---

 

This writing was accepted for publication in the 108 page perfect-bound ISSN# / ISBN# issue/book... “Embracing Shadows” Down in the Dirt, v146 (the June 2017 Issue) You can also order this 6"x9" issue as a paperback book:

Order this writing in the issue book Random Thoughts the Down in the Dirt July-Dec. 2016 collection book		get the 418 page May-August 2017 Down in the Dirt issue anthology 6" x 9" ISBN# paperback book:

Order this writing in the book On a Rainy Day (the 2017 poetry, longer prose & art collection anthology)		get the 298 page poem, longer prose & art collection anthology as a 6" x 9" ISBN# paperback book:

Killing Papa

D. Harrington Miller

    I smelled him before I saw him; the pungent draft of maraschino and cigar smoke smacking sobriety into my rum-drunk skull.
    Three days on the island. La Républica de Cuba. Three days exploring a city frozen in time. Three days huffing gasoline fumes whilst narrowly avoiding collapsing balconies, vengeful pedicabs, and the internet. Three days drinking, heavily.
    He settled onto the stool beside me, off-white guyabera shirt soaked through, his body’s condensation a higher proof than the cerveza on my lips, swollen face an echo of the lumpy travel pillow I’d abandoned on the plane, beard the color of sun-bleached bones. The picture of a man who had found himself and promptly spent decades trying to forget. The bartender slid a cracked highball glass in front of the Old Man and poured him a daiquiri.
    You don’t meet many americanos in Cuba, so whatever gutter this fermented Falstaff dragged himself out of, I thought it fortuitous. Of all the rum joins in Havana, he chose this one. My inner stereotype got the better of me and I blurted out in my best Midwestern patois:
    “I hope your day’s going swimmingly, amigo.”
    “Fuck your adverbs,” the Old Man muttered.
    “Pardon me?”
    “A man has no need for adverbs. I drink. I fish. I drink again. I doesn’t matter how I do them. It only matters that they’re done.”
    He belched and sipped his daiquiri.
    “You don’t like words, do you?”

    “When they’re clean, sparse, like a...” The Old Man stopped himself, “You almost had me there.”
    He raised his daiquiri into the air and I toasted in kind. But before I could bring the drink to my lips, the Old Man had slurped down his libation and ordered another. His eyes landed on my half-full glass.
    “Pussy.”
    He followed this invective with a belch to rival any thunderclap.

    The hours ghosted by on a broken wall clock, hands forever announcing twelve forty-six. I had barely made a dent in my sixth cerveza, but the desire for a Dark ’N’ Stormy interlude was growing stronger by the minute. I held up an index finger to announce my intentions when I caught the Old Man gazing at me through glassy-eyed delirium, irises fixed on my face while his eyeballs swam in their sockets. Perhaps he’d taken offense to the peach-fuzz disaster pathetically sprouting from my upper lip. I’d left my razor back home, regrettably, and all spare dinero had been allocated towards the forget-her fund.
    “Fuck you,” he barked.
    “Um... Why?”
    The Old Man’s guts gurgled. A cherry-flavored hiss bubbled up through chapped lips. The bartender, seemingly fluent in hoary incoherence, appeared with a fresh daiquiri. I again attempted to flag down the man, but a meaty paw grasped my neck and another clawed open my jaw while the foremost phalange funneled a fresh daiquiri down my gullet, most of it getting in my eyes.
    Temporarily blinded, I screamed for help, but all I got in response was the Old Man’s reply, “Quit your bitching and take it like a goddamn man [belch] You might just grow some real hair on your face.”
    My correct estimation at the cause of the Old Man’s ire brought no calm. I wiped the sugary sap from my eyes and felt hate in the back of my throat; the inchoate rage had triggered my reflux. I wanted to hit this man, to beat him senseless, to pound his fat face with my fists until his frontal lobe resembled raspberry jelly. My fingers clenched with feral instinct, I shoved the stool aside... blood throbbed in his temples. The American grabbed his cerveza and shattered the end against the bar top, the Old Man burped again, prepared to be unmade by the jagged ridges of the broken bottle...
    “That’s the spirit! You’re finally writing like a man. That’s some terse narration,” the Old Man bellowed.
    He smacked my back, and the bottle dropped from my hands, fracturing on the floor. He grinned, teeth nearly splitting apart his face. A ruddiness returned to his cheeks. A stability to his vision. My bloodlust appeared to have brought the Old Man back from the brink. Even his beard seemed fuller.
    “I just want to drink in peace,” I begged. My rage forgotten.
    “Hogwash! You’ve just scratched the surface, hombre. Have you seen the Malecón?”
    I had not.
    The Old Man’s eyes came alive, “Then to the Malecón we shall depart, tout de suite!” He flung his glass against the back bar and dragged me out the door, followed closely behind by the bartender’s curses.

