Poison Spur

This update to Poison Spur is going to be lame.  it is completely going to suck.  In fact, if you've managed to read this far, you're probably regretting it already.

I apologize.  I know you've come to expect better.  You usually have one hand wrapped around the neck of a gin bottle and another stuffed down your pants when you read my blog.  That's how much you like it.

And it should have been no different this time.  I had source material.  Oh boy, did I ever.  I went to Stockton on Saturday with Paula.  Stockton, CA, God's country, or at least where God squatted down after subsisting for a week on a diet of pork rinds and Schlitz.

Sunday, we met up with friends of hers and wandered SF's Chinatown at a street fair for Chinese New Year.  Frank Chu was there.  So was half the planet, it seemed.  I should have been able to come up with something clever from that experience as well.

Then a flu bug hit me.  At least I thought it was the flu.  My only symptoms were feeling feverish and fatigued.  This was not normal.  I just wanted to go home, lie down, and feel sorry for myself.  This is plenty normal though yesterday, it was in excess of what I'm used to.

So I went home.  My head hurt too much to read so I watched TV.  Larry the Cable Guy was doing stand-up on Comedy Central.  He still wasn't funny.  Perhaps I was not so far gone after all.

I ended up sleeping a lot, ten hours at least.  That definitely helped.  I feel much better today.  Unfortunately, I didn't have much chance to write. 

But write I must.  I made a promise to myself that I was going to be less of a loser from here on out.  I committed myself to writing more and posting to Poison Spur every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.  No excuses, not even when I feel off. 

So there you have it.  I'm keeping up my end of the bargain, for good or ill. 

Mandy was taken from her home on a winding road that made its way along high ridges and deep canyons.  The mountains gave way to foothills and beyond that lay a valley that spread as far as the eye could see.

Out in the valley, places that had once been towns and cities were now just remnants of buildings that had been bulldozed flat or gutted by fire.  Most people had moved to refugee settlements, away from the metropolitan areas.  These were made up of mobile homes along with camping tents and tool sheds repurposed as domiciles that sat tightly packed and surrounded with high fences topped with barbed wire.  A recently privatized state prison nearby had evicted its entire inmate population and now advertised cells for rent to those who could afford something a little more upscale than settlement living.

One unmistakable feature of the valley was the prevalence of open-air crematoria.  By a long-standing executive order, all corpses were to be burned in these facilities.  The fluids from the bodies of zombies, which did not burn, flowed outward from the bonfires and killed all vegetation they touched.  From the elevation of the foothills, the toxic rivulets that stained the earth around the fire pits looked like strands of coarse black hair.

The truck descended into the valley and continued along a main highway that had, like everything else, fallen into disrepair.  Potholes were unavoidable and large metal pieces of former automobiles were a common sight along the shoulder and out in the middle of the road.  Driving here in the day was dangerous.  Attempting it at night would be suicidal.

After a while, the truck pulled off the highway.  It drove up a dirt road bisecting two fields sloping gently upward on either side where lettuce had once been grown but now yielded a crop of weeds.

The truck came up to where there were a dozen steel cages lining the side of the road, stopped, and then backed up against the last of them.  Carl got out of the vehicle, trotted over to the cage, and opened it.  He then drew his sidearm, slid open the back door of the truck, and stood back.

At the same time, Dan lit a highway flare and climbed through the door that went from the cab of the truck into the main cargo area.  Mandy stood at a slight crouch and grunted at him.  She had freed herself of the net during the journey and was completely naked, the few strips of clothing she had on her after 15 years caught in the nylon.

Mandy was hungry.  She had been unable to hold onto the arm that lured her when she was trapped.  A much larger meal was now close to her but she was kept away by a red hissing flame.  She greedily eyed his love handles.

Dan waved the flare back and forth as he approached.

"How would you like me to shove this right up your ass?" he asked her, rhetorically of course.

Her dislike of fire outweighed her hunger and she retreated.  Dan moved toward her steadily and soon she was out of the back of the door and into the cage.  Carl swung the cage door shut and latched it.  For the second time in one day, Mandy was trapped.

Carl took a few of photographs of Mandy in her cage then the two men got back into the truck and drove away.  

A few of the other cages were occupied.  There was a fat man, an old woman, and a young man who had lost both his legs.  They were all zombies.  Mandy had no interest in them.

