The Send Off

The psychotic bitch in line reminded me of Dotty, my older sister, and in order to make you understand what a sheer pain in the ass that is, I will just say that Dotty is crazy.

A lot of idiots say that all the time but they don’t really mean it. You’ll hear some jackass who wants a divorce from his wife say, “That bitch is crazy,” when all she did was continually ask him to pick up his socks off the floor or wash the dishes. Or you’ll hear a grandmother go on about how nutty her grandkids are after they’ve spent a long weekend jumping down off her staircase or using her cooking utensils to scoop worms out of the dirt.

These instances have nothing to do with the total shit storm that is the word “crazy”. Crazy has nothing to do with other people. That’s what I’ve learned. It might seem like Dotty is interested in what you’re actually doing, but I assure you she gives less than a squirrel’s wing wang. It’s what’s in her head that counts, and if that means she thinks you’re public enemy number one then that’s what you are.

Dotty is bipolar. I spent a lot of time wondering how crazy that makes me, but I stopped feeling bad about our respective insanities after I read somewhere you’ve got to have a few maniacs in your family to do anything great. She’s pretty out there too, constantly screaming upsetting things at people (???). Mom gets the worst of it. She has accused Mom of major offenses, like being a perverted pedophile, or mounting a conspiracy with the mailman to kill her.

Yes, Dotty definitely knows how to get your attention.

She used to be great. She used to protect me from the neighbor’s dumb brats when they teased me for being so skinny. They would say I looked like a black handrail or a burnt piece of toast and I would end up crying all over the place, the idiotic little bastards. Then Dotty and I would do some pretty vindictive shit together, like throw piss balloons down on them from the upstairs windows or put bags of Mom’s quilting materials and a loud, squeaky dog toy behind the neighbor’s car so they would think they ran over one of their stupid brats. I really miss the old Dotty.

Now we’d be lucky to have a straight conversation without her bringing up her mad mailman bull. That’s the kind of sordid stuff she likes to talk about now, the post office serial killer that supposedly peeps into her window at night. And then sometimes out of nowhere she will have this big moment of clarity and then wham! she’s her true self, and I’ll end up talking to her for hours about the good old days when we were kids. It’s great when that happens, but it tears you to pieces when the crazy bitch comes back. It’ll make you just about cry. And it happens enough to be a real problem. I’m not kidding.

Mom is not a pervert. I should mention that from the beginning. It’s just that Mom noticed Dotty’s oldest son, Travis, did not want to stand up to piss. You might not think that’s a big deal but the damned boy was about seven. Sweet Jesus, when I was seven I did really disturbing things like trying to steal my mom’s car to go over to my friend’s house for the weekend or selling tap water to all the stupid high school football jocks after school at practice. I don’t know if they just bought it because they thought I was a retard or a disadvantaged youth or what, but I made money. Like serious money for just being a dumb little kid. So you can imagine what kind of idiotic moron my mom thought Travis was for not knowing how to stand up and hold his junk.

Mom asked Dotty about Travis and his vertical deficiency—it’s always a terrible idea to ask Dotty anything—and mentioned that it was about time her two boys learned how to piss.

“What are you, some kind of pervert that you want to stand around and watch children pee?” Dotty screamed in a manic frenzy. “You must be a damned pervert.”

Yes, I think anyone would be cranky if they had to deal with Dotty all of the time.

It was not a compliment that she reminded me of my crazy sister.

“The cling peaches,” she whined, waving around the stupid sales sheet. “It should be against the law for you to have cling peaches in the sales sheet and none in the store!”

“Oh Jesus! Not the cling peaches!” I moaned back at her face. I was trying to be a sarcastic jerk but she was too busy complaining to appreciate the effort. For no less than twenty minutes she screeched, first to me and then to Mr. Spelt, the store manager. We all knew she’d get something for free because Mr. Spelt started breathing heavy as soon as he’d come down from his perch in the manager’s office, his bald head gleaming and his bug eyes popping out of his face while he stared down her generous cleavage. He was one of those little old, ugly men who loved the ladies. I always think that kind of thing is pitiful as hell.

She was pretty gorgeous outside of being an idiot. Even Rusty, the youngest of all of us working at Bucky’s Bonanza, thought she was hot.

