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Widoe’s Den

Michael Greeley

    There was no latent energy streaming out from my authority. I had one fist and it was used to mash and mangle, because, in the end, that’s all I’m here to do.
    Motherfucker talks shit to me, he gets knocked the fuck out. End of story.
    Yet, I sway in emotionless debt, the moneyless kind, that leaves me ranting like a parasite, like one of the hood rats I choke out so they’ll shut the fuck up and I can go home.
    If one more delicate flower makes his way over to me, whining about his stringy wife and their bastard son, I am going to flip my shit on him. If your kid gets out of line, you take care of it. You shouldn’t have to call the cops.
    This was my line of thought until he started acting out, crackin’ wise at everything and everybody, smoking weed on the side of the house, that kind of thing.
    And what did I do? I slapped my bony kid around. No big deal.
    He ain’t like me. And I can’t make him be, but I can make him follow my rules ‘cause it’s my house.

The aching tides of duty, they follow me.
My one and only son,
How he hates the ground under which I walk,
All that matters to him is fun.

    The agony that exists inside a father whose son hates him – it is not to be discussed. Shove the pain down below, into a clenched ball the size of a fist within the stomach and stop being such a pussy.
    I’m sitting in my squad car, watching these rich kids next to the pizza place at 11:30 at night. They’re all drunk. These people think they’re better than everybody else but they’re just- they’re just- nerds! Dorks. Softies. If you threw them in the jungle, they wouldn’t survive. People like me would chop their heads off, watch them run around like crazed chickens and then eat them for fucking breakfast. Or I’d use ‘em for bait to catch a bigger animal. In whichever case, they’d get eaten, even though their skin don’t look that good –appetizing’s a better word. It looks yellower than mine, pastier, like they’re rotten inside.
    Here comes some of the high school football team, the Prep school that is...all boys...college kids. These people walk like they got a pole up their ass, their noses sticking up with their shoulders pushed back. The guys look like girls and the girls look like guys. Some of the townies got that problem, too, though, I guess. Fucking queers.
    My jerkoff son has got that problem, too. I don’t tell him he looks like, you know, a fag, walking around like that, but I think about it all the time. Why can’t he just walk like a regular guy?
    These kids are fuckin’ dumb, hootin’ and hollering like I’m not sitting right here. They probably don’t know my kid, though, so I wouldn’t be embarrassing him if I busted them right now for underage drinking. Not like I would care if I embarrassed him, ‘cause I got a job to do.
    People think we bust people at every chance we get, but it’s not like that. I hate to say it, but we let a lot of shit slide, even with the spics and niggers. Offended? Get used to it. I stopped giving a fuck about it a long time ago. Everybody’s racist. Everyone. I don’t care if you lived in a rainforest all your life and have never seen a human before. You come out of that forest and you see a shiner standing there and immediately you start making all weird kinds of comparisons and whatnot, just to make yourself better than him because you got lighter skin. I’m telling you, it’s true. Cops know it, ‘cause cops are the most racist motherfuckers on earth, even more than Tommy Prep Football Star over here. We’ve just accepted it. Don’t get me wrong. I like black guys, even more than most white people, ‘cause they got balls, but I’m still a racist and always will be.
    Here comes the call – a bunch of white kids smoking weed behind the dentist’s office again. Let me give you a tip: if you’re going to go smoke blunts with your friends, don’t do it at 11pm at night, on a Wednesday behind the town dentist’s office. What are you a fuckin’ moron? Just a small hint for the jerkoffs out there who don’t feel like getting a wrist smack for smoking the ganj’, because, let’s face it, that’s all these white kids are going to get.
    Fun time. Let’s go. Chase some 16-year-olds around the neighborhood.
    I roll up on the scene and see a number of them scattering from the hub, the parking lot dipped below a square of trees next to the highway – Lipoma’s office-
    There they go! Look at them run! Morons. I run up on one of them walking down the road like nothing’s the matter, trying to fool me into thinking he’s not with the other kids. Meat! This kids is in his fucking pajama pants.
    “Put your hands on the car!” I yell to him. He gives me a look like nothing’s wrong. “You’re eyes are blood shot!”
    White kid. Doofy haircut. Harmless. Take his ass home to mommy and daddy so they can deal with him. But that’s not my gig tonight. I’ll let the rookie do that. Tonight I get to chase these kids around.
    The call comes through, a bunch of them scattered all around the railroad tracks, hiding up in the trees and in the nooks and crannies along the road. This should be good.
    I put the lights on just for show. I got one pinned down, next to the highway bridge, except he squirts off to the right, down the highway entrance. I see him in the light for the first time. Is that? Nah, Bill, my son, he’s not that stupid.
    Anyway, this kid’s about to make me get out the car and chase him on foot. Nah. Hell nah. I’m arresting this kid straight up when I get him. Taking him straight to jail, no warning, no nothing. I’m out the door. This should be fun...