She spent the next three weeks in her cage.  She was given nothing to eat and it rained on her twice.  This continued until one cold Saturday morning.  Mandy was crouched motionless in the corner of the cage, a layer of frost covering her body.  A red light flashed in a small electronic box in an upper corner of the cage.  There was an audible click and an entire side of Mandy's prison came loose and fell flat onto the cold hard earth.

She did not respond to her newfound freedom until the scent of human flesh carried by the morning breeze found its way to her nostrils.  She got out of the cage and stood upright, then walked toward the origin of the smell, which came from somewhere beyond the barren field on the other side of the road.

When she crested the low hill, she walked toward three men standing about 50 yards away.  They were a few paces back from the severed arm that had first lured her and now was put out as bait again, thawing atop a picnic cooler. 

Two of the men were Carl and Dan.  The third man was taller than the others.  He wore a leather bomber jacket and camouflage pants that been ironed so there was a sharp crease running down each leg. He was also carrying a hunting rifle, which he pointed at Mandy and fired.

The shot was wide of its mark and the bullet sailed past her several feet away.  The next shot was better aimed but too low, hitting the dirt several feet in front of Mandy.

Carl walked over to the man and flipped a switch on the side of rifle, turning on the laser sight.  The man pointed the rifle so the red dot was directly over Mandy's heart and pulled the trigger.  The shot would have killed any living person.  Mandy didn't even slow down. He put another bullet into her right thigh, which gave her a slight limp.

"You've got to aim for the head, Mr. Madison," Dan called out.

Mr. Madison put the red dot in the middle of Mandy's forehead and fired one last shot.  The bullet entered Mandy's brain and she fell backward.  She lay very still in the shadow of a sign facing the road that said:

Zombie Hunter Safari

Where the savior of humanity is you!

Carl looked at Mandy through a pair of binoculars and then gave the all-clear signal.  The three men walked over to her.

"I got her! I sent her back to hell!" said Mr. Madison.

"You certainly did, sir," said Carl.

"You know," said Mr. Madison.  "I envy you guys.  I spent the whole war in my gated community and never saw any action.  Our private security took care of everything."

"We certainly could have used you," said Carl.  Isn't that right, Dan?"

Dan nodded.

Fluid seeped from Mandy's wounds, killing the surrounding weeds.

Mandy Banks was either 19 or 34 years old, depending how you looked at it.  She and her older brother Richard had run a gas station together along a road high in the mountains.  They never did a whole lot of business due to their remote location, but it had been enough to pay the bills. 

One afternoon fifteen years ago, Richard drove to the nearest town to buy supplies, leaving Mandy to mind the station.  A couple of hours later, she saw his pickup truck coming fast back up the road.    The truck skidded to a stop on the gravel out front of the gas pumps.  The driver-side door swung open and Richard piled out.  He was holding his hand over the side of his head.  Blood ran thick between his fingers and was all over the collar and shoulder of his shirt.

"My God, Richard!  What happened to you?" Mandy said.

"The whole town has gone nuts," Richard said.  "People were just attacking each other on the street.  And remember Mrs. Berryhill, your old piano teacher?  She came out of nowhere and tackled me.  Took damn near half my ear off with her teeth."

Mandy helped her brother into the office where they kept the first-aid kit.  As she cleaned and dressed his wound, she said she should take him to see a doctor.  He said the nearest doctor was in town and there was no way he was going back there until things calmed down.

That evening at the dinner table, Richard began to feel ill.  He held his arms around his sides and shivered.  When Mandy put her hand against his forehead, there was no sign of fever.  If anything, he was cold to the touch.

She put him to bed and stayed with him until he fell asleep.  He didn't look good.  Town full of crazies or no, she swore to herself that she would take him to see a doctor the next day.

When Mandy went to check on Richard in the morning, he was dead.  She dropped to her knees, took his hand in hers, and sobbed.  She knelt by his side and cried for a long time, blaming herself for not getting him medical attention right away.

Then Richard's eyes opened and he bit her on the arm.

The bite was deep enough to break the skin and draw blood.

"Damn it, Richard.  That hurt," she said.

She expected an apology from him but he didn't say anything.  He just stared at her with eyes that didn't know her anymore.  He reached with one of his hands and tried to grab her.  She batted it out of the way.  He then lunged at her with both hands but she dodged his attack and ran out of the bedroom.

