Our Blood in Its Blind Circuit
Page 11
Sam. Right. So anyway he’d watch these hookers work and get blowjobs from the toothless ones in the front seat of his car, and when they go to sit their bony, wasted ass in his passenger seat he’s gotta move all manner of used takeout boxes and crushed Camel packs and beer cans and bottles of Jack Daniels and even a keg that he bought on a whim, on one of these stakeouts, that he sat in the back seat just pumping, pouring red Solo cup after red Solo cup, it never affecting him because he’s just that kind of sweaty machine.
When he’d get done shooting what is no doubt diseased seed down these hookers’ throats, he’d beat them until they gave him information on the johns they take up to the hotel rooms, beat them for the information they would probably give up gladly, but we have to establish that Sam Titiriga is a rather fucked individual, so these hookers might in a moment of rare, I mean blood diamond rare, conscientious objection refuse to “give it up” as it were and Sam will set about to beating on them. It’s pretty horrible, but they’re all horrible people, so instead of feeling kind of shitty about the situation, we feel shitty about life in general and still stick with our old beer drinking, ass-whipping friend Sam because he’s all we’ve got in this wasteland.
Once he figures out what’s up, he robs the shit out of those johns, with a sawed-off shotgun. A regular shotgun or really just a regular pistol might do the trick, but there’s something sexy about the sawed-off shotgun, the raw, compact power of it, the fact that it kind of reminds him of a pirate’s pistol, and the fact that it’s immensely powerful and might take someone’s head off, that gets Sam Titiriga’s dick rock hard.
And the robberies are where he gets the money to be in this nothing bar on a Wednesday night, drinking whatever’s cheapest on tap, and whatever’s cheapest out of the well. He doesn’t have friends per se, except for his inbred moonshiner acquaintance Bug, who runs a prostitution ring out of his mother’s cabin way out in the sticks, probably at least fifty or so dirt roads out there.
He takes a break from the ass whipping talk to sing the praises of a website where you can buy laser sights for any kind of rifle or pistol for dirt cheap, which catches the attention of the drunks who’ve already phased him out, and they nod their heads into their glasses as he describes the gps targeting system he’s going to buy once he sells off all the meth he stole from an acquaintance of a john of a hooker he beat the hell out of.
We’re now kind of floating in this miasma of boredom, those of us not on Adderall at least, and we’re going to need a description of the redness of the dirt or the smell of stale cigarettes from the bar or maybe, if we’re lucky, a description of a gun or a bone breaking, in order to keep us from moving on to another story with another Sam Titiriga.
Two options:
1) There’s a young man at the far end of the bar, a clean cut, nice young man just home from the war, and he’s going to say something to Sam that will escalate into a conflict, though the young man clearly doesn’t want it. In the end Sam will beat him damn near to death and there won’t be a single consequence for this because in this world of hardboiled fighters and meth addicts, there are no consequences for their actions, there is only the cold law of the jungle. Sam still dies. Maybe he gets shot by a hooker.
2) Sam receives a call from his long lost son, who has grown up in a hard way, much like his father. The two have a detached conversation that ends not with them agreeing to meet up or anything like that, but rather with a terse goodbye, because it doesn’t really matter that Sam Titiriga has an estranged son, but rather that his embodiment of darkness will continue. We have the added bonus of now having a bit of humanization we can place on this character, meaning that his offer to fight anyone in the bar will end with a vivid description of his eye becoming dislodged from its socket before a silent Indian type with knuckles dipped in gasoline beats him so bad that, we’re supposed to figure, he’s dead.
After he’s gone and that last line has run its course and we’re left with the pulpy expanse of pages between this story and the next, if you squint, Sam Titiriga is riding a dragon through space and time. The dragon is purple and scaly and Sam controls it by plunging both of his arms into the two wet holes at the base of the dragon’s brain. He flies the creature up past the edges of our galaxy to where two gods in the shape of windmills tower over a swirling purple fog, and they each press their hands to their chest and it glows white. Sam Titiriga sees all of the options his existence presented, realizes that he’s dark and speeds toward the mouth of one of the gods with a sword growing from the top of his head. He hits the thing in the mouth and everything is a blinding white flash. In the white, he can begin to make out the grains of printed paper, and he sees a big word, “Gritty”, looming over a waterfall of black letters, with him poised to fall into it like the ball in a dexterity puzzle, and suddenly he feels a sequence of written sound enter his chest, and he is 100% blue fuck positive he can whip anyone’s ass.