by Jane Brooke
Cough, sputter, a trail of black smoke, edge to the drive way, gravel cracking under the tires, left turn, accelerate, groans from her lips, back on the road again.
The old doll is dying, she knows it.
Please, just Vegas, that’s all.
THE DEEP SOUTH, more bent, more twisted, warmer, pungent, humid, torpid and a lot weirder then Tennessee Williams had depicted it.
As she drives she feel the metamorphous, slow pace, stoops, rocking chairs, old Negro women, black kids in overalls. Truck stops, pickups, gun racks, turkey legs, chittlins, grub, greens, grits, gizmos bayou swamp men use to murder crocodiles, catch coons, make moonshine, she suspects.
Men chewing Skoal, spittin’ tobac juice, white kids all look alike. Lots a white skin, scatter guns, red hair, no sign of Stella in her sheer, food stained negligee, nor Stanley Kowalski in a ripped up T-shirt, not just yet.
She fuels up, eats garbage, drinks beer, sips at Wild Turkey, smokes, odd places, odd people, a world like melting candle wax. The old south passes, raking her mind of memories of what she has read.
Several hours pass, better tired than dead. Over 60 hours no sleep, manic, safe, annoying music over the car radio, opted for I-Pod, head phones, Alisha Keys leading the way.
She tried the radio, gospel hour, preacher’s rants, thumping the Bible hour, just before incest under the neon lit Ferris wheel. Driving her mad, gotta get out; out of this red neck part of the woods. She’s a chameleon forever transforming her skin; she feels the southern way seeping into her blood.
LATE AFTERNOON, she bitches, kicks the dash radio with her boot heel, more groans. Her physical pain is palatable. Caddy sputters, coughs, stutter steps, coughs and, then rights herself. Worry on her face.
JACKIES MISSISSIPPI BAIT SHOP just ahead.
Thank fucking God.
Pulls in, cloud of dust, layers in next to the gas pumps, cough, sputter, the engine goes silent, backfires.
She groans.
HERE I AM. FUCK.
Again, shouted out clear and loud. Usual suspects sitting on the wooden stoops, checkers, hound dogs sleeping, squirrel guns set along the rails. Overalls, black men, nap hair, white temples, white men, racial integration at full sail, everybody knows the peckin’ order of things.
Black kid again friendly and all.
“Fill her up.”
He’s all smiles. “Yes Mamm.”
She retreats, in the store, junk food, coffee, a life blood, more beer, body burning off alcohol as fast as she consumes it. Pay up, no eye contact, smile, not to bright, out the door, men nudging, juking, whispering, back to the car. She might as well be a blond solar flare she is so fucking dramatic looking.
The engine shutters to life, back fires, winces and moans from her crazed mouth, exhausted lips.
Car in gear, edge out, turn, too much gas, wrong decisions, tires smoke, car back fires, men whistle, laugh, watch her like a bullet from a magnum spit fired down the street.
“Just fucking perfect.” She wheezes.
Banging her knees with her leather fists, she finds her B Sox ball cap, slots it on her crazy head, slams the gas. Petrol fuels the carbs, shimmy, shimmy, the Caddies butt waggles as it roars down the asphalt road.
Car coughs, she whispers. “Come on princess; be good to me, cowboy up, pleeease.”
She reminds herself that something as trivial as her life depends on the old gal toughing it out the rest of the way.
Fire flame, Zippo flint locked, cigarette tip burning ash, she turns on the radio. Preacher Bob ranting that she’s bound for hell. She already knows that news.
“Food”, I need music.” She mumbles, barely able to see.
Off in the distance, there it is; a massive white elephant structural savior, an icon of the mediocrity of the USA.
Spying the great edifice of a Wal-Mart, she slaps the blinker.
“Blink, blink, blink.”
She swings off the road, flicks her smoke, stops at a stop sign, sighs, turns the wheel and, then moves towards the food she desires.
Wal Mart
BATON ROUGE, early day, humid, hot, razor cut stuff, sweat gutting the life blood out of her, black jeans, black sleeveless T-shirt, work boots.
She’s spent like a smoking discharged cartridge casing.
She swings the boat in, parks off the mark, between the white lines. Anonymity is good, even at a fucking Wal-Mart plugged into the asphalt like a clone of every one just like it. There blasphemous, organic of metal, concrete, rebar, stuck into the earth.
