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þÿAim for the Medulla

Joshua Copeland

    I was in high school. Party over Jimmy’s. Saturday night. He pushed a projector into the room. “Look what I got on super 8. Transferred from 35 mm. People all over the web are looking for this. And they’ll never find it. The police confiscated this film back when it happened, in 72. They didn’t use video for news back then, for this particular show, they used actual film.”
    He hooked up the reel, turned off the lights, turned on the projector. First a lot of red scribbles on white leader zipped by, then logo for “The hottest News show in Florida” sizzled on, superimposed over yellow beaches and a lazy sea. An anchor woman in her late twenties flashed on the screen and introduced herself as Christine Chubbuck. She V’d her mouth and eyes into an evil grin, and said, in leering fashion, “Now, in accordance with KCAT News bringing you the best in BLOOD AND GORE, here is a fascinating story: attempted suicide.” She reached behind her, pulled out a revolver, put it to the back of her head, and pulled the trigger. Her mouth locked open and blood poured out, hosing onto the desk.
     The crew ran over to her, one guy said, “She did it, she actually did it!” People slashed their necks at the camera, yelling “Cut!” The newscast ended. Cut to a black and white movie.
    Jimmy shut off the projector and turned on the lights. “You can’t tell anyone about this. I’m not supposed to have it. A lot of people could get in a lot of trouble. She was all depressed that she had never been laid. She was a spinster. A few days before, she had gone to some cop, saying she was doing a story on suicide, and she asked him what’s the most surefire way to do it. He said a gun to the head, but not the mouth, or under the chin, but the medulla, in the back of head, where all the basic brain functions go on.”
    I was treated to the surrealistic sight of someone else in my studio apartment. He pointed to my radiator and asked if it was working. “Josh, it’s going to be getting cold at nights in a few months.”
    I nodded and nodded, “I know, I’m fine,” shaking my head Yes, anxious he was seeing the true me—my dirty apartment. He looked haggard and dim of eye; he wore dusty work shoes, jeans with a hole in one knee, and a brown shirt with the seventies’ foreshortened collar. His face looked eroded by years of work, by years of asking the same questions, of fiddling with the same gadgets using the same tools. Thus he lived without a college education.
    For a moment he stood there, taking in the apartment, the bowls of dried macaroni with fuzzy, animal fur-green mold on top, the empty bottles of wine, the bottle of Koch’s Beer in shattered pieces all over the bathroom floor, the dried pitter patter of my blood from trying to step over it all, the bath and toilet covered with grime like gangrene, the twenty or thirty light blue boxes of empty Nytol, the steak knife in the wall (Since I have nothing to do all day I practice knife tossing), the yellow stains of burst and sprinkled semen around my laptop and my TV stand and 12 inch TV, no sheet to cover the black puke stains on the mattress, and last but not least, the huge hole I kicked in the wall a few weeks ago.
    The man told me if I needed help, just knock on his door.
    I said, “Okay.” I just wanted him out. He left.
    I’m surprised he didn’t mention the hole in the wall. All day I ruminate, all Goddamn day...It’s like there’s a whirlpool of filthy milk above me, following me where ever I go, twisting like a tornado, draining into my head: I had agonized over and over about an incident on Jack’s on 18<sont size=-2>th, a bar in Pittsburgh. Steve Sheldon had agitated me, but like in a passive aggressive way, he and his smarmy smirk. The incident with Steve was two years ago. So why does my brain suffocate about it now and hug it to death? Don’t ask me. But it got so bad in here I kicked in the wall and gashed myself with the steak knife over and over on my left arm. Jesus Christ dude, calm down, that was two years ago.
    I tried to lay down in bed, but I was still vibrating from the encounter with the repairman. I got up and began to walk back and forth, back and forth, mumbling to myself but unaware of what I said. I looked at my crusty boxers by the TV. I could not jerk off with just my hands, it didn’t feel right, for some reason I don’t like touching myself directly down there. But if I pulled off my boxers, I could use them as a kind of grip, and I can rub my dick that way, without having to touch it directly, and pull off an orgasm. I turned the TV to a Skinamax flick, spermed to it, so now my boxers were wet (Some splattered on the boxers, some splattered on the TV stand and thinly carpeted floor; millions of dead potential families, a whole glossy, slimy holocaust).
