“God is an evil, demented, son of a bitch!”

“Oh my.”

“And I’ll tell you why Robin, you wanna know why?”

“Of course I do; who wouldn’t?……..But I’m afraid to ask.”

“I’ll ask.”

“Okay Fred, go ahead. Ask.”

“Fine. Howard, why, as you so gracefully put it, is God an evil, demented son of a Bitch?”

“Because he gave me the smallest penis on the planet!”

“Aaahhh, ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”

“Oh, come on, you have to be exaggerating.”

“Robin….when I’m naked, it looks as though I have two belly buttons.”

“I think God compensated for it though with that nose. Hee-hee-hee-hee!”

“Yeah, go ahead and laugh jokeman, laugh away; Laugh while your wife is having sex with black men on the front lawn, in broad daylight.”

“Hey, I didn’t write that joke! Fred handed that to me. Hee-hee-hee-hee! I wish I did, though. Hee-hee-hee-hee!”

“I knew I didn’t want to ask.”

 The clock radio, sitting on the soiled shag-carpeted floor, blares out the syndicated morning radio show on WYSP. A listless right arm falls on top of it slamming the button down. The hand attached to the arm fumbles about and finds a half empty can of Pabst Blue Ribbon leaning against the radiator. Mahdakis takes a pungent gulp and opens his eyes, acknowledging the dawn of another hapless, miserable day on this wretched, grey planet.

It is past eight o’clock on a Wednesday morning. The birth-givers and his younger brother, Pumpkinhead, have long gone to work…as most responsible adults have.

Our hero stumbles downstairs groggily, and turns the TV on as he begins to fix breakfast, a vegetable omelet with an abundance of cheese; enough so to scorch the frying pan beyond color recognition. The cartoon, Inspector Gadget is on; he watches with mild curiosity as he seats himself at the lonely cedar kitchen table wondering if anyone ever thought of making a porno version of Gadget, “Go, go gadget penis!” But his happiness is quickly subsided, as he is once again smacked in the heart with reality, and reminded that for the first time in four years, he is with the absence of true love in his life. For whatever reason, he liked being in love and having a girlfriend. Was it insecurity, or just an overwhelming need to possess another person’s affections? It was good that Jezebel was out of his life. But now he had no one else to blame for his problems…and he hated that.

Lying on the table, to the right of where he is eating, is a yellow note pad with writing on it. It is a song that he had started the day before yesterday. There are only four lines written on it:

‘Lovers may go but new ones will show

As the faces change and the years go by.

But I’m too weak to smile

And I’m too strong to cry…’

He gives pause as he considers adding another line. In the background he hears the desperate plea of a foiled bank robber being captured by Inspector Gadget, who had used his Gadget legs to extend up into the air another twenty feet, thus allowing him to walk over traffic. Mahdakis thinks for a moment how that would really come in handy…as long as everyone else didn’t have the same capability. Because then, you’d have the same problem with traffic congestion, but just twenty feet higher above the ground.

The twenty-year-old peels a pen up off the floor. The pen is covered in some unidentifiable goo (most likely something Pumpkinhead spilled on it last night while making dinner for himself at one in the morning while stoned off his ass). Mahdakis adds six more lines to the would-be song:

‘As destiny pulls me away

Towards a much more cloudy day

And there’s nothing more to say…

 ..But to face the truth and realize

That it’s time to break these emotional ties

That keep me locked up behind cold eyes.’

There.

His work was done for the day. Still chewing his food, he gets up from the table, walks to the kitchen and dumps the plate into the sink. ‘Someone will clean this up, they always do. Every day I put dirty plates in here and the next day they’re gone.’ He turns off the TV and heads upstairs to rub one out and take a shower.

It is almost ten o’clock by the time he is dressed.

There.

Two hours killed without too much thinking. But how to destroy the rest of the day? His birth-givers told him he’d best find a job soon…..‘or else’. He didn’t know what ‘or else’ meant, but it didn’t sound promising. He had come to appreciate the comforts of a real home (warmth, electricity, his own room, a toilet), and was in no hurry to return to the lifestyle of living under bridges, in friends’ cars, and in laundry mats as he had done with Carl and Floyd only a year ago. He walked to his upstairs bedroom window and stared outside, deep in thought, trying to remember the events of the night before……

Photo: "I have got a crush on you," by Tor Alden

Art: "The Burnouts" by Liz Aikler

© 2016 Mark Rogers

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