Cars, pick-ups, campers, kids, people, needing the needle, everywhere, feeding off of the Right-Tackle of a monolith that has decimated every down town culture from Seattle to Bangor with its buying clout.
A corporate hideous scam that is force feeding the blood vessels of a Nation with artery clogging poison cheaper than anyplace else in a deconstructing, decomposing obese USA.
She knew, never been to one before, but she reads, she knows, quite well.
Millions of jobs outsourced to China, India, Bangladesh; slave wages, coolies in flip flops, a buck a day, rice in the bowl. America needs its stuff, cheap stuff, Asia supplies it, in spades, aces, corporate America had won; fuck their own American people.
Time, the great equalizer, nobodies concerned, lynch pins, towns, people walking, talking, giving commerce to mom and pop stores.
ZIP, ZAP, all swallowed up by a corporate vampire of vulgarity, devouring like locust any last stand kindness any American Family still possesses.
Football tail gate parties, slabs of beef ribs, Lazy Boy’s, obesity, Pro Player Stadium on NFL Sunday, super duper deluxe fire grills. Beer, stuffing your face, bellies, lumbering Yaks, no thoughts of the consequences. God given right to have it all in and All in America.
Tasty stuff and eating stuff that fixes leaks in your roof; no respect and no dignity left.
This is how it is in this once proud country, barbecued to death.
Take a pill, some guy dancing on the tube, fuck, they saw it on TV didn’t they and to boot, it’s always on sale at Wal Mart.
Must be right. Must be OK.
63%, obesity rate, clinically diagnosed, Big Mac promises, diet industry booming, shilling lies, heads, tails, nobody can figure it out. Wal-Mart, K-Mart, siblings flourishing, both sides played against the middle.
Fatten them up, like beef steers, heart clogging poisons, guilt trip them, screw up their heads. Gym’s and Richard Simmons mind fucking the people, models, bulimic, frolicking, running on the beach, perfect lives, perfect girls, failure, nobody has any discipline and, then comes the diet shit.
Jenny Craig can fix everything.
Nothing.
Want what we want when we fucking want it.
Sick people, drug companies’ step in, a perfect, Daisy Chain of deceit and nobody can get a hard on their own any more. Corporate CEO’s, rich getting richer, unfortunately lots a folks becoming very fucking dead.
Isn’t that Pizza Hut at the door?
She’s pissed, its standing there right in front of her. Just looking at the place burns her up.
Yet, stuff, music, maybe a banana, an apple, fuck it, let’s do it.
“Grrrrr.” The rag top grinds up.
She locks the doors, five hundred K in the back seat, next to the pipe bombs, cozy in the back seat, nervous, should be fine, old car, no prob, sweat, slink machine moving, girl needs to shop, why the fuck not.
AN HOUR later dazed, bewildered, befuddled she’s toting two plastic bags as she staggers to the car.
Hyperventilating, from her first experience, the key vibrates against the lock and, slot, then open’s. She crawls in, entire body shaking. Down goes the top, she inhales, shaking hands controlling a cigarette, the fire, inhale and exhale.
�
��WHAT THE FUCK.” Wheezes out of her mouth
Being the privileged whore/courtesan of a mobster she only had to open her yap to get anything her self-absorbed heart ever wanted. Sheltered her entire life by an obese mobster, the Wal-Mart experienced has shattered her.
Imagine now, you are her, or something comparable, an Alien and somehow you have landed in the parking lot; that is if you can find a free space for your flying saucer machine. You remain invisible; lingering in the void, away from the rayon tube lights you feel are eating your bubble head brain, piece, by piece.
You are petrified.
You have been monitoring these barbarians for some time, scrutinizing them, watching as they destroy a planet once beautiful, bountiful, pristine, and above all rare. You feel uneasy being anywhere near these brutal serial eating machines and glad you have the invisible beam on and you’ve checked the oil on your flying saucer.
You peek out of your port holes, watch never ending lines of huge, waddling, white skin sacks of lard lumbering off, mutant kids in tow. There pushing gleaming wire cages on wheels, filled with dead cows, horses, birds, fish, crustaceans, everything that you have studied for eons that ever made Earth such a unique place.
