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Showdown on I-5 by T. S. Hand

A little monster lives in me at all times. It has but one desire, one plan for my future. This demon wants me dead. Period. It has many ways of convincing me to take my own life, or making my life unfit to live anyway. You might have it in you, too. Maybe you call it something different. I call it The Dread.

It’s been louder and more active since my blow-out fight with my girlfriend. All day I’ve been running from The Dread and barely escaping; at least, I thought I had barely escaped. I woke up on the guys’ couch this morning in the aftermath of a party with a raging hard-on. I think my hair-raising caffeine intake is playing games with my hormones. I’ve been uncommonly jittery, capricious, moody and horny for the last few days. I’ve been over-spicing my food in hopes of singeing some component inside me that’s making me radiate like a light bulb about to exhaust itself. I feel flayed and raw, exposed to everything and dangerously absorbent. My impulses all tell me to fuck, flee, drug, force-feed these feelings out of me, this vulnerability. I feel like a child covered in smallpox, a cow succumbing to madness, confused, falling, prostrate.

But, like I said, I woke up with a hard-on and immediately everything I wanted was beyond reach…just one of those days: the girlfriend’s thousands of miles away and every fucktastic tart who’s easy is too far away, bitter, or asleep. Thus began the abusive relationship betwixt two of my most-used appendages. There had been a rash of such violence recently, though it was no longer stemming the tide of nervous energy. I thought of my girlfriend while I came, because at least this made me feel human, well-adjusted.

Then the roommates joined the world of the wakeful and rested. Our chatting made me feel like a bad friend; I just couldn’t focus. Their sentences would run up on me and knock me uncharacteristically speechless. I only knew it was my turn to speak by their facial expressions, which began to impart impatience and frustration as the conversations grew increasingly one-sided. My default response when I’m not listening or when I don’t know what to say is to just laugh and say, “No way,” although there were at least three instances in as many minutes when I did this and it was utterly uncalled for and out of context. Whoops. I scrunched up my face in concentration trying to understand them and add something to the sewing circle, but then I would notice a fly, or a stray hair, or a flickering shadow. My head felt like a vacuum cleaner with no bag attached, an Acme peanut canister housing spring-loaded cloth snakes.

I started frantically cleaning every surface in sight. I broke off conversations mid-sentence to sash to another room and collect bottlecaps, beers, matchbooks. I swept the floor with such fervor that no roommate in his right mind would dare interject. But soon the house sparkled dismally, and The Dread occupied every doorjamb, reminding me that I ain’t shit and these “friends” probably don’t even want me here, miserable fuck that I am. I thought maybe “productivity,” yes, that would help comfort me. Nothing quite like standing back from a glistening creation and saying, “I made this!” so I cooked everyone breakfast, too, in hopes that spattering grease and smoking toast would at least keep The Dread out of the four walls of the kitchen. This didn’t afford me much solace, however, because The Dread began to use its well-hewn techniques of self-pity, angst and acute ADD to have me on the verge of bloodletting or self-decapitation.

I plopped onto the couch and stared catatonically at the Duke game with my roommate and his un-amused girlfriend. “It’s beautiful outside, you know,” she kept repeating at her comatose flesh-pile of a boyfriend. The third time she barked this I took notice and peaked behind our khaki curtains. It was beautiful outside, pristine even.

By the time the notion bounced from my frontal lobe to my mouth, it had become a certainty: I would push up my plans to leave town in a week for home, and instead drive today. Work could be excused, and I had the nine-hour drive to think about the excuse on the way.

If I left quickly enough, The Dread couldn’t come, though it would probably just go to the airport and meet me in
L.A. But, hell, at least that’s nine hours with no Dread in sight. Within ten minutes I had merged onto the freeway, offered no explanation to my roommates and forgot four out of five essentials of travel, though I had somehow remembered the towel.

There was heavy traffic on the way out of town and it made me uncomfortable, not because I dislike driving, but because I could sense The Dread gaining on me. Apparently it did not jump on a plane to meet me in
L.A., but instead hang-glided over the freeway and onto the roof of a moving van. It was now probably biding its time until the United Van Lines semi-truck got close enough to me to where The Dread could do a somersault through my sunroom and into the passenger seat with me. Or it would probably do some sort of ninja move into the backseat and stretch wire cable across my Adam’s apple. I grabbed a stick of my ubiquitous chewing-gum, and shut the sunroof, unwrapping a toothpick for good measure. The summer air quickly grew fetid inside my car and I thought of The Dread even more. Once I got out of the city’s traffic and no vans or semis were encroaching upon me, I opened up the sunroof and windows once again.

