---

 

This writing was accepted for publication in the 108 page perfect-bound ISSN# / ISBN# issue/book “Shot out of a Cannon” cc&d (v248) (the January / February 2014 Issue) You can also order this 6"x9" issue as a paperback book:

Order this writing in the book a New Pen the cc&d Jan. - June 2014 collection book		get the 394 page Jan. - June 2014 cc&d magazine issue collection 6" x 9" ISBN# paperback book:

The Whistlers

Joshua Copeland

    I lived in Los Angeles, trying to make a living writing screenplays. Soon I was three months late on my rent. I called my brother back in Athens, Georgia. He said he could lend me a few hundred, but after that I was on my own. And my mom and dad were through sending me money. So I packed up my things and moved to Las Vegas, where I could live cheaply. I put my belongings in A1 Storage in Korea town before I left. I moved into one of the cheap motels that are fifty dollars a week: The Harley Motel.
    My first few days there I saw him, wandering the motel parking lot, which the motel squared on all four sides. For a skirt she wore a striped shirt that went high up over his thighs. He was black, made up with dark eye shadow and bubblegum lipstick. The thing had the thousand, the ten thousand, the gazillion yard stare, and he kept wandering around the motel Laundromat, stepping through a dreamy slush, looking for johns. And it looked ever so skinny, as if there were no skin, just naked bone. If you hugged her, she’d crack and collapse and break in your arms. Late one day I got in my car and stopped at the motel exit, waiting to pull into traffic. The skinny hooker approached my car. He kept trying to make eye contact, but I avoided him.
    Did it carry a cinderblock in its purse? I don’t know, but when he swung his purse at my driver’s side window, the glass shattered and splintered into my face. Through my one working eye I saw it stare at me with a white hot hatred, someone who’s chance at life had long passed, someone too blind even for tunnel vision.
    I drove to Southwest Medical, and sat in their waiting room fucking forever. This made the people around me mad. They told me to be assertive, that with my injury I shouldn’t have to wait. Slivers of window were ground into my face and right eye. The ER Tech called, “Gonzales, Edward,” but Edward told them to take my first. So they did.
    It was unbelievable. I had outraged the nurse. She anesthetized my face with a hypodermic needle, all the while hollering at me. I heard a baby cry and scream in the other room. “Go fuck yourself,” I yelled at the nurse.
    The security asked her if she wanted to call PD on me for disturbing the peace.
    “Yes, please do,” She said.
    I pulled up my shirt and exposed by four AA batteries duct taped to my breast plate. “See this? If the cops Taze me, they blow my heart out, and I die, lots of paperwork for you and them. So they’ll be forced to strong arm me, and that’ll be a free-for-all in here, a wrestling match, with all this expensive equipment around.” The nurse changed her mind.
    I asked her, “How could you be so angry with me? I didn’t get beat up because I wanted to.” The baby stopped crying. As the nurse finished wiping off my face a tear ran down her cheek.
    They were going to discharge me and then I’d return in a few days for eye surgery, but the ophthalmologist said it’d be safer if we did it right then and there. So I breathed in the anesthetic, counted backwards from twenty, and woke up. For a few days I was an inpatient and wore gauze over my right eye, and then they took it off and gave me special eye drops to use for two weeks. But I wasn’t thinking of that. Like a commercial that never ends, all I could think of was “it,” that hooker. He was going down.
    They told me not to drive but screw them. After discharge I left to the auto shop on Tropicana and spent half my measly cash supply on fixing the window. And they couldn’t get it done that day. But I could not leave it in the motel lot; the darkies would be all over it like monkey bars if they saw it had a broken window. So a company car drove me back to the motel, picked me up the next day and drove me to the shop. The car was ready, I paid, got behind the wheel, and left. Now for the hooker.
    On my way back to the hotel I stopped at a 7-11 and bought lip balm and a little black canister of tear gas spray. I parked at the motel. Got up to my room, and spent the days and nights chugging bottles of Kochs beer and just watching the lot through my window, just waiting for it and its striped shirt barely covering its crotch. For a few days I just watched, then...he stumbled in, wandering, zombie eyed, each step bringing with it the unkept promise that there will never have to be another. Keep away from the trajectory of that purse.
