tired, then he would switch arms and wear down. He left welts on my ass.
“When he was finished, he would become remorseful and read the Bible to me and pray. Then he would tell me to turn on my television set and watch it. That I was redeemed. That the sin was cast out of me by pain.
“My mother went away when I was eleven. I thought about her a few days after she was gone, but I never missed her. She had been nothing more than someone around the house, going this way and that in a plaid housecoat and slippers with the backs broken down. She ate a lot of sweets and drank lots of coffee and sipped Nervine that she poured from a bottle into a great big spoon. She seldom spoke to me and never fixed meals. I took care of myself. I grew up on Cokes and Twinkies. The characters on TV spoke to me in her place.
“When I graduated, passed more out of courtesy than from any other reason, my father took his belt to me and beat me until I couldn’t get off my knees. He gave me a new Sylvania set and told me to be gone by morning and to never come back. He had taken care of my raising until I was a man, and now I was a man, and to go.
“I went. I couldn’t get a good job. The people out there were cruel. Unlike TV, they expected things of you. They wanted college educations. I wanted a satellite dish and more channels. The chance to see time and again Apocalypse Now, Taxi Driver, The Andy Griffith Show. It really didn’t matter. Just images. My images. Part of my holy communion. Kurtz and Opie, Leatherface and Lassie, side by side.
“I ended up working at a filling station. I could never get the work straight. I mostly put nozzles in gas tanks and dreamed of Gilligan’s Island and a trip on The Love Boat, of chain-sawing pretty people and stripping their flesh so that I could wear it, jacking air in a gutted corpse. I missed my father’s belt. Gasoline ran over my shoes.”
As he talked, silent scenes from films and TV shows and commercials ran across his screen like track stars. I couldn’t take my eyes off of them. Something about them tugged at me. I felt drunk. I wanted Popalong to turn his face off and shut up. I wanted a hot bath and a good meal and a hot fuck. I wanted to be home in Nacogdoches, tooling down Main Street with the car windows down and a hot wind in my face, looking to see what historical house or building they would tear down next.
But what I got was more of Popalong.
7
But the boss kept me working even if I wasn’t any good. It wasn’t a place that got much business and nobody else wanted to work there because the pay was cheap. Lucky for the boss, I didn’t need much and no one else would have me. He let me watch television there at the station between cars. I was between cars a lot.
The money I made kept me in Twinkies and Cokes, TV Guide and the cable. I saved up and bought a VCR. I bought a belt like my father used to beat me. I was cozy. I lived in a one-room, walk-up apartment that smelled like the winos in the doorways below. I often saw them when I was walking to work, shuffling ahead of me in search of a bottle. For some reason they made me think of Henry Fonda in The Grapes of Wrath.
At night I would take the belt like my father’s and slap my naked back with it. I did this while I watched tapes of Hopalong Cassidy reruns. Hopalong had a face like my father’s. Watching him made the beltings work all the better. I slapped myself until I bled. I tore pages from the TV Guide and stuck them to my back to stop the blood. Sometimes there were not enough pages.
When I finished, I would put the videotape of The Bible into the VCR and watch a few minutes of that while I knelt and held the box the tape had come out of. I prayed there would be no electrical blackouts while I was watching a movie, I prayed my television would not wear out until I could afford a big-screen TV. I prayed I would someday have a place of my own away from the noise of the winos, a place where I could have a satellite dish and fill my head with channels. I wondered who I was praying to.
So it went until a week before Halloween. I was on my way home from work eager to get my belt and put in the Hopalong tape, and what do I see in the window of the costume shop between Sylvester the Cat and a pirate outfit but a Hopalong Cassidy costume. I felt weak in the knees.
I went in there and blew all the money I had. I knew I would have to buy some cheap brand of soft drink and some sort of pastry that wouldn’t match Twinkies, but I had my Hopalong suit, complete with hat and boots and holsters, though the guns in it were cap pistols.
When I got home I put the outfit on and looked in the mirror. I was disappointed. My shoulders were not as broad as Hoppy’s and my face was nothing to look at. I didn’t look like my father who looked like Hoppy. I looked like a weasel staring out of the woods.
I took off the suit and hung it in the closet and put the boots below and the hat on a shelf above. I discovered if I left the closet door cracked and turned on the end table light, or if the moonlight came through the window just right, it looked like Hoppy was standing in there, hiding, waiting to come out and beat me with a belt or shoot me with his pistols.
I liked that. The suit was not a total loss.
Then about Christmastime I saw this special on random killers. I noted that most of them had sad little faces like mine. But here they were with their sad little faces going out to millions while I lay in bed holding my dick. They had done things like pump hot lead into warm bodies, and all I could do was shoot a pathetic wet bullet onto my sheets. What they had done brought camera crews out, and they got their pictures taken. Got seen by millions. Got to be stars. What I had was more laundry.
But when the special was over, I knew what I wanted to do.
I had to save my money again, and this meant I didn’t eat very much, but I never really cared that much for eating anyway. The more I thought about what I wanted to do, the more excited I got, and the more I took the belt to myself. When I showered it looked as if red paint were running down the drain.
I took to wearing the Hopalong outfit. I didn’t look any better in it, but I didn’t care anymore. I knew what I wanted now, and knowing made me feel better about myself.
First I bought a car from my boss for three hundred dollars. A white Ford Fairlane. I was not a good driver, but I knew how. I could get from one place to the next if I could get my mind off television. I tried to pretend that I was part of a television show like Miami Vice, and I was patrolling the streets for crime. I drove every day so I could get better at it, but I never learned to like it.
Then I saved up enough to get the rifle. A Winchester with an old-fashioned lever. I had it replaced with a loop cock like the one John Wayne had in Stagecoach. It was no big problem to get the rifle. I merely had to sign some papers. It didn’t matter to me that later they would be able to trace it. I wanted them to.
By the time the summer came around I was able to buy two pearl-handled, silver-tooled pistols and enough ammunition for them and the Winchester. Again, I merely had to sign some papers.
I went home and took the cap guns out of the holsters and put in the real. 45s after I loaded them. I loaded the Winchester and put it in the closet. I watched a video of The Wild Bunch.
Next afternoon after work, I put the rifle in the trunk of my car and went back in and put the Hopalong outfit and gun belt on. The real guns weighed more than the cap pistols, but I liked their weight. It was like waking up and having muscles.
When I went out to the car the second time, a wino saw me. He said, “Man, who you supposed to be, Hopalong Cassidy?”
“That’s right,” I said, and pulled one of the. 45s and shot at him. I missed him by a mile. The bullet went past him and smacked into the doorway of the apartment house. The wino ran around the corner, and I shot at him again. This shot wasn’t any better. He got away. My marksmanship worried me some.
I drove out of town, and by the time I got to the overpass, it was starting to get dark. I pulled over next to the concrete wall and unlocked the trunk and got the rifle. It was dark now. I could see the lights of the cars, but to see who was in them I had to let them get pretty close to the overpass so the lights there would shine down on them and give me a look.
I watched a few go by before I shot at anybody. Guess I was getting the feel of things.
I picked one out and aimed between the headlights, then lifted the rifle barrel above that so I could center on the windshield, then I moved the barrel to the driver’s position and pulled the trigger.
First time didn’t work because I had the safety on. The car went beneath the underpass and on.