—————————————

Two hours have passed. I’ve listened to the only two albums in my car and now I’m kicking myself for not owning an iPod. I’ve stopped outside of
Stockton for some gas, I think. I probably don’t need to stop here but it’s a little late for heroics or changes of heart at this point. I know The Dread’s here somewhere, I’m just not sure where. It just seems fitting to dispatch The Dread in a place that sells tamales, hot showers, and under-the-counter porno.

Hours of feeling hunted have made me defiant and bold. I’m being proactive and brave choosing this place as our O.K. Corral. It’s gutsy on my part because there are few witnesses in case anything goes wrong, no one to save me. I pump some gas and sniff out The Dread. But, I don’t notice it anymore. Perhaps it gave up, recognized an uphill battle, a dug in enemy? Perhaps this truck stop will remain a peaceful place after all.

I mosey on into the shop and head towards the bathroom. While I’m contemplating the thirty-two synonyms for pissing, a lighting-hot cattleprod jolts me from out of nowhere, my wrists are buckled with opaque snap-ties and a ball gag is shoved into my mouth and secured with black leather straps.

The short chain linking my feet manages to scrape and slither its way across the linoleum as The Dread pushes me out of the bathroom and towards the poor, hapless Hindi attendant at the counter. She’s literally the only person here besides me, the only person who could have warned me that The Dread was biding its time in that bathroom. She looks at my horrific, brutalized countenance and remains stony-faced and impassive. Apparently, she couldn’t give a shit less about what’s going to happen.

The Dread inches me towards the counter and un-straps the ball-gag. She looks at me, both of us look like we’re pleading for something. I finally ask, “Can I get the change on pump six, please?” She says sure, but she knows I’m stalling. I’ve already left a corona of condensation around my handprint on the counter. The Dread knows I’m stalling; it inflicts quick stomach cramps and a sinus headache, with the promise of more to come if its wishes are unfulfilled. I wish a meteor would blot out the one square foot of Earth I currently occupy.

As I’m waiting either for a meteor or The Dread to give up, both futile wishes, I’ve already racked up $15 in extemporaneous garbage I’ll never eat or need on this roadtrip. The clerk keeps asking, “Anything else?” because it’s her job but I want her to shut up and curse me for bringing her into this, curse me for choosing that dusty shop of all the I-5 haunts.

I quickly flash through my head what her dark lips would look like pursed in anger and desperation, telling me, “You shouldn’t have come here. Just get the fuck out. Get in your car, and don’t stop until you’re in a safe place.” Does she have some sort of foreign accent when she gets emotional? I’ll never find out, because she just keeps asking, “Anything else?” and I want to maim her for her foolishness. I want her to feel one iota of the misery I’m feeling now. Then she wouldn’t ask me anything; she’d just come around from behind the counter and give me a hug, coo in my ear, or scratch my head fondly.

But she does keep asking, and eventually I fold: “One pack of Marlboro Reds, please.”

Excerpts from a Novel by T.S. Hand 

Today was a bad day. It said so in red pen, right there between the 15^th and 17^th, which both forecasted “good” in blue ink. 

I cut myself shaving. It didn’t hurt too much so I did it again. I showed up to work with oozing little scrapes all over and circulated a story about cut power and having to shave in the dark. When I heard my boss’ feet approach on the industrial stain-resistant carpet, I picked at the little devils until fresh rivulets appeared. By 10:30 AM my boss took pity on my (somehow) worsening condition and told me to take the day off. It was an office full of social workers. They were nothing if not compassionate.

…………………….. 

“What do you do?” I ventured.

“I’m a whore.”

I had heard stranger things before from women, so I mulled it over and then offered, “You mean, like a prostitute?”

“No, honey, I’m a whore.”

“What’s the difference?”

“A prostitute has more syllables.”

I chuckled, it was the only spontaneous thing I’d done in awhile. It was unique among spontaneous things in that it felt right. Oh, yeah, today was a good day.

…………………………..

The 18^th, a bad day.

I’m hiding in a payphone alcove on 8^th Avenue and 36^th Street. It’s the nearest place to my office where I can smoke without my boss seeing me from the fourth-floor window. A disheveled young thug comes up and demands, “Yo, man, lemme get two cigarettes.” I’m so taken aback by his order that I acquiesce before I can feel offended. I mean, he didn’t even say the magic word for fuck’s sake. I don’t let it bother me too much, because something in his personality resonates with me, conspiratorially: fuck the man in the suit; take everything you can from him.

A woman comes to the phone next to me and sighs. She looks homeless, but not overly so. She asks if I have a spare nickel for a phone call. A quick check of my pockets yields a quarter. I ask if she has change. She says, “No. It’s OK. It’s just so damn American of you.”

