David Flynn

Degenerate. Damn Right.

 

 

I am an octopus.  Actually, I am a teenager, but I want to be an octopus.  Imagine, living in an ocean of food, having those tentacles with the suckers, changing colors depending on my mood, and being more intelligent than a baby human the same age—much more interesting than what I am now.

 

OK, octopi die at age two, but even that sounds good.

 

What I am now is a boy named Reggie.  Everybody thinks I’m black before they meet me.  I am a middle-class white only child living in a suburban blah house within walking distance of my blah high school.  My grade point average is C-.  The teachers are stupid and ignorant of their subjects, like the science teacher who never takes us into the lab because he doesn’t know how to do the experiments.  The principal is a former college linebacker who is mean as hell, at least to me.  He shouts.  The preacher watches porno on the church computer; I caught him one time.  I’m pretty sure he has a mistress, a fat washed-up member of the church whose husband is our tire dealer.

  

Blah blah blah.  Pretty whiney so far.  But I have to get this down into words for the web or I don’t exist.  Time for a scene.  I got this from my English teacher, a cutesy blonde who has never published anything.

 

I drove, yes I’m past 16, the family Toyota to my ‘friends’ house.  They were forming a heavy metal band.  Since my mother makes me cut my hair to accountant level, and makes me dress in blue shirt, beige pants most days I don’t exactly look the heavy metal headbanger drug slave type.  My ‘friend’ does, which is why I told my mother—usually I call her Yvonne; my father lives two states away after their divorce—I call him asshole—told my mother I was going to the library.  And get this, she bought that crock of shit.  The library!  Like the internet never existed.  So, Freddy meets me in his garage, tattooed in color, even his neck, rings in his nose, both ears, his lips, a tongue stud, ear plugs, all in black of course.  He’s wearing an AC/DC t-shirt for God’s sake, like that band isn’t a hundred years old, or dead, or something.   The band equipment is set up.  His parents bought everything because the dude is spoiled rotten.  Wish I was spoiled.  Whiney whiney.  In school I play the flute.  Heavy metal flute.  What a concept.

 

“Hey, Reggie.  Wearing your diaper,” says my ‘friend’.

 

“No, Clara.  Sucked your momma’s tits today?”

 

That’s what passes for greetings nowadays.

  

I’m the first one there.  Except for Freddy.  We are taught to straighten out the complications like that in English class.

 

I spot a flute leaning against a Marshall amp.  Damn.  The mother put some money in this.  Guitar is Gibson.  Gretsch drums with a grim reaper on the head.  Damn.

 

Two hours later—I have no patience; fill in the time yourself; nothing but ‘now’ as the TV guru says; mom was into him instead of God for like months—the band is screeching, banging, screaming.  We don’t know any songs, but we love noise, amps to the max.  I am adding tweets and toots, making sure I don’t go into any of the bullshit music we do at school, like “Fire on the Water.”  I’m the only one with all my teeth.  We don’t even have a name for the band.  Do we really need one?  When three police cars pull up to the curb, blue lights flashing.  I personally was disappointed they didn’t use their sirens.

 

“We have a complaint from one of the neighbors about the noise.  You have to stop,” the lead cop, one of six standing in the driveway, announces.

 

“Maybe we should go to jail.  Be great for the band’s rep,” I say.   My peeps - isn’t that what pseudo whites say? - including the drummer who guffaws, that’s the only description I can think of, guffaws, then gives a tap and cymbal like I’m on the Jimmy Fallon Show.

  

“This is serious, boys,” said cop pronounces.  “This could go on your record.”

 

“At least you could have closed the garage door,” cop #2 orders, real strict, like he is our boss.  “Have concern for other people.”

 

“I hate other people.  I hate all people.  I hate the band members.  I hate you,” I say.

 

Which is how I ended up in a smelly room with drunks, a bleeding eye from a bar fight, two whores, and a burglar so stupid he kept burgling even after the house alarm went off.  Police headquarters.  I loved it.  What a new experience!  No scrubbed middle class jerks off like my mother knows.  No air heads with no futures like at my school.  Real degenerates.  My people!  At last!

 

Best was that I was the only one from the band arrested, and only after I took a swing at cop #1.  The rest of the heavy metal wannabes just stood there, afraid for their job resumes.   I was the only one unlikely to be accepted at a good college; I was the only one outside of the mainstream; I was the only one headed for some kind of bullshit rehab center.  Which is exactly what I wanted.

 

Enter.  Now it is six months later.

