Okay, I'm invoking the Meemaw Clause on this short story. My MeeMaw (my grandmother) sometimes drops in to read my blog and I told her that whenever I put up a story that had a lot of bad language or explicit sexual content, I would warn her so she wouldn't read and be offended. Meemaw, don't read this story because it's got a lot of both. Don't say I didn't warn you.
This story is still in rough draft, but I thought I'd put it out in its infantile form to see what kind of reader response it got. Feel free to let me know what works for you, what doesn't, what you liked, and what can make it better. You can leave a comment or send me an e-mail through the Contact link in the sidebar. As always, thanks for reading...
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Where did the Whole Thing Fall to Shit
by Joshua Minton
This was the defining question of Ronnie Dawn’s life and his preeminent preoccupation as he stood in the Kroger pharmacy line metamorphosing from lower middle class slave wage worker to a criminal. It was getting dark outside and a black drug dealer named Ralphonso was waiting in a 1973 Chevy Impala for the two pill bottles Ronnie Dawn was about to exchange for a legitimate physician’s note. Ralphonso is going to unscrew the pill bottle, shake the capsules into his hand, eye them, smell them, pop one, and then funnel the rest back into the bottle. If the pills are good, he will reach into his left jacket pocket and pay Ronnie Dawn six hundred dollars in twenties and tens. If the pills are wrong, he will reach into his right pocket and pull a Targus .38 snubnose revolver, jam it into Ronnie’s ribs and tell him to take over the driving. He would then force Ronnie to drive to the junkyard that Ralphonso uses to store his drugs and he would either beat him mercilessly with a pair of brass knuckles (also in Ralphonso’s right pocket) or would murder him outright to save time.
Even under the harsh fluorescent lights of the Kroger, Ronnie was still the good times man, twice-married with two kids he knew for sure were his and one that was still a rumor in his mind, a story from long ago passed from acquaintance to friend to his ear during a bullshit session over a sizzling pig, a case of Keystone light, and the Bristol NASCAR race. The rumor was that his first wife, Holly, had given birth to a son seven months after she put him out by flicking a lit cigarette at him and telling him to
get right the fuck out and never come back. If it was his son, he only hoped he fared better with women than his father did; but besides these well-wishes, it was an urban legend to him.
There were seventeen people in line and the ribbon ropes were effecting traffic in the winding snake pattern that summed up the modern state of humanity, at least the slice that Ronnie had been relegated to graze on during his time on earth. They kept calling for Mr. Flick over the Kroger intercom and the woman in front of Ronnie kept huffing and shuffling her plastic sack from one hand to the other. Ronnie could see the circular plastic puff of an Oscar Meyer bologna package and a six-pack of V8 vegetable juice in cans through the tan translucent sack. She turned back to look at him, hoping to find another disgruntled line waiter. He moved his eyes away to avoid the woman’s suspicion. It seemed lately he was always moving to avoid being suspected of one thing or another.
It felt like he had spent the last eight years of his life setting up pristine bowling pins which had all been knocked down in the last two months in some kind of cosmic strike, a cruel joke. He was eight weeks from being laid off and two weeks from last speaking to Lori, his present wife, who didn’t flick a cigarette at him but told him to
get the fuck out all the same. He hadn’t seen his kids in a week and a half and it was like someone did invisible surgery on him to remove everything that made him a man. Hell, it wasn’t someone—he knew exactly who it was and he hoped the bitch burned in a diesel fuel fire.
Ronnie had squeaked by in life with the juvenile notion that men were the powerful pillars that kept the wheel swinging and the birds singing. And even as he stood in awe of Lori’s pregnant belly, he didn’t realize that there was multitudes more power in that ball of flesh than the highest yield nuclear warheads in the pocket arsenals of the masters of war. He and Lori had built a life for themselves but once she was pregnant, nature marginalized him into some kind of bystander. Life was just happening to him again.
Women had always ruled his life though he tries to remember it different. In his mind, he smacked his mother across the face when he was seventeen; stormed out of the house, fired up his Ford Ranger, and sped off into the hot summer afternoon of Central Ohio feeling like a motherless child. In his mind, he yelled so loud, so long, and so many times at Holly that she finally dropped down like a bleeding dog that learned its function in the world. There were nights when she slept on the couch and he would stretch out his arms and legs in bed like the Vitruvian Man in some kind of post-battle victory pose which always involved him being alone. It never occurred to him that victory could involve two hearts celebrating mutual achievement—the trophy always got dipped in blood when he threw down.
Life is a struggle—that’s what his mother taught him and was the true legacy of his fatherless rearing. His mother’s voice rose from his memory as he stood watching the woman continue to shift the bag from hand to hand, grump, and huff about the wait. His mother spoke from the halo of cigarette smoke he held her memory inside and her sentences always cracked free from the smack of her lips together like the warning clap of a thunderstorm.
