---

 

This writing was accepted for publication in the 96 page perfect-bound ISSN# / ISBN# issue/book... “Treading Water” Down in the Dirt (v127) (the Jan./Feb. 2015 Issue) You can also order this 6"x9" issue as a paperback book:

Order this writing in the book Adrift (issues edition) the Down in the Dirt Jan. - June 2015 collection book		get the 318 page Jan. - June 2015 Down in the Dirt magazine issue collection 6" x 9" ISBN# paperback book:

Order this writing in the book Adrift (issues / chapbooks edition) - the Down in the Dirt Jan. - June 2015 collection book		get the 378 page Jan. - June 2015 Down in the Dirt magazine issue collection 6" x 9" ISBN# paperback book:

Order this writing in the book Sunlight in the Sanctuary (the 2015 poetry, flash fiction, prose & artwork anthology)		get this poem collection 6" x 9" ISBN# paperback book:

Right on Cue

Mike Brennan

    Like many 16 year olds, Billy hated school, and he constantly compared Kennedy High School to the concentration camps of the Holocaust, although he knew it was wrong to do so. He was fine with going to class, and almost always got straight A’s, but despised the other students who knew him since Kindergarten and tormented him daily. When he read Kerouac at lunch, a popular guy would slap him over the head with the book, and call him a “fag.” When he blushed while talking to a pretty girl, he would soon hear her snickering about it with her friends and calling him an “ugly retard,” and make fun of his acne. When he was forced to play volleyball in gym, another jock type pulled his shorts down while he reached upwards for the ball, and everyone including the coach laughed at him and absolutely nothing was done about anything. That’s how it went every single day. It was like his peers figured out new methods of torture especially for him, rather than doing their algebra equations every night; all in preparation for the next day- well, almost every day.
    Life at home wasn’t any easier. Both his parents were alcoholics and lived off Social Security and his father’s VA Disability checks in a three bedroom apartment about two miles farther than where the other kids lived, while the rest of his class lived in white picket fenced suburban palaces, most likely with two cars, siblings and a dog in the yard. He was also probably the only student in his 11th grade class who didn’t own a car. He only owned three pairs of jeans, four t-shirts, and two sweaters, which he had been rotating continuously for the past three years. Despite his impressive GPA, unless he got a substantial scholarship, college seemed far out of the picture. Unless he got a decent job, he couldn’t even afford the application fees. And how would he get a decent job without driving, and his two parents were always too drunk by noon to drop him off. At least the bus took him to school, just like the trains took the Jews off to Auschwitz he’d imagine. There didn’t seem to be a way out of this hole and the future looked bleaker and darker the older he got. I will never fit in anywhere, ran through his head as a constant mantra. He figured he might just join the Army when he graduated. That seemed like the only way out of all of this nothingness.
    Like many a troubled kid, Billy was intrigued by Columbine and other mass shootings, although he knew in his heart he would or could never do it. Despite the fact that his Vietnam Vet father had once been an avid hunter, before becoming a full time lush, and had enough guns and ammo in his possession to pull it off, he knew he never could. He respected art and beauty and even life at times too much to become a murderer. As his dad would say, he was just too sensitive and lost in his own thick skull.
    Suicide often crossed his mind, but he figured what solution would that be if nobody would miss him; and what if there really was a hell like Dante wrote about specifically for suicides? He was scared of the Inferno but life often seemed so much worse. His only hobbies were reading, writing short stories, and watching old movies. The kind the kids at school had never heard of. He was an obvious virgin and desperately wanted old Hollywood romance, but had never even masturbated. He wanted love from Lauren Bacall or Lana Turner, not the cheerleaders who called him a mongoloid in the hallways between classes.
    One afternoon, during the middle of the school year, he saw a flyer for auditions for a play adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Although, he never acted before, Billy decided to sign up since it was one of his favorite novels, and he would love to do it since he knew the book back and front, even though he probably wouldn’t land one of the leading roles, he’d give it his best shot and signed up on the flyer for an audition after school in two days. It raised his spirits considerably to be doing something different for a change.
    He originally read for Gatsby, giving the Drama teacher his most pompous “Old Sport,” but also read for Nick Caraway, as he also longed to recite the novels’ famous, and in his own opinion, one of the very best, closing lines in English Literature. The Drama teacher was noticeably impressed, especially because Billy already knew pretty much all the lines, but when the cast list was posted the following week, to his utter dismay, he saw he was cast as George Wilson.
    Figures, he thought, I get to be the dumb mechanic, while the two of the most popular kids get Gatsby and Nick. The kid, who landed Gatsby’s role, Scott Matheson, was one of his constant tormentors to add insult to injury. He was of the football set, so why the hell would he want to be in a school play? Oh well, at least I get to shoot the bastard at the end, he muttered to no one but himself.
    When he went home that night, he told his parents who were already deep into their daily supply of whiskey and wine. While they were continuously drunk, they were never the violent argumentative types. They were much more likely to just pass out in strange places and say stupid things than engage in any kind of abuse or real interest in anything but liquor.
    It was the seizures that scared him. Once when his Mom said she was quitting drinking for a week, she threw a raging Grand Mal right in front of Billy, scarring her face on the kitchen sink in her fall, mere minutes after he came home from school. He heard the crash and called 911 since his Dad was already passed out and couldn’t be roused, while Mom flopped around the linoleum like a dying fish gasping for air. That was how he learned if they quit drinking they could die, so he just took it all in stride after that first scare.
    Billy asked them, as they watched television, “I am going to be in a school play, The Great Gatsby, in a month. Do you want to go?”
     “Sure bud,” his dad replied, then took a swig from his iced glass of Kessler’s.
    “Sounds great Son,” his mom said, “We’ll go. Won’t we?”
    His father nodded, and took another swig and although Billy was less than infatuated with the role of George Wilson, he beamed with pride.
    “Thanks guys. I got to go study. I’ll see you at dinner.”
    “Go hit those books Tiger,” his dad slurred, thinking of baseball yet again. “Good going Kiddo.”
    He went and did his homework as Kurt Cobain howled in the background. Finally, maybe, he had found some footing in this world.

