Truncated II: A Cold Day in Heaven: Truncated, #2

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THE MIND IS an interesting place. I’ve never been one to judge others. Too much. Mostly I judged myself. The battle between good and evil, God and Satan, has always been a metaphoric thing to me. Not literal. The very war going on inside one’s head when making a decision, say: Should I go to work today or call in sick? can be a debilitating dilemma that would seem, if one weren’t paying close attention, to be guided by these outside forces. On the God side, it’s, You should go to work because you are not sick and that’s the right thing to do. On the Devil side, it’s, You should stay home, because, fuck it, work sucks, you hate it and you should eat bad food, watch TV, and jerk it. A lot. Sounds like good and bad voices in your head, but in reality, it’s a war between brain tissue.

The conversation in my head would go something like this: first of all, I’m not sick, second of all, if I’m not sick, could I actually be making myself sick by feeding my body negative signals of sickness, and when I show up to work tomorrow not sick, everyone will know I’m full of shit and think I’m just a pussy, and say, Wow, Bill isn’t very committed to our ‘mission’ here at work, or will start with some really strange scenarios like, Well, he doesn’t seem sick, but because he never calls in sick, maybe he has something more private and severe going on like, it burns when he pees because he’s always with a new and oddly exotic girl who came from somewhere where they have things like that, and I’ll never look at Bill the same again.

So you end up gnawing on your brain-tongue with things like, If I’m really just made up of atoms and molecules, carbon and water, what in the Sam fuck hell am I worried about? And all it really is, is different parts of your brain at war, just like the angel on your right shoulder and the devil on your left working out whether you need to stay home, watch TV and masturbate at least three times until nothing comes out but a puff of air, or what people will think about you and wonder if you have a venereal disease and if you’re not committed to the company or its employees, and which scenario will work out in the long run for a job you hate and people you don’t like, and the strange distant whispering voice that sounds like the kid you used to be, saying, You only live once.

All it is, is these warring factions of brain tissue wanting their due. You have the old reptilian part wanting the food, the sex, the safety and the newer parts saying, we want fulfillment and fun and meaning. So you end up taking several years off your life by staying in the battle of attrition, instead of just going to work or making the phone call that would take under ten seconds and tell them the truth: If I come into work today, it’s one more step up the clock tower and what I really need to do is jack off and eat really bad food and watch some worse mid afternoon TV.

All that goes on, and more, and all the time over most of life’s big and little decisions. And while I’ve always found the world to be a strange place and the universe itself to be very interesting, i.e., it’s really big, it has really big shit in it, shit’s really far, it’s made up of really small shit, and it trips the shit out of my brain, the bigger trip is that there’s not just one brain, with their little Should I go to work or jack off? battle, there were billions of them.

And really, you can’t blame us for not knowing what the fuck is going on, or why this collection of molecules wants this or that collection wants that or why this one is fat and this one skinny and this one can catch a ball and this one can play the flute and how in the hell can there be judgment when there’s just too much possibility in a place created by a nature that really doesn’t give a shit about us and at the same time our current reality was created by these collections of molecules that really don’t know what they are or how they got here or… if they should go to work or stay at home and eat bad food and watch TV and jack off three times.

So with all the possibilities the universe has to offer, I mean, the Big Bang banged, and then a lot of shit happened, like stars were created and then galaxies, and then there was this planet with air and water and dinosaurs, and then ice ages, and it took billions and billions of years to make a brain that could send a man to the moon, split atoms, and have go to work or jack off battles going on inside at all times, all the while stars are burning out and making black holes and galaxies were colliding.

What led me here to this moment was somehow a culmination of everything that started after the Big Bang, the creation of the Earth, and then all that nature that happened over eons, where most animals died, but we developed these incredible brains as fantastical as the universe itself, and we had ancestors that started as some sort of mollusk probably, but still we evolved and evolved surviving all the hardships that were somehow helping, and in some ways guiding us to what we became, and what we ended up with was the Do I go to work or stay home and jack off? war.

And when I opened my eyes after my glazed and ephemeral epiphany about just where I fit in this universe: I am a bunch of jack off molecules that hate work, imagine my surprise to be staring at a bunch of go to work or jack off molecules hovering several inches above my nose and wearing a set of Coke- bottle glasses that magnified his eyes to alien proportions, staring back at me.

The jack off molecules grinned. Then spoke.

You’re looking well rested, I see.

The jack off molecules were British jack off molecules.