    I waited until her back was to me before I left my room, so he wouldn’t see where I lived, and pay me a visit at a later date via karma. So I walked out my room chugging a Kochs. I held my TG canister in my front pocket. I walked towards him, across the lot.
    It spotted me. He grabbed his purse and wound up, ready to swing. Just out of his reach I pulled out the TG and sprayed the queen like I had the Raid and she was the insect. It grabbed its eyes and scratched and coughed helplessly and clawed at its face and throat with long, rainbow colored fingernails. Blood from his face and neck ran down his chin onto his shirt. Then I cracked my beer bottle over its forehead. The cloud of TG hit me before I could back away, and as a kind of rear guard action I rubbed the lip balm in my eyes, neutralizing the TG. I walked back to my room and at my doorway I turned around for a final look. The hooker was swinging its purse around aimlessly and shrieking like the queen that it was...
    My days I spent doing nothing. The Harley Motel had no cable or AC. All my TV picked up was a Latino station and a Christian station. I subscribed to the magazine DOMAI (Dirty Old Man’s Association International), jerking off was ever so important, it calmed me down. But I had trouble getting it up. And I was running out of money.
    I had graduated from Athens U, majored in Writing. The problem is, you cannot teach writing in a classroom. It’s all about rewriting, the same story, over and over, not first drafts. All my classes only asked for first or second drafts. You winced when your Prof lied to you, “This is first rate work. Find a home for it.” And they should have classes that center around getting rejected repeatedly. There in Vegas I spent two or three hours a day at the Arlington Library, writing away on their computers.
    Most of the publishing out there is written by, for, pansies. Yes, I do think I’m better than them and their moonlit garden fiction. If you want to write a story on, say, sexual predation in jail, The Atlantic Monthly would reject it so their readers would not have to put on their monocles and grunt, “Harrumph!” Same with the New Yorker. And no, I am not a fan of Bukowski. Too misogynistic. He was a wife beater, and the theme showed up in his stories. Same with Hunter S and Burroughs. Well, Burroughs didn’t exactly beat his wife, but he shot her in the head, so that kind of counts.
    When Sylvia Plath finished her last batch of poems, Ariel, no major mag would except them, her work was too “extreme.” The New Yorker rejected her—though they had accepted her previous, “safer” poems that sounded like an asexual schoolgirl, and with lots of asides about Greek and Roman mythology. A few years after her suicide, Plath won the Pulitzer. To appreciate human nature as a whole one has to study both sides of the prism spectrum, from red to purple.
    I called my sister from payphone at the Rainbow Inn. “Bec. This is serious. I’m running out of money.”
    “We’ve been over this before. Get a job. And keep it. Don’t get fired.”
    “It’s not my fault. I fuck it up. Every time.”
    “Okay, I’ll wire you the two hundred, and then THE PINCH IS OFF!”
    I began screwing a lady cabbie who lived in 140. Her name was Shelly. “I’m the last white cabbie left,” she said. She looked butch. Was she bi?
    And I’d always screw up the sex. I’d be inside her, going limp, and she would ask, “What the hell is wrong with you?”
    “My money situation. I worry.”
    “Are you supposed to be worrying about this now?”
    “I can’t help it.”
    “Get out of me.” she grabbed the condom and threw it across the room. It hit the wall with a Splat! Thus consigning me to a “Cunt Tease.”
    “If it’s any consolation,” I told her, “I can’t jerk off to my DOMAI mags. It’s not just the money situation. This motel is a rough place to stay. I looked at some girl in the lot yesterday, and her boyfriend, some big fat oaf with a mullet, looked at me like he was going to kill me. Maybe I’ll end up at the Covenant House. But it’s like I keep falling, grabbing, and falling more. I don’t have money any more to pay for my storage in LA.”
    Shelly sighed and lit a cigarette. “Look at it this way. I’m forty years old and have kept this job despite all the Patels. I’ve driven a cab now for seven years, and I don’t fuck up, so they can’t fire me. That must mean this is what is meant for me, driving a cab in Las Vegas at night. There are just some things you are meant to be. It’s a square peg in a round hole story. You jam it in and hammer it in and eventually it fits. There’s no other way. Yeah, you’re falling, but you’ll land when you reach what you were born for. Your final destination may be panhandling and living at Covenant House. Who knows?”
