You ever hear that phrase snitches get stitches? Well, in my
case, that’s provided I even make it to a hospital to begin with. That
ambulance had to be haulin’ ass and doin’ all sorts of Motocross tricks across
the highway to get me there on time now that word probably got out the minute I
stepped on the concrete. Somebody would have heard about me ratting on Scar
Tissue and White Snake. Whomever had their eardrums pounded with that
information first would be the ones shanking me to death or putting bullets in
whatever was left of my messed up brain. If it wasn’t going to be Scar Tissue
and White Snake themselves, who would it be? The Bad Faith Actors Guild? The
Monkey Slayers? The United States of Hitler? Any number of incel gangs rooting
around in Bull Rope?
Nah, man. I didn’t see anybody in fedoras wanting to stick a
knife in my guts. What I saw made me want to die. I’d been wandering around the
city for a while not really paying attention to my surroundings until I found
myself in a homeless district. A whole sidewalk lined full of ordinary people
who lost every ounce of hope in their decaying bodies.
I saw a teen momma with a face full of dirt trying to bottle
feed her little crotch goblin, if only he’d stop cryin’ his baby blue eyes out.
Lord knew he had a lot to cry about not only in the present, but if he survived
poverty and somehow made it into the future without dying of starvation.
I saw an old lady sittin’ in a scraped-up rocking chair
trying to bundle up with every piece of fabric she had. Nothing would be thick
enough to cover her skinny-ass body and she shook hard. The shaking might have
had less to do with the chilly weather and more to do with drug withdrawal. I trudged
a little further trying to hold back that stinging saltwater in my eyes.
And then I saw a pair of blistered and cracked feet hanging out
of a cardboard box. I could barely see a chest rising and falling in there, but
even that wouldn’t last forever in this frosty mess that we call weather. He
didn’t have nothing but a torn up T-shirt on his back and a little paper cup
with change jingling around in there. I wanted to give him a big wad of cash
that I earned from wheeling and dealing with Black Tar Kiss, trading for ingredients
to make that magical chewing tobacco. A wad of cash had nothing on a good
homecooked meal and my heart sank to the bottom knowing it was already too late
for him.
Seeing some shopping-cart pushers, some little kids in
knockoff coats freezing their butts off, some old grandpa slumping around with
a cane and not a single thing on his naked feet, not only did seeing these
people put my weary eyeballs through hellfire and torture, but they reminded me
of a meme I saw on the Book of Faces one time. It said, “You’re closer to being
homeless than you are to being a billionaire.” A broken heart was the least of
my worries. That meme was looking more like a reality the more I realized my
money wouldn’t last forever. I could stay at a cheap-ass motel for a few
nights, but then what? Right back on the streets to meet my new neighbors.
This wasn’t a neighborhood. It was a graveyard for people
who still had something resembling a pulse. Old people and kids were among
them. Old people and kids! My stomach growled and ached at the thought of these
homeless folks dying a slow and agonizing death all because nobody would give
them a bite to eat. They probably heard the unwanted advice of, “Get a job!”
even though they already took it and still couldn’t afford shelter. Bull Rope
ain’t no hippie paradise. This place was a death camp with no guards. Smelled
like one, too. Made me wonder if the coroner had a steady supply of nose clips
to go around, that was if he wasn’t too busy blowing snot out of it from all
the tears he shed beforehand. Making a coroner or an undertaker cry took talent,
but none of them talents translated into success in the job market. Squandered
potential everywhere, though someone probably squandered it for them.
Speaking of squandered potential, as I was dragging my
frozen carcass across the newspaper and plastic jug-covered sidewalk, who else
but Scar Tissue popped up in my swimming head. Swimming was an appropriate way
to describe it, because I just about sold my own pal up the river. This wasn’t
just some wannabe thug who couldn’t cut it in the Mexican Mafia. Hell, he had
no business in Black Tar Kiss anyways. This was a dude who played multiple instruments
and had a love for heavy metal and hard rock. This was a dude who should have
opened for Slipknot one year and headlined his own show many years down the
line. He should have been slapping that bass and beating them drums all over
the world from Italy to Japan to Brazil to back here in the US of A.
Why would a guy with all the promise in the world want to
throw it all away just to hang out with incel thugs? During our time together
while we were out of earshot from White Snake, he told me why. Truth was, he
didn’t throw any of it away. His momma did. His batshit bipolar ass-beating
momma decided her own hijo was a worthless piece of crap and smacked him around
with her rubber slipper, damn near every night. Grades too low? Smack on the
arm. Didn’t do his chores? Smack on the ass. Couldn’t get a part-time job at
the pizzeria? Double smack on his thighs. Couldn’t walk on water like Jesus Christ?
Breathed in and out? Dared to make a little bit of a fuss? Thwack, thwack,
thwack! Apparently, physical punishment was a big part of Latino culture. It
was so normal to his family that he would hear Mexican comedians on TV joke
about it and think it was a high bar for parenting. If he complained about it,
it would just bring about more beatings with the slipper. Or a leather belt. Or
an open hand. Or a copy of the 2,000-year-old fantasy novel that my dad read a
lot.
Speaking of Christianity, God bless Scar Tissue’s soul,
because he tried to find an outlet for his trauma. Lots of them, in fact. He
already told me he learned how to play drums from listening to The Warning. What
he also told me was that he was a little bit lovesick for them three chicas.
Every night he’d go to bed and have these intense fantasies about them girls.