She kept moving until she was out of the house and on the path back toward the gas station.  He looked over over her shoulder and saw Richard standing in in the doorway, drool running down his chin and that same empty look in his eyes.

Her first thought was to drive away in the pickup truck but the keys were in the house, with him.  Mandy was a good runner so her next plan was to head down the road on foot as quickly as she could and flag down the first car that came along.

As she ran along the side of the road, her heart pounded and blood pulsed through her veins.  The cold numbness of the bite wound on her arm quickly began to spread and her entire body started to shiver.  She felt exhausted, more so than she ever had in her life.  Mandy stumbled a few more steps then leaned against a tree and slid to the ground.

By the time the first car appeared, she lay there out of its view and unconscious.

That afternoon, she got up and walked back to the gas station.  The car that had passed her was parked in front of one of the pumps.  There was the sound of an infant crying in the back seat.  The driver of the car, a woman in her thirties lay on the gravel with her throat ripped away.  Richard crouched next to her.  He had managed to tear open her abdominal cavity and was greedily shoving sections of small intestine into his mouth.

When he heard his sister's feet scuff along the gravel, he looked up at her for a moment and then resumed his meal.  Mandy paid even less attention to him.  She walked to the car and opened the back door.  The baby's crying stopped and Mandy had herself a late lunch.

The plague that had turned Mandy and Richard into zombie cannibals was ravaging much of the country.  This led to a war between the living, who wished to remain that way, and the living dead, who kept trying to eat the living.

The battles continued for years.  The living soon found themselves to be a dwindling minority as people reluctant to shoot their zombie loved ones in the head were either devoured or infected and turned into zombies themselves.

In the end though, the army of the living prevailed.  Once people became accustomed to the idea that butting a bullet between your mother's eyes did not necessarily make you a bad person, the zombies never had a chance.  After that, it came down to a contest between gnashing teeth and firearms.  Countless species on the planet had already learned the painful lesson that it is really no contest at all.

Humanity, with their survival assured, then set about the tasks of putting corpses to the torch and building their world anew.

Mandy and Richard missed most of the excitement because the war never came to them.  They fed on wild game and the occasion outdoorsman or stranded motorist, letting one day drift into the next without a care in the world.

They lived (or rather, dwelled) at the gas station for over a decade, making forays into the wilderness periodically in search of food.  This went on until one evening when Richard was struck by lightning while chasing a raccoon across an open field.  He was filthy with motor oil from clumsily tripping and knocking over drums of the stuff back at the station so when the lightning bolt hit him, he went up like a torch.  He took two steps and then collapsed face forward, the flames coming off him licking the night sky.

Mandy was standing no more than 20 feet from her brother when this happened.

"Hnnngggh, mnnngggh," she said, expressing a disdain for fire common among zombies and wandered off to start her solo career.

The next five years were as uneventful for Mandy as the previous ten.  The only real difference was that the decline in numbers of the human population had brought the availability of their meat down to almost zero.  Mandy fed on possum, skunk, whatever else she could get her hands on and did so willingly, albeit with less enthusiasm than when she had the chance to bite into a hiking-firmed buttock of a Sierra Clubber.

Then one day, Mandy was walking along trail in a wooded area and saw a human arm hanging on a rope from a tree branch overhead.  She salivated, let out a little hiss, and marched toward the severed limb.

When her hand grasped the arm, she triggered a trap.  She was hauled up in a net made from thick nylon mesh.  Mandy thrashed about but was unable to free herself.

Two men approached.  They smelled of beer and being alive.

"Carl, I think we just recuped our expenses for gas and that arm," said one of them.

Mandy continued to writhe and strain against the nylon.

"Yeah we did," said Carl.  "She's got plenty of fight in her.  I bet our man'll like that."

"As long as she doesn't have too much fight."

"She could be Lucy fucking Liu and it won't matter one goddamn bit.  Come on, Dan.  Let's cut this bitch down and throw her ass in the truck."

I spent much of this past weekend trying to come up with a new story idea.  I wasn't tying for anything that would win me an award or even be publishable anywhere but in my blog.  I just wanted a story that could hold a reader's interest for 500 words or so.

I looked through a spiral notebook that I've used to jot down stuff that pops into my head when I was at work or some other place where I couldn't take an idea and run with it.  I thought there would be an absolute gem in there somewhere since I have all this untapped genius that has been sitting there waiting to get out for almost half a century.

