Gunshot Stigmata

by Scott C. Rogers

  The sound of traffic. The lonely songs of crickets.

  The click clack of a pair of unstable high heels on concrete.

  I have a gunshot stigmata.

  21

  Memories worn smooth. Jimmy’s sister was raped by an albino a few years back. I take a drag from my smoke and watch the dawn break over the horizon. Strange how certain thoughts creep forth from the darkness of the mind and claw and hiss at the daylight.

  We drove around two days looking for the fucker, high on diet pills and crank. When the cops pulled us over and asked about the shovels and hoes in the backseat, we lied and said we were on our way to a jobsite.

  The smell of burnt paper and leaves.

  22

  The seasons are stretching from one to the other. It is somewhere between late summer and early fall. The air is cool and wet as we drive downtown. The Union office is in a building that used to house fur coats on the top three floors and a slaughterhouse on the bottom back in the 20’s. The advertisements for these things are still visible on the faded brick exterior. Although Ron fired me, the union still has to agree to it before I’m officially out of a job. It’s a morning of paperwork, sitting on metal chairs and sipping stale coffee from Styrofoam cups.

  I am slightly dizzy from the car ride. Maurice’s driving. He’s here to file sexual harassment charges against Ron. This is why his piss always comes back clean after Best Mart tries to drug test him. He’s just crazy enough to scare people, so they like to keep him pacified as much as possible.

  I look at his shoes and realize that they are mismatched.

  23

  I tear into the Styrofoam cup and leave behind teeth imprints. I am Marv Albert chewing on an escort’s ass. Hours have crept by like a constipated god. Maurice’s head is tilted just so and his mouth is opening wide and closing hard, making a slapping noise. He is a dog eating taffy. He catches my stare and smiles. He pulls a balloon from his mouth. It hangs there at the end of his dirty fingertips, glistening in the light like a used clown condom.

  Maurice likes balloons. He says they turn him on. He likes to blow them up really big until they explode. He says it feels as good as cumming.

  This is what my eye looked like when it was sliced.

  What?

  My eye. It looked just like this.

  He holds the wet, maroon balloon to the side of his face.

  It just fell open and slid.

  I just chew at my cup and nod

  24

  Four days pass. They move like the sad hips of a middle age stripper.

  I am squeezing a blue rubber ball with my gnarled hand. Therapy. A skinny faced woman is counting off numbers as I pump my hand closed. She is young and unattractive. As she counts I wonder if I should try and sleep with her. Would finger fucking her count as therapy? She moves and the blue of her scrubs make a noise like I imagined the cape from Superman sounds

  25

  My dead hand is a gnarled up tree trunk. My fingers are atrophic roots curled back from the pits of hell. There are 27 bones in the human hand. I fucked each one. The blast ripped right through the third and fourth metacarpal bones leaving behind a huge gaping hole. Along its path the carpal bones become chalk dust, the interossei and lumbrical muscles were pulled apart like string cheese. My tendons were as good as used chewing gum stuck on the bottom of a shoe on a hot summer’s day.

  I got my wish. Never to play again.

  My fingers would never bend to form chords just as they would never touch her again.

  26

  A murder of crows kick up into the air.

  One for sorrow,

  Two for luck;

  Three for a wedding,

  Four for death;

  Five for silver,

  Six for gold;

  Seven for a secret,

  Not to be told;

  Eight for heaven,

  Nine for hell,

  And ten for the devil’s own sell! [1]

  [1] M. A. Denham’s Proverbs and Popular Saying of the Seasons (London, 1846):

  27

  Today is Tuesday. Other than that I’m not too positive. I stumble into the hallway and stand quiet, straining to hear the noise that drew me out of the bathroom and rushed my morning shit.

  Knocking.

  I open the door and the raven haired girl is standing there in skin tight black jeans and a NO MEANS NO t-shirt. She smiles and pushes a coffee towards me. I take it with my good hand and let her in. She does a 360 look about and then tries to move in and kiss me. I let her. Her lips are sweet.

  She stares at the scars across my bare chest. The zipper that runs from one side of my belly to the other. She leans down and licks my right nipple.

  The kitchen table. We undress in fury. The fuck is mean.

  28

  Mickey comes waddling back to the bench and hands me an ice cream cone. I hold his as he jumps up and gets situated. He motions for his cone. I take a giant lick and hand it back.

  You nasty fuck. I know where that tongue has been.

  I just laugh and lick mine.

  We are seated before the Lion’s den at the Detroit Zoo. The sky is the deepest blue I have ever witnessed in all my days. People stroll by and stare. They slash like razors. Our bodies have betrayed us. I am Frankenstein and he is Tattoo from Fantasy Island. I wave my mangled hand at a blond bitch with designer sunglasses.

