Good guys; bad guys, all the same

    Scene:  (Bill is in bed)   -- a hand shakes him awake, then camera pans out to see the back of Martin.   MARTIN:             Wake up, Bill             Quick   BILL (GROGGY)             Huh?             What do you want, Martin?   MARTIN:             I need you to wake up             IT’S IMPORTANT   BILL:             What time is it?   MARTIN:             About 4 o’clock   BILL             IN THE MORNING!!!   MARTIN:     ...

  Most of my clients don’t care who they stick it into as long as she is young and fairly pretty. For them any twenty-something girl will do. But for some guys, twenty-something is just too much for them – too much attitude. These guys need girls who won’t give them any guff. So I got younger girls for these guys. But young girls are hard to come by – and the younger they are, the harder they are to find. So this means my customers got to pay more. One guy with a lot of money always comes in looking for a young as I can get. Maybe he’s got troubles at home. Maybe he’s got a bitch of a wife and kids who won’t listen to him. So he wants a kid he can get with the least guff possible. He’s also a particular sort. He hates getting kids every Tom, Dick and Harry’s had before him, and hates having the same kid twice. And though he paid a pretty penny to go through my stable of younger kids, he wanted an even younger kid. And he wanted her exclusive and was willing to pay for the privilege...

  I pull into the gas station my radiator steaming from too many miles under too much sun. I glance back up the highway half expecting to see police cars there. I expect them everywhere I go because I know they are always looking for me. Five murders in LA alone More elsewhere. The newspapers ask why I have killed whole families and if I am a member of a cult. A young man with a faded blue uniform stained brown in spots asks if I want gas as well as water. I nod. He looks too weary to be suspicious. I ask for the toilet. He points to the side of the stucco station where a rusted metal sign once said “restrooms.” The inside smells of urine and hand soap, the undissolved powder of Borax spilling over the sink side and onto the tiles near the toilet. It smells of Georgia again, lacking only the sweet scent of bubble gum I chewed non-stop to keep off the road sickness, my old man shouting at me for being a sissy each time I came close to vomiting, momma telling him to stop so I wouldn’...

  To tell you the truth, Darcy, I’m not surprised. Jason was over the edge when I still hung out with you guys. I knew sooner or later he would murder somebody and how he has. I didn’t mind the robbery. I still steal sometimes when things get tough. But the beatings scared me. You could see how much Jason enjoyed it just from the look on his face. And with you and Hollis cheering him on, it was more than I could take. That’s the real reason I stopped coming around. Sooner or later it had to lead to this. The last thing I need is to get my self hanged for something I didn’t do. You want me to help him? How? Breaking him out of jail is another way to get myself in his boat. You want to spring him, you spring him, leave me out of it. And for god’s sake, shoot him in the head once you do. Or I will.   Main Menu email to Al Sullivan

    “Call Martin,” the note says. I have to read it three times to make sure it really says what it says. Martin who? The only Martin I know died two weeks ago in an auto accident up the coast. Okay, so the circumstances are suspicions enough to have the police investigate foul play. But this note borders on the occult. And I turn the note over and over searching all sides for clues as to who send it. But it only an old office memo. It takes me another minute to realize it came from Martin’s office And I get scared. What next? A phone call from the great beyond? Maybe the police lied to me and never did close the investigation like they said. Maybe they know the truth and are using this note to trap me. I glance out the front door expecting to see a Swat team there. It is time to pack my bags and get out of town. Someone knows the truth. It can’t me Martin. He’s dead. I know that for a fact because I’m the one who killed him.     Main Menu email to Al Sullivan

  I breathe deep, but it is not enough. Butler’s out-of-breath voice yelling at me to launch before the purple plants grip our ship so hard we can’t. Why we landed here, I still don’t know. One of Butler’s schemes to find which planet Captain Rake left his treasure on, but if he ever came here, he would have hated the place as much as we do. Purple vines streaming around us like water, attaching to the metal with purple claws, digging in with every intention of getting at us inside. Take off! Take off! Butler screams. But the air is so thick I can’t think. An overdose of carbon dioxide even the best adapters could not overcome, and our adapters are not good nor new. Take off! It takes me a moment to figure out the sequence, which series of protocols I need to put into place so that we simply lift off the planet’s surface and not blasted into hyper space. Ever since I came to space at 16, I’ve been fearful of getting lost – finding myself some place where the stars are so unfamiliar...