Poor Rusty, the green little bastard. He probably didn’t even know what went on under the sheets. The only thing Rusty could do was stare in our direction like a dumb pubescent rabbit from the front entrance, which he had just mopped. He turned out to be a real serial killer with that damned mop because he never ever put out the wet floor sign. Half a dozen times he’d almost done away with the Sunday morning religious nut jobs unlucky enough to have their dress shoes on. One Sunday a little old lady spent the better part of an hour belly up on the floor so we ended up giving her free groceries for a month so she didn’t completely clean us out. What a mistake! Rusty’s reputation spread and then the idiots started falling all over the place just to get free groceries. It wasn’t long before Bucky’s on the weekend had the look of a well-dressed amateur skating rink.

So the absolute gem standing at my register whining about the cling peaches decided after I rung out her order that she wanted to buy a set of plastic garden ice buckets because horny Mr. Spelt had given her a one-time thirty percent discount to make up for our tragic peach deficiency.

I think I was a good guy by cutting the crap and telling her point blank that there was no way I was going to ring up a second order just to give her another thirty percent discount. The deal was that she would take her marked down bread and milk and get the hell out. She didn’t like that; she told me I had a terrible attitude and that for someone of my color it would not serve me very well.

“Puta,” Miguel said angrily from the aisle directly behind me where he was stocking creamed corn. I am pretty sure everyone who heard him, whether they spoke Spanish or not, knew exactly what he said. Even Rusty raised his eyebrows so far up all of his acne spots disappeared.

Now, I could have also gotten mad like a jackass but I didn’t. God knows Miguel, a Mexican immigrant who did not want to hear anything derogatory about brown people, looked like he wanted to drop kick her in the face. But then again I’m pretty calm. I didn’t even run as a little kid when old Mr. Marlon would dress up on Halloween as a clown zombie. All the other kids would just about rip their parents’ arms off trying to get away from the stupid old striped faced idiot, but I would stand there and take out scoops from his bowl of candy until there was nothing left.

I learned early in life not to complain about things you can’t change, so instead of bitching about it I calmly turned back to my register and prepared myself for another shit storm from the next jackass in line.

It was a regular occurrence.

That’s when the funniest thing happened, the kind of stuff that plays out in your head all the time but only once or twice in real life if you’re lucky. I heard a sharp scream and a loud slapping noise, followed by a woman’s voice throwing out curse word combinations even I had never heard before.

I looked in the direction of the noise and in the entrance, sitting on her bare ass—her mini skirt had ridden up and she wore a thong underneath—was our diamond in the rough, the whining peach lady with the awesome tits. She slipped on the wet floor and fell ass first onto the ground. Every male eye in the building was focused in on her bare behind and thighs as she scrambled to her feet.

To make it worse no one helped her, but instead Rusty ran out like a bastard from the toilet paper aisle, his zits bright red, pointing at the wet floor sign next to our bare-assed peachy princess before yelling out, “It’s right there! I didn’t forget! I didn’t forget!” This is the kind of freak show that went on every single night.

It’s hard to blame the kid though. Life is a terrorist, and just when you think you’ve cleaned everything up, somebody’s there to let you know you forgot to put out the wet floor sign.

I can’t go around worrying about everything. If I started doing that I’d be in bigger trouble than Dotty. If my head was filled with anything other than sugarplums and pipedreams I never would have started that application to Martindale in the first place and I wouldn’t be thinking about the worst thing I’ve ever done. Because I’m only twenty-two it would be easy to assume the worst thing I’ve done is steal ten dollars out of my grandmother’s purse or tell some ugly chick to go put her head in the oven, but nothing could be further from the truth. I’ve done some pretty terrible stuff, stuff I’m not proud of.

You see, I used to be a drug mule.

I blame Dotty’s boyfriend Steve. Every time I had a school function as a kid, Dotty would go crazy because that jackass set her off. One time back in middle school I had a poetry recital and Dotty ran into the hall and screamed that the serial killers down at the local post office were going to kill her. If that wasn’t enough to make you think twice about committing suicide, the next day after he’d moved back in—I don’t remember him ever having a place of his own to live—he gathered up his two brain cells to make a comment about it.

“It doesn’t matter anyway,” he mumbled between gulps of beer. “You’re just a damned kid. No one cares about your stupid poem.”

I wanted to crack that homeless idiot in the balls with a mallet. I would have too, except Dotty had cried for two whole months and Mom and I couldn’t take it anymore. The only time she stopped being dramatic was when Steve the asshole came back into the house, so I gave it a rest and decided his balls could survive another day.

Speaking of balls, I must have a monstrous set of them and that’s how this shit really all began.

That damned application.