Life sucks and then you die, Ronnie. He had done so many things to make her prophecy come true. He imagined her in hell right now, cackling, coughing, and laughing at him through the flames.
He thought of Arlene in hell, her devious ways catching up with her on final judgment where she would be asked to account for her emotional crimes. The awful judge would run ‘em down, the whole list, how she went from man to man, sucked him dry and moved onto the next one. Her attention was intoxicating on them. Her compliments were poisonous weapons of wooing that spun webs in the minds of her prey and when she finally bit, she always bit deadly. She was one of those
witchy broads, as his cop brother referred to them. One of those gypsie-like bitches who infested a man’s mind like cockroaches in the cupboard, scuttling around until they ruined all the food equally. Of course, it started off innocent enough. She was working as a cashier in the drive-through oil-change joint he had been assistant manager for during the past year. The Warlord Oil Change Company offered him salary plus immediate benefits starting off at eight grand more than the Jiffy Lube he worked at before.
Your butt looks really good in those slacks. That’s how the whole thing started. It wasn’t even a battle tactic for him to be pursued; he had no attack plan as response besides,
Thanks.
Then it was,
I had a dream about you last night, acrylic nails and tanned flesh on his arm, fingertips making circlets on his tricep and his dick getting hard. Then it was drinks after five—ostensibly with everyone and eventually happy hour dwindled to horny minutes, erect and swirling around them both with margaritas, draft beers, soaked cardboard coasters, wadded up napkins, and finger trails through the nearly clear beer spilled on the table. Lips were licked. Glances given. Innuendo was the common tongue in the world they built for themselves between his wife and her absent conscience. There was lipstick on half the pilsners left on the table when they left the bar and even though he had a full tank, he stopped at the gas station on the way home to pump $1.23 worth of premium unleaded so he could spill some on his hands to mask the scent of her saliva, perfume, and the musk of her twat.
The line was moving now and Ralphonso was probably shifting in his pleather seat, fingering the trigger of his .38 and jonesing to light the overstuffed blunt roach in the rusted ashtray of his gray Impala. A severely obese woman left the counter with four stapled bags of pills or creams or whatever it was that fat people used to treat themselves against themselves nowadays. The huffing woman in front of him turkey necked to the right and left of the man in front of her, cursing the
fat bitch for not moving quicker.
Lori never suspected a thing even up to the point when he told her because guilt got the better of him and because he was bad off when Arlene dumped him after their third hump in the back of his father-in law’s Chevy Astro Van he was driving because the bank claimed the unpaid note on his pickup truck the month before. They did it between the car seats that his children sat in each morning and where his wife put the milk and eggs so they wouldn’t roll around in the back. The van rocked so hard that the little mirror fell off which let him see what his kids were doing in the backseat while he drove. Afterwards, he collapsed against her, his jeans around his ankles and his white calf socks collecting fragments of dead leaves from the van’s filthy floorboard.
He never felt so lonely as that night when he drove her back to her car still in the oil change parking lot. Her tanned arms sparkled in the moonlight from the expensive fruit lotion she put on to mask the scent of their sex. She huffed and grabbed the ceiling handle when he ran the red light and turned left across a busy intersection to drift recklessly into the Warlord’s parking lot, brakes squealing into the manager’s parking space. She reminded him of his wife when she huffed at him and the mental connection triggered a wave of neurochemical disappointment cascading through his nervous system. And it was that moment when he felt Arlene slipping from him as the diffused physical attraction between them bled into their past, leaving only the monotony of strangers without the sweaty possibility and mysterious feel of each other’s sexual organs one day touching each other. The loss of hearing her say,
See ya, turn her back and walk to her Ford Festiva was as poignant as watching a loved one slip away in a cold hospital bed. He missed her wholly before her vaginal fluid had even dried up and evaporated from his matted pubic hair.
The huffy woman was at the counter now, the sack with the bologna at her feet. She was barking directions at the pharmacist, brandishing her insurance card like a VIP pass, slapping it down on the counter, pointing to the brand name of her carrier, and pushing it forward into the pharmacist’s space with the snobbery of European royalty. She held her fat head high on her rounded shoulders and reminded Ronnie of the pictures of Old King Cole in his son’s book of nursery rhymes that he used to ask him to read to him before bed every night.
One week after their car seat fuck, Arlene was heading off to the bar with the head mechanic, her car stayed in the parking until late at night or sometimes the next morning. Two weeks after that Ronnie was laid off due to cutbacks. Warlord was closing six branches and eliminating an entire level of middle management as they invested in a better inventory tracking system and instituted a work-group based reporting structure where head mechanics shared managerial duty in exchange for a greater share of the bonus that formerly all went to the assistant manager.