I’m crawling out of my steel smoke cave with the dregs of my cigarette when an unseen woman brushes against me. She starts howling about the bag I just burned with my cigarette end. I look down at the damaged cigarette in my fingers and the pockmark I’ve left in her Coach bag—probably a knock-off. “Oh, shit. I’m sorry. Really.”

“I don’t give a fuck if you’re sorry. Look at my fucking bag, you shithead!”

“I’m sorry, Jesus! You ran into me. Fuck, lady.” I feel all pretense of remorse leaving me as she continues on with this barrage of insults and haranguing. Realizing this could go on forever, and noticing that I’ve already over-extended my lunch break to dangerous lengths, I choose a quiet time in her tirade to look squarely in her eyes as I take the still-lighted cigarette and stub it out in the sinewy back of my hand. Her countenance changes predictably. The smoldering anger she felt now turns to horror.

“Is this what you want? Do you want to see me hurt?” I asked as the pain sent flashes of light behind my eyelids. “Does this make you fucking happy, you cunt?” She turned tail and walked away, quickly. She only looked back once to see if I was real.

…………………………….

I spent more time today with Christie, the Whore. These meetings are usually on good days, although some bad days I even make time to see her. Some bad days I especially need to see her.

Even in our first moments together she was the only one who looked right at me, into me, and saw that I was all bristling hair, bared claws and stiff upper lips. She saw the flicker in there that belied my emptiness. I was equidistant from bludgeoning her for revealing it and kissing her for accepting it; my weakness, that is. She made quick calculations of emotional earnings potential, return on investment and sunk cost, followed rapidly by two blinks forceful enough to stop a bullet mid-flight. Exhaled, caught it, paused, finished exhaling.

She reached out and cupped my jaw, her fingertips tickling my ear pleasantly. “Oh, darling, you’re just so…orange,” she opined. This label was deftly original. I was defenseless. She moved in for the kill. “You know,” she assumed “nothing rhymes with you and you don’t come around all that often, but the moments you do appear people really take notice. You’re life’s solution to beige.”

Mommy Says Me by T.S. Hand 

“I fulled up!”

“Charlie, eat your peas, please. Then you’ll be full,” the mother enjoined, x-raying into the toddler’s stomach.

“Maw-mee!” the child blurted, “I dunnah like peas uhn! Muh-moh-ME!” His ejaculatory loathing dispatched all semblance of adequate language development, and he continued babbling incoherently into his dish. Perhaps because God doesn’t like peas either, Charlie’s father walked in.

“Duh-daddy?” pleadingly, “Mommy eat me peas.” Smugness spread across the boy’s face like a tattler exposing his classmates, knowing the injustice would be dealt with swiftly.

Even a tottering child knows tension in a room, knows its danger.

Her eyes darted to the sheaf of papers jutting haphazardly out of a manila file-folder on the countertop. They looked contractual, even from her cross-kitchen distance. His eyes followed hers, until he saw the subject of her attention. He took a quick, sucking breath and stammered, “Don’t. Like this?”

Charlie, taking the sudden break in silence as proof of resolution, related to his ashen father, “Daddy, I says mommy I fulled up—”

“I’ll get better, for chrissake, Sue. Give it a chance, even.”

“—but mommy says me she fed up.”

Kitchen Cupboards & Electrodes by T.S. Hand 

On my eleventh birthday, I wanted to become a man. Feeling bold, I asked my sleepover-party friends if they’d like a drink. They looked aghast. I stood atop a chair to reach the liquor cabinet. My first sips of scotch were revolting, so I mixed it with a peach juice-box.

I awake in a hospital bed, stuck with tubes and electrodes. The last thing I remember is finishing a water bottle full of vodka in the back of sophomore physics class. My mom sits in the corner sobbing in choked bursts. “My son, the drunk!” she spurts.

Drivers-ed class was showing an instructional video. My then girlfriend, sitting in front of me, discreetly reached behind her desk and up my short’s leg. After my erection subsided, I sauntered to the bathroom to peel off my boxers. I naively hoped the DMV would be this exciting.

I awake in a urine-soaked and vomit-encrusted mess on my bedroom floor. My mom stands over my naked body; she’s obviously been crying. “Why can’t you just stop?” she pleads. It’s Tuesday, so I shower, dress and go to my junior-year homeroom.

People say you’re addicted to heroin the first time you try it. I was a science major, so it was only a lab experiment to me. Six hours later I vomited in my dorm bed and writhed in agony. I knew just one more hit would make everything alright.

