I don't have to make sense
by George Sparling
[ fiction - january 11 ]
Willard's worst nightmare Thad, my best friend, was murdered, a guilty payback because I lay on the couch, crazy-talking about the noise pollution outside and the mean clicker/cracker (on walls and bookcases and ceilings) I called Cunt, who surveilled my every nuance, every sotto voce, every syllable transcribed (I'm a neophyte, computer illiterate, sort of a throwback, proud of my spiteful attitude towards the digitalis age - see what I'm talking about) on some god-only-knew website, monitored by the town's police, as well the FBI in their safe house a few doors down the street.
"You'll have to kill me, gutless ones, I'll never swallow your puke anymore. I can always go to the hardware store and buy a $500 high-powered staple gun, shooting high velocity, legal revenge projectiles into your sorry-ass brains," I said, lying on the couch, eyes shut, knowing sooner or later they'd push me into psychosis after damming and ramming accumulated semen into me after three years of celibacy, no longer watching online sex sites. "Yeah, it must've been the illegal porn that got me into this mess."
Willard, an Episcopalian pastor, who officiated at Thad's and Alicia's wedding all the while she had an ongoing affair with the married pastor, I saw now out my window, wearing his white collar, as he surveilled me in his SUV, looking at his iPhone, seeing and hearing everything I do or not do inside. Thad used to talk like this: Alicia, knew her since grade school. We used to make out on the slide during recess, no, not recluse, as in brown recluse spider that bites, but Alicia slurping my ear from behind, then reaching bottom I turned and slurved her right on the mouth, we were in seventh grade, the last year the school had recesses. And, oh those teachers, they warned us about bad touch, good touch, but in high school we'd more space, mental as well physical, to spread out, and we caught rats and mice, then sucking gasoline up in straws, holding one end, then releasing our fingers and blowing it onto the poor little beasts' fur, Zippoing them, laughing as they turned fiery, then charcoally.
We must've caught dozens, much better than sex. Poor Alicia, her folks Mormons, having to wear special underpants. I read where Steve Young, the San Francisco quarterback, a Mormon, wore them, teammates asking why so thick and long, why so special, down to his knees, he saying 'Aw, you guys couldn't afford them,' laughs all around. Alicia's were a parental reminder not to have anything to do with what goes on below the waist. After betrothal, in the best hotel in the area, she bought a triple-large pair and I slid inside her supper-large underwear, sort of bundling, what those American Puritans did in the 17th century. We were kiddy garnishes, snuggling tight as two peas in a pod.
We met Leo in a bar, drinking absinthe. Good guy Leo, that goofy, sweet, charming psychotic Leo, the screamer, who-the-hell-wants-to-make-sense-of-anything bloke. Always paranoid of higher powers, the guys and gals who ran surveillance on him, making him a recluse in his Victorian gingerbread house. But, no matter what, we three stuck together, that is until Monsignor Willard used his bully pulpit, seducing drugged-out, eighteen-year-old Alicia, she innocently drinking spiked date-rape wine, and Willard's singular sperm shot in one penis stroke made her pregnant. He paid for an abortion and we told the Monsignor we'd tell the world if the SOB didn't cough up for our mortgage payments. He filched money from collection plates, lying about projects to entice wealthy donors into giving him contributions. That, plus Alicia's continual whoring with Willard supported us. Thad's death blew up hate for W 100-fold: How did I know Willard was out there? I heard his voice pound in my brain: I'll get you, Leo, don't think you can avoid your destiny, laying on your couch, dreaming of Gatsby getting murdered, you low-slung muckie-muck from Midwestern suburbia. We, the entire church, we, the entire neighborhood, we, the whole shooting match of Blahtown, hells bells, the entire county, state, nation, world know about your feeble attempts at intellectualism.
W said: I grew up with you, made the grades, went to a good university and theological seminary, but you were the 130 pound stupid liar, a guy who never got out of seventh grade. Inherited all your money. We were buds, but you stabbed me in the eye with a Ticonderoga pencil, blinding me for life. You licked the blood, slurping around with your tongue at my eyeball. I was then in the most pain ever but now, seated behind the wheel of a SUV, looking at you, picking your nose, popping whiteheads, listening to classical music you know shit about, crying about pukes like me ruining your life, telling them we're nothing but cunts. I relish exiling you from Bleeptown because of your screaming at us that you'll take that dull Buck knife on your next thirty minute walk, having it sheathed and bouncing against your thigh, ready to slit the throats of some six-year-old child or pushing an great-grandmother into the traffic in her electric cart, wanting somebody to pay for how they tortured you based on Geneva Conventions, UN provisions against terrorism, etc.