    I think I unconsciously annoyed a lot of people since I’m in a constant, sea sick mood, eyeballing everyone. One day the short kid—around twenty years old—in room 104 yelled to me, “Hey brother, come in here for a second!” Usually I’m careful about such invitations, but I thought about driving around many a night and sleeping through the day and Shelly yelling at me, and how all that bored me. So I walked in.
    I smelled meth making equipment. Some dude was piping up in the bathroom, behind a screen. Hard Core porn played on the TV. A luck-empty burn out sat there watching it. “Suck it, bitch,” he said. The short, scrawny kid told me to have a seat on his bed. He brought over a fold out table and was very solicitous overall. He opened up a Tool CD cover, flattened it on the table, and poured a line of meth out the dime bag. The cover showed a guy sucking his own dick. “Man,” the dealer said, “If I could do that I’d never leave the house.” He handed me a section of straw.
    But I had my own stash in my room above. I kept it in a Tool CD too. The CD I kept it in was called Undertow. The Tool CD the dealer kept his meth in was called Animae. I felt nauseated and unfriendly. “I can’t do this man. I just can’t.” he peered at me and frowned.
    The next day I saw him hang jump off the second floor walkway. I lit up, “Hey, what’s up man!” I chimed.
    He said right away, “You fucked up, dude. You missed out. Someone else bought it. With that he walked to his room and slammed the door in my face. I went to my room and did a few lines, but the hangovers were getting worse and worse.
    Every time I saw the dealer I’d yell hello to him, and eventually we were on better terms. One night the dealer and I were both in the lot, there was a motel security guard down the way, and the dealer yelled to me, “Hey Hank, see that guy down there! Don’t trust him! He’s really not security! He’s a meth dealer!” And the dealer and the security laughed. Of course the guard wasn’t a meth dealer. This was a joke between the two. So the hotel knew the dealer dealt out of the hotel. Some of the dealer’s profit must go to the hotel, and in turn they allowed him to work there.
    I’d listen to the radio a lot at night, if I wasn’t driving around. I listened to the heavy metal station. The DJ who worked nights would constantly complain he had a cold. Every night: “Man, is my nose runnin’ or what?” one night I called up to request Black Flowers by The Offspring. The DJ asked, “Does it sound like I got the sniffles?”
    One night, as I left the Playhouse Movie Theater, a guy approached me. He was well dressed, a bit erudite and geeky. He asked me, “Sir, can you tell me what you do for a living?”
    “Nothing. I write, but I can’t make a living off it.”
    He guffawed in a regal, bejeweled way. “Ah, a student of life.”
    That made me mad. I felt my eyeballs bulge, like my head was in a vice. “I could break your leg in four places!” I wanted to scream.
    Instead: “You could say that,” I said.
    He went on, “I’m handing out tickets to a movie here at The Playhouse on the 13^th, five days from now. It’s free to get in, here’s your ticket. All you have to do is fill out a survey after the movie.”
    Why not? It’d get me out more. So I took the ticket and he left.
    Then some kid comes barreling up the street, his arms inked with tattoos. He looked panicky, like he was about to shit himself. The kid had jungle crazy eyes, pupils like pinballs bouncing round the whites. He said to me, frantically, “Hey sir, I’m not dangerous, I’m a runaway. I just got here a few days ago. I haven’t eaten or slept in two days, and stores aren’t letting me in to use their water fountains. I need a little bit of money! Anything!”
    A crew of around five or six blacks lounged around up ahead at a 7-11. They had an empty grocery cart with them. I pointed, “Look man, do you see those jungle brothers up there? You go up to them, and ask to do a favor for them in exchange for chow money. There’s your ticket.”
    I watched him hustle up there. As he talked with them, he gesticulated and thrashed like he was falling off a skyscraper. They pushed the cart over to him, and he took off. He ran so fast you could hear the accompanying din of the cart over the sidewalk.