     When rehearsals began, the daily abuse of Billy increased three fold. The first day someone smeared dog shit on his locker. Three days later, Scott and a group of his buddies drove past him in a Range Rover as he was standing at the bus-stop, and hit him in the back with an aluminum baseball bat. He recognized him and the rest of the crew from their letterman jackets, but didn’t say anything to anyone. The following week, while showering after swimming in Gym, a towel was thrown over his head and he was attacked by several unknown laughing shadow figures and left on the tile floor whimpering in agony like a puppy. He now was starting to ponder other plans.
    The rehearsals continued, and were becoming increasingly nothing to Billy. George Wilson had so few lines he had them down the first day. He just kept going, despite his boredom, because he wanted to feel what it was like to be on stage. That and to kill Scott while he was floating in his luxurious swimming pool.
    The dress rehearsals went off without a hitch and before he knew it, it was opening night. Most of the school was forced to attend by their English and Drama teachers so the gymnasium, usually reserved for pep-rallies, was packed. He was sure Scott’s popularity also added to the enthusiasm. Like they had said, both Billy’s parents came, although they took a taxi to avoid catching any more DUI’s.
    The play was only an hour and a half long, and Billy only appeared sporadically, stumbling over his lines as stupidly imperfect as his character seemed to entail. Finally, there came the finale, the moment Billy had patiently been waiting for. Scott was wearing swimming trunks and sunglasses, lying on a floating mattress over a blue tarp meant to symbolize a swimming pool. Billy came out of the shadows of Stage Left, wearing greasy overalls and a purposefully unkempt head of hair. He fingered his father’s old .45 service pistol he had taken from his closet that very morning, which was now concealed in his overall’s bib. The cap-gun the drama department supplied him with just sat uselessly in his right hip pocket. He wasn’t going to kill Scott. He was just going to scare him the shit out of him.
    On cue, Billy pulled out his father’s pistol and shot twice at the tarp and into the ground but deliberately missing the football player’s body. Scott jumped upwards, obviously terrified, while the rest of the crowd started questioning each other whether those were real gunshots. Billy knew his father would know what they were instantly, and most likely recognized the pistol if he hadn’t imbibed too much liquor before his only son’s stage premiere.
    Just as in the story, Billy raised the handgun to his own head, right by the plastic bushes where the “gardener” and Nick would find him. Smiling a simultaneously extraordinary and serene smile, a smile he’d never shown the world before, pulled the trigger without the slightest hesitation. The splatter on the stage showed everyone witnessing that this was indeed a literal suicide not just another act overblown for the stage.

    First the Principal and Vice-Principal, and the very same coaches that laughed at and ignored him rushed the stage, shortly followed by the staggering and blubbering of his parents. Billy had blown a hole clear between his eyes, a third eye which still stared onwards- between the two baby blues long broken and begotten; but it was the smile...with a small amount of blood smearing the left side of his lips, like Judy Garland’s lipstick, that firmly held it’s mark. While it was obviously noted that he was no longer breathing. Billy was far, far away...but still silently dreaming- just like a boat borne ceaselessly back out of his almost predetermined to be poor, loveless and lonely past.

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...