    Havana was drowning in a nameless tropical depression. We stumbled down rain-soaked streets, past concrete buildings swollen and sallow, bricks bulging under the water weight. Mildewed cabbage and broken bits of caulk, tire treads and castoff vitamin bottles, a diluvian cavalcade bobbed to the surface of one-time gutters, now flooded arroyos. The entire city was topsy-turvy, smothered by an inverted ocean. The Old Man greeted the storm with brio, a smile never leaving his face. The wind whipped stinging droplets against my body, but I soldiered on after him.
    “Uno momento.”
    The Old Man disappeared into a darkened building and emerged with another daiquiri.
    “Are you an ass or tit man?” His voice boomed, propelled by sheer force of personality.
    I shambled along, ignoring his query.
    “A man can’t grabass anymore. Where’s the fun?,” he thundered, “When did we take the policing from the actual goddam poliçia?!”
    I thought of answering, and thought even harder of not answering.
    The Old Man conjured a cigar from his pocket.
    “Conjured. You write like a bitch,” he said, teetering on his feet as he futilely attempted to light the limp cigar. “Sure you got a dick down there?”
    Unsuccessful at making fire in a rainstorm, the Old Man tossed his soggy cheroot into an eddy. Lighting briefly lit the tableau.
    “Let’s wrestle.”
    He tore off the guyabera, his naked torso carpeted in a thick white shag. Sinewy muscles tensed under layers of paunch. Before I could utter a syllable in response, the Old Man enveloped me in his boozy essence, and quickly hugged the breath out of me.
    “Uncle,” I whimpered.
    “You don’t get to give up that easily.”
    I passed out.

    I awoke an undermined time later, senses blunted by the acrid permeation of diesel fuel and the endless drone of Soviet-era car horns. The storm had rolled westward. A dark memory on the horizon. What I at first assumed to be a palm tree providing shade was the Old Man, arm braced against a rusted hatchback, letting loose a steady flow of brownish urine that pooled between the cobblestones adjacent to my forehead. I leapt to my feet, instantly cured of my hangover, but my hard-won vocabulary had been lost somewhere in the deluge. I only managed a meek grunt and what I hoped was a look of flabbergasted confusion.
    “No one cares about your damn Thesaurus. You sound like a faggy Brit who misses his mummy. De-flower that prose.” He hocked a loogie into the piss stream. “You want the people to read your words, use words the people know. That’s what Odets missed. Fitz. All of ‘em. Your audience, they want to hear themselves. They want to recognize their lives in your self-important bullshit. We’re all narcissists at the end of the day.”
    The Old Man tucked away his member and continued onward.
    Our heathen hajj had taken on a different tone, that impromptu wrestling match had awakened the Old Man’s competitive edge; his joyful fecundity mutated into grotesque sport. It seemed every moment not spent dodging traffic was interrupted by another brazen display of physicality: Shot-putting bricks against crumbling façades, deadlifting parked cars, crushing cinderblocks with discarded rebar. And the competition devolved from there: foot races across derelict construction sites, an impromptu push-up-a-thon, and many one-sided exchanges of insults... at this rate we’d be waging a thumb war before we reached Plaza Centro.
    “I’m gonna go back to the hotel. My feet hurt,” I muttered.
    The Old Man brought his forefingers to his temples, aimed skyward, exhaled sharply through his nostrils, and charged me. I had sobered considerably since the bar and easily sidestepped him. He tripped on the uneven pavement and tumbled to the ground. A weary torero and his sad old bull.
    “I’m done playing. Enjoy Cuba.”
    The Old Man wiped mud from his bleeding knees, “So that’s it, scrivener? You’re giving up?”
    I saw him. Finally. Surrounded by ruins. Crumbling facades. Derelict. Left behind. The past decays, yet remains. In shambles, but it remains. Piles and piles and piles and piles. It occludes. Clogs. Chokes. It stops up the damn drain. To concinnity and beyond!
    I stood in a landfill, no longer Cuba. The tectonic plates of human history, shifting atop the sediment of forgotten heroes. A sad entertainer spinning plates. He’s weary. He needs a rest. I’ve lost it, the metaphor. Gone. Slipped from my grasp. The meaning. Conveyance. What was I trying to say? What am I trying to say?
    “That you’re a hack,” barked the Old Man.
    Take two tablespoons of the past. Grind it. Into dust. Add a pinch of salt. One cup water. And simmer. For an hour, for two, for a century. And from that primordial soup, pour into a mold. Let dry. You’ve made a brick. Now build the world.
    The Old Man stood naked while the city collapsed.
    “Your words are his words, are their words, are mine. The is the. And is and. They don’t care what you have to say,” he roared.
    He was right. So I buried him in language. Expressions. Smilies. Adjectives and allusions. Voltas and stanzas and epithets. The entire span of the Oxford English Dictionary, and Barlett’s for good measure. He dropped to one knee, the sheer sparsity of his being, crushed by the overwrought prose.
    The Old Man wrangled a loose adverb, twisting it with his bare hands into a meager pronoun. But he was no match for the onslaught of words. A vicious onomatopoeia gashed his throat. Blood gurgled from the wound, and with it leaked a single word:
    “Pussy.”
    He collapsed into the linguistic swarm.
    I watched for a while, as the starving mutts of Havana picked at his bones though the razor-sharp bits of satire, scarfing down loose dialogue and dactyls. Then I walked back to the bar. Goodbye, Papa.

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...