Fortuitous broken sailors surging
Forward in their aching ships
Forgot to whisper words of wisdom
To the quieter side of their souls before the expedition.

Instead they acquiesced, petty against
The sobering tide of restlessness and grief.
Hallowed be the croaking dawn
Of ports tried and true.
Rescued in the agony of regrets,
How I besought the company of one,
And how he hated me.
How could it ever be so,
That I sought the company of
One, the father, and how he hated me so...

    I was privy to thoughts and batteries lining my walls like orchestrated canvases of sadistic, apocalyptic mirth. But this weed will give me something to do. It makes the studying better anyway, for high school is agonizing. All I do is study, all day long about things that I could care less about and that I won’t remember in 5 years anyway. Why do they do that? Why are things the way they are when things don’t make any sense while they’re like that?

Six peasants wrap themselves around
A telephone wire,
Hoping for a voice
That’s their own for all to see,
Only to be spattered along
Inequity’s redness, a perfect
Wet dog whose dire
Disposition wreaks of depravity
And musk.

    You can tell a lot about a person by checking out their dog. My dog sucks, not going to lie. The bastard is fat, ugly, and his eyes sag and are bloodshot with deep sadness, but I don’t think that’s my fault. He’s my dad’s dog, a police dog. How much fun could that be? Dogs take on everybody else’s energy, the energy of their masters – mostly the stuff that he or she doesn’t want to look at – that’s the dog’s job. That’s why they’re called dogs, the opposite of gods, because they pick up on everybody else’s shit. You need to kick something when you’re down? Kick the dog. I’m the dog, too. If we didn’t have another one I’d be walking on all fours.
    Who cares? Take the blunt and smoke it. Have a few laughs with your buddies and cause some trouble. Just don’t get caught, because if you do, you’re dead meat. My dad would kill me, beat the fuck out of me like the dog.

Bon voyage to simple things!
The quickening of gray approaches!
Splendor inside of gorgeous
Symbols that were twisted out of stone
Will grow from inhaling this poisoned root.
Suck in the smoke and let death squabble inside itself.

    This stuff tastes a lot stronger than normal – not like earth, like chemicals. Botts says it’s laced. Thanks for telling us that, asshole. I have to go home in an hour. But mom is asleep and dad is working, so it’s no big deal. Just let the high sink in. Relax. Smoke a butt, listen to some music and laugh. Just laugh everything away. That’s all we do is laugh.
    But this feels too weird. What was in that shit? Ecstasy? Damn dude, why didn’t you tell us that? But it doesn’t feel like ecstasy at all. I can feel my heart racing, fast, much too fast, like there’s nothing and everything wrong at once. I think I’m going to be sick. I am going to die. What a realization! One day I will be dead.
    Here come the lights, a thousand of them, barreling over the sidewalk, bleeping out their crazed sirens like blood sucking hounds. I am high. I am running with the rest of them like deer from the slaughter through the trees. I am so fucking high. I’ve never been this high. Fuck you dad.

    This kid looks a lot like Bill. Shit. That’s Bill. Don’t go toward the highway you idiot.