Alas, there were no gems, and not even what would rate a cubic zirconium.  This is what I found instead:

• What the Retard Saw (murder-mystery title)
• He had sleepy creepy Baldwin eyes. (character description)
• "That's just God's way of telling you your faith doesn't mean shit to him." (Advice to the unfortunate)
• Watching stump fucking on "Darfur's Got Talent" (Pithy satire of mass entertainment)
• Women are like onion rings.  If you batter them, they won't make you cry. (Pearl of misogynist wisdom)

Not even my standards are that low.

I ended up spending most of Sunday morning staring at the ceiling in my bedroom and brainstorming.  I had a few premises with potential but nothing concrete.  Finally, I came up with something I could use.  Unfortunately, it not the kind of idea where the story writes itself.  To produce narrative that doesn't completely suck, I'm going to have to work with this one.

I should have something knocked out by Wednesday.  If I don't, expect another filler entry like this one.

Oh, if you're wondering what the photo has to do with this entry, the short answer is "nothing."  I just liked the pic and thought it might spice up my prose.  Naked mannequins, I mean, what's not to like?
 

I was never a huge fan of comic-book superheroes.  Superman, Batman, and the like were as much an enemy to me as the criminals they fought.  They were here to make the world safe for jocks, fascists, and idiots and I hated them for that.  

Admittedly, I did lust after superheroines from time to time though the villainesses were the ones who really floated my boat.  They, like their goody-two-shoes counterparts, were built like brick shithouses but what made them extra hot was that they were unconstrained by some lame definition of what is right, proper, and just.  These women knew how to party.

Much of the appeal of fantasy is that it doesn't have to be something your mother would approve of.  You can stray from the straight and narrow into the world of pure evil and when you're done, you hit the reset button and you're back in the real world as guilt free as when you took your detour.

That explains much of my love for horror comics in my youth.  The best were printed in black and white and were therefore exempt from that holdover from the McCarthy era, the Comics Code Authority.  Good did not have to triumph over evil.  What was meant to triumph was the horror, sometimes in the service of a harsh form of justice, but not always.

In these comics, heads came off.  Often.  I liked that.  I was a kid growing up in a southern California beach town where nothing bad every happened to anybody.  It was only natural for me to crave a little mayhem. 

My friends and I used to swap stories about people who died at Disneyland.  This was long before the internet came along so you could just make stuff up without any fear of fact checking.  I may not have actually believed that some bozo stood up on the Matterhorn, got decapitated, and had his headless body cartwheel and splash down in the submarine ride.  I didn't have to.  The story was gruesome as hell and that was good enough for me.

Well, it is probably more accurate to say it was good enough for the moment.  I needed more.  I wanted stories.  They didn't have to be plausible stories or even good ones. 

A typical plotline in either Eerie or Creepy would be about a guy who gets sick of his wife's nagging he shoots her and dumps her body in the swamp.  That night, the dead wife, dripping with algae and assorted swamp slime, walks in through the front door and eats his face.

What more could a twelve year old ask for?

A few weeks ago, I was in a bookstore in Sacramento and bought three hardcover volumes of Creepy issues from the mid 1960s. The material was about a decade older than the stuff I remember so it was all a fresh read.  The themes, however, were very familiar.  Ghosts and ghouls, vengeance and violence, it was like a reunion with an old friend.

It was also an inspiration.  I often have a hard time coming up with new material for this blog.  The pulp reviews were fun for a while but if I'm going to be showcasing bad fiction, I would prefer it be my own.  Horror stories, especially the kind that exalt in their own cheesiness, seem to be the kind of stuff I can churn out with regularity. 

Oh, don't expect any young-vampires-in-love bullshit.  I don't even like the fanged fops.  If I ever write a vampire story, I'll have the sorry undead bastard dumpster diving for used tampons.

It was a rainy spring morning in 1972.  Leon stood alone at the last stop for the school bus before it turned right on West 5th Street and made the three-mile trip from the beach community of Oxnard Shores to Curran Elementary.

Leon's raincoat looked like a hand-me-down.  It was certainly too big for his four-foot-three frame.  The sleeves hung down past the tips of his fingers and the hood that was pulled up over his head covered nearly his entire face.

The bus driver almost missed stopping for him.  Usually, there were no children waiting there and he would drive on by without a moment's thought.