Vats of packaged fat, sugar, sodium, monosodium glutamate, chemicals, everything that your advanced race knows destroys all life, no matter what planet you are from is everywhere. These creatures frighten you, terrify you and fuck up your antennas, finally sickening you.
You quickly surmise that you have landed on an island of cannibal’s, bent on total destruction, no matter what the cost. So you fire up the rocket ship, disappear into the cosmos, glad the terrible place is finally, forever behind you.
As you whizz away in a fireball of relief, the frigid ice oceans of Jupiter never looked so good.
SHE is an ET to this world, as she had watched the men, wearing sports jerseys, flip flops, athletic shoes, huge guts, jowls expanding, hammering the bar codes of the Wal Mart feeding center.
Having never visited a Wal Mart is perhaps like never experiencing Heroin.
You know it’s out there, enticing, but you are terrified of the needle jab because once plunged into a vein you are certain that you will be unable to fight the addiction once you have tasted the magic.
She is off kilter, for watching the demise of America through the eyes of MTV, CNN; C-span was so different than living it first-hand.
Banging her forehead with her palm, she knew she must get out, escape, for she feels that the whore house is emulsifying her noggin.
Steadying her hands, she gawks at the burning ember of her cigarette. She wants to push it into her eyes.
Anything, make it stop, make her mind cease the constant evaluation of life, as well as herself and, then the voice, berating, screaming, brings her back.
“YOUR AN IDIOT, YOU FUCKING COW. YOU STUPID FUCKING BITCH.”
Soaking wet and ninety pounds of a southern beat down, young girl shes maybe twenty-five, thin, emaciated, pale and fragile like a wind battered spider web.
Pixie cut, red tank top, shorts, spindle legs, pretty, looks used up, cowering, like a frail doe. Six-foot two, country boy, sports jersey, huge gut like a beach ball hangs over his surf shorts, flip flops, one hundred to many pounds, red face, like suet, veins in the jowls, towering over her, clenched fists, screaming at her.
Mandal, gasps.
He slaps her, takes her arm, shakes her, slams her against their American Dream SUV. He takes a step, pinches her cheeks, and screams. “WHAT DID I SAY? WHAT DID I SAY. YOU STUPID, STUPID BITCH.”
Mandal watches, waits for it to stop, it doesn’t. He keeps poking her in her skinny collar bones. Each poke, a scream, a threat, blue bruises appearing from the pokes on her white skin.
Three, two, one.
Mandal’s head explodes; no thoughts of safety, consequences.
She leaps out, over the door, one of those Hockey thugs just burning off a penalty, her brand new Sammy Sosa aluminum baseball bat in her hand, a flame thrower spewing out of her blues.
Zoom, zoom, zoom, eyes sweep the parking lot, nothing, off shoot of the feeding center, he’s screaming. She’s cowering, tiny waif, caged, can’t-move, tears, face shuddering as Mandal begins her prowl.
She’s a cat, a fucked up queen of the jungle. She moves like that, sinewy, muscled, cut arms rippling as she moves.
She’s there, behind him, bat back, wait for the pitch, fat mans knees, swing for the fences, put your doll bod into it. She does, here it comes, vicious blow.
“BLAST, “SMACK”.
The bat rips into the back of his fat knees sounding like a gun shot.
Screams, he hits the asphalt, tries to twist around, to see, what is going down, just in time to catch another “CRACK” in his pudding gut. Gushes of pain, whooshes of hurt, flops to his palms, wining, crying, weeping, moaning, his eyes wide like broken dishes. His wife freeze framed, just gawking.
Mandal, good at this stuff, crushes his beefy wrist with her boot heel, more pressure, grind, grind, grind, whimper, complain, whimper, wife gawking, a slip of a thing.
Mandal liking payback, smashes the back of his hand with the tip of the ball bat, grinds a little, more insanity, more protecting the weak, her mind spitting blood, crazed, what else is new. Swing, it’s over the plate, his fat head, he tries to rise as the blond bitch splits him on the back of the skull.
“WOMP.” Hollow sound like a watermelon thumped with hollow point, down for the count.
Adrenaline making her thinner by the sec, no fans yet, no appreciation for The Long Ball.
Tiger says chicks dig The Long Ball.
