Bad Chili

18

I won’t describe the video we bought in great detail. We watched it when we got back to Leonard’s place. It gave me nightmares. Like the kid said, if it was set up, then it was a horribly beautiful setup.

In this one some thugs in the park, presumably the same cowardly thugs from the first video, still wearing their bar codes across their faces, took a brick and knocked a young man’s teeth out and made him suck them, bloody mouth and all. Then they kicked his ass and left him lying in the dirt. If it was special effects, it was damn good special effects. But considering the way the rest of the video looked, I doubted there was anything artificial about it.

“Do we show this to Charlie?” I said.

“Not yet,” Leonard said.

“Why not? I don’t like the idea of this thing being in my house.”

“We’ll put it inside the couch at my old place, with the rest of the stuff.”

“I don’t like that either.”

I took the video out of the machine and put it back in its box.

“I never thought I’d live to see such a thing as this,” I said. “I can’t believe it. What in the hell has happened to everyone? Every time I turn around, I’m amazed at how little I know about human nature. About anything, for that matter. But this…”

“Whatever it is,” Leonard said, “I’m tired of it being given names and excuses. Guy sells drugs, it’s because his grandma died. Poor kids sell drugs, it’s because they’re poor. Guy goes off his rocker, kills someone, it’s because he eats Twinkies and the sugar gave him a rush. I reckon sometimes it is those things, but you know what? I don’t give a shit. I think a person ought to be responsible for being an asshole. Used to, person had to be responsible, had to pay the price, there was less of this shit then.”

“There’re more people now, Leonard. More pressures.”

“There are more assholes,” Leonard said, “and it ain’t got a damn thing to do with pressure. Or say it does. So what? You ain’t been pressured, man?”

“Leonard, you yourself are talking about going out and eliminating some people. What’s the difference?”

“Difference is, I’m responsible for my actions. I ain’t gonna say I got a bad hotdog and it gave me a bellyache and that made me do it. I’m gonna do it ’cause I want to do it, and I got my eyes wide open going in, and if I can do it and get away with it I will. As for you, I only want you to go so far. I don’t want to be responsible for your actions.”

“It would be hard for me not to help you,” I said.

“I know,” Leonard said.

“What about Charlie?”

“Wait a bit.”

“How long?”

“A bit. I want to see we can find some things on our own. We solve it, we got things laid out so the chief can’t tuck it under his ass, then we show it to Charlie and maybe I don’t have to empty my box of shotgun shells.”

A day later I started looking for honest work. The dough I had made offshore had been damn good, but at the rate it was going, it wouldn’t be long before I had nothing more than an empty palm and a flapping wallet.

I went first to the aluminum-chair factory, but just walking in the door made my stomach hurt. Factories and foundries, and I’ve worked in both, were my idea of hell on earth. I stood there a moment smelling machinery oil and listening to the thud of the machines at work, watching people shuffle about as if they were pushing great boulders up a hill, and I went out of there.

I went to a local feed company for a try. The foreman told me quite frankly, “We mostly just hire niggers and wetbacks ’cause they work cheap.”

“I work cheap,” I said.

“Yeah, but the way we work someone, we wouldn’t do that to a white man.”

“Well, that’s certainly white of you,” I said.

“Yeah, ain’t it,” he said.

I left that cocksucker to it, drove all over town, tried a lot of places, but there wasn’t much available, and what was available wasn’t worth having. I put in some applications. One that looked promising was a job at the chicken plant, being a security guard. It wasn’t exactly what I wanted, but at my age exactly what I wanted I couldn’t get and what I could get I didn’t want.

I began to think of the rose fields again, where I always found work, but decided against it. That hot sun, that dust up the nose, I just didn’t think I could go back to it. It was a young man’s job on his way to somewhere, a foolish man’s job on his way to nowhere, or the last job a man could get.

It was a pretty sad situation. Here I was in my mid-forties and no real job, no retirement fund, dog-turd insurance, and a squirrel bite on the arm.

After a day of unsuccessful job hunting, I drove over to Brett’s and took her to dinner at a kind of home-cooking joint, then we went back to her place, went to bed and made love, which was a damn sight better than looking for a job or working in the aluminum-chair plant. Though, considering most anything is, that isn’t giving Brett the sort of compliment she deserves.

As we lay in bed, we began to talk. We talked about all kinds of things, and gradually we got around to me and my life and I told her about my job search, and how I had never really settled into anything, jobwise, that mattered. I told her about Leonard, that he was black and gay and that he and I were as close as brothers. Probably closer.

“Wow!” she said. “I’ve never really known any black people, you know, close up. Friend-like. Way you say you guys are.”

“Is that a problem?”

“You know, I was one of them kind always thought that line about ‘some of my best friends are niggers’ made a certain sense. I didn’t mean nothing by it, I was just ignorant as a fuckin’ post. Later on, I was all for civil rights, and I went out of my way to treat the blacks in school like they were my friends. Condescending is what I was. In other words, I was actually a blue-collar redneck trying to come across like a middle-class stiff ass trying to show those poor niggers what a liberal I was. So I haven’t really hung around that many blacks.”

“You didn’t mention the gay part.”

“Yeah, there’s that, too. I always kind of thought of gays as perverts growing up. I never hung around any. Maybe it’s high time I gave it a try. This Leonard, he’s your brother, I reckon he ought to be mine too.”

“You couldn’t have said anything better.”

“Great,” she said. “I get to be the first in my family to hang around with niggers and queers.”

I laughed at her.

“’Course,” she said, “my family background was the kind of folks thought you touched a black person’s hand you could get cut, like sharkskin can cut you. I grew up thinking all blacks did was fuck, which seems like a fairly legitimate pursuit, actually.”

“I like it.”

“Yeah. It passes the time. My daddy, he was the kind of guy thought miniature golf ought to be Olympic sports, called blacks darkies when he wasn’t calling them ‘shines’ or ‘niggers.’ My mother, who was a kind of liberal for where we lived, called them ‘nigras’ or ‘coloreds’ and thought they ought to have the right to vote but should have their own toilets and water fountains. Later on, after civil rights, she never did like the idea of going into a filling station and thinking a black ass had been on the crapper ahead of her. So, you see, I’ve had some hurdles to overcome.”

“Well, your old man might have been a racist, but I’ll tell you, when it comes to miniature golf as an Olympic sport, he might have been on to something. It’s a hell of a lot more entertaining than skating.”

Brett grinned. “Give us a kiss.”

I did. And another.

“Now,” she said, “make love to me and try to have it last longer this time.”

“Thanks for considering my ego.”

“Not at all,” she said, shifting herself under the covers to accommodate me. “You know where the hole is, don’t you?”

“I’m a little bit limp right now,” I said.

“Hey, baby, it’s not the meat, it’s the motion. We’ll make it happen if we have to poke it in there with a stick.”

“Oh, that’s stimulating.”

We didn’t have to resort to the stick.

And Brett was right.

It wasn’t the meat. It was the motion.