Creamy Bullets (5 page)

Not a Mermaid

I
t was some lake up in Washington. Some boat just big enough for the both of us. Some green water smell. Some time apart from your family. I put your hand in that private spot and you responded by doing the same with my hand. The water underneath us rocked just slightly, so we didn’t have to move our bodies to enjoy the contact. Your mother and father were inside a cabin somewhere, preparing lunch. They would never know that we did such things in the boat. Look, you said, and pointed to a huge fish swimming underneath us, just discernible enough for us to see. It looked blue and silver and strong.

It looks like a shark, you said.

It’s not a shark, I replied. But still I was scared just because of the thing’s size.

Do you think it’s a piranha?

Don’t be silly.

It’s something big.

We watched it move below us, gleaming in the sun and coming more into focus as we watched.

When we arrived back at the cabin there was something unsettled between us. We sat on the couch but didn’t hold hands. You had that far away look, as if you were still thinking about the fish. I hope we don’t have fish for dinner, you said.

In our sleeping bags later, you insisted on sleeping with your head pointing away from the water. I wanted to sleep the other way so I could look at the stars through the unzipped sky flap of our tent. Go ahead, you said. Tell me what you see.

I scanned the stars for shapes. Look, I said, there’s a bunch over here shaped like a Christmas tree.

You’re just saying that, you mumbled.

That night I had the dream about the fish. He came out of the water and walked up to the tent. In this dream, I watched his shadow walking with a limp and I wanted to scream. When he leaned down to talk to me he said, Don’t get your hopes up. I’m not a mermaid.

He held out a part of his body that looked almost like a hand. That’s when I felt that wetness, not in real life of course, but in dream life. I shook his “hand” and we talked for what felt to be a long time. He said he knew what I was doing in the boat and I better watch it. When he saw the sun starting to emerge he said he had to leave. He tried to embrace me and I felt some other kind of wetness from him as we touched. Maybe tears.

Did I do something wrong, you said as I woke up. You were out of your sleeping bag and pressing against mine, your arm across my chest. You were crying. You always cried in the morning for some reason.

You look so mad, you said.

What do you mean, I asked.

Your forehead is all scrunched up, like you’re troubled. She rubbed her palm on my brow as if to smooth it out.

I was asleep, I said. I can’t control what I do when I’m sleeping.

Writer’s Block Theme Song

H
er small house is made with bricks. In the front room everything is of equal importance. Every object, pumping with electricity. Her computer is staring at her. Her television is on but the volume is low. Her clocks drone away and her books are left open, hanging in mid-sentence. She knows that if she doesn’t go to bed soon she will be up until the morning and then she will have to sleep all day. She thinks about the effect this will have on her later in the week.

When she was a man she would sleep all the time and that is why she is a woman now. If she goes to bed now she will be able to wake up at a decent hour and then turn on all her things again.

She struggles with loneliness. You don’t need to be told that. Just look at her, sitting there. She glances at the television from time to time, hoping that something grabs her attention, and when something finally does she feels empty inside.

The world is so big, she thinks. It seems to keep expanding the more and more she stays inside. She feels insignificant if she can’t write, if she can’t fill her computer screen with words.

When she is able to write, the world becomes smaller with each word, each page. Her chair fits her body better, her legs, her back, her skin, all of her that is not male. But only sometimes.

Her suspicious history contains these facts: She has written one hundred poems and kept eight or nine of them. She once wrote a 200-page book that was published by a university press. It was about airplane catastrophes. That was eight years ago, when she first became a woman. She wrote the book when she was a man but couldn’t get it published. She wonders now what captivated her to write such a book. She had a brief stint at a bad local magazine as an assistant editor. She quit because she heard someone making fun of the magazine at a restaurant. The people at her neighborhood bookstore keep forgetting her name.

She goes into the kitchen. Her freezer is full of food that keeps falling out on her toes. She makes toast with peanut butter. She eats all of it except the top crust. She puts music on the stereo and puts the television on mute. She picks up a book and reads half of a page. She decides to let the music put her to sleep and try again tomorrow.