The bus came to a halt and the door swung open.  As Leon climbed the steps into the vehicle, the driver noticed that something was not quite right.  This schoolboy smelled of cigarettes and bourbon.  What's more, a close under Leo's visor revealed he had five o'clock shadow.

"Wait a second," said the bus driver.  "You're not a kid at all."

Leon pulled back his hood to expose a face that was no less than forty years old.  He then pointed a revolver between the bus driver's eyes.

"Fuck you," Leon said and pulled the trigger, spraying his brains into the laps of identical twins in the front seat with matching dresses and ribbons in their hair.

The twins screamed in terror.  So did the rest of the kids.

"Fuck you too," Leon said.

He opened his raincoat to show he was holding a Thompson submachine gun with a 100-round drum magazine.  He holstered his revolver, leveled the Tommy gun at the children and opened fire.  Little hands and "Brady Bunch" lunchboxes were thrust up in defense but they proved to be a pitiful shield against the deadly hail of bullets.  Those kids who scrambled to escape through windows and the rear door fared no better.

By the time Leon's magazine was empty, there was no more screaming, only a few moans and sobs.  Leon quickly silenced them as well by walking the center aisle of the bus and delivering a finishing shot from his revolver where needed.  In the end, 23 people lay dead.  Among them was Cindy Jacobs, a straight-A student and the odds-on favorite to win the class spelling bee two weeks away.

This was the same bus I rode every day but I was not there that morning.  I was home sick with the flu, blissfully unaware of the horrors that had just transpired.

Almost four decades have passed since the events of that fateful day.  Their only reminder sits on my bedside table.  It is a small plastic trophy with the inscription, "Spelling Bee Winner, Mrs. Silver's Fourth Grade Class."

Not only Cindy Jacobs but every other kid who volunteered to compete in the class spelling be had died on that bus.  I had won by default. 

I was quickly eliminated in the school-wide competition but for the brief period in between, I savored the only taste of victory I would ever know.

There is a business card in my wallet.  It reads: 




If I ever reach that point in my life where I need to feel even more like a winner, I know who I'll be calling again.

"Oh Mother," said Samantha.  "Put away that stick of butter."

"Oh Samantha," said her mother.  "You haven't gone veggie on me, have you?"

"It's 'vegan' Mother, and yes I have."

"Your father wouldn't have liked that, you know."

"Samantha let out a laugh and then stopped herself.  As a child, there were many meatless dinners.  There was no money to buy any because her father had spent it all on liquor.  He would then accuse Samantha and her mother of stealing from him.  One time, he pounded his fist on his puffed-out chest and swore that he, the provider and man of the house, would go out and hunt for meat just like in olden days.  That night, he killed the family dog, cooked it, and forced them to eat it.

This was her father, a man who was frequently unemployed, always abusive, and took far too long to drink himself to death.  His funeral that afternoon had been attended by Samantha, her mother, and a half dozen of his buddies from the bar.  It was from overheard conversation that Samantha learned that her father had a reputation among his pals as a real "pussy hound."

He was, in short, a typical male, perhaps even worse than most.

Samantha poured a cup of peanuts into the saucepan containing water, sugar, salt, and corn syrup.  She then slowly stirred the mix together as it simmered on the stove.

"What are you using instead of butter?" Samantha's mother asked.

"Rapeseed oil."

"Rape seed.  That's fitting.  It was, after all, one of the prime ingredients in your conception.  It's funny.  If I has been more successful fighting your father off, you wouldn't even be here."

Samantha and her mother watched the water slowly boil from the saucepan.  After most of it had evaporated, Samantha stirred in the rapeseed oil and baking soda, and poured the contents on a cooking sheet to cool.

"He used to beat me, you know," said Samantha's mother.

"He used to molest me," said Samantha.  "I think that's worse."

"Yes, but did he beat you?"

"Sometimes."

"He beat me a lot more than sometimes, I can tell you that much."

The two women stood and stared at the steam rising from the molten peanut brittle as it began to congeal and harden on the cookie sheet.  Each passing minute seemed like an eternity.

"I have cancer," Samantha's mother said.

"Me too," said Samantha.  "What kind do you have?"

"Ovarian."

"I have breast cancer.  That's far worse than ovarian."

"Is not."

"Is too."

At that moment, the fabric of the fictive milieu ripped open and out I stepped, brushing fragments of suspended disbelief from my shoulders.