  Mickey tells me that the word midget is like saying nigger.

  I tell him I like the word nigger.

  He elbows me in the ribs.

  He looks like a mini-Kid Rock. I’m just dirty and lost.

  29

  The thud and crackle of a bowling alley. Mickey swings a giant black ball like a crane and releases it from his grip. It shoots down the pinewood path like a cannon ball. The skull on the ball just appears as a mush of black and white over and over. I take a sip of my beer and watch as he leans in the direction he wants the ball to flow. There’s a giant crack and what’s left are two white fangs in a distorted mouth. He mumbles to himself as he wipes his hand on a towel and waits for the ball to scoot back up the conveyer which reminds me of something from the Jetsons.

  The White Stripes are on the sound system. I mumble the words When you gonna ring it? As he prepares for the two fangs.

  Those jeans make your ass look so fine.

  He flips me the Bird and lines up on the line.

  Oh Mickey! You’re so fine! You’re so fine! You blow my mind! Hey Mickey! Hey! Hey! Hey Mickey!

  Over my shoulder I hear the soft Hindu voice of Talan who makes his way down the steps and sits next to me.

  My gosh, you are killing them today, my friend.

  He makes some kind of gibberish sound and then whistles. He drops his sandal and begins to stuff his enormous brown feet into a bowling shoe.

  I look up and see that Mickey has made the mouth toothless as an Appalachian housewife.

  30

  Sitting on the couch I lean forward in search of an open pack of cigarettes. I grab the last smoke, light it and stare at the painting hanging above the TV. As artwork goes it’s shit, but then again it was painted from shit. She wanted an original and that’s what she got. It took months to get a hold of someone who knew someone who could get one. You could get a kidney on the black market quicker than a fucking clown painting by John Wayne Gacy.

  I did and she got it.

  I exhale slowly and stare at the white oval face and those fucking eyes set in blue triangles. The suit resembling a peppermint candy and lips as fake as wax. There’s something sinister in the pose. That smile.

  The clink of ice melting in a glass of whiskey. Shifting. I pick it up and swirl the ice around the glass.

  A year ago I was sitting in darkness, crushed by the weight of a mountain. I don’t wonder where I’ll be in a year; I just wonder where I’ve been.

  31

  There was a stained area rug. A wrestling mask from Mexico. A purple dildo. Books and DVDs littered everywhere. A l
one sneaker. A pair of pants, crumbled. The oven hadn’t worked in months. A glass ashtray from my mother’s house, filled to the brim with, sat on the claw foot coffee table.

  I was seated at Burger Chief when she told me who my father was. My five year old brain just filed it away as I peeled and placed the decals on the race car lid to my lunch.

  How does that make you feel?

  I just shrugged. I don’t know.

  Do you want to see him?

  I guess.

  My nose started to bleed. The conversation ended with her grabbing napkins and shoving them up under my nose. I didn’t meet my father until my early twenties when he laid in a nursing home dying.

  32

  He did not make a pretty girl. Travis was the kind of drag queen who resembled Carol Burnett portraying a drag queen portraying Audrey Hepburn. It was a vicious and ugly circle. From a giant leather purse he would pull out a little electric shaver and run it over the deep ridges of his long hollow face. Usually dangling from two crimson lips was a Marlboro.

  33

  It was fall. I was in the first grade. My favorite t-shirt was a Superman one, but not the blue and red; this one was black with the S in silver. She was raking leaves in the front yard and I was jumping in them trying to swim. My hair was a long, shaggy strawberry blond.

  When the green car pulled up her face went white.

  She told me to stay outside while she talked with the lady inside.

  I sat on the steps and played with my Star Wars figures. There was yelling. My mother’s voice. I got up and ran inside to save her. She sat defeated on the sofa, her head in her hands, a cigarette burning in the left one.

  My suitcase was a brown paper grocery bag from Best Mart. It was filled with a few pairs of pants, shirts, socks and underwear. I was embarrassed that the lady saw them. I could only bring a few toys.

  My mother kissed me. Her cheeks wet.

  I wouldn’t see her again until just before Christmas my fourth grade year.

  By then the damage was done.

  34

  I’m sitting on the couch finishing off a bowl of Lucky Charms and watching the Rockford Files when Maurice comes in from the hallway and sits down next to me. He lights up a joint and then says.

  Dude, what kind of dragon did Ricky Steamboat bring to the ring when he was going against Jake “the Snake” Roberts?

  I slurp my bowl. Why?

  Cause I think there’s one in the john.

  I place my bowl down and get up and walk to the bathroom. I open the door and sitting on top of the john is sure enough a Komodo dragon. It turns and hisses at me. I quickly close the door and head back to the living room.