The girl sleeping with her back to me is my girlfriend. Awakening, I re-piece the previous night. The last thing I remember is discovering her infidelity, and walking towards her with clenched fists. I lay in bed, too scared to wake her and see the horror. My dry, shaking sobs finally stirred her.

After detox, some friends advised me to say “I love you” to the people I had hurt most. The first person’s usually the same for every recovering addict. In a Thai restaurant’s dimly-lighted bathroom I took a deep breath and said three words into the mirror.

____________________________

The sign on the door urges, “This Is a Safe Place.” I walk in behind my father, who has himself strung together four months of sobriety at the age of 62. We enter the nondescript church rectory and take seats next to the other five inhabitants from middle-America retirement communities. Just a teenager, I am the only participant under fifty years old. As I descend torturously into my stiff-backed folding chair, seven hits of ecstasy beckon, connive in my billfold ID sleeve, as an emergency curative. After some initial readings and collective grunts, “Hello, my name is Tommy, and I’m an alcoholic…”

After forty minutes, however, I sense peace and contentment for the first time since I reached into the high oak cupboard that held 15-year-old single-malt scotch. Neuronal appendages split and reattach. I cry, unforced and unashamed. I forgive myself for the sick I was.

When I cross the doorway threshold to the sun-baked O.C. parking lot, the sign still reads, “This Is a Safe Place.”

The Godlist by T.S. Hand

“Hope ya ain’t goin’ far.”

I didn’t answer him, I just climbed up into his early-nineties Ford dually and set my rucksack between us. He made another stab at conversation. “Pretty girl like yaself…dangerous to hitchhike, even around here. They’s crazies all around this side of the Sierras.”

“I know,” I said, looking right into his eyes for the first time since he shoved the truck down the highway. Either my response caught him off guard or the way I gave him an all-too-knowing look, but he seemed to shudder a little. Maybe I had already given away too much. We made small talk, and I let little notes of laughter hang for awhile on his unfunny jokes. He commented on my intelligence, to add to his earlier “pretty” complement. They always did this, always tried to appear so kind.

I came onto him subtly, enough to let him know I was interested, but not enough to make him think I was for sale. He got the hint. After we passed a sign out of Lone Pine, California, cautioning “next services 77 miles” he called my attention to the nasa satellite array a couple miles east. Six upturned mushrooms big as freighters pushed their stalks up to the sky as the seti project’s search for Truth.

It was then—with my attention turned east—when he cut the engine and began his acting debut: “Oh, shit, shit! Goddamn this piece of shit—”

“What? What is it?” I knew the stunt.

“Goddamn truck run outta gas, all a way out here.” He really was making this too easy. His biggest mistake was pulling off on the frontage road, where he said we wouldn’t be hit by any drunk drivers. I eased the cap off the spray canister in my pocket.

He hopped out of the cab once we rolled to a stop. He said he’d call Triple A to get this whole mess fixed. Good play, I thought, most girls have probably fallen for that. I saw his fingers mash nine digits into the cell phone’s key pad, knowing that Triple A is a ten-digit 800 number. He carried on a great fake conversation, really an Oscar-worthy performance.

Jumping back in the cab, he flipped on the radio and scanned for awhile. The only station in range, propitiously, was an evangelical station. I asked him if he believed in God. He said, very openly and matter-of-fact, “Sure, I think God’s in them mountains over there and in that little fishing stream we passed awhile back. Maybe God’s in these little moments that test your mettle, too.”

“That’s all just marvelous, but what about the balance between good and evil and reckoning and all that? Don’t you believe in that?”

“Well, uh, sure honey. But when ya get to be my age, ya start to see that it ain’t all black and white like they taught ya in sundee school. They’s good wolves and bad wolves in all of us. The one you feed everyday, that’s the one gon’ win.”

I pretended to mull this over, like his words had made some profound effect on me. He decided the time was ripe to put his hand on my thigh. We both looked at it flopped there, helpless. I’m sure we had completely different thoughts on what would happen next.

He leaned in for a kiss, eyes closed. I maced his tear ducts and open mouth. While he flailed around, going on about, “What the fuck! Jesus!” I fingered open my cargo shorts pocket. A more cultured man would know that cargo shorts are suspicious on a girl who looks as good as I do. I took out the medicine bottle of ether and soaked my handkerchief in it as he groped along the door for the latch. I strong-dosed him, enough to keep him from moving so much but not enough to knock him out.

Opening my own latch, I climbed down and around to his side door to let him out. His weight helped the door flop open and he collapsed in the cloddy sand. After a few deep, controlled breaths to decide the Gameplan, I worked on his face with my boots and at some point he lost consciousness because he stopped blocking.