    But what am I going to do with a girl? Ask for a hand job done with boxer underwear? No wonder I’m a virgin. I got to practice doing it with my own hand. And If I get anxious when the repairman enters my room, what am I going to do when I bring a real girl home? There’ll be a lot of performance anxiety—the thought of sticking my dick in some girl does not arouse me at all. I put on the boxers I used to jerk off; I got a kick off wearing the splotched boxers.
    I hate it in here. I swear to you, sometimes it feels like I’m a fish in an aquarium, like I’m surrounded by half visible faces in the dark, revolving around me, studying me as I swim back and forth. Go to sleep at eight a.m., wake at two p.m., and watch that trapezoid of sun from the window crawl across the floor. I looked at the scars on my arm. How could I have been that crazy to do something like that?
    I needed an excuse to get out of the apartment. Been in here all day bouncing off the walls. Looked at my watch: an hour till midnight. The grooming began. I showered, brushed my teeth with Close Up toothpaste, flossed, gargled with Listerine, rubbed in Sasson hair gel, threw on my black Levi Dockers, my four hundred dollar Las Marine loafers, splashed on some Christian Dior cologne, put on a long button down Gap shirt, strapped on my BW (Back Waistband) check holster, grabbed my Jericho 941, and holstered it. The problem with the piece and the holster is that the holster tends to slip down.
    I had the Goddamn shirt and pants tailored, for fuck’s sake. I went to a tailor from India and brought along my piece and we worked on devising my button down shirts so the gun didn’t leave a print. And he tightened my pants around the waist so the waistband would hold up the holster. Yet the holster still slips. I grabbed the piece, unlocked all three safeties, racked the slide, holstered it, and loosened the back of my shirt. I headed out the apartment, past the safety door, and with the momentum of the steps I was out the front door.
    I bought the Jericho back in Pittsburgh. Illegally. A hardware store on the North Side sold firearms. I asked the clerk what I needed to buy one. He said he had to see my driver’s license and I had to sign a paper saying I had never been arrested or committed to a mental hospital.
    He makes a phone call—to whom I don’t know—gives “Them” my name, they run it, and if my name comes up clean, the gun’s name. Then it’s mine. I thought, That’s impossible. I had Googled “Pennsylvania gun permits,” and the sites that came up said there’s much more to it than just a phone call and driver’s license. Oh well...
    I lied on the paper I signed. It asked if I had ever been committed to mental hospitals. I had been committed to adolescent units numerous times, up until my eighteenth birthday. So I waited as he made the call. After about twenty minutes he hung up and said, “You got a record brother. You lied to me. That’s a felony.”
    “I’m sorry, sir I’m moving into a barrio right outside of Oklahoma City. It’s a bad area. I hoped I could get something for self-defense. You won’t have me arrested?”
    He studied me, wincing, putting himself in my place. “No, I ain’t gonna do that. It’s the Goddamn gun laws. They step on all our rights. I could give you a pellet pistol. Looks like a real pistol.”
    “No thanks, I’ll just buy a butterfly knife and some tear gas.” I turned around to leave.
    “Sir, sir, wait, wait up.” I walked back.
    “It’s sad. The government is all over our gun rights. Without militias there’d be no one to protect us from the ATF, FBI, CIA, DEA, NSA, all them three letter law enforcement agencies.” He stared at me a bit, then he spoke softly. “I tell you what. Fuck the paperwork. If you add a couple hundred, I’ll sell you the gun. Fuck them.”
    “Yeah, fuck them,” I said—though I didn’t know much about the debate on gun rights, and I had never handled a gun in my life.
    I had to pay him in cash, so I had to go to a bank, take out the cash, go back to the store, and in five minutes I walked out with a back waist holster and a Jericho 941.
    I got back home and joined the Google group alt.firearms and I posted that I lived in Pittsburgh and I had bought a Jericho 941 and I wanted to know how to use it. It was like when Malcom X visited Egypt as a Muslim. The group gave me a super friendly reception. I was part of this new group, lots of gun owners all over Pittsburgh offering firearms education services to me.
    I drove up to a former Judge’s house in Sewickly. He helped me register with the NRA. He taught me how to take the gun apart, clean it, how to grip the handle, how to stand when I fire it—the Weaver stance or the Isosceles stance. I asked why the characters in the movie Menace II Society fired with one hand, the gun angled to the side. “Cause they’re ignorant darkies,” he replied. A couple of months later I moved here.