Sometimes he would open for their shows. Sometimes he would have dinner and
lunch with them. Sometimes he’d hold hands with them and walk down the streets talking
about this and that. And then there were those nights where his fantasies were…let’s
just say, a little more involved. He was in love with all three of those
sisters even though he never had the chance to meet them. Not once did they
come to his home town. When Scar Tissue took the last beating he was going to
take from that slipper smacking his bare ass and stinging the piss out of him
literally, he knew The Warning weren’t coming to save him. He felt betrayed by
three girls who never knew he existed. The sting of his ketchup red flesh
outweighed the beauty of his lovey-dovey fantasies. When he first started
communicating with White Snake over the internet, he jumped at the opportunity
to run away from home and into the arms of an “alpha male”.
Everyone thinks gang leaders and Black Pillers like White
Snake are just brainwashing and torturing random kids just so he can send them
into battle to live out his own perverted fantasies. It was brainwashing, but
he did it by giving us what we wanted and telling us what we wanted to hear.
Before we joined Black Tar Kiss, we were nothing. No different from the gum
stuck to someone’s shoe. No different from the diarrhea dumps in a public
bathroom stall. No different from the tampons that soaked up more blood than we
could dream of spilling in a gang fight. But once we joined up with him and got
our names, we became badasses. We controlled the narrative. And if we worked
hard enough in his ranks, we’d get better gangbanger names and all the money
and chickies as far as our tear-stained eyes could see. All we had to do was
reinvent ourselves. Get hard. Get tough. Pump that iron. Max those looks. Flex
those muscles and macho man ourselves into the gang world. If anyone
disrespected us, we would make them pay. If any woman turned us down, they’d be
laying down and we’d be getting down.
Remembering Scar Tissue’s origin story must have been like
taking a skewer to the eyeballs, because they were hurting like hell at this
point. I wasn’t about to let out a whimper in case any of them thugs from The
United Staes of Hitler or the Black Dragon Machineguns lurked around the
corner. And then…some little lady did my whimpering and crying for me. Snapped
me right out of my eyeball-murdering trance and made me realize I had been
walking this whole time not paying attention to where I was going. My phone was
buzzing like crazy, but I wouldn’t have answered it even if I was alert and
alive. I had to give my dad credit, though: he wasn’t about to give up on the
last of his bloodline. Maybe he should have, ‘cause I’d already given up on him
and prepared myself for life on the street. A cardboard box was small potatoes
compared to the spring mattress with the volume turned up to eleven.
After I had gotten my bearings, I turned my head and saw a
group of chicks in yoga pants crouching on the ground attending to someone who
shook and cried like she had just seen holocaust footage…in real time. These Stacies
were supposed to be my enemy. This was a perfect opportunity to up my alpha
male game and make them all obey. Lay them down and lay them good. Then my
tummy got sour as I remembered all the misogynistic and pedophilic rhetoric
that spewed from White Snake’s mouth like word vomit. Why the hell was I going
to bat for him anyways? I never liked him past the point of getting me out of
my hellhole of a home. These girls needed help and I needed a redemption arc in
the worst way. I ran right over to see what the hell was going on.
Once I asked one of the women, she screamed, “There’s a guy going
crazy in there! He just started wailing on us and yelling a bunch of nonsense
about Black Pills! I don’t know what the hell is wrong with him!” Her speech
got more frantic and she started stuttering at a million miles an hour as she
held up her phone. “I can’t get any reception around here to call the cops! He’s
still in there!”
She was spitting out information while my fried brain worked
overtime to process it all. And out of the corner of my eye, I see that whoever
was in there ranting and raving like an idiot had dropped his wallet, also like
an idiot. I picked that sucker up and rummaged through it, hoping to find
something resembling useful information. In between all the dead credit cards
and dollar bills, there it was in all its glory: his driver’s license. That was
definitely White Snake’s face on it, which looked like a prison mugshot with
his wild eyes and serial killer frown. You know what else was on it? His
government name. He never used it because he didn’t want me and Scar Tissue using
ours. Our gangbanger names were our identities moving forward.
And speaking of moving forward, guess what bad decision I
was about to make with my immature teenaged cerebral cortex? I tucked the
wallet in my pocket and dashed into the yoga studio where all the chaos was
happening and no copper could do anything about it because the reception
sucked. Them yoga-hosers tried to plead with me not to go in there or do
anything stupid, but selective deafness was a bitch and White Snake was about
to become mine.
The yoga studio had exercise equipment strewn all over the floor
like a stampede of horses just rushed through here. Busted windows, benches
smashed in half, the reception desk had its cash box spilled all over the
floor, and wouldn’t you know it, there was the devil himself. You’ve seen this
movie a thousand times, so what did you think White Snake was doing with the
chick in pink yoga shorts and blue sports bra when he had her by the brown
ponytail? He repeated exactly what he saw at Battleground Park with Me Encanta
Femicidio: he bent her over a bench that hadn’t been completely wrecked and spanked
her apple bottom something fierce. Even the dialogue was relatively the same. SPANK,
SPANK! “Naughty girl!” SPANK, SPANK, SPANK! “Bad, bad girl!” Repeating cycles
was normal in his neck of the woods, obviously.
I could have ran over there and spear tackled him to the
ground, maybe break a few ribs in the process. But I decided to hit him where
it would hurt even worse. “ALLEX!” That got his attention in a heartbeat. He
even let go of the chick he was spanking and she booked it out the shattered
glass door. Getting shards between her toes and stuck in her soles was the
lesser of two evils when the alternative was getting one more wallop on her butt.
“Allex Broker! That’s the name your momma gave you, right?!”
And just like that, he stared at me like he wished he had a sniper scope in
front of those coldblooded eyes of his.