    So I showed up at The Playhouse Movie Theater five days later. The line was at least two blocks long. And it went nowhere, it didn’t move. After a circa two hour wait I saw a woman with assistants walk from person to person, asking them questions, which the assistants duly recorded. The lady was in her fifties and in perfect shape. Only in LA, New York, and Vegas do you find women at that age in shape. Finally she and her gaggle of note takers arrived to me. She asked me my name, my age, my job, what kind of movies I liked. Then she asked if I went to college.
    “Yes.”
    “What was your major?”
    “Writing.”
    She winced. “Sorry sir, we don’t allow writers into these showings.” Her assistants glared at me.
    “Look ma’am,” I said. “You got to be kidding me. I’ve waited over two hours. I will not leave. I am not going anywhere. Trust me. I won’t steal any ideas off your movie.”
    “Sir, please don’t turn this into a scene.”
    I stayed silent. She said to an assistant, “Kelly, call security.” Kelly backed up a few steps and made the call on her cell phone.
    The crowd shouted, “Let him stay! What’s the big deal?!”
    Two average built brothers straight out of the first episode of 2001 swagger up to us. They weren’t especially big. That means they carried Tasers. The lady told them I refused to leave.
    Then they both tried to lightly push me away from the line. But I held my ground.
    “Look sir, we are asking you to leave. Rules are rules.”
    “Don’t ‘sir’ me.”
    One pulled out a Taser and pointed it at me. “Do you know what it feels like to get zapped,” he said. “You shit yourself.” Like a wave, the crowd moved away from me.
    I pulled up my shirt to show the AA batteries duct taped to my breast plate. “I’m prepared to die,” I said. “You zap me, you’ll have a crime scene on your hands.”
    He put his Taser away. It was like I interrupted the script of a bully. Neither the two security guards knew what to say.
    “Jesus Christ,” the lady said. ‘Let him stay.”
    The crowd applauded.
    One of the orangutans asked the lady, “We can call more security and remove him by force?” The crowd booed. “You want me to make the call?”
    I said, “You know what? I don’t want to see your crappy movie. What’s it called?” I looked at the ticket. “The Blair Witch Project. Sounds like a dud to me.” Everyone around me relaxed.
    I left back to my room and picked up the book How We Die, a book written by a doctor on how to deal with death by disease. Problem is, the author was an atheist. Who the hell wants to read a book like that? I bought the book because I thought it’d be about getting into heaven, not, “When you die, there’s nothing, no butterfly, no blank screen, just an empty theater.” Jess Franco, the French Intellectual, carried the book around after the death of his wife. Don Edmunds, the British Philosopher, carried it around before he died of throat cancer.
    I hate atheists. They dance around you in a circle, taunting you: “You are weak and such a wuss! You’re afraid of a life without an afterlife! You’re feeble! We, however, have the balls to live a life with no heaven or hell when we die! Not like you, we are not weak, puny and pusillanimous.” And if that’s not bad enough—I finished the book tonight—for the last sentence of the book the author wrote that suicide was evolution’s logical way of thinning the herd. What an asshole. I ripped my smoke alarm off the wall, took the batteries out, threw the book in the sink, and with my cig lighter set it on fire.
    One night as I walked from my car to my room the meth dealer grabbed me by the shoulder and gently corralled me into his room. “So you run out of money soon, right?” he asked.
    “Yes. Real soon, too.”
    “I can promise you double zeros if you mule for me.”
    I had no reason to trust this midget. But a hundred would keep me off the streets another week.
    He showed me four dime bags. “See these? Take them and shove them up your ass. Though not too far, or you’ll absorb them like suppositories and go ape shit. Here are the directions to the place.” He handed me a lined sheet of paper with writing.
    He said, “Don’t go keeping all the money for yourself. I know exactly what the buyer will pay. I know where you live, and I know your car. Have you ever been arrested?”
    “I’ve never been convicted.”
    “There you go. They can’t touch you. I’ll do you fifty-fifty, zero-zero for me, same for you.” He put his hand under my chin and moved it up so we were eye to eye. “I may not be big,” he said, “But I know guys who are. So are up for it?”
    I paused. Eh...it’d be writing experience. “Okay, I’ll do it.”