    As I walked out the door of my apartment building a dude rode by on a bicycle. Faceless, his hood was on. He wore a backpack. See, that’s the shit you got to watch out for. Tonight was Sunday night. A lot of muggings and break in’s occurred Sunday night. The punks assumed everyone would be in early and asleep sooner than usual. He rode by and didn’t stop, so I was okay; or at least I assumed as much.
    The night air somewhat revitalized me, but I still felt that whirlpool of milky filth above me, draining into my head. The moon glowed orange, an exclamatory circle on a matte of smoggy black. Apartment buildings crowded the street I lived on. Most lights were off, little dark rectangles. People with jobs, people with lives, people with other people to fall asleep next to. A stray walked out an alley. He was chewing something white. I called to it and it walked away, looking anxious, absorbed into the dark. I felt the coldness of my holster and wet spots of sperm as I walked up the street towards Olmos Ave. The audience screamed, “RASKOLNIKOV HAD IT BETTER!”
    That’s where I’ll go, I thought. To the vending machine on Wightman. I’ll buy a soda. You see, all of you behind those little dark rectangles, I do have a life, or at least a semblance of one. I walked up the street feeling okay, cutting a swath through the night air, leaving it in eddies behind me. One time on an Ocean City boardwalk I visited a shifty Armenian swami for a palm read. She grabbed my hand, ran her forefinger around it, and said, “I see...a bullet.”
    “That’s all? I asked. “Nothing about growing up, a job, kids, a wife?”
    “No sir, I just work here and report what I imagine. A bullet. But it doesn’t matter. Your life line says you are already dead.”
    As I walked, I looked around. Where was my unseen audience? Where were the private dicks, (“dick” being the operative word), my parents hired to surveil me to death when I moved into the barrio? My folks are the stereotypical, overprotective, splashing-in-piles-of-gold-coins parents. Worried and clinging. They didn’t want me moving here, but I thought, Hey, it’s a dangerous neighborhood, there’ll be lots of excitement.
    I did not need people watching out for me. I was the reluctant protectee.
    I imagined trench coated shadows in every alley I passed, only the orange dot of a lit cigarette to indicate their presence. Red veined eyes in the black...actually they mostly worked in cars, on foot surveillance only done in the Pelez Mall and the business district at daytime.
    You’d think they’d want to stay unnoticed; it’s funny, I remember one night, in the back lot of my building, a PI stayed out there all night in his car. When I went to bed at nine a.m. he was still sitting there. But it got to the point of conspicuous surveillance. That’s what they call it when they want to be noticed. You could see the orange incandescence of his cigarette, and he most likely with some type of hi tech microphone pointed at my room. I should complain to the landlord about such bullshit. If they’re parked back there, they needed his permission. That fucker of a landlord. My folks probably cried to him I didn’t know how to take care of myself.
    And you could spot them a mile away. They would drive with one headlight off—you can attach a remote control device to the light, so you can turn it off and on from behind the wheel—so when they pass you a second time, both headlights are on, and you say to yourself, “Oh, no one’s following me. This car has both headlights on.” Dunce cap idiocy all the way. The one good thing about them, the only good thing, is that their presence may ward off any potential crime against yours truly.
    If the Average Joe witnesses something illegal he is not obligated to inform the police. However, if PI’s witnesses something illegal, the ethics of their trade require them to inform the police. But I don’t know, maybe loyalty to my folks, the PI’s don’t want me to end up incarcerated, so if I do something illegal, and they witness it, they bolt, they leave the area, so they can say they weren’t there to see it. One time, while I was buying C at the dealer’s front door, a car with one headlight off stopped about half a block away from us, watched, and when I jiggled the dime bag of coke in front of him, the car U turned and screeched off.
    Or all the times I adjusted my piece in public. As soon as they see that, poof! They walk or drive away. They used to scatter when I used my fake ID to buy beer or wine. So apparently a PI contacted all five bars in this area, along with Ricardo’s Supermarket, and told them not to sell to me, that I was underage. None of them let me buy alcohol now. So I just accost a passerby and ask them to go into a bar or Ricardo’s and buy me a six pack of beer or a bottle of wine.