I shut my eyes and opened them hoping I was dead. I wasn’t. I was looking at a guy with Coke-bottle glasses, gray, messy rock-star hair that jutted out like a salon styled Einstein, and he was actually wearing a bleached white lab coat, board shorts, a Grateful Dead tee shirt and flip-flop sandals. He checked the IV line that hung from a two-by-four with a rusty nail in it next to the bent and rickety gurney I was laying on.

Looking druggedly out to my surroundings, I saw broken chunks of cement, blue sky, a few assholes with guns, thick numbered pillars and a few cars. I was in a parking garage for some reason.

I looked down to my torso and socked feet, horrified at what I might find. I was in a hospital gown. I was horrified.

Why am I wearing a hospital gown?

He looked at me like I was crazy.

Because you’re in a hospital.

I looked around again, thinking maybe I was crazy. One of the gunmen turned to me and stared with a blank, I want to kill you stare.

Right. I said. I forgot.

Okay. So this guy was crazy.

He pulled my gown to the side so he could inspect me. There was a thick weave of bandages wrapped around my abdomen and a small spot of blood and a yellow circle of fluid surrounding it.

I’m just going to re-dress this wound for you, if you don’t mind.

I don’t mind.

I looked at the faces of the gunmen. Hispanic and white. Takers and gangsters. My old friends that were hellbent on killing me, were now doing their damnedest to keep me alive. These were the same guys who chased me up the coast from Huntington Beach and into Long Beach where they killed some new friends of mine and shot… my Elf.

A wave of pain rippled out, not like a pebble dropped into a pond, but more like a boulder dropped into a filled porcelain bath tub. I swallowed what felt like a dry grass-filled dirt clod and pulled my gaze from the faces of the men, lest I project my feelings of wrath and mutilated vengeance in their general direction.

I had no illusions that I was James Bond and had some sort of super power that would allow me to swipe these Coke-bottle glasses off this crazy doctor’s face, quickly smash off a piece into a sharp edge, throw it into the carotid artery of the closest gangster, do some sort of flip roll off the gurney that only caused slight discomfort to the bullet wound that entered my intestines and then exited my back, grab his gun while he falls dead, drop and do a spin move spraying down my enemies and then turning the gun on this mad scientist and saying something like, Just what the doctor ordered, and shoot him between the eyes.

No. I would just lay here weak as a newborn baby and try to die quickly rather than slowly. I wondered why they were keeping me alive, so I asked, Why are you keeping me alive?

Ah! A very good question, old chap! So that they can kill you again.

I see. I said. Umm… and why exactly?

Because they hate you. They really, really hate you.

I get that a lot.

He checked the IV line again. I as it is, I don’t hate you, but they pay me, so…

He took some scissors from his lab coat pocket and my belly recoiled from from the cold surgical steel as he clipped through the bandages.

And how do they pay you?

Oh, I don’t know, food… boys.

I’m sorry?

He looked up from his handy-work, pissed that I was interrupting him.

Food? You don’t know what food is?

I do. I just thought you said boys.

I did! Now stop interrupting! I’m trying to work.

He went back to peeling off the bandage that stuck, for what probably would have been a painful moment to the entry wound, had I not retreated mentally so far away from the fact that I was being kept alive so that I could be killed again by a pedophile doctor (he could have been an accountant for all I knew) who liked food and little boys and worked for the guys who hated me and just seemed to be standing around waiting for me to get better so they could shoot me and probably rinse and repeat the cycle as many times as they could until I just wore out.

I hated molecules.

When your body is healing from massive trauma from say, a gunshot wound, time has less meaning. It’s like that part of your consciousness shuts off to allow for other things to take place, such as, repairing the thousands of capillaries and blood vessels that were damaged as the bullet entered your flesh and then mushroomed out in order to cause more and nastier damage than if the bullet were to stay that shiny pointy thing it started out as. What a beautiful creation.

Was I here in this parking garage hospital for weeks? A day? A few hours? Or just minutes before I opened my eyes to this whole new and special nightmare of being surrounded by my enemies and being kept alive in order to be killed again?

I didn’t know. All I did know was that I couldn’t do much about it. Lifting my hand caused my heart to race and my lungs to work overtime. Again, and I was sort of becoming an expert at this having been shot twice now, I knew it was because my body didn’t want to do shit until I was healed. So I lay there wondering just how healed are they going to make me before they shot me again. Is an arm lift worthy? Or do I need to be able to walk again? I highly doubted I could walk.

The doctor guy sat on a parking block, his hands around his knees rocking himself for what seemed like hours. It went on for so long that it got funny, then it got old, then funny again. The gunmen standing at various positions throughout the parking garage didn’t talk much. I just heard mumbles and grumbles and the occasional fart. It seemed like they were waiting for something and I don’t think it was just for me to get better.