    He handed me four dime bags. I went into his bathroom and did the deed—it was work—and walked in a weeble wobble out to my car. Driving in Vegas can be impossible if you don’t know exactly where you’re going. Drivers honked at me, one called me a “fucking cock” and another asked, “What are you looking at, faggot?” but once I got out to the suburbs I was good to go.
    I found the house. A row of palm trees lined the front yard walkway. There was a second floor balcony, and under that a Cupid fountain. The columns of the porch, I’m pretty sure, were Corinthian. By the walkway up to the door sat two sculpted lions, taller than humans. Ready to attack.
    The guy who answered the door was built. Nothing bad in or of itself, but he was stiff necked, like he had military and LE training. He also had the direct diction of a police officer. Bad start.
    “Relax,” he told me. We made some small talk, more coppish linguistics, then he asked, “Where’s the powder, bro?” behind him was a huge blue fish tank. A Hammerhead swam by.
    He pulled out a roll of cash. I said, “If you show me to the bathroom I’ll get it for you.” He pointed to the bathroom. I opened the door and turned on the light and Bam! Someone grabbed me by the throat and shoved me up against the wall.
    “Sheriff’s Office! Keep your hands where I can see them!” he felt me down. “Nothing that’s going to cut me?!”
    “No sir.”
    He felt down my chest, yanked up my shirt, and saw the duct taped AA batteries. He ripped them off and said, “Don’t go giving other people that idea.”
    He hit me on the back of my head and screamed in my face. I felt the spit: “Where’s the powder! Where’s the powder! Where’s the powder!”
    I saw where this was going. It’s up my ass. If you give me a chance I’ll get it.”
    But there was no such doing. He ripped off my jeans and boxers, shoved his hand up a surgeon’s glove, stuck a baton up my ass and maneuvered it around a bit, then reached in and pulled out the four dime bags. “Ta Da,” he said.
    I saw the cop outside talking Latino over the phone: “Sure, but I need the meth purple, you got that? Mule it over here. Is it cooked and ready to go? Okay, here are the directions. Are you writing this down?...”
    I saw a cop herd four other unlucky mules—who had been held somewhere else in the house—out into the entry hall. All looked depressed, all were cuffed behind their backs. A cop said to us, “Okay boys, you’re off to jail.” The cop cuffed me, shuffled us all into a paddy wagon, and it took off. “This is bad,” one off the mules said. “We’re going upstairs on this one.”
    I was about to exclaim, on a positive note, that I would not snitch on my dealer. But then I remembered the cop who searched me took the sheet with the directions on it, so all the LE had to do was follow the directions in reverse.
    I waited all night in a holding cell with a herd of other bottom feeders, all waiting to see the judge at nine a.m. I felt so down and I wanted to sleep so badly, but other inmates used the benches to sit and talk. Come morning they called us out, one by one, to see the judge, who was on a monitor. And I saw myself on one of their monitors. I pled Guilty. “Custodial Sentence,” he said to me. “You will not go home. Ten days. Jeannie, will you get us all some coffee?” The stenographer got up and left. The judge banged his gavel with machine-grade boredom.
     A guard cuffed my wrists to my waist and walked me across the walkway over The Strip into County. He looked at me and said, “You’re a first timer, huh?”
    “In a big city jail, yeah. Why?”
    “How old are you?”
    “Twenty-three.”
    “In there, do what you have to do to survive, got it?”
    “Got it.”
    “What did I just say?”
    “Do what I have to do to survive.”
    They gave me an orange suit to wear. I had a single cell. Someone down the hall screamed like the devil shoved a red hot poker up his ass. The shrieks were incoherent, but accentuated with animalistic pain and agony. One of the inmates with Kool Ade lipstick told me, “They arrested a nigger crack dealer, and he swallowed his stash. They tried charcoal on him but it was already digested. He kept us up last night. He’s strapped into a chair in seclusion.
    He was dying, this was his final song and dance. I saw a guard walk up to the seclusion room and stomp his foot and clap his hands as if he was listening to music. That afternoon the crack dealer calmed down. They took him out on a stretcher, dead or almost dead. He looked about fifteen.