    On foot surveillance is harder for them If the T (Target) talks with the PI or associates with him in any way. This “burns” the PI (And another takes their place). If they see you begin to walk towards them like you want to talk with them, they’ll take flight.
    And then, like God decided to play a practical joke on me, I passed a hooker on the corner of Ortese and Aloca. Her tight black leather miniskirt squeezed out folds of flesh, John Waters style, and, in the spirit of Britain, a row of multi directional teeth sprouted from her black gums. Her hair, obviously dyed a stale yellow, sat in a curled, crooked bun atop her head. And she wore a lot of pale jewelry, too much. This called for a misogynistic entry in my diary; she looked like a billboard for a warped fucking and sucking machine.
    “Suck your dick, sir. Twenty five dollars. Mean blowjob. “
    “No thanks, ma’am,” I said, stressing, “Ma’am,” leaning into her and keeping eye contact enough to let my contempt sink in. If she was effected, she was too stone faced to show it. She’ll make her take for the night. I left and she went back to standing there.
    I made a left down Luiz and approached two Latinos and one Rastafarian sitting on a door step. As I got closer I saw they passed around a pipe, and I smelled pot. Above them a streetlight flickered, giving their movements a disjointed look. The two Latinos, one tall and lanky like Jimmy Stuart, the other short and pudgy, both wore neon orange garbage pickup suits. They reminded me of Loki. The Rastafarian wore a loose Hawaiian shirt and ridiculously large and leggy blue jeans...and a lot of gold that winked in the streetlight. All looked in their early forties—two decades older than me. The mood I’d got was that they’d been sitting there forever, from sunup to sundown, that spiders had drawn webs between their bodies and the steps, and that in a year or two they’d become gargoyles, a permanent projection of the stairs they now sat on, made of the same stone; it would grow into them like ivy.
    They smiled and whispered about me, looking at me during their dialogue, not at each other. I looked down, purposely losing eye contact. A radio sat next to them and played something Hispanic. They stopped talking and gawked and...reeled into the past. A car with one headlight off drove by me in the opposite direction. There we go, I thought. I was wondering where you were.
    “Hey sir, do you want a hit,” the smaller, chubbier Latino asked. He had the air of Santa Clause. Pot veined his eyes. They all laughed.
    “No thanks. I’ve done some C tonight already,” I shook my head.
    “How about taking a seat for a bit and talking with us,” he asked. I sat.
    “Yeah, just for a bit,” the taller Latino said. “Where are you going this time of night dressed in shoes like that? Man, if my son was here, those shoes would be gone.” Then he laughed. “Do you know what I’m saying?”
    “That’s okay. I carry,” which made it especially hard to sit, even with the holster.
    “That ain’t gonna help you,” the Rastafarian said. “Not if they get the drop on ya.”
    “Yeah, well I’m pretty fast at pulling it out. I practice in my apartment.”
    They all laughed.
    “Sir, where do you work?” the shorter Latino asked.
    “I don’t,” I said.
    “You don’t?” the taller Latino asked. “Shit, we have to be at work in half an hour,” and he looked at his smaller cohort. “It’s a hard job, do you know what I’m saying. We got to go into Wellington. At this time of night, every night. Our driver, he carries a gatt under his seat. We got to doze those two tonners in the back of May’s. I’ve had two hernia operations. Even though I wear a lifting belt and all. It’s a hard job.”
    “You live alone?” The Rastafarian asked, “Or you got an old lady?”
    “No, no girlfriend, but I just passed a hooker on the corner of Ortese and Aloca.”
    “That’s Lucy,’ Jimmy Stuart said, after a long huff off the pipe and a few stifled coughs. “Don’t date her. She’s bad,” He shook his head. “Do you know what I’m saying? “
    “Yeah, of course, I’d never do anything like that.”
    “It’s her cha cha. She got the plague, mon,” the Rasta said.
    “She also has teeth growing out of her gums in opposing directions,” I offered. They all laughed.
    “Are you a student?” the shorter one asked, grinning like a jackal. “You’re a student. You gotta be.”
    “No, but I will be in the fall. Until then, I get to watch a lot of TV and sleep in. That’s about the extent of my day. “
    “Shit,” Jimmy Stuart said, looking at his pals, “If that was me I’d go loco. How do you pay your rent?”
    “My parents.”
    “Damn mon, the Rosta said, “I wish my parents paid my rent.”