 

I have no mother because she doesn’t even visit me in jail.  We never had relatives that connected, no Thanksgiving with the folks around the table—mom did serve frozen turkey roll and those canned cranberries with the ridges on the top, frozen pumpkin pie, yuk!—and now they were, I think the proper word is, horrified.  How did this degenerate get into our family?  Mom must have had sex with a Mexican drug dealer some night—cut; I lost count.  I have to push away a picture of my mother naked.  Saw her once in her red negligee; she was a real prude.  Nice enough bod for an old bitch.  After all, I had darker than normal skin for a porcelain white boy, slightly.  Good riddance.  Who needs a family.  I want to be alone.  Totally alone in the cold black universe.  Somehow, I have to get into solitary confinement, isolation.  Too many fellow psycho, brain damaged, gang member, Aryan Nation prisoners.  Like living at a rock concert.

 

Scene #2.   I attacked not one but two guards with my plate of gruel or whatever shit they plopped on our plates for lunch, stabbed one with a plastic fork in the face, jumped on top of the long table filled on both sides with orange prison uniforms hiding rapists, murderers, drug dealers, one wimpy embezzler, and a child molester.  Jumped, I say, on top of that table, screamed with all my might, and began reciting, because it was the first thing that popped into my mind, “The Raven”.  We had to memorize it for a fastest-reading of “The Raven” contest for  my English club at school.

 

“Once upon a midnight dreary!  While I pondered weak and weary!”

 

Mistake.  If I hadn’t gone assault and/or battery, AAA, I’d been nicknamed “Schoolboy” or something.  Didn’t take much.  Frankly, criminals are rock stupid.

 

Guards ran from miles around.  Blue uniforms versus orange jumpsuits.  I grabbed the plastic fork and started stabbing faces, blue and orange.  Took the plate of shit and stuck it in the face of a guard I particularly hated.  Isn’t it great to hate?  Feels so good, feels so right, feels so open.  Looked for a knife but all they let us have were plastic.  All I got charged with were the guards I bloodied; they gave a shit about the orange prisoners.  I got beat to hell, but pain is good too.  I like pain.  Pain is sex inside a prison for somebody not queer.  And I’m not anything.  Blood—I licked it up from my torn lips.  Too bad I didn’t get a concussion.  Poor training for the guards.  Headache though from the batons.  Hah batons, like my high school band.  “Fire on the Water”.

 

Enter.

 

So here I am in my green world, that industrial green I like so much, the walls, floor and ceiling of my isolation cell.  My world is industrial green.  A non-color.  I hate color; it’s so hopeful; it’s such a lie; it’s so Target.  Here indefinitely, which means until the sun flares dead, the galaxies flake apart, black holes suck themselves into nothing, God comes with the key, which means years and years and years.  Because hell if I’m going to apologize.  Because next stupid human who gets into range of my arms is going to be strangled, hit, gouged, tongue pulled out, “S-H-I-T” carved in his forehead and rubbed with salt so it scars.  I got fantasies.

 

What I also have is the thoughts in my head.  This shit you’ve been reading, somehow.  Facebook?  Twitter, bit at a time?  National news after I kill, say, the president somehow.  Stay out of my way.  I hate you.  All you want are these words.

Not a face, not hands, not legs, not a dick, not a neck, and certainly not eyes.  This, as the hacks on newspapers and cable news used to say, is my rant.  Only I am calm, and I really mean this in a real way, really.  You will say I am insane, because you’re too stupid to handle complexity.  The top Ten Ways Reggie Hamilton is human filth.  Stories like that.  Like all of you, however, all I have is my brain, and that can be sliced, smashed, burnt, or simply rotted.

 

My big fear is that computer privileges be taken away, maybe after they read this shit.  As they will.  Fuck you, warden.  Fuck you guards.  Fuck you every human being on Earth.  Fuck you rainbows.  Fuck you baby ducks.  Fuck every atom in every part of this universe and every other universe if they exist.  Just fuck everything except me.  No, take that back.  Fuck me too.

 

If they take away my computer privileges, I’ll just post in my brain.  My new user name will be Resentment192.  A whole, better internet inside my brain.  I am retreating inside myself.  And that’s my life, my future.  I am everything that exists.  Always was.

 

This feels good, like release, like power, like infinity.  Been small too long.

 

Part I.  The end.  I’ve got lots of time.  You don’t.

 

 

 

David Flynn was born in the textile mill company town of Bemis, TN.  His jobs have included newspaper reporter, magazine editor and university teacher.  He has five degrees and is both a Fulbright Senior Scholar and a Fulbright Senior Specialist with a recent grant in Indonesia.  His literary publications total more than two hundred.  David Flynn’s web site is at http://www.davidflynnbooks.com .  He currently lives in Nashville, TN, where he is director of the Musicians Reunion, an annual blues festival now in its 35th year.