My answer came moments later when a band of five more gunmen strolled up the cement ramp weary and pissed off. Two were white Takers, and three were Hispanic. One of the white Takers was holding my gun. My mother fucking gun! Mother f…. He looked at me with satisfaction and a pride filled grin. And here I was in a hospital gown.

The one in the middle was Hispanic and more than likely the leader. He had the flannel shirt buttoned at the top, but for some reason unbuttoned at the bottom look going. I admired it. He was still representing and I was in a set of mismatched socks. Okay, maybe I was a little jealous.

The doctor stood up quickly as though at attention and the lead gangster handed his AK-47 to another gangster and approached us. An Hispanic gunman who had been standing watch over me called out from the far corner of parking garage.

You get em, ese?

Naw man, they got away.

I assumed they were talking about my little band of homies that included my older brother, my niece and nephew, the Li family, the Crip gangster Lokee, Hammed the Persian, and the dark and mysterious Carl. We had all come really close to getting dead by these guys outside the Taj Mahal Indian restaurant in Long Beach. I couldn’t say it was mostly my fault, but it sort of was. Even if they weren’t talking about my group that was on a mission to my mom’s house, I had just decided at that moment to imagine it was them and let it be. That would curl my lips up for a quick moment. And I needed that, because this really pissed off and serious gangster may have already decided I was alive enough to kill again.

He approached the doctor but looked at me the whole time.

How is he?

The doctor was nervous and stuttered, I — I — he — I — better and better.

Can he walk?

I was marveling at the gangsters perfectly shaved head.

I can’t say for sure yet, maybe a couple of days…

Can he stand then?

Wow, he really hated me.

I asked him, How do you get your hair like that?

Say what, ese?

He glared and got close to my face.

Nothing, just, it looks fresh, like today — I’m just saying you look really good.

Shut the fuck up!

He back handed my mouth. Ow.

I felt the copper taste of salty blood. Good. I was hungry.

Right. It’s just that there’s no electricity and I was wondering if you do it yourself, or —

Smack! Ow. Fuck. Okay, I decided to shut up.

You don’t get it do you, ese? You killed my primos.

I wiped blood from my nose and stared through tearing eyes.

Your what?

My cousins!

Oh, so this is really a family thing.

Smack! Ow. Fuck. Why couldn’t I just shut up?

Umm. Sir. Far be it from me to interrupt a man when he is working, but shouldn’t we let him heal a bit more and then beat him?

This was a terrible day.

The gangster walked away to cool off and came back, getting in my face again. His breath smelled like onions. I was about to ask where he got them, then stopped myself.

I was going to let you heal all the way, holmes. I was going to let you get up and walk and enjoy life again. I’m sorry, I just don’t think I can wait that long. But I like the idea of you thinking about it. Tomorrow. Tomorrow when the sun is high, I’m going to shoot you in the knees. And maybe the balls.

Or the head. My head is good.

Smack! Ow. Fuck.

No. No, no, no. I’m going to let little diddle fuck doctor here, keep you in pain and heal you up. Then I’m going to chop off some fingers and maybe some toes. I don’t know, maybe every other one, then let you heal, then chop off the rest. Then, I’ll go to work on your face. Ears, eyes, nose, tongue.

"Well, my tongue isn’t technically on my face."

Smack! Ow. Fuck.

Then I’m going to parade you around. Our little pet, It. We’re going to bring you to picnics and barbecues, and the occasional quinceañera. A fucking mascot, holmes.

I opened my mouth to say —

Smack! Ow. Fuck.

The blood on my face had cooled, then dried and I was too tired to wipe it off. I laid there in and out of consciousness, with a gaggle of images and nightmares until night, and was woken from a particularly unpleasant dream where I was at a party filled with Hispanic children who were all dressed in white at a park and they were all gathered around and laughing at me and all I could see was my toeless feet at the end of a gurney and when I raised my hand to look at it, it had no fingers.

The sound that woke me sounded like a body had dropped. I only know that because I had heard a lot of bodies drop recently, including mine. I sat there listening hard, which is a strange thing because I didn’t know if it was possible to listen harder than you were already listening, or it was like eyesight that was pretty much fixed. But either way, I listened harder.

I thought I could hear feet trying to be quiet. I thought I could hear a minor scuffle, a muffled grunt and another body drop. I looked around in the dark of the parking structure and saw what looked like a set of feet, face down and leading down a ramp as though it were a kid set to slide down the snow on a plastic disk. The feet didn’t slide and I wondered if I was dreaming.

I heard fast footsteps approaching behind me, then the locks on my gurney wheels made a clank,