    “Then you wouldn’t be in and out of County,” the taller Latino said, and they all chuckled.
    “You better get out of here,” the Rosta said to me. “You’re too up-the-ladder for us, do you know what I’m saying?”
    “Yes. I know what you’re saying, and I whole heartedly agree. Later, guys.” I stood up and walked, and I could hear the silence and feel their eyes bore into my back. In fact, I was getting used to eyes boring into my back.
    The funny thing is, you can spot the PI cars even when both headlights are on. The light that the remote control is attached to will always be a lot dimmer than the other headlight. I guess that the remote control causes resistance in the light.
    Sentences spoken today: eleven. That’s got to be a record for this month. That’s not counting the PI’s I curse out. They’re losers, they have no life. That’s why their job is sucking you like a leech. It makes up for weak externals. They were lonely, and their lives were made up of one thing, and one thing only: themselves. They needed someone to rotate around, they needed to whizz and buzz around the firelight...Or maybe this was all sour grapes on my part.
    As I walked I saw someone coming in the opposite direction. Déjà vu, where do I know him from...The Luna Bar! He was the Armenian bartender. Thanks for trying to cut off my alcohol, jackass. Do you know I still get beer off your bar? I just pay people to go in and get it for me. He kept his head down as he passed.
    I made a right up Wightman and finally, the gold at the end of the rainbow, the vending machine that stood lonely vigil outside Ricardo’s supermarket, which was closed. I fumbled in my pocket for the necessary eighty-five cents, slid each coin through the slot, each time heard the tinkering of coin against metal, and pressed Diet Pepsi.
    Nothing, soundless, no mechanical kathunk! of my purchase. “Don’t do this,” I pleaded. “I don’t have any more change with me.” I pressed it harder, eight or nine times. Still nothing. Shit...I pressed Change Return. Silence. I pressed it again, I banged it again and again, and it kept my money. I was robbed. There the machine and I stood, facing each other, both solitary and upright. A dog barked. A bus grunted to a start in the distance. A car drove by.
    A twenty minute trek with a pile of dog shit at the finish line (My wallet had a credit card, but no cash). I stood and stared, pathways of action branching out before me. I can bang and bang the Diet Pepsi button. I could repeatedly bang Chang Return. I could kick the machine over and over. Or I could leave and return home empty handed and come back with change. Or I could go home and not return. How about this: Try a different a soda. So I pressed the button for each soda. The machine did not deliver.
    “Leave me alone. I will not condescend to give it to you.” The machine said.
    “Oh yes you will. What the fuck kind of anticlimax is this? A let down of tragic proportions. I did not walk all this way to be the denouement of some half-witted gadgetry. You will displace to me my Diet Pepsi.”
    “Why should I? What have you done to deserve it? You aren’t in the least bit up to being a member of our club. How should I say it, you’re not up to par. You reside in the valleys of the graph. We’ll invent your own personal segregation. From here on out, like in the South, you’ll have your own water fountain, you’ll eat in a cordoned off area of the restaurants, you’ll sit at the back of the bus. All this you are worthy of. Comprende? Now please go home.”
    “It’s not my fault,’ I said. “I’m not required to be around people every day. You’d be stressed about being in public during the day if you lived my life.”
    “Hmmm, that’s interesting. I have the latest DSMV here, allow me to page through it...ah...no...that’s not it...yes...no way...close, but no cigar...THERE! Agoraphobia. You’re an agoraphobic. Now, my opinion of you is lowered even further. You are flattened gum on the bottom of someone’s shoe. Scoot on home now. What a tool.”
    “So how do I fix myself?”
    “Don’t worry about that. You are best left to staying up all night. Your brain, bathed in its stew of psychotic chemistry, knows this. Why doesn’t it let you sleep at night? So you sleep through half the day. You don’t deserve sunlight, except in the way it shapes itself on your carpet, a crawling trapezoid of light. I can thrust my head high. I’m good at what I do. What do you do? You overdose big time on Nytol, you overdose on way-to-diluted cocaine, you drink cheap, cheap wine, you ignore the shattered beer bottle all over your bathroom floor, you mope, you moan, you whisper sentences you’re not aware of. I deserve to be touched circa one hundred twenty times a day. When was the last time you were touched?”