And your yapping about how you were oxygen deprived at birth, even though it can't be documented, screaming about how the whole family in the house next door hammer on your walls, telling them as they banged harder and harder with whatever, pipes, wrenches, steel pipes, that they'd better watch out, faggot nuclear family, you're gonna get sulfuric acid thrown into your faces. I and crew outside are nothing but scumbags you say but I know you don't even know what a scumbag is, and if I asked you point blank, you'd race to the computer and have to look it up.
I know you wanted to learn a trade back it some town called Barrington, Illinois, but when I searched online, the only Barrington I found was Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and you figure we're all liars complicit in your disfigured life, but we, and even that dirty bitch Alicia also despise you just for the sake of punishing you. You broke into my rectory and drank my Chivas Regal, then watching me poke Alicia's arse with my tattooed bone, "Fuck You" wrapped around my dick, and then you yanked your cock, shooting sperm onto the red rug in the church, and when you yell "Fuck you," you think that we outside figure you're saying "Fuck Jews." You idiot!
When the mail carrier walks away after delivering the mail, you can't tell for sure whether it's a he or a she, but as I speak these words into you pea brain, you think vehicles outside your Victorian will make louder and louder noise, like right now when they roar and screech down the usual quiet street, they'll say, shit, man, he don't even know what's makin' all our fancy-smanchy bedlam, you think way beyond your capacities, they must be on loco weed or dirt grass, but when you asked your longtime shrink about medicating your paranoid panic attacks, he gave you a doctor's name, and you made an appointment with him, and he charged $150 and sent you ten pages of fine print forms. You wouldn't fill them out because they were too detailed and prying, so you called the doctor's office and said you no longer wanted marijuana cookies or cake and cancelled the appointment. When you went back to your shrink and told him that you wanted no part of getting high, it would only make you more paranoid, paranoid just like right now as I blow my vuvuzela, scaring the bejesus out of you, this instrument which moaned like an electric banshee a loud monotone during the World Cup in South Africa.
You think they're making fun of you because you're one heck've of paranoid job, a paranoid white man, but the truth is that your mother was mulatto, your dad half-Native American and African-American, you're a no-name, talentless jerk, not an artist as Steve Martin was in "The Jerk."
Why are you so screwed up? Because you think race means the human race, but when you try to run (race) you can't do it anymore because after your cervical spinal stenosis surgery you have to walked hunched over. You have good days/bad days walking because you don't take an extra pill in the daytime, and when you take your daily fix of six pills at eleven o'clock p.m., gulping them two at a time, and walk into the darkened bedroom, you'll assume we think you didn't take them. As my precious words penetrate your daylit/sunshine mind now I'll call you out a cheater, a liar, a bamboozler, a dead asteroid of a character, and in your bed under the covers, you can hear me shout into that feeble-minded reptilian core, "You're mind-raping me, get the hell out of here, what do you think this house is, a Nazi Stalag? Get out you revolting beasts, you sharks smelling blood in the water. I'll get you, cunts, if they'll only cooperate, a parody of what Sugar Ray Leonard told Howard Cosell years ago before those televised championship boxing bouts
You yell, I just want sleep, that's all, sleep and food, your cry-baby blubbering a ruse to gain sympathy, so you howl, get the hell out or I'll call the goddamned cops, and when you will sometime find out that I work undercover for those same blood-thirsty cops, you'll want to kill me with that derringer you've hidden in the closet. Bring it on, you say just before easing off to sleep.
And when there's a knock at the door, you open it, and the guy said, "Oh, I'm sorry, it must be the wrong address," and before he walks off your porch, you scream at him, "YOU FUCK, NOBODY EVER GETS IT WRONG," and in your messy heart you want to kill that piece of smarmy hipster shit. YEAH, and all those wrong numbers aren't wrong, you curse them out and hang up. THEY'RE WRONG, KILL THEM ALL, you yell inside your living room, then going outside, picking up a rock and throwing it through your neighbor's living room window, knowing full well you won't get arrested because their intent is to drive you out of town no matter what you do.