    Later, I saw someone had left their con suit in my room. I kicked it out into the hall. Around dinner time all the cons are pushing me to take a shower: “Come on, cuz, you’ll stink if you don’t shower.” You could see the forest fire in their eyes. That was my first day there. I stayed awake all night, digging my nails into my arm and biting my tongue to stay awake, expecting a blanket party. But it never came. I let myself sleep after breakfast.
    That afternoon I woke up to “Gimme all your whites!” I opened my eyes. It was the squirt meth dealer, from the motel, pushing a laundry bin. He said to me, “Hey, jackass, you act like your shit don’t stink. They’re going to be tossing suits and whites in your cell for a wash, and if you don’t do it, they’ll come down on you like the rent.” I was scared. I wish that I didn’t look so young, that I had grown a beard and shaved head.
    I approached the house guard. “Look. I’m not safe here. I want to go into PC.”
    He guffawed. “We all got to start being a man some time. Just kick ‘em in the balls.”
    So I tried a different angle. “I want to die. I have a long history of suicide attempts. Of real attempts, not just half assed attempts.”
    “Aw come on,” he said. “Look at all you got to live for. You don’t need PC. Just don’t rock the boat. This is a system. The best of all possible worlds. Don’t screw it up.” He sighed. “ Level with me: How hard is it to collect dirty laundry? Do you know what will happen to you, what we will allow to happen to you, if you cop out on laundry detail? There was some guy here bout a year ago. He decided to fight it out, and by the end of a few days, they had him brushing his teeth with Clorox.”
    “I’ll shank myself.”
    “Good luck. Don’t hurt anyone else.”
    Later in the day, I woke up to find a pile of smelly undershirts and underwear and suits on my floor. I kicked them out into the hall. All the cons on the cube began to bellow, “Do your share, bitch! Do our laundry! You’re on laundry detail!”
    The meth dealer approached me. “Dude,” he said, “Use your head. If you don’t do it, they’ll break you in. it’s not worth it. Soon all the queens will be, “Why does he get off, and we don’t?”
    I walked out my cell and saw the Latino inmates bouncing around the hall. I had an idea that I did not think would work. I looked at the house guard. He was watching. He saluted me and laughed. I walked up to the smallest of the inmates, they guy had tattooed tear drops, and was about five-foot-one. I threw a round house that landed on his right temple. He went down and I backed away like ten feet. The inmates helped him to his feet and began to close in on me.
    “What’s the matter?” I screamed. “Is he that much of a pussy that he needs you to protect him? So he can’t defend himself?” That stopped them.
    The short guy pulled out a shank from his left sleeve and began to walk towards me. “Please stab me to death!” I yelped. “Don’t pussy out on me now! I’d be dead rather than wash your bacon stripped underwear! Please, I can’t take it here, I beg you to stab me!”
    “Shank him, Angelino,” one of his buddies yelled, patting him on the shoulder.
    “Please kill me!”
    He walked up to me.
    “Get him A!” One of his cohorts yelled.
    I screamed and danced all around the house. “Angelino is a punk! He’s a jailgirl! He’s just standing there! What are you afraid of?!”
    Finally the guard acted. He made his presence known. He pulled a Taser and ordered a block lock. Everyone walked into their cells and the doors shut and locked. I had agitated him. “Get in your cell,” he yelled at me. “You don’t need no boxes for the move. The PC crew will be here in a few hours.” So I thought I had escaped gen pop.
    Not yet. I had to wait for the escorts. What scared me was that they ended lockdown and the inmates were free to wander again. They made a beeline to my cell, which was locked, and told me, “You see this broom handle here? We’re going to pop your cell.” I’m sure the house guard saw, but let it happen. They kept fiddling with the lock, shoving in the broom handle. They shouted, “We are going to fuck you and send you home in a body bag!” Time just slowed down. Like a tape player losing battery power. Seconds turned into minutes, minutes turned into hours. Praying would do no good. Day turned into night. “Where’s the fucking PC crew!” I screamed. The meth dealer walked by and shook his head. Finally two escorts came, handcuffed my wrists to my belt, and escorted me to PC, Protective Custody, Punk City.