    “About six hours ago. By myself. But—”
    Sir, sir, that’s a negative. When you automanipulate, you do not fondle your genitals directly, you do it through your underwear. So no, you are not touching yourself.”
    “But I don’t need touch. I can get along fine without it.”
    “The heck you do. Every night you wake up feeling you are dead. You’re a corpse with a pulse. What do you do most? You haunt. Just like the private investigators. You haunt. You died eons ago and now you do not belong here. You’re a ghost of a boy, you and your Jericho 941. You walk through walls, you glow in the dark, you howl into the wind. You haunt. You’ll never be happy on terra firma. Did you hear the one about the square peg and round hole? No one touches you because you cannot be touched, you’re the afterlife, an untouchable, in more ways than one. For the tenth time, go and leave us. We want less of the ethereal and more of the essential. You stress me, you wear my gosh darn nerves down to splinters.
    “Please please PLEASE gimme my Diet Pepsi. If you do, I’ll leave you alone.”
    “You know what? I’ll do it. If you leave. And I’ll give you a warning. A couple of nights ago I was watching some super 8 film. It showed your tombstone, Red tulips, yellow daisies, purple orchids, all raining on your grave, all in slow motion, until it was buried...You are a pathetic specimen. Here:”
    Like a staged magic routine, it gave. I reached down for the can. Silver dreams, I possessed my Diet Pepsi, gloriously cold in my grasped palm. I felt like I was in a commercial. All I needed to do was open the can, letting loose a gush of air, and raise it to my mouth and drink it to some hip music. Words would pop on the screen, and a narrator would speak them, “Diet Pepsi: Worth the trip.” I chugged it all in a few gulps, crumpled the can, tossed it into the street, felt a minor Diet Pepsi high, and began the walk home. I checked my watch: 11:52. Network One puts on a bikini contest at midnight, if I jogged, I could make it back in time. I made sure my pistol was packed tight in the holster. As I jogged, I passed small, Hansel and Gretal type houses. Most had some type of religious sculpture, a porcelain Christ or Mary, or some such shit.
    I came upon a crowd of about eight people ringed around some guy with a bloody shirt, sitting on the curb. I heard someone say he was stabbed. A bystander took off his own shirt and pressed it to the victim’s wound. The victim said, “Thank you so much. Brother, I’m scared.”
    The bystander said, “Chill out. We’re here to help you.” Another spectator took the victim’s pulse. Finally one, than a second, then a third cop car showed up, followed by an ambulance. The paramedics scissored off the victim’s shirt. All the sirens screened a dazzling and brilliant display of fireworks on the surrounding houses. It looked like UFO’s had landed. And I was camouflaged into the crowd. It was a thrill, I could feel the holster and wet splotches of sperm through my boxers.
    So one cop, I think he was the LT, began questioning us in a heavy Tex-Mex accent. “Did you see what happened?” He would ask.
    The spectator would respond, “Yes sir.”
    “Okay, stay here.” Then on to the next person. They all said Yes. He told all of them to hang tight.
    Then he got to me: “Sir, did you see what happened?”
    “No sir.”
    “THEN GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE! WE’LL TAKE YOU TO FUCKING JAIL!”
    As I walked away the LT yelled at lower ranking lady cop, what he was bitching about I didn’t quite understand, but he cussed her out: “You fucking sit on him! Don’t let him lawyer up on you! YOU SIT ON HIM!”
    She replied, “Okay sir!” She was flustered but trying to act irritated.
    I walked past the dope smokers on the steps, their radio played “Miss American Pie,” bringing bad memories to the fore. When I was sixteen, my friend Bret’s parents bought him a Mercedes. It’s hard to go slow in those cars. He didn’t stop for Stop signs. We crashed into a tree doing fifty. I was not wearing a seat belt. It took paramedics forever to extricate us, and it seemed that song played the entire extrication.
    Back to my apartment, to the oneness I detest so much. I’m starting to babble to myself in public. Got to quit that. Won’t get me campus chicks. Like I had a chance of keeping one anyways, with all my sexual misdemeanors and pathologies. Nose picking like Sylvia Plath did. Still, I’ll be around people, I’ll be a student in a jostle of students, one bobbing head sloshing around in a sea of bobbing heads. Maybe then I’ll average more than seven sentences a day. As for now, a city vacant of people and crowds, where the newspapers blow like tumbleweeds, where you can hear a penny drop...That’s my life. Man I hope I get a girlfriend once classes begin. I walked on the side opposite the street of the girl with the metropolis of slanted teeth. A car cruised by ominously, the same car I spotted before, only both headlights were on now. I flipped it the bird.