That's it, I won't quit, you say...Honest, that's really it. But in your deep-throat those same words rasp repetitively, 'Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you...' You cannot be borne back ceaselessly into the past. Wake Up!
Alicia drove her BMW into my driveway. At first, I thought she was part of the BS in the street, a creep not knowing when to quit, when to get a real job. Alicia strode up the steps to my unlocked door (the shits outside and wi-fi monitoring won't allow any burglar inside because they have a monopoly on crime). She sat down, her black leather jacket draped neatly on as straight back chair, her red shirt she claimed Venezuela's Hugo Chavez gave her after belting down espresso after espresso with him, getting high.
We drank green tea, listening to Mahler's Resurrection Symphony. She fast-talks no matter what she drinks, smokes or swallowing pill/tablet wise. She said: They're playing vigilante, tough guys (femmes, too) don't dance, eh Mr. Mailer, guys like Denzel Washington in "Unstoppable," gals like Angelina Joie in "Salt," the party's over, Dickheads, god rest your Gnostic, psychotic noir-soul, Philip K. Dick. Hell, Leo, you're Duke Mantee, you've short-cropped gray hair and would use a gun if you had to, not that Mantee had in "The Petrified Forest," though you and I saw the movie long ago, the only twinge of memory was that Duke was psychotic, if memory served me well, and you sure lapped up his screaming. D. Mantee, a world class killer, you told me.
She went on: But that wouldn't be such a bad historical tag, to kill as many of these usurpers outside, those who live on gas fumes, Cheddar cheese, adderall and puke, maybe even some dog shit licked off the street, sort of like licking a toad, going Witchy-woman psychedelic. Speaking of dogs, last night I saw "White Dog," Romain Gary's novel turned cinematic, a German Shepard trained to attack and preferably kill blacks, ending up killing whitey Burl Ives, giving me the idea that if we bred a black, white and brown dog, making sure they were large and mesomorphic, then you'd clean up the streets of this hick town, a place removed from big city cultural whirligigs but just large enough for its citizens to feel they're better than you, this Blearville of moral ruins dominated by hubris, hate and immaturity. I know you love diatribes.
I said: Yeah, I almost gagged on my last meal (It could very well be The Last Supper - da Vinci would get a hard-on if he wasn't dust and corruption) of the day, a meal I gobble down as fast as possible because if I don't the entities outside and clicker inside will kidnap my soul and rape its presiding spirit until my personal god, Violence, got put out of business.
Alicia stretched her legs, got up, went to the window, a gave the finger at the thugs outside, as well the clicker, called he/she a stinking cunt. She put her arm into it, body language allowing no doubt of her contempt. She mooned them and then went to the bathroom. Five minutes later, she came back with three plastic baggies full of shit, walked outside, firing methodically firing them at Willard, hitting him in the face. I saw Willard go apeshit, Alicia, his best piece of ass ever, and that had included the goat he fucked at the church picnic. Alicia photographed the event. She put the goat fuck pics on Facebook and mailed them to parishioners
She said: You and I should blow up this town with a handheld predator bomber. Pentagonists have been working on one for a few years, I know, I'm online, zipping through news stories faster than one of your outside/clicker tormentors could say "Leo's a shit," its electronic sound nearly birdsong. I heard it many times on those thirty minute walks you heroically take.
I said: You know, dinner is from Middle English via France for "to break fast," break the operative word because I want to break these locals heads in, cut them with a machete, slice and dice them up with a scimitar, shamsir in Persian, which reminded me of fanatics, fundamentalist jihadists, al qaeda dirtying up the street outside my home, littering the sidewalks and pedestrian crossings with improvised explosive devices (who the hell cared about hyperbole, who gives one Tinkers damn (Tinkers are Gypsies, another group of people I support because they've been bashed/genocided for centuries.) But these foulest of people in this Poopberg, the worst group I'd encountered in my life, for years I thought I was aligned with them culturally, socially, politically, but not so now.
Alicia recommended that I shouldn't spend every waking/somnolent/sleeping moment in my house, getting whatever I needed from toilet paper to smoothies, booze to batteries, DVDs to soap from her, she now a mole in the town's police force for the Muslim Uighurs in China, unable to be my supply line to the outside world. These past months the demonic posse have constipated my life, making me feel like a shit-stool, a floating brown turd in whichever room I seclude myself, now severely convinced that the fascist cretins want to capture me if I step out of my house. Alicia's mere presence reinvigorated me, a boost to my confidence, coaxing me out of Gitmo. The master Demeanors outside in their vehicles, every single passerby included, made me feel strong and righteous like a Twin Tower slaughterer.