My professors were happy as hell, mostly because they thought it relayed some sense of accomplishment on their boring as shit lives, as if they were the ones applying and not me, a poor black guy from New Mexico. If I’ve learned nothing else from my four years in college, I’ve learned my English professors live out unfulfilled fantasies through the exploits of their most promising students, especially minority students. They spend hours together in lunch meetings bragging about how great and generous they are, as if my decision to apply to the English graduate program at Martindale makes up for them not becoming the Pulitzer Prize winning writers they always thought they’d be. It’s pretty damned sad, but then that’s the nature of this story.

A bunch of damned sad idiots from a small town in New Mexico.

You want to know something else that people say all the time that is a damned lie? They say criminals are lazy. I’ve never done more work in my whole damn life than when I ran with Lexie and her hoard of thugs. Who the hell wants to try and get killed every day? Certainly not Justin Morgan, but then I never thought I’d apply to Martindale either.

So the creamy bullshit really plopped out with an email I received in January after a professor at my college, Dr. Elligan to be exact, made my head blow up by praising a fictional story I wrote to my creative writing class. It was a conversation piece between Antony and Cleopatra, but written in modern slang. I had to do it that way because nobody reads anything anymore unless it’s got a truckload of cursing, sex and murder in it, and they only read that if you can dumb it down into one syllable words. The kids today have the attention span of a hummingbird suffering from ADD. They’re all a bunch of damned idiots.

After Dr. Elligan’s ego stroke, I was stupid enough to believe almost anything and decided to take a chance on world domination by applying to graduate school. I swear to God I’ve never done anything so dumb in my life.

Dear Justin Morgan,

We are pleased to inform you that we have received your application for admission to the Martindale School of the Arts Masters Writing program. In just a few weeks we will be reviewing the incoming applications and let all applicants know our final decision by mid-March.

However, we regret to inform you that due to a computer glitch we did not receive the $500 application fee with your application package. We must receive this nonrefundable fee before we are able to review your application. If we do not receive this fee by February 31, 2015, we will not be able to offer you admission into the Fall 2015 semester.

Please contact us if you have any further questions.

Sincerely, Gods of the Literary Universe

I knew something was wrong with the online application because it took about three whole minutes to upload, which today is like three lifetimes.

What I didn’t have a clue about was where in the hell I was going to get five hundred bucks. No one in my circle had that kind of money lying around. My spoiled college friends would annoy me with their stupidity by constantly asking ‘why don’t you ask your family?’ or ‘can’t anyone in your family help you?’

As far as I know there’s very little family involvement. They exist, but they’re about as likely to send me money as I am of giving them healthy bone marrow. My mother’s brother is some rich bastard in Connecticut, and he has made it clear that I am something he wouldn’t bother to scrape off his shoe. From what I understand, the stingy bastard didn’t like my father very much and blames him for the general screwed up state of his niece and nephew, basically Dotty and I being as crazy as runaway buses. As you can imagine, Uncle Dave’s opinion didn’t get any better when Dad went AWOL. He pretty much told Mom she had made her bed so she had better lie in it or some other psychological fluff only rich guys say when they’re pissed. Since then there’s only been my mother, my sister and I. The bleeding hearts out there are probably having some kind of breakdown about it, but I’m over my deadbeat bastard of a dad. I’m not the first boy to watch his father walk away, and I won’t be the last. I don’t need any sympathy.

I actually dated a girl in freshman year who was a lot like Dotty. Her name was Tracy and she wasn’t crazy but she was completely unaware that the world did not revolve around her. She was gorgeous, and every time I was away from her I thought about how I was going to dump her on her ass, but then I would see her and I’d be buying her flowers and a truckload of candy and shit without knowing what the hell I was doing.

She did it to everybody too. Her own mother would give Tracy rolls of cash left, right and center but wouldn’t give her ugly little sister a dime. Her little ogre of a sister was smarter than hell and would need money for a book or pencils or some other nerdy bullshit and her mother would damn near have a heart attack laughing at her, the poor little troll. But if Tracy asked her for money to hire a damned jongleur from Malaysia to feed her pineapples mixed with cocaine, her mother would do it. It was bizarre.

We’re all a bunch of disgusting apes, the whole human race. Sweet Jesus.

So that’s pretty much it. I needed cash and I could work at Bucky’s Bonanza for a million years and never make enough money to buy a postage stamp. They paid us in peanuts, the stingy bastards. I couldn’t even buy a pack of gum out of that place on payday, so after a few weeks I knew I would have to find some other way to make up the application fee. It wasn’t like I had a shitload of time either. Welcome to my life. The question is, how could I not be a criminal?

I’d better warn you now. This is not going to be a fairytale. This is definitely a fucking tragedy.