Sorry Ron, it’s a hell of a thing was the only comfort that the bald headed store manager offered him after taking his signature on the consent to release form.
It was his turn in line. The huffy woman was making her way through the electric doors, mumbling to herself and creating a void of humanity in front of her as people strained to get out of her way and avoid speaking to her. The pharmacist was smiling. Ronnie began to sweat.
Two years ago, he had suffered a major back injury when he fell down into the lower garage. He thought the platform was up and it wasn’t. He landed on a tool box, dislocating three vertebrae and shattering his right radius. He was given Oxycontin to treat his pain and he was addicted by the fourth day. From that point on, he took two pills three times a day religiously for eight months. He couldn’t function unless he was in a narcotic haze and after the surgery, when they had him on morphine, the hunger for numbness grew into an essential food group in his mind.
By the second month of recovery, he had invented a perpetual phantom pain to keep him in dope and the doctor kept writing prescriptions. Ronnie even broke down in tears once when lying to the doctor about how bad his back hurt. In true junkie fashion, he believed his lie before he even told it and now he was cashing in on his addiction. And why not? Truth be told, he wanted to grind the whole bottle up, snort it, and die with blood streaming from his nostrils. Anything to kill this empty fucking feeling he had. It was like his integrity got sucked out of his dick somehow and ended up in that festering little twat’s cunt, his sperm probably sentenced to die in vagina wash with the acidity of battery acid. Everything he once admired about himself had been flipped over and the grub worms were crawling all over his self image, feeding on whatever tentacles of his guts remained.
The pharmacist returned with two stapled bags. Ronnie didn’t even need to read the instructions or warnings. He knew the dangers of what lay inside all too well and this was his last chance. That $600 in Ralphonso’s left pocket was going to pay one month of his three-month late mortgage before his wife and kids got put in the street by the sheriff. It was too soon for a divorce since he and Lori had only been separated for a couple weeks now and the bank called once every other day. The phone was set to be shut off next week and the television had been feeding off antenna reception for two months now, cable cancelled by Lori the day after he lost his job. This was his last chance to ever sleep in the bed they bought on joint credit and made payments for three years for. This was it, jack—the last stop before he didn’t want to think where because his thoughts were growing dim. There wasn’t much light left shining out of him.
Jesus Christ, how can people do these things to each other? I mean, what the fuck is it about that little wet slit between a woman’s legs that makes a man lose all of his self worth, drop to his knees and beg like a fucking dog for a scrap of table meat? She wasn’t even that good, always primping while we fucked, fixing her hair and pouting her lips out like there was a hidden camera in the van. And her nipples were too small. She had narrow hips, and this annoying fucking way of circling them around when she rode me; it was like an old fucking dog circling a blanket to lay down. And her moans were as fake as a President’s promise for peace. Why did I throw my life away for that miserable little cunt?
The electric double doors whiffed open and the cart boy was piloting some contraption that drove at least thirty carts into the cart bay. It was raining out now and the day had drained almost completely away as he stood in line for his drugs, for his life. He could see Ralphonso’s Impala and the wipers were going, making shrieks as metal scraped against glass. The driver’s side window was cracked and Ronnie smelled marijuana as he approached the car. The passenger side door opened.
Get in nicka! What the fuck took so long? Shit!
The pills were good. The money was good. The Impala was road bound again and the engine roared up the country road that Ronnie used to drive home from the Warlord on.
Aye, whur you wohn me tayk you, fooh? Ronnie stared straight ahead, watching the screaming wipers still going full speed despite the lack of rain.
Take me home, man. He thought about the day his son was born, how he put down the video camera to cut the cord and lost the moment on film. It was the most vivid memory of his life and had become his cornerstone of peace. It was the only light left in his mind.
Lori heard the Impala turning the corner onto their cul-de-sac. The screen was down on the front door because the cloudy heat of the rainy afternoon made the city like a sauna. She heard the screaming windshield wipers coming closer and somehow knew that Ronnie had come home. Part of her felt relieved. Part of her hated herself for that relief.
Ronnie walked up to the house as the Impala roared down the street, Ralphonso finally turning off the wipers and giving him a chopping salute of parting with the first two fingers of his left hand hanging outside the car window at the stop sign. Lori was watching him walk up the gravel driveway through the screen door. She didn’t open the door but she didn’t tell him to get the fuck out either. Her head disappeared and the door was unlocked when he pressed the button on the handle.
The slam of the heavy aluminum door against the splintering wood frame was a blessing of invocation.
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When the Hell Did the Whole Thing Fall to Shit?,
Short Story,
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fiction,
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