    The cell was small, but it was like someone opened up a little sliver of heaven for me. I was safe, though there were minor drawbacks. It always smelled like shit, the toilets always stopped up, but the worst was at night. Whenever anyone flushed the toilets, it made a huge metallic roar, and woke the whole cube up. All day long the PC inmates would lie down on the floor, their feet to the door, and bang away against it all day, the act beautiful in its pointlessness and minimalism. I got ” too. It was like a primitive prayer.
Word got back that the guards who let the fifteen-year-old crack dealer die would not be in any type of trouble.
    After five days I was out. A life that includes short stints in jail was not for me. I found out from my court papers the address of the house that fucked me. I called Shelly. She picked me up and drove me to the house. I picked up my car and thought, “Covenant House! Covenant House! Covenant House! I don’t have much cash left!” So I checked up on them. It was made up of fifteen rooms with futons to roll out at night. There was a vending machine, but no real meals. If you wanted to use their laundry services you had to live there at least a week. If they catch you with tricks they expel you. Same with drugs. Daily church attendance was mandatory. And...I had read that the founder, Father Bruce Ritter, was A Number One against pornography. All pornography, according to him, Andrea Dworkin, Kitty Mackinnon, and Peter Bogdanovich, was rape. Hard-core, soft-core, gay, straight, Lesbian, water sports, B&D, S&M, Bukake, it was all evil.
    re a lousy lay. I can get me one of the strippers off The Strip. You are a cunt tease. Sorry kiddo, you can’t stay here. Can’t you run home to mommy and daddy?”
“Nope. Not with my job record.”
I drove across country with gas money from Shelly to Jackson, Tennes
    ee. I had been there in a loony bin, once:
    I drove across country with gas money from Shelly to Jackson, Tennessee. I had been there in a loony bin, once: Pathways. The city had a hell of a lot of churches, and they could put you up for the night on a sofa. Problem was, I found out that if they put you up for the night, they expected you to come in for services. Yawn. I hadn’t known that was the deal. Sometimes you could also go to them for gas money. The city wasn’t that big, it had a mall, two main streets, and a bus system. I worked with a counselor at Pathways to have my conviction nullified, cause once I got two more, it’s strike one, two, three, you’re outta here!
    I’d spend my time there at The Madison County Library. One day a patron approached me. My growling stomach annoyed the other readers. The patron looked mid-fifties, had a red beard that was tied in knots at its tip. He was really tan, and because he was bald on top, the exposed area of his scalp was tan too. He had horn rimmed glasses and spoke quietly but with a pent up rage, like a lion pacing its cage. He spoke in spondees, accenting every syllable. Much later, I came to see him as someone God granted a telescope to, but instead of pointing it to the stars and the planets, he turned it earthwards, and trained it on our planet, on us.
    ke praying to the Lord?”
“No, it’s a pain in the ass. But you got to put in an appearance if you want a place to sleep. It
    17;s one of the reasons I kept away from Covenant House in Vegas.”
“Sir, you must forgive my bluntness, but I preach in a church, and we teach a totally different approach t
    an the regular churches, one that I think you would appreciate. And we would be more than happy to welcome you to our fold. At least, I believe, you should give it a try.”
“Could you muster up gas money occasionally?”
“I’m sure we could muster up some gas mone
    . Be at 1305 Hollywood Street tonight at nine. We welcome
    you.”
“What type of religion is this? I don’t want to slit no goat’s throats.”
“You have
    to be there to take it all in. You’ll see when you get there. We’re called ‘Th
     Church of the Whistler,’ as in ‘Whistleblower.’ It’s in a church that caught fire about five years ago. We’ve held sermons there ever since. Oh, and bring a case of beer bottles, not cans. You okay with drinking?”
“You know it.”
At nine I showed up. The place reeked of charred wood. The fire had melted the colore
     glass into multicolored m
    At nine I showed up. The place reeked of charred wood. The fire had melted the colored glass into multicolored mush. Parts of the ceiling were caved in. Beams and girders had fallen across the violet pews. Rain and bad weather had desaturated and worn down the seats. Candles burned everywhere. I counted nine people there. All brought cases of beer bottles (I managed to collect from a church on Highland enough money for a case of Koch’s Beer. I said it was for food). A life-sized crucifix with a Jesus attached to it leaned on the wall behind the podium. Part of his head was gored out, his nose was gone, puncture marks covered his bony chest, shattered beer bottles littered the carpet around him.