Jailbreaker

I
know everything there is to know about getting into jail. Trust me. This is going to hurt me more than it hurts me.

It started with the parking citation. I just went into the store for a second. A loaf of bread and one of those new Snickers bars. Five seconds tops. When I get back out the ink is still wet on the ticket as it flaps under my windshield wiper. I look around and spot the bastard getting into his parking enforcement buggy. The kind that looks like a fucking golfing cart gave birth to a dwarf. It’s got three wheels and a sign that says DO NOT FOLLOW, like you’d ever want to. He sees me coming and tries to get away by making a right turn at the corner. I get a good running start and drill him like vintage Lawrence Taylor. Piece of shit flips over like a bike messenger. I kick his midget wheels and smash his little walkie talkie. Then I go to jail.

They dress me up in some orange jumpsuit and trot me out in front of the judge so he can stare at me over his bifocals and mutter some law school psychobabble.

They let me call my cousin Randy before they throw me in the cell. Randy’s not there so I try to leave a message before getting cut off. Piece of shit machine. He thinks he saves twenty bucks a month with that thing. Only assholes think shit like that.

When I get to see my view behind the bars at the Strom Thurmond Correctional Prison, I make the acquaintance of my cellmate, a wannabe rapper named Derelikt. He’s up in my grill about his hood and how I’m not welcome to buy a Hostess Fruit Pie at his Uncle’s convenient store. His orange gear has been modified to look a little more street and he’s got a head band holding back this crazy ‘fro that’s about a foot high and has so much product in it I’m afraid it’d blow up if I so much as burp. I tell him that I can do fifty push-ups and can bench press twice his weight.

He’s swaying back and forth right in front of me, rapping: I won’t hesitate/if you get me irate/(indecipherable) dinner plates/until you learn to navigate/(indecipherable) gay or straight/I’ll make you my playmate…

I don’t understand half of it but I know it’s not nice, so I knock him over and accidentally bang his head against the metal toilet. He scrambles to his feet and I push him again. He hits the toilet again. This goes on for a while and he keeps hitting the lip of the shitter and getting worse by the minute. Eventually he dies. Then I go to jail.

I’m in the lunchroom at the Jeb Bush Correctional Prison when a posse of slackjawed hillbillies tries to cut me open like a watermelon. I swiftly sidestep them and then disarm them with a series of kicks and thrown biscuits, wet with gravy. They’re such a sad lot, they make me look like Jackie Chan. One dude deflects a dry biscuit off his rubbery chicken neck and convulses on the ground until his heart stops. Then I go to jail.

Out in the exercise yard of the Pete Wilson Correctional Prison, I’m walking the circle and listening to the
woosh
of the nearby ocean over the high walls. I tried to climb the east wall last week but the cyclone barbed wire proved too tricky, even with a pair of stolen oven mitts. This place ain’t so bad though. You can sit in your cell and listen to the waves and the birds outside and it gets kind of peaceful. As I walk, I start to hear a little buzzing sound. I look down and see a tiny remote control car make its way to me. No one else is outside. I reach down and pick up the toy. There’s a note attached. It’s telling me to come over to a red Port-a-Potty that I’ve never seen before.

When I get over there I swear I hear a voice. A woman’s voice. I cautiously open the door but don’t see anyone. In here, the voice says.

I look into the pot and witness the face of the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. She’s smiling and motioning to me to come in with her. I sniffed the air in there first to see if it smelled bad but it didn’t. It just smelled like strong seawater, like the beach.

Take off your shoes, she says. Those fuckers will sink ya’.

