We celebrate with drinks.
They come in later, official representatives of the Law outside, looking for the pop star, but no, officers, we haven’t seen anyone matching that description. Lemme look at the picture. Nope. Haven’t seen her. Any of you seen someone like that in here?
There is a slit-eyed older lieutenant in on the hunt, a Harvey Hardass, a faded jaded seen-it-all, and I catch the eyes of the other regular patrons, see the nods and the smiles, and I look again at the cop who thinks he’s seen everything.
His friends are already moving away, out the door.
I nod to the Others, letting them know that they’re to snag him if he tries to leave.
I look at him, catch his eye.
Confused, maybe a little frightened, he looks around the darkened room, then back at me.
I grin.
Welcome to the Ugly Bar.
The Sooner They Learn
WRATH JAMES WHITE
“The Sooner They Learn” was first published in his collection
Pain is the nervous system’s primary indicator that we are doing something that might compromise the integrity of our bodies. It prevents us from destroying ourselves. To not know pain is to not understand what it takes to survive and succeed. Darrell was an educator, a teacher of pain. He had a warehouse of agonies concentrated within him that he needed to share, to diffuse amongst all those who had yet to know it, those who needed to learn.
The boys walked past Darrell, followed by the pungent aroma of tobacco. They were perhaps only eight or nine years old. Way too young to be smoking. The larger of the two boys held out a pack of Newports to his shorter friend as he coughed and choked on the coffin nail dangling from his own lip. He was obviously not used to smoking. Perhaps he could still be saved? Darrell began to follow the two boys, listening to their conversation, looking for the perfect opportunity to issue his sermon.
“Hey Sam, take a hit off this,” the larger boy said, shoving the pack of Newports into his friend’s hand.
“Naw, Joey. You know I don’t smoke. Besides, my mom would kill me if I came home with my breath smelling like an ashtray.”
Sam tried to hand the smokes back to Joey, who snatched them from his hand.
“Damn Sam! You’s a little bitch! I thought you was down? I was going to pick up some weed later. I suppose you wouldn’t smoke that neither?”
“Hell no! My mom would beat the hell out of me if she smelled that shit on me!”
“I can’t believe what a little punk you are. You scared of your mom? The bitch is like in her fifties! What the fuck is she going to do? I’d smack the hell out of my mom if she tried to talk some shit to me. I do whatever the hell I want!”
Joey took another long draw on his cigarette, smoking it down to the filter. He dug into his pack of Newports and pulled out another, looking around to make sure the other kids in the playground were watching so they could see how cool he was.
Darrell sat across the playground on a park bench, watching Joey. A tear rolled down his cheek. The anger built within him into a tempest, spilling from his emotion filled eyes into the air around him.
“Another child that we have failed,” he whispered, wiping away the tear with the tattered sleeve of his mangy plaid fur coat.
Darrell knew all about life, all about pain. He knew that it built character, made you strong, taught you discipline. He knew that it was something every child needed to know about.
Darrell freely acknowledged that he had failed his own children. He had let the world take them and it had broken them like kites in a hurricane. He watched them spin out of control into the maelstrom of drugs and crime until their shattered fragments had fallen headlong into the abyss, one in the grave and the other in prison. It was his fault. He’d been too permissive, too liberal. He’d allowed them to make up their own minds, make their own mistakes, hadn’t set down enough rules, hadn’t taught them about consequences and repercussions. Linda and Jake had grown up thinking the world revolved around them, that they were invincible. Now they were lost and it was Darrell’s fault. He had failed them. But, there were many other children in the world and he would not fail them. He would teach them all.
Darrell rose from the bench and stalked out of the park after Joey.
“The sooner they learn,” he mumbled as he closed the gap between them.
Joey’s eyes burned from the thick miasma of tobacco smoke that choked the room. He coughed repeatedly and started to retch. The unmistakable click of the revolver’s hammer cocking back immediately silenced his coughing fit. Quickly, he put the cigar back to his lips and sucked down more smoke.
He looked over at the huge disheveled old man that sat beside him, holding the revolver. Joey’s frightened bloodshot eyes pleaded with him, but the old man’s were ruthlessly silent. Joey coughed again. Darrell leaned over and placed the cocked and loaded.38 caliber Colt revolver directly to Joey’s head. The boy winced as he felt the chilling bite of the metal pressed against his temple, still he continued to dry heave. He had already regurgitated all the contents of his stomach. His throat was raw with the acid burn of stomach bile and the caustic fumes raking at his esophagus as he was forced to inhale more of the pungent smoke. The boy’s body began to hitch with sobs as tears raced down his cheeks.
Joey wanted to beg Darrell to let him stop, but held himself back. He had begged the old man just minutes before, only to be snatched out of his seat by the jaw and dragged within inches of the man’s enraged countenance, which had twisted into a horrible scowl. The old man stared into Joey’s eyes looking as if he was about to bite his face off, then he spun the cylinder on the revolver and dry-fired the gun against the boy’s temple. The hammer fell on an empty chamber with a dull hollow click. Joey’s anus clenched up and his testicles rose into his stomach. A violent trembling shook his entire body and he nearly fainted. He had seen the old man put three bullets into the revolver. He knew that the chances of him surviving another round of Russian roulette were not good.
The old man took the cigar from the boy’s lips and pressed it into his own palm where it sizzled as it scalded his flesh. “You stop smoking again and this is going in your eye,” he said in a voice that was hoarse and raspy, as if he had just smoked 6 boxes of cigars himself.
Joey put the cigar back to his lips and sucked down more smoke. He had never felt so sick or scared before. He was woozy and his stomach rolled as he sucked on the huge cigar. It no longer felt cool. It no longer made him feel like a man. Six empty cigar cartons lay on the floor amongst the butts and ashes of nearly a hundred cigars and six more cartons sat waiting for him. Joey felt like he was going to die. If the cigar smoke didn’t kill him, then he knew Darrell probably would.
Darrell was a child’s nightmare. He was the real boogieman. Draped about his neck was a necklace of severed Barbie doll heads, pacifiers and the miscellaneous limbs of broken action figures. The moth-eaten fur coat that Joey had originally thought was plaid was, in fact, fashioned from the hides of fur toys, Teddy bears, stuffed rabbits and big purple dinosaurs. Most of them still had their little glass eyes intact and they stared out of that bizarre collage of artificial pelts, as if beseeching you to rescue them. Some of the fur looked real, however, and were in the perfect shape of small dogs and cats. Some of these still appeared to have their skulls intact, though minus the eyes. It looked like some last minute attempt at a homemade Halloween costume or the place where childhood dreams found their death.