"Who the hell are you?" demanded Samantha's mother.

"Can't you see we're having a women's moment?" added Samantha.

I put my hands on my hips and cleared my throat.

"I am a dissatisfied reader who has Gumby power and is not afraid to use it," I said.  "I have never been a big fan of Ms. Leeks but was content to endure her contrivances, or rather had been until you two came along.  Good God, have you listened to yourselves?  I had no choice but to step into you little story and take matters into my own hands."

I jumped up on the table, straddled the cookie sheet, and began to pull down my pants.  The two women gasped in unison.

"Cool your jets, ladies.  I'm just here to shit on your peanut brittle."

When I squatted down, it dawned on me that my own existence could be nothing more than a work of fiction as well.  Maybe some reader of my story would be just as disgusted with me and use his or her Gumby power to enter my world to dish out a similar form of literary criticism.  But it didn't have to be that way.  Fictional or not, I knew in my heart that I possessed free will.  I could shape my own destiny.  I made a pact with myself to do just that. 

Confident that I was entering a new era of being the best person that I could be, I pinched off a section of bowel movement that hit the hot vegan peanut brittle and sizzled like steak.

I like the picture of a peasant girl on this Russian chocolate-bar wrapper, and not just because she looks like the long-lost child of John Candy.  For one thing, she looks nothing like the sort of kid you'd see on American packaging, a greedy-eyed little bastard with a maniacal grin who puts his love of consuming the product he's advertising above life itself.

With this child, you're not exactly sure what's on her mind.  She could just be off in her own little world.  Children are prone to do that.

That would be nice.

Then again, perhaps her blank stare comes from little mind working overtime trying to process a visual no child should ever have to see.  Like her father bound and gagged while her mother does the horizontal bop with a cossack, Stalinist komissar, or Vladimir Putin, depending on the era.  With a culture and history as rich as Russia's, there are so many to choose from.

Too extreme?  Disturbing?  Foreign?  OK, picture the kid safe and sound in her Amercian suburban home.  Mom and Dad are downstairs watching "American Idol."  The kid walks into the home office, climbs into a desk chair, and starts surfing the internet.  Her mother and father are very responsible parents and installed a filtering program so any attempt to access adult content will redirect the browser to the Disney's Little Mermaid Fun Page.  It's a very sophisticated piece of software but not without its limitations.  It can't know about every objectionable site out there.  It does not know about Poison Spur.

This is a very precocious child, able to read even as a preschooler, but too innocent to know what all those words mean.  She takes in as many words as will fit in her brain and desiring explanations, ventures downstairs.

"Mommy, Daddy, what's a pug room?"

A guy can dream, can't he? 

My old roommate, the late Ralph Ross, once told me a joke about two hikers who encounter a bear and start running for their lives.

"We're never going to outrun this bear," says one guy.

The other guy says, "I don't need to outrun the bear, only you."

There's a valuable lesson to be learned there.  Unfortunately for Ralph, it was just one more piece of wisdom that failed to resonate.  If there was anything that Ralph taught me, it was that "happen" and "occur" are not necessarily synonymous.  Things happened to him all the time but nothing aver occurred to him. 

He found himself on the losing end of life's race to survive and died in 1992.  It is said that a fool and his money are soon parted.  In Ralph's case, the same can be said for a fool and his motorcycle, especially after hitting a guard rail. 

As for me, well, I'm still running.

I sometimes think the world has an annual body-count quota.  The old and weak and the young and stupid fill up most of the coffins.  If you've managed to reach an age where you're somewhere in the middle, survival can be pretty easy.  It can also be pretty dull.

Of course, I'm talking about folks who live in an industrialized nation, have some level of education, and have reasonable job prospects.  That's a pretty small percentage globally but a rather high one for people reading this blog.  In fact, I would be be bold enough to say that the average Poison Spur reader has fewer than ten flies crawling around the edges of his or her mouth at any given moment.

People are able to take the long view and suck up the boredom.  There are more important things to consider.  They have families to raise or other responsibilities outside of work that give their life fulfillment.  And then there are people like me. 

I've always dealt with the specter of life's obligations by running like hell in the other direction.  I'm fully aware that I need to keep working so I don't end up some homeless guy who sits on a bench sporting a ZZ Top beard and shits his pants while begging for money to bankroll his filth.  Other than that, there is not a whole lot I do to justify my existence and that shows in my attitude at work.  In fact, it's safe to say that my level of professionalism at every job I've ever had peaked at the end of the end of the interview.