I took off my shoes and even stripped down to my underwear for good measure. When I’m all the way inside (had to pop my shoulder out of its socket for a minute), she turns her back toward me and asks me to obliterate this huge pimple. I squeeze and squeeze and she screams and starts to sweat a little. We fall in love and spend the rest of the week having sex on a nearby island. We’re married in a quick private ceremony performed by the local voodoo priestess. Before our honeymoon, my new wife takes me to a big department store to buy some silk sheets. While I’m in the home entertainment section, I see my mug shot on about fifty screens. The colors are a little off on a bunch of them and my skin looks green or brownish. My face all over the place, sick-looking. Some security guy spots me and takes out his taser. He’s trying to be sneaky, coming up from behind, but I see his reflection in one of the TV screens, right next to my own reflection, which sits mask-like on top of my televised face. I quickly pretend like I’m looking at some computer equipment. When he’s about to zap me, I spin around and swing a computer mouse in his face. It works like you’d expect, quick and stealth. I can’t help myself though and I start shouting and yipping and swinging the mouse around my head like a lasso. A sales clerk acts fast and comes at me with a box cutter. He is able to dodge my swinging mouse attack and cut me deep in the belly. The medics come and grant me thirty-two stitches and a couple of staples. Then I go to jail.

At the Captain Vere Correctional Prison, I spend most of my time writing letters to my wife. I know her name is Kathey (or Cathey) but I haven’t learned how to spell it yet. I’m not sure what letter it starts with so I decide to call her “Athey”.

Athey has a cousin whose boyfriend’s stepfather has a twin brother that works for the security company that makes the keys for the prison. She uses her connections and delivers me a concealed key on one of her conjugal visits. I am able to retrieve it during an inspired session of oral sex. She even put it in a little pink envelope with my name on it. We plan to meet outside in the nearby Costco parking lot the following evening.

The next morning at breakfast, I tell all the lifers that I’m good as out. Lifers don’t give a rat’s crap. They’re in for good. I tell them I’ll get one of their wives to pull the same trick but most of them are gay now and won’t go down on a woman. Still, I give myself a tattoo to show loyalty to my prison brethren; a heart with a ball and chain around it.

When I find Athey’s rusted-out Honda Civic the next day, she is asleep, with an opened Family Size bag of Dorito’s in the passenger seat. I wake her up with a key tap on her window. We embrace quickly and make for the exit. Once on the freeway, we are chased by helicopters and state troopers. We run over a strip of spikes and spin wildly into the concrete median. We flip over the barrier into opposing traffic and smash into a semi, which straightens us out. We continue to drive on our tire rims and find the nearest exit, where we lose our pursuit on a rural road somewhere in the dark. Unfortunately, we run out of gas and have to hike across a dirt field. Out of nowhere, we’re hit with spotlights and chopper blades are blowing dirt in our eyes. “Freeze!” someone yells.

The way the cops are talking I realize they were tipped off. Goddamn stepfather’s twin cousin!

In the back of the squad car, Athey and I stretch our arms from behind our backs. We hold hands and I realize I’ve lost my ring. Then I go to jail.

I do a lot of thinking at the Julius Caeser Correctional Prison. I think about love and second chances and practicing yoga and the Denver Broncos’ playoff run. There are many things important to think about at this point of my life.

This is the toughest prison I’ve ever been in and I even have a job, like I’m going to be here for a while or something. I’m in charge of popcorn and refreshments. That’s right. You heard me. I have to make sure the kernels don’t get burnt in the popper before we start the movies on Friday nights. I’ve been contemplating making a device that’ll utilize the hot oil as a burning chemical weapon, but they watch you real good here. And there are cameras. So I just hand out little paper bowls of popcorn and pour the flat generic cola in the cups. Last night we watched
Rain Man
. I like the part where Dustin Hoffman freaks out when Tom Cruise tries to get him on the airplane. I think I’ll do that next time they try to get me in jail. I’ll start to screech in a high voice and recoil and figure out some crazy math in my head.

Yeah, someday I’ll do that. I’ll be like that guy. The cops will get embarrassed and start looking around and people will wonder what they’re doing to me, they’ll point and say something like,
What are they doing to that poor man?
And the handcuffs will be put away. And the pepper spray will be reholstered. And I won’t have to come here anymore. Then you can stop listening to my problems.