Alicia's BMW was parked in my garage and that made my escape easier. She thought we could seek asylum in Canada or maybe Senor Chavez would welcome us. We backed out, heading through the town's square, me smelling the ocean, smelling blood too, thinking about Willard, his murder of Thad confirmed by Alicia, learning the details poking through police and FBI records, hacking into files. When Alicia saw the hulking slob W getting out of his SUV, dressed in priestly attire, walking across the street, she stepped hard on the accelerator, and as W turned to his left, looking at the BMW, seeing her through the windshield, she made a hard right turn, smashing into his puke form, driving over him then back again.
I had an over-and-under derringer she advised to carry in case the bastards kidnapped me I'd have the option of sticking the derringer to my head and killing myself rather than get taken alive and physically tortured in the center of town, tens of thousands of haters cheering as four Clydesdales were led to my bleeding body, ready to draw and quarter me. I got out of the car, ran to a barely moving Willard, putting two thirty-eight slugs into his head, finishing him off.
By then hundreds of vehicles swarmed to the scene, but Alicia, a former NASCAR driver, distinguishing herself when she caused a ten-car pile up, killing off the best drivers on the circuit, herself unhurt, determined to find a way clear, droved past Adolf Eichmann's bronze statue in the middle of the square, running over one of Willard's sons in the process. She knew him intimately, the son fucking her a few times while Willard was watching my house, as usual, seeing and hearing on his mobile phone, as they all did, in front of my house and around town. I don't have to make sense. Remember.
The son used no condoms as father Willard had, Alicia getting pregnant, having the child, caring for it until she visited me today, deciding it was better to smash the infant's brains out, smashing its head against the small electric parking-ticket vehicle stationed down a bit from my house. The parking-ticket woman and police officers looked at the poor creature's remains splattered against the front of her vehicle.
The cops arrested her and the D.A. charged her with homicide, she soon convicted, now serving a long sentence in a state prison. Please don't ask me about how I knew that happened in the future. My nickname had always been, "Future Tense," so trust me: It happened. I stopped making sense a long time ago, when I heard a neighbor across the street say loudly, "Leo's a Communist," to a friend of his. "I hate them," the friend said, and the neighbor replied, "Or an anarchist," and his chum said, "That's worse," and that was ten years ago, the first time definitely knew I was an Enemy of the People.
So, everything conspired to metamorphose my mind into paranoid, politically incorrect gibberish. Gibberish derived from "jabber," to talk nonsense, this I learned on Wikipedia, reminding me that today the founder of Wikileaks, Julian Assange, exposing all the lies, torture, terrorism and murder committed by Western forces in Iraq and Afghanistan (lefty rhetoric), had been charged with rape and sexual molestation by Interpol, and as I lay on my couch, I screamed, "You mind-rapers, I'll kill all of you, you pukes," then remembering I'd killed Willard (short attention span: ADD).
I got up to take a piss and then looked out the front window. I saw that son of bitch Willard still watching me in his SUV, and because I knew that stories shouldn't end with, "It was all a dream," I had a default setting in my life: I do not have to make sense of anything. Repetition is good for the soul. The creepy, tinier Hitlers outside wanted me to believe it was merely a dream, so I relented, taking out my opium pipe, heating "black idol" to the proper temperature, leaned back, inhaling, relaxing, seeing visions of Julian getting raped by hordes of convicts in a remote northern prison of Sweden. As one image merged and melted and flowed into another, I saw my face superimposed on Julian's as he was slashed with lethal homemade weapons, killed by criminals just like those outside my house.
Yes, telling truth hurt like hell, especially when I'd always told the truth about my situation - it was that gosh darn online porn that caused all my troubles. I now had second thoughts: I had always predicted I'd land in prison, getting killed within a month. Sort of a dream state, where, on my back upon the couch, I absolutely knew my afternoon, snooze-blown, slumberous fate. If not a dream, it must have been a nightmare, one like in Willard's Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome murder-mind: Thad, a corpse. Or, was I a dead man, cadaver, ashes and bones, annulled from the cosmos, a nightmare staring back at me in the mirror under the influence of lies?