    I am the leopard soaked in ionized whiskey. I am vermouth seething from a hallowed assailant who cries drearily in the night. I am a fornicating madman on the loose, and there is naught who can impose his will on me. I subjugate myself before the altar of impetuous rioting, for I am the deity of callous indignation.
    This pig, this lark, this buffoon wishes to sequester me like some sopping wench filled with holes that drip with sand?
    Lackey! Morose scoundrel who I’d dignify with a chase! For it is I who writes history. It is for I the songs are sung. And it is I who sings them, altogether!
    Porridge redefines my girth and liquid youth breathes life through my petrified heart. Run!
    Run from the piggie! Oink! Oink!
    Down the ravine you go schoolboy, toward the Hollywood Hills of vitriol. The highway! Run through it like a specter!
    Impose your leg work upon the cement and show this beast who controls the earth and for what reason. Youth! For mine father, be the one! A servant of the state, fattened with regulations and grease. Chomping local bread and cheese that the peasants afford him is how he spends his days. He speeds around in a chariot made of steel to quench his lust for power, just to make an only son feel like a lost pebble made of shit.

How I wish he loved me.
Covered in darkened soot, I run.
I run from his ordinance,
I choke on the stars in the blackness,
How I wish he could see.

Just one fleeting glance,
At how I revere him so,
Then he might not chase me
And set my candles spinning.

But privy be, not on this night,
A carnival of chaos now the more,
I’ll make him burn and growl
And gnarl.
I’ll brew his pot to boiling hot
Before the gods of angst and turmoil,
And let youth settle our score,
For fate and fortune are what I crave,
Take the step toward the lakes of fuming gas and oil.

And run across that highway you worthless, ugly son!

No. Bill. Don’t. Please. What’s he doing? Christ...

Follow me on thy feet, you whelp,
Cross dangerous worlds galore.
I’ll feed thee to thy crosses.
Praise your maiden, the holy law, you
Whore,
Catch your son, then tell all of your bosses!

    The officer’s son ran across the budding, burning highway as his father pursued with relentless passion, a quarter of such sentiment resting on genuine concern for his yolk, the remainder on the reputation in question, the one he’d built over years working hard for the community at large.
    But Bill was fast, and the officer had eaten two “Jumbo” slices of sausage pizza with a large coke from Mario’s while on his second break. What could he do? It was given to him for free.
    The son had been high on marijuana before, though this time he’d inhaled more than that which would set his nerves at ease. The fact that his friend, Botts, had sprinkled half-a-gram of Angeldust upon its contents only intensified his impending plunge into monster-truck-infested waters.
    He flew through the night, a reckless, diving, diadem filled with self-imposed ideals of greatness. Be that as it may, the gods always have their fun with those arrogant enough to twist the teats of mother fortune.
    Cars and trucks, vrooming at gargantuan speeds close to that of madness, flung themselves from the boy’s path with honking atriums that blurred his senses.
    And, huffing and puffing, father followed, though he was the pig, and it was into the wolf’s house that he now wished entry. “Quite the paradoxical accord,’ the gods quipped, as they pulled their strings with their acutely individualized brand of pleasure.
    And father followed, as always he did, just to see what was the matter.
    In belligerent despondency, the flailing, garbled youth flung himself atop the divider, his trek only half-fulfilled. That stony triangle which we all take for granted, that which splits our pointed, dotty automobile blood, now acted as a resting point as father cried out from close behind: “Stay right there! Freeze Bill! Don’t move one more inch!”
    But with a smile filled with wraiths, the boy turned, high as a fucking kite with no anchor, and dared invincibility for the first and final time.

666

His funeral is next Thursday,
And daddy won’t be there.
Remember that amid thy ego,
There’s always room to care,
About a father’s rules,
And a son’s need to break them now and then.
Compromise! My blessed Grandson, is more wise than Buddhist Zen.

For they were both smashed to bits by the teeth of speeding cars,
And now life, it has no meaning,
For their mother/wife,
Who’s heart is sapped with seamless scars,
Alone in her widow’s den.

‘Cause life, it n’er have meaning,
Without the quickenings of strictly lawless men...

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