    York introduced me all around. I cracked open a Kochs Beer, lounged on the pews with my legs spread, and the ceremony began. York walked up to the podium with a bottle of Coors, the candle light flickered in his face. I guess he spoke through a megaphone cause there was no electricity for a microphone. “Where to start. Hey Jesus. They say you healed the sick. My grandfather has abdominal cancer—yes, you’ve heard this before, I know—and he’s in tremendous pain, and he has to shout and pout to get pain meds. And you let it all happen. What a phony. You and your dad.” York cracked open his bottle of Coors, chugged it in one gulp, and like a baseball pitcher, wound up and hurled it at Christ. It exploded against the naked ribs, spraying glass everywhere. Applause rang. Cat calls. York took a seat.
    Amy walked up to the podium and picked up the megaphone. “Hey Jesus, we appear to have different priorities. You do not care that North Korea tortures the shit out of its citizens. It’s all over You Tube. They’re thrown in work camps and experimentation camps, like Camp 66. Children are stoned in front of their parents, and vice versa. JC, is this the way you treat your people?” she walked to the Christ, her boots squashing the broken glass like chimes, and hit Christ over the head with a full bottle of Miller Light. Then she sat down.
    No problem at all.” Reggie looked like a biker, with black l
    ather pants, a jean jacket, a baseball cap turned backwards, and he walked with a gut-first swagger. He grabbed the megaphone: “Oh Ye Holy Christ, why can I not keep a job? If you were a real savior, you would help me find employment.” He cleared his throat. The megaphone crackled.
“You are a whiney, slimy, phony piece of shit. ‘Oh Father,’ you blathered, ‘Forgive them
    “You are a whiney, slimy, phony piece of shit. ‘Oh Father,’ you blathered, ‘Forgive them. They know not what they do.’ Jesus, look at the reality shows. If someone is kicked off, or leaves, they go out with BANG!” he slammed the podium. “Here you, the son of God, go out like whimpey jackass. ‘Father why have you forsaken me!’ Puhlease.” He hit Christ across the face with a bottle of Boston Lager. Then he dropped the bottle and lost his temper and began to punch the ribs like a professional boxer, over and over, until he began to cry. He cracked a hole in its sternum. York had to walk up and calm him down and slowly escort him back to his seat.
    o me, “Hank! You’re up to bat!”
I walked up to the podium, a Kochs beer in one hand, and with the other I picked up the megaphone. “So Chr
    I walked up to the podium, a Kochs beer in one hand, and with the other I picked up the megaphone. “So Christ, those who practice iniquity get what they deserve, huh? In jail, I listened to a fifteen year old dealer die a slow, miserable, painful death, puking his guts out, while guards sat around and laughed. Later, during my stay there, word got to me no one would be in trouble for his death. He was a child. Just because he dealt crack, he did not deserve to die that death. Why, I ask you, did you let that happen? Here’s to you, Jesus. I chugged my bottle of Kochs until it was empty and bashed him with it in the crotch, denting it.
    family and me, Hank? You won’t have to pay for room and board. My wife can fix you up a good meal, and we have a computer room you can sleep in. We got sleeping bags.”
“That’d be great York. I’d really appreciate it.”
“We have a box of Playboys dated
    “That’d be great York. I’d really appreciate it.”
“We have a box of Playboys dated from 69 to 7
    . In 71 they went below the pubic line. Anyways, it’s the way we pray. You’re okay with that?”
    “Sure.”
    “The women have Playgirl.” He put his hand on my shoulder and said, “And finally, all this is on one condition. You come to our church twice a week.”
    “No problem. No problem at all.”

Copyright of written pieces remain with the author, who has allowed it to be shown through Scars Publications and Design.Web site © Scars Publications and Design. All rights reserved. No material may be reprinted without express permission from the author.

Problems with this page? Then deal with it...