Flicked eyes at the wife, back to fat boy, he’s bitching bout something, maybe bout the doll with the Sosa ball bat.
Back to wifey, her insipid eyes are filled with awe, wonder, secret happiness, the blond with the bat reverse engineering her pain. Mandal bends at a knee, twisting lard boys wrist; lowering beauty lips to his face.
See these blue eyes, look at this face, I am a fucking lunatic.
Acid etched all over the face of the most stunner girl hubby has ever seen.
Mandal, roll playing, not really, killer bee, seethes. “Listen you fat fuck, us cops been watchin’ you for a long time. We don’t like what we been seeing, got it?”
More pressure on the wrist, a little bent goes a long way, dad cries, moans, pleads for it to stop.
Mandal, Emmy time, is getting secret props from the wife.
“From now on I’m gonna be your fucking shadow, get it pork chop? I even think you touch this angel again, it won’t go down well for ya.” She rips a tuft of hair, slaps his head back, in his face, “CLEAR.”
Blubber, blubber, blubber, snot, tears, something like that, anything
“Just don’t whack me again.” Drools out of his maw.
“We got your house under the eye, so fucking WAKE UP. Swat will fuck you up.”
She stands, ball bat, tap, tap, tap on the back of his skull. She turns to the mouse, moves to her, violently pinches her teary face, fingers, thumbs, ice in her eyeballs, gets into it, stares of sisterhood, blond smiles, no smiles, really serious, dire stuff, loud so trundle boy can hear.
“If he ever touches you again, you come to the station, ask for Sgt. Friday. Me and the boys, we’ll visit him, not nice like I just done, but bad. Got it?”
Mandal winces using the name Sgt. Joe Friday, all she could think of, pinch time, brain spinning like roller derby wheels.
“Grow a fucking spine, okay sweets.”
Wife nods, tears, smiles, peeks at a once hero rolling on the asphalt, tonnage stacked on the asphalt, eighteen wheeler, guts spilled out on the road. Play full wink, from the blond cop, another wink, tap, tap, tap, big boys head sound like a ping-pong ball. She turns, just as fast as she was there, gone, a white otte
r, back into the deep, gone, into the shadows.
Wifey staring, if it was that easy, why didn’t she know it? A little bit of knowledge is a beautiful thing. Looks at Wal Mart, rubs her elf jaw, turns, walks, she likes the fucking Sammy Sosa, 42 incher, Louisville Slugger should do, might get one of her own.
Back at the boat, feeling positive about life, good at bat, giggles, thinking about Friday and the bulls at the station, more giggles, winces, she fucked up, got away with it.
Please get me to fucking Vegas alive before I get someone killed, mainly me. She thinks, when she can think.
Laughs erupt, out loud, she thinks, the beating just shelled out and she knows that it had been a good thing. She is one happy gal. New women, future husband of the year candidate wondering if the cop’s eyeballs are gawking at him though the TV set.
Giggles, summersaults the bat into the back seat, wonders maybe wrong career course, maybe marriage counseling was her true gig, tire irons, ball bats, sometimes a bullet.
She groans as she whispers. “Come on Doctor Phil, get it together, write a book, get Ophra to whore it, get famous, ooops, Tony is coming, zip yer brain fucking back up.
Blink, eyes back, mind back, time to scoot, over the door, money still there, that’s good, weapons stashed, some light stuff in the Wal Mart bags, turns on the motor scooter, cough, sputter, evens out, in gear, gas, wind, warmer now, next stop New Orleans.
Jazz City
NEW ORLEANS, lazy, hot, steamy, crushing humidity, dangerous, run down, stoop’s, shacks, pick-up trucks, whites, blacks, not to mention the weather, like wearing a muslin Hindu toga 24/7 in a sauna bath.
9 PM, “THE SWAMP CLUB.”
Its semi filled, cause it is early, serious boozing still to come, never before 1 AM. On the out skirts of Jazz City, desperate, aging nude dancers, broken down tramps, trolling soldier boys from the army base, Camp LeJeune, bayou trash, strutting-their stuff.
Someone for everyone, filling needs. Solid working men, grifters, petty crooks, stick up men, liked their women like their drink, aged, some ballast, cheap to the wallet, sexed up, wantin’.