Skulls are like piñatas: once you split them they practically dissolve. Pink bits and red and tooth squeezed out of the entrances to his caved-in face. After his pulse stopped, my rucksack of tools took its normal position on top of the sternum. I put on my gloves and fitted the surgical saw attachment to the cordless drill. I carved out his upper and lower mandibles and removed the soft palate; teeth are a bitch to get rid of, and on this trip I didn’t have access to an incinerator, though there were some smelting kilns up in Bishop if I was feeling mischievous and daring.

Only one car passed in the half-hour and there was a high sandbank concealing me from the highway. I unzipped the vacuum-sealed pouch and removed the six-foot bag and from the other rucksack pocket I pulled out the Tupperware of Centenella larvae, which would dispose of 200 lbs of evidence in a few days. Before I zipped the whole mess up to throw him in the hole—oh yeah, I dug a hole after I removed his dental records—I plucked up his sausage fingers and dabbed one in the pools forming near his neck. I opened my notebook to the bookmarked page that said “ Terrence Bedford” at the top. Somewhere near the bullet points of “occupation” and “offenses” I smudged his gooey fingerprint, blowing lightly on it until the stain turned maroon.

Ten minutes later I climbed up to the highway. North to the right and South to the left. I opened to the back of my notebook, to “The Godlist.” Of the nineteen entries, eight had strikethroughs already. After crossing through “Terrence Bedford, rapist, Big Pine, CA,” my pen rested on “Othelia Downs, child molester, Needles, CA.” I scampered to the southbound side of the highway and was about to thumb a ride when Mr. Bedford’s cell phone rang in my cargo pocket. After contemplating the 800 number appearing on the caller-ID screen, I answered.

“Oh, hello,” offered a warm-voiced woman, “someone from this number requested the emergency fill-up service. We’ve dispatched a tow truck.”

“Oh, thank you, but that won’t be necessary.”

“Is there still a problem?”

“There was, but I think we fixed it.”

The Trial 

T.S. Hand

She gave monumentally bad head and it took him forever to come, though he eventually did gurgle out thick, desperate floods. To repeat, alarmingly bad head (Exhibit A). He considered this along with the fluffy blonde down on parts of her nape (Exhibit B) and stomach (Exhibit C), which ex facie suggested she had lied about her age. As he washed beneath his foreskin in the hotel sink it dawned on him that she was some father’s little princess, a fresh entry into the club scene with a fake ID and probably no more than 17 years under her belt. The realization swept over him like a sentence.

He wandered aimlessly about the eighth floor and felt touched by its symphony of lives behind numerous identical doors. He wondered how many behind those doors had been shanghaied into mouth-fucking a minor. He imagined the knocking of gavels and the swish-swish of orange-bootied inmate shoes.

He made his way to the lobby in a flurry of resolution. Being an adult—he ruminated as he walked into the hotel bar for the second time that night—means dealing with the consequences when you fuck up. He had fucked up (abysmally) and now he would atone. He scoped the bar for the burliest corn-fed Midwestern football fanatic he could find, hopefully one who exuded previous martial arts training. Approaching his target from behind, he slapped this blue-blooded ox of an Amerkan in the back of the head, hard, and quipped, “Look a’ this lil’ faggot.”

There was quick action, the kind that required tenfold longer to explain than to observe. At first, no one understood why the jumbled and leaking heap on the floor had scarcely thrown a punch, had actually only demanded more malicious manslaughter through clenched teeth with acerbic haranguing, (“Come on, you fucking terrorist!”) and had forthwith writhed on the black-checkered tile in a maudlin mess of whimpers and sinister sniggers.  

But this was all easily explainable—reasoned the bar patrons seriatim, after mulling it over and swishing it around in their pint glasses. After all, how often have we seen someone get a little brave, boastful, flammable? And how often have we seen a drunk ignite like a tinderbox and devolve into a beast?

And one by one, the stool-sitters and nut-munchers deliberated until their mind had dotted the “i”s and crossed the “t”s of the snafu’s unfolding, arriving finally at a satisfactory explanation they could take home to their wives or coworkers as proof, beyond a reasonable doubt, that they were “good men.”

But why,—and this singular fact, forgotten by most, continued to bother the blue-blooded ox accomplice until he would find his own atonement involving a ball-peen hammer, two underutilized fingers on his right hand and most of the knuckles on his left—why, in all the depraved, sick lunacies of the motherfucking free world, why had the instigator chomped down expectantly on two Amethyst Hotel matchbooks—like someone getting dental X-rays—just before the first punch described an arc that terminated at the sinewy part where his jaw met his ear?