    I walked down the street, got to my building, walked in, stuck my key into the security door, and felt chilly metal on the back of my head. “Don’t turn around, G. Don’t fucking look at me. You yell and I’ll blow your fucking head off.’ Fuck! It was the dude I passed before when I left the apartment, the one with the backpack on the bike. He saw which apartment building I left, and probably hid in an alley and caught me as I walked in. The one time I needed the PI’s, they’re not there.
    We moved through the security door. “Don’t turn around and look at me. Open your fucking door.” He walked me into the apartment. My piece, my piece... all I needed is one chance, a split second. He kept calling me bitch.
    “You’re apartment’s a fucking wreck, bitch. Are you a student?”
    “Not until the fall. Look, you’re making me nervous, I got to piss, do you mind if I go to the bathroom?”
    “No, bitch, I got my eye on you. Take off your shoes.” He told me to sit down on the bed. I did. He put my shoes in his backpack, along with a few fistfuls of CDs. I could barely see him through the hood, he sounded like a Latino teenager. “Gimme your wallet,” he said. I grabbed it out my sock and gave it to him. He wacked me with the butt of his revolver and said, “If you call the police, my brothers will be back here, they will find you and slit your throat and pull your tongue out your neck.” He whacked me on the forehead with his jet black revolver and then he left. He had not given me one chance to pull my gun.
    I felt blood run into my eyes. The motherfucker, I cursed him. What do I carry the Jericho for? My one chance to use it, blown. The NRA would laugh me out of their org; they’d disown me. He doesn’t know who he’s fucking with. I wiped blood out my eyes with my forearm, walked out my apartment, and out the front door of the building.
    He was riding away. I put my hand on my pistol. “Hey! Come back here! I’ll call the police! You can’t pull this shit with me!”
    That got his attention. He stopped riding, put one foot on the ground, looked back at me, and began to ride back in my direction. I shook and gulped. Everything was in slow motion. Closer he came, closer...and I pulled out the Jericho, nervously positioned my feet, and fired it. You could hear the echo zigzag up the street. I hit him in the chest. The Latino went down. I walked up to him and shot him in the stomach. “You’re gut-gut shot, buddy,” I said. “Good luck.” Through my anxiety I did something stupid. I forgot to take away his revolver. We all do stupid things. He pulled it from the front of his waist band and fired. It felt like a sledgehammer first, blowing me back, and then it felt like I had no legs, like I was floating. I hit the ground without feeling a thing. Like someone excised me below the waist.
    He wheezed in short gasps, trying to breathe. People came running out their buildings. They pulled his hood off. The Latino, who looked about fourteen, gasped in Tex-Mex, “Help me breath, help me breathe.” The crowd yelled for someone to call an ambulance. In the many faces I saw the two Latinos and the Rastafarian. The hooker approached. Then the Luna bartender. And what was that, something weird, coming down the street? It was the vending machine, taking clumsy steps as it approached in a swinging gait, almost like a swagger, or someone trying to imitate a swagger. Every time it stepped it elasticized itself, and you heard all the sodas inside it shake. I could see the shelf where the drinks came down twisted up into a grin.
    Someone took off the Latino’s shirt. The one bullet hole to the chest was up around the heart, bathed in blood. I grew dizzy. The crowd kept trying to walk over to me, but every time they’d try to get close I’d raise my firearm, and I coughed at them to keep their distance. A car pulled up with one headlight dimmer than the other one. A dude got out and flashed his license. “Let me handle this,” he said. He looked at me and I raised the Jericho at him.
    “Josh, we’re here to help you. You need to let us help you. Don’t point that at me. Be cool, be cool.”
     The cops showed up with an ambulance. Same LT as before. “Hey buddy, put the Goddamn gun down. We’re here to help you. We know you’re scared. You shit yourself. Calm down. You want to live, don’t you?”
    No, not like this. “You guys sure do your jobs well, “I said to the PI. It was either now or never.
    I put the Jericho to the back of my skull—“NO!” the PI screamed—and pulled the trigger. He deserved it. They all deserved it. Too little, too late.

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