The wind blows across the Texas Panhandle like sandpaper across my face, a harsh sun making this dip south feel like a trip through hell. I think of LA and how much I miss its dismal streets and how I ache to get back to a place where rain takes a whole season to wash the world away, rather than this place which dumps it all on you at once after months of slow scalding torture. I keep thinking I’m already dead, despite the doctors’ claims – they asking me again and again if I’ve ever used a dirty needle or made love to another man. They make assumptions about me because my driver’s license says I live in LA. They ask me for a list of lovers, then shake their heads when I give them one, trying hard to make out the boy’s names from the girl’s, and wondering how on earth they will manage to contact them all, eyeing me as if they suspected me of deliberately spreading a plague. The car radio naturally stopped working in St. Louis. So I feel again in the glove compartment for the box of bat...

  SCENE: Inside a suburban home – door bell rings   NICK: (opens the door:   GEORGE (pushes into the room accompanied by Frank and a swat team) Nicolas Barrens?   NICK: (in a weak voice) Yes?   FRANK: You’re under arrest (pulls out cuffs)     NICK: For what?     GEROGE: You’re a suspected terrorist   NICK: But I’m only a high school student   GEORGE: Don’t give us lip, boy, you’ll get your chance to talk when we get you downtown.   NICK: I need to call my mother at work.   GEORGE: You’ll call no one.   NICK: But I have a right to…   GEORGE: Under the patriot act you have no rights. Bring him along, Frank.   FRANK: I think we should let the boy call his mother, George.   GEORGE: No way. He’s a terrorist suspect.   FRANK: But he’s only 17.   GEORGE: Seventeen year olds can kill. Remember Vietnam? Those kids were half his age and they blew GI s up.   NICK: Can you tell me what I did?   ...

  They wouldn’t let me kill the punk, even when I told them the punk was costing me two hundred gs a day in lost receipts. Bad for business, said the big nosed jew who did the company books, not blood enough for family, but one of theirs just the same. Eating at the same table with them, patting his lips with the same linen napkins, telling me they wouldn’t let anyone kill the son of a mayor over such a small thing. Had the boy raped my daughter, well maybe they would have let me put a bullet in him. But for money -- especially it being my money -- they weren’t going to let the city start a war over it. I wasn’t blood either. Just the a small town hood that had made something of myself, out eating the rest of the sharks so that I was the big shark in my corner, but never so big a shark as to take on this suit and tie cigar smoking crowd, who decided life and death of people like me over sips of espresso. I wanted to kill them all, the jew and the big noses, and the few other tokens...

    My woman yells at me thought the prison bars, asking when I’m coming home, and if not soon, she won’t be there. She’s always harping on me when I can’t do anything about a situation. My fists are so tight around the bars she can see what I’m thinking and for the first time shuts her mouth, waits a minute, then more calmly says, “I just gotta know.” I see the fear in her eyes, as if she is picturing me with my hands around her throat instead of the bars. I tell her I’ll be out when ever the sheriff makes up his mind to set me free. The grim lawman holds a grudge against me because even dead drunk I whipped him, and in front of his deputies no less. She shouts that ain’t good enough since she’s got kids to feed and I ain’t helping feed them by my lying around in jail I tell her to get and wait for me, and if she don’t wait I’ll know where to find her. That makes her blush. She tells me she ain’t taking up with Robert no more, something we both know is a lie, since she always...

  My once snug jacket hangs on my slim shoulders like poorly fitted curtains. Still, she says I look fine. She doesn’t see me. She floats ahead of me into the hall and down a memory lane I can’t share She has come to say farewell to all the friends she made a college. I cling to her shoulder like a crutch. I envy her. I am the perpetual dropout, the lost soul who doesn’t fit in with any civilized society, needing only cowboy boots, spurs and a long ride into the sunset to feel remotely comfortable. She forgets me. I hang back looking out the window at the dark and the parade of cars that streams along the riverside road, headlights like eyes, the people inside each vehicle invisible as if simply parts of a watch. The swish of tires on the wet pavement like the ticks of time passing. I count each despite my promise to her to remain social. Her shrill laugh, her uncaring air, stirs up something in me as if mixing inside me the ingredients of an explosion. Jealous rages I cannot wait ...

