankfully, the fight was over before it started. I peeled out onto the dark road. Behind me I could hear the bar united in song: “Hey heeeey . . .”

  A few blocks out I veered down a side street, laid off the gas. Idling in front of a fenced square of dirt, rocks and garbage, I looked in the rearview mirror at my busted upper lip, gums, nose, left cheek and eye. I could see alright, though some of the white part was red. All my teeth were still in my head. I didn’t think he’d broken anything important. I unsealed the Gentleman Jack, slugged down a mouthful. Dousing my fingers, I touched the wounds. The burn was good.

  I took out my wallet to consult the map, hoping my homie was straight before our misunderstanding. Staring at the photo I’d printed of my son in his baby blanket, I broke down. The tears stung more than the whiskey.

  I was lucky this scrap hadn’t escalated. I don’t know what I would have done if the law had shown. I had to steer clear of trouble or risk another confrontation with the ex and lose my son forever. I knew this I knew it, and I knew it could be done. But I was not convinced God was on my side.

  The directions were good, the rest of my overnight with ticktockclock not bad. I apologized, presenting my gifts. She ooh-ahhed on the upscale liquor and greasy treats and mothered my injuries with antiseptic and premium powder she said she just happened to find. I thanked her often for her hospitality as the night progressed at a painfree clip.

  I embraced my mashed-up face for the humanity that lay beneath, the underside no one else could see. I thought the same about ticktockclock. She was human just like me, not a monster, despite appearances, and we were both in need.

  In the morning, after our final push to ziplock a zygote, we sat down again to processed corn and caffeine. My face felt worse than it looked. “You’re a tough guy,” she said. “You heal quickly.” I didn’t tell her how it hurt to chew.

  Staring into her coffee, she said, “So I’ll let ya know if we’re on our way.” Her knees wagged as if fanning her crotch. I touched her thigh and she froze. “If you still—”

  “Let me know.” I kissed her neck and her cheek, her chapped lips. She clenched her eyes. I imagined she was holding back the sobs she’d loose when I was gone. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Anythin.” She sniffed, glancing at me then fixing her gaze elsewhere.

  “How come you don’t go all the way? Why not bring new life into this world?”

  Lighting her first cigarette of the day, she filled her lungs, chewed on her pale lower lip. “Who in their right mind would bring life into this world?” She tossed her hands up at the room. The smoke from her fingers drew gray crazy-eights in the foul air. She pointed at the window. “Or that.”

  When ticktockclock excused herself to the toilet, I pinched some powder and shake, left on the table from last night, and soon drove home in silence.

  First thing, I made a run to the rifle range. With my cap slung low, no one noticed my face. My skills had improved such that I could now pop the bull’s eye from two hundred yards. I was single-minded with the Savage in my hands, though not thinking on whitetail, grizzlies or jackalopes.

  Back at my place I washed up, downed a double-dose of pain meds, checked my inbox. More than a dozen personal messages. I was in-demand.

  Number one, dream2live4evR (additional identifier: Remedios). She wrote several times to tell me how she missed my “loverly verses,” how she was “sooooooo looking forward to getting together SOON in the flesh and blood,” and wonde
ring “where oh where have you gone, dreamlover?” She said she’d be around this evening if I wanted to chat. I could think of no better way to spend a Saturday night.

  Then there was Ms. V, the Vocabularist, itching for fun with words and then some. She baited me: “In all probability, and certainly from a statistical vantage, your prospects for emerging victorious in our next showdown are auspicious to say the least.” I wrote that I was sadly overbooked but I could make the following weekend.

  Lil_Girl was looking for an encore. “I miss you, daddy. Why haven’t you called like you said you would? Mommy says I’ve been a bad little girl and deserve to be spanked. Should I pull down my panties now? I love you, daddy.” I didn’t write back. I vowed never again.

  Watch_me_now said she was sorry she’d missed my call but was thrilled by my “cute message” and “absolutely still up for our date on the dance floor.” Forwarding new windows of availability, she said I should contact her in the next few days.

  CondeeCandee dropped a note with details on where and when to meet after services tomorrow. “It will be my distinct pleasure,” she wrote, “to spend time with a real man for a change.” I wondered if my face would be too real for her. Just in case, I readied a heroic tale of how I rescued a family of pit bulls from the clutches of a fight club.

  Finally, there was this message from happyhappy: “So, one who calls himself cain_is_abel, you think you ‘know where I’m coming from,’ eh? I appreciate the feeling behind your words, I do. You seem sincere, respectful, unafraid, perhaps most importantly, but really, you can never know, nor imagine in your sickest fantasies, what I’ve been through or where I’m coming from, so please don’t try to make out like you do.

  “I don’t mean to be dismissive. It’s just, as I’ve written, I haven’t found anyone yet who hasn’t chickened out and I’m skeptical, bordering on cynical, though my faith is stronger than my doubt.