I stood in his apartment. The door had been blown open by inclimate weather and gunfire. Maybe at that point it was just the weather. I can’t really say. I can only relate what I think happened as memories are as unreliable as used car salesmen. They are particularly unreliable when the used car salesmen is snorting so much coke that the nose bleeds seem like a dream and the pills popped are as effective as candy asprin unless otherwise directed. Otherwise memory is a farce of imagination. What I can say is that I never wanted to be here. I only wanted a few things out of life and some routes down roads paved in drugs and sex were not the way to get them. Prostitution of, not only my body but my mind were not ways to get places. Being tied up and force feeding myself drugs to ward of the pain of what it was to become this human refuse.
Wind had forced its way in by force of cold blows to the frail window. It wasn’t much of a place anyway. Always stunk of cat piss, stubborn marijuana smoke, and beer. A small pile of snow had started to settle itself into the corner where the window had finally given up and fell prey to the relentless wind. I had the shiny new metal muzzle of my Berretta Tomcat trained warily on the middle of his forehead and a stiletto heel in the knee that I had previously blown through. I thank god for Achilles and our gun lessons at the farm on that steel cold January morning:
Hold it like this (as in a scene from a bad romance where the man leans over the woman and holds a limb or two in order to instruct conduct or proper use of an item, in this case a gun. His hands are cold, dry, and hard with work. They are massive around my hands as he shows me how to hold my arms and take aim at the Miller High Life bottle and then the depressed and crucified scarecrow whose head is slumped over at an impossible angle for anything to be alive. I shot it right in the arms and the bottles came down after a few hours. Lee smiled at me, his lips chapped and cracked from the cold and yellowed cigarette teeth on display).
You’re a natural. (We were close to kissing at this point. His mouth was inches from mine but the closeness of ammunition and gunsmoke between us was enough for us. I didn’t need to kiss him to know how he felt and I never needed to let him know that I was grateful).
Memories of my father’s gun collection that my mother sold after his death also came to mind:
We can finally get rid of these Veronica (my mother says with her perpetual cigarette hanging from the side of her thin lips. She’s wearing some kind of summer dress that looks like it’s made of paper flowers with a belt in the middle to cinch the waist and cloth buttons, hair pinned tightly to the back of her head. The widow Ballard stares at my father’s life in guns as sprawled out on the green shag bedroom carpet. It looks like they’re on display in a shop window complete with fake grass and her paper dress. It’s an Easter display. Her eyes are reading them as they would a magazine. Maybe in her head she wants to keep at least one, as a memory of when she and him went to go shoot something, though I doubt that they ever did that together. Her long thin arms are collecting the guns, my father’s pride and joys, into a large chest. She’s an animated mannequin in this scene staged from my memory. She picks them up each separately and feels the weight in her hands. She feels their coldness and knows that they would only ever be warm again when in someone else’s hands. She would never feel that warmth or any of his warmth again).
With a warm gun contained at the end of my arms something felt very heavy. A large weight had been suddenly slung over my arms like a load of wet laundry. Heavy arms and dry mouth as I stared this fucker down. He was just another scarecrow now.
“You better not fucking move,” I spat out at him. The reaction that I got was not what I had expected, nor what I would do if some crazy redhead bitch had a gun trained on me. My eyes felt like they were heavy marbles in my head. They wanted to escape from their cavities and forget what they had seen but it was too late. Everything was intensified and then rounded; a fish bowl of vision. The drugs made my hands feel slick with a cold sweat.
“Are you going to shoot me? Because if you do that again you should kill me. I could do bad shit to you. Little fucking coke whore,” he hemorrhaged out of his mouth like the blood from his knee. The heel of the boot gouging the wound to make it more open to some kind infection of intense pain. The last word hung in the air above me. I began to feel more like I was doing something right, rather than try to convince myself that I was. I wanted it to be excruciating. This wasn’t to be some kind of pleasant thing like: here I take your money and drugs and leave you alone. I wanted him to learn his lesson. I wanted to shoot his dick off for knowing what he had done and what he would continue to do. If he thought that this was some kind of expensive joke then what I wanted was far worse then most would ever get. I would cut his fucking face off and let his cat Cookie gnaw on the mass of human tissue and muscle mass.
“You better shut the fuck up,” I snapped back. I shot the gun in the air and the pieces of stucco ceiling fell lightly on us like the snow coming in through the window. And then everything was quiet. And we stared at each other for a moment. Assessing the situation. What could either of us do, or for that matter what would we do?