  A brown Nova slides into the land ahead of us, and I shout, gearing down the trash truck to keep from hitting the bastard. The last thing I need is an accident today after all that went on last night. Harry, my partner, sits in the passenger seat of my truck, munching on a BLT so loud I’m nearly deaf from the crunch. So I tell him to shut up. With his mouth full of food, he mumbles it ain’t his fault I broke up with Susie. I tell me to shut up about that, too, then slam on the break as some soccer Mom with suicidal tendencies weaves in front of me in an olive station wagon, deciding without signaling that she likes my lane better than her own, and we both skid on the ice like we’re trying out for the ice capades. Winter struck early this year, a snake attack that sent the temperature plummeting 50 degrees over night, leaving me and Harry trapped in a rush hour parade of panicked people, car fumes rising around us as if the city needs to shed a little more head before really kicki...

  They’re all gone. The people and the visions. Though the living room looks like Kansas after Dorothy left it. Food strewn across the carpet, revealed in the orange wedge of sunlight as I throw open the porch curtain to let in fresh air. The place smells of pot and hormones -- ashtrays overflowing with the endless parade of more ordinary cigarettes. Butts even float in the bottoms of almost empty wine bottles. I smell him, the stranger who stalked my girlfriend all night, giving us both hits of LSD as if the each tiny tablet was key for his getting between her legs. His heavy cologne stains me with the outraged I was too stoned to stop. She slumbers in the other room alone as I stand naked, bathed in sunlight. I am changed. A chemical reaction running me in a way I can’t describe, as if I was the rape victim, as if my virgin thoughts have been violated by the light show and the hallucinations, s if I am some new person craving to get back to what I once was. I’m too scared to wake...

I mean it. They don’t get me back alive My ankles are raw from the hackles and I’m nearly deaf from the chains ringing in my ears all the time. I ain’t no Cool Hank Luke. I didn’t get into this scrape for cutting off no parking meter heads. I killed somebody and got caught. I ain’t the first time I killed nobody either. But what the law don’t know what hurt me, and that’s why they put me on a chain gang instead of the gallows. Some folks said I got off lucky by not getting hanged. Even the judge seemed to think he’d done me a favor. Some favor. Niggers on the outside have it better than I do. No one beats them up unless they do or say something uppity. Me, the screws figure I ought to get beaten for getting away with murder like I did. As if 20 years hard labor isn’t punishment enough. Sometimes I think I got a raw deal all the way around. I didn’t plan to kill nobody. Even those other times when I didn’t get caught. I just got into a situation with no other way out. This time it was i...

  Hello, Bill? Are you there? This is your wife You remember the one who cooked your meals, did your laundry, raised your child for all those years. I’m the one with the big boobs and the foolish notion you ought to be loyal to me. You’re payments are late Don’t give me any excuses about you’re being short this mouth. I’m sure you pay your bookie and your bar tab on time. Don’t groan. You know it’s true. You also know I have bills of my own to pay. So you’d better deliver or I’ll have you in court again. After all, she’s your daughter, too. And she spends like you as if that’s only trait she inherited. This is the last time I’m going to call. I have my lawyer’s number right here, and you know how much pleasure he gets from this after all you put him through in high school He would like nothing better than to see you in jail. Bill? Do you hear me? Call me. You have my number. You’d better have my money, too.   Main Menu email to Al Sullivan

  Okay, I got no class. Not like you see art thieve do in the movies. I just went it, cut the stinking thing out of the frame and stuffed the rolled up work of genius in my jacket. When the guard yelled for me to stop, I ran. Now I’m on the street looking for a way to keep the cops from catching me. I’m not even sure what I meant to do with the canvas when I thought up this get rich quick scheme a week ago. Hell, I’m better at hocking hot radios than masterpieces. The only thing I know about art is what I got in art appreciation in high school where I got a D. In fact, seeing my year book made me think this plan up. I figured I could get a lot more for something I took from a museum tan I could haul out of people’s houses. And I need a vacation. Sure, people think thieving is easy. I’m telling you, it’s not. I could get a day labor job that’s easier. You just get hooked on stealing the way you do on drugs, and can’t stop. I’ve tried. I got a warehouse job once. I hated it so much I...