Living in Sweetwater was like going to a Five Finger Death
Punch concert every day for the rest of my life, but there was no heavy metal
and no mosh pit, just beer cans, Trump signs, shotgun shells, and idiots who
put those things there in the first place. Not a lot of opportunities for a kid
like me. Like any small rural town, it was a whole lot of nothing for miles and
miles and miles. Maybe some grass here and there, maybe a few cow pies to make
my nostrils bleed, and that was about it. My 18th birthday, joyless
and festive as it was bound to be, was only a month away, but my father gave me
the best gift I could ever ask for and it wasn’t even on my list: a reason to
leave him and this god-awful town behind.
There I was walking down that lonely road with a Dark Side
of the Moon T-shirt on my back, some blue jeans on my ass, and my whole life packed
into a garbage bag slung over my shoulder. I didn’t even bother bringing a
suitcase, not that we could afford such fancy things. Just a trash bag for a
piece of white trash. How appropriate. I had a gorgon death stare on my face
the entire time I was walking. I wasn’t even the least bit concerned about the
sores on my feet or the achiness in my legs. Something else of mine was hurting
a hell of a lot more than that: my broken spirit.
My mom left us when I wasn’t even old enough to be in the
double digits. Too much drinking, too many drugs, and neither me nor my father
wanted to deal with her anymore, so she up and left. You’d think that’d be the
end of the drama, but my relationship with my dad wasn’t much better. He was a
yeller, that’s for sure. I probably would be too if I married a woman like
that. Or it could have been a generational thing. Either way, when he yelled at
me for the slightest inconvenience, I drifted apart from him. To his credit, he
never slapped me or spanked me with a belt like other fathers in my town would
have done to their kids. But I guess that’s where the Five Finger Death Punch
analogy comes into play: lots of screaming, lots of noise, and lots of BS. I’m
surprised my ears didn’t bleed like faucets after one of his fits of rage.
To the surprise of absolutely nobody, I never wanted to see
him again, but he sure wanted to see me another time or two. In fact, he was so
desperate for a verbal sparring partner that I heard his truck engine gurgling and
burping not too far from where I was walking. I’d know that truck anywhere.
Didn’t smell great either. For a guy who fixes cars for a living, he didn’t
have much time for his own truck. Definitely needed a tune-up. I probably would
have had to beg him to tune it up before one of us died from lung cancer. That
truck engine got louder and louder, but I just kept walking. As far as I was
concerned, the engine and his voice were every bit as obnoxious as each other.
Wasn’t nearly as bad as that horn was, though. He blasted it
a few times to try to jolt me out of my pissed off stupor. I didn’t budge at
all. Kept walking. He blasted it some more like he was in a jazz band, or maybe
Five Finger Death Punch got themselves a saxophone player. I still didn’t turn
around to face him. Then he called my name in a way I’ve heard many times
before. “Elijah! Get your ass back here!” He honked again. “Elijah! Move it!
Come on, buddy, let’s go!” I didn’t give two damns and just kept walking. He
honked one more time. “Elijah! Get your ass in the car, now!”
“Yeah, Dogmeat, get your ass in the car! He didn’t say which
one, though.” And there he was, parked in a silver corvette off the side of the
road, which had like a dozen key scratches on it, probably to reduce its value
and make it easier to buy. Or it was stolen from the rich folk in Bull Rope, I’ll
never know. That would be White Snake sitting in the driver’s seat. He wasn’t
an actual member of the hair metal band, but he did have that long black hair,
sunglasses, and leather jacket that would make you believe otherwise. The
closest he ever got to playing an instrument was beating rival incel gangsters
like a drum, as you could see from the redness on his knuckles.
Riding shotgun with him was Scar Tissue. With that spiky
haircut, milk bottle skin, and 70’s porn star moustache, you wouldn’t believe
this guy was Latino. But if he had been anything other than milky white, White
Snake would have booted his ass a long time ago. I guess he just liked having a
guy around who could translate Spanish for him and occasionally curse at other
gangsters in his native tongue. It was pretty damn entertaining watching him
rundown some poor bastard with words I wouldn’t know if my C+ in Espanol
classes was anything to go by. I knew a few words, but I could never hold a
full conversation. His English was topnotch, though, so I wasn’t worried about
it.
“Dogmeat? That’s what you want to be called now? Dogmeat?
What are you, stupid?” Fair question coming from my dad, but I was in no mood
to entertain the thought of getting in his truck.
“Yeah, you’re clearly daddy of the year calling him Elijah.
That 2,000-year-old fantasy novel ain’t worth the paper it’s printed on, my
guy. And that church you go to every Sunday would be better off as a Mickey D’s.
The food’s about as fake as the stories in that god awful book.” White Snake
wasn’t one to hold back and I already loved him for it. Naturally, I started
gravitating toward the corvette with a million scratches on it.
But of course, this conversation wouldn’t be complete if my
dad didn’t honk the ear-piercing horn one more time. “Elijah, if you get into
that goddamn car, you’re making the biggest mistake of your life, son! You
think these high school dropouts care about you? You think these losers are
your friends? You’re better than this, damn it!”
I stopped in my tracks and looked back at him with some sad
ass eyes, like I was about to see the light. But then again, people who stare
at the eclipse with no shades on see the light and look what happened to them. “Sorry,
Dad.” I told him. “Your mouth got you into trouble for the last time. Goodbye,
old man.”
To the Beethoven-like symphony of my dad honking his horn
and cursing at the top of his lungs despite being a good Christian boy, I ignored
all of it, and got in the backseat of the corvette. I threw my trash bag of
this and that onto the adjacent seat and gave him one last sad-ass look before
White Snake and Scar Tissue hooted and hollered in excitement. White Snake
stepped on the acceleration and those screeching tires were more heavenly on my
ears than my screeching dad’s voice. Off we go into the night without a second
thought. Why would I need a second thought? It was the easiest decision of my
life walking away from Sweetwater.
For the next three months, one of which my 18th
birthday passed without a hitch, I would be a full-fledged member of Black Tar
Kiss, an incel gang who fought other incel gangs for the rarest resource of
all: the love of some chick with a huge…huge…HUGE…Twitch following. And if she or
any other Stacy didn’t want to give us that love, we would take it with both
hands, which didn’t sound like a figure of speech to me at that point. It all
sounded so exciting even though the first three months was basically a trial
period to see if me and Scar Tissue were good enough. Mostly grunt work and white-collar
stuff, some wheeling and dealing, and maybe some training in an abandoned
building that was great for squatting, both the homestead and gym rat kind.
But after that three month grace period, the three of us
were on our way for the biggest battle of our lives: a fracas with Me Encanta
Femicidio at Battleground Park. The real excitement was about to begin. But if
I’m keeping it a hundred with you all, any excitement I felt during that grace
period was starting to feel like homesickness. Yeah, my dad was the only stable
environment I’ve ever been a part of. Yeah, he was louder than a heavy metal
band who tried WAY too hard to suck up to the troops while using a brass
knuckle microphone. But when he told me that joining Black Tar Kiss would be
the biggest mistake of my life…he wasn’t joking. If looking at beer cans and
Trump signs on the side of a Sweetwater road was enough to make me miserable,
hanging around with White Snake was a hell of a lot worse…