  I take a seat next to him and watch Jim Garner light a smoke.

  It was a Komodo dragon.

  I thought so.

  35

  There is the gurgle of coffee brewing. My feet are bare. The sun is coming up. I haven’t worn underwear since I left the mental hospital.

  36

  There is an old man sitting in the booth across from me. His hair is thick, bright white and slicked back. He has a pencil-thin moustache. I watch him reach his cup to meet the waitress halfway.

  There are green numbers tattooed on the inside of his forearm.

  37

  My hand gives me away. I try and move like a ghost, but my deformed hand always attracts their attention. When I know they are staring I often will raise it up and pick my nose with one of the dead fingers. I will reach around and scratch my ass. Children are brutally honest. They smile when I do something silly.

  They wanted to remove the hand. They said my life would be more productive, simpler without it.

  I never wanted those things. I wanted to remember.

  I wanted to bare the mark of Cain.

  38

  I fuck my physical therapist in the bathroom at the clinic. I lift her up and sit her on the back of the toilet and fuck her silly.

  Her pussy resembles a Rorschach test.

  39

  It’s pouring rain as I sit at the kitchen table and help Maurice count damp dollar bills that were stuck in the g-string of his woman just a half an hour ago. He is rubber banding them into fifties and then putting them in a Ziplock freezer bag.

  Miracle owes the club owner money for the boob job he fronted for her. The rest they spend on drugs, food and other necessities. Every Wednesday she puts a hundred dollars in cash into an envelope and drives over to her mother’s and leaves it in the mailbox without saying a word.

  Miracle has long dreadlocks that are died in different colors. It looks like Joseph’s magical coat. She walks around the apartment with nothing on but a few tattoos.

  The word SLUT is inked on the inside of her bottom lip.

  40

  I get a letter in the mail from the Union office. It’s official. I have been fired from Best-Mart.

  I walk out onto the balcony and light a joint in celebration.

  The squirrels have already begun to prepare for winter.

  41

  Davey Boy snapped his neck diving into a pool when we were in the 9th grade. He has been in a wheel chair ever since. He has about as many degrees as I do deformed fingers. He also grows the best weed in town. I knock twice. The door opens to a blond with way too much eye make-up on. She looks like a Kabuki Warrior or a Rodeo Clown.

  I move past her and fix a cup of coffee. There is always fresh coffee and a bong waiting. I take a seat in the brown football shaped beanbag chair. Carl Sagan is on a 72’’ Flat Screen TV. Davey Boy looks down at me and smiles. His long black hair pulled back into a pony-tail. We have the same skull ring.

  I tell him about being fired. He says he knows a hacker who can increase my last paycheck if need be. I have my hand and tell him not to bother. That I still have plenty of money to kill myself on.

  42

  I am sitting naked on the john. I have a revolver stuck in my mouth and my right index finger around the trigger. It would be so much easier. So quick. Like thunder, I tell myself. Sweat from my forehead drops and runs the length of the barrel.

  The devil was once an angel too.

  43

  I roll over and see a silhouette of person standing at the end of the bed. I blink twice. There is light shining in from behind. I hear a soft voice.

  I’m late.

  Often times she comes to me in dreams. Sometimes she is healthy and beautiful. Other times bloody and damaged.

  Suddenly a fist hits my leg.

  I’m late asshole! I’m late. Do you know what that means?

  I sit up and rub my eyes. Yeah, you’re late.

  She sits on the edge of the bed. Her head falls to her hands. I see now it’s not her, but the raven haired girl. She is mumbling about being a mother.

  I reach for my smokes and light one.

  Today isn’t starting off too good.

  44

  Sitting in the park on a bench older than my grandmother, she has her legs pulled up to her face. I am next to her. My arm wrapped around her shoulders. A coffee from 7-Eleven warming my crotch.

  She is crying. Again.

  I never saw the movie Juno and I don’t get the references she keeps making to it.

  45

  When I was ten I lived with a family that had two boys of their own and then brought in six other kids. They made us call them Mom and Dad even though they would never adopt any of us. One of their boys was named Mark and he was sixteen. He played guitar and taught me how to play.

  He gave me my first LP Kiss Rock-n-Roll All Over.

  The seed was planted.

  46

  Jimmy pulls up in his Camero and yells up to my balcony. I walk out and see he’s not in good shape. He looks like he’s been fighting. His shirt is ripped and he’s got blood everywhere. He climbs up the balconies until he gets to mine. He tells me he finally found the Albino and beat the living fuck out of him. He kicked in all his teeth. He pulls a handful of teeth from his pocket and shows them to me.<
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