Oh, I muddle through well enough to not get fired and avoid the sort of hijinks I used to do when working at Dining Commons in college.  For example. I once took a condom out of its wrapper and putting it in the bread warmer, resulting in some freshman finding it melted to the side of her dinner roll.  I'm better behaved than that now. 

However, I have even in the past decade pressed my luck just to make my professional life more challenging.  Massive hangovers were a common occurrence for me although I wouldn't say I used to make it a habit of staying up all all night on drugs and spending the next day on the job and getting paid even though I could barely put a sentence together.  That would be wrong (not to mention illegal) so I wouldn't say I was doing that at all.  And even if I was, I'm too old and decrepit to continue with that level of foolishness.  Not that I would ever do such a thing, mind you.

Nowadays, I'm pretty much just a Walter Mitty miscreant.  In my world of make-believe, disgusting limericks and haikus of my own creation cover the surface of every men's room stall.  I've spotted the CEO's laptop unattended and use his account to send a company-wide email with the message "LET'S FUCK!"  There is a fetal pig floating in the coffee pot.  Fortunately for all concerned, I am content to snicker like Muttley at what shall never be. 

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to work for some fucking reason or another.

I steered with one hand and held  the other cupped over an eye to keep me from seeing double as I drove.  I had less than a mile to go before I made it home to a warm bed, two kids, and a wife who was willing to give me one more chance.

I came up to a corner and made a left turn onto the quiet residential street where my house was located several blocks away.  I am quite a good driver so I was able to execute the turn with only a mild screech of the tires.  Had I noticed either the stop sign or the police car, it would have been perfect.

The cop pulled me over, got out of his car, and approached mine.  He pointed his flashlight directly in my face and asked me for my license, registration, and proof of insurance.  I managed to gather these with a minimum of fumbling around in the glove box and under the seats.  I handed them to him smiling as wide as I could to show him how cooperative I was   At this point, the cop asked me if I had been drinking.

"Not really," I said.

This was somewhat true, relatively speaking.  While I had in fact just left a bar and indeed alcoholic beverages were consumed, I was nowhere near as intoxicated as I had been on recent nights.  In fact, I was arguably more sober than a week ago when I came to at the wheel with the engine still running, my wife standing outside the driver-side window in her bathrobe with in her arms crossed, wanting to know what possessed me to park on our front lawn.  Yeah, definitely, I was more sober than that.

The cop asked me to step out of the car and told me he was going to give me a field sobriety test.  I was instructed to stand in the middle of the road looking upward with my arms outstretched from my sides.  I did what he wanted, told him it was a piece of cake, and asked if I could please go home now.

The cop said that the test was not over.  He wanted me to touch the tip of my nose with the index finger of my right hand, bending only my elbow and continuing to stare straight up at the sky.  When I tried this, my finger came in contact with the tip of my nose at the exact same moment the street came in contact with the back of my head.

Hitting the pavement like that didn't knock me cold but it did stun me.  As I stood up, I asked the cop if we could make it best two out of three.

He told me I was under arrest for suspicion of driving under the influence.  I pleaded with him to reconsider.  I told him how if I got another DUI, my wife would leave me and take the kids with her.  These kids, I added, loved their father so much they've poured my liquor down the drain and cry when I throw up in the morning.

The cop told me I should have thought of that before I decided to drink and drive.

I believed I was well and truly doomed but then a shot from a high-powered rifle rang out.  The bullet made a rather small hole as it entered one side of the cop's head and a much larger one when it came out the other side.

For a second or two, the cop just stood there with glazed eyes and his lips pursing like he was going to blow me a kiss or something (I still don't know what was supposed to be up with that!)  He then fell forward and lay there deader than if he had never been born.

I waved in the direction of the rooftop where I had seen the muzzle flash.

"Thank you Crosshairs Avenger!" I shouted, but it was too late.  He had already disappeared into the night.  When a man takes it upon himself to protect a city and its citizens from the excesses of overzealous law enforcement, there leaves little time to stick around and listen to people express their gratitude.  But grateful I am and every time another one of his daring exploits is reported in the news, I take heart that there is hope for justice on the streets of this city I call home.