Today, you're going to stare at a phone.

"GI, you buy?"

"Jesus jumped-up Christ!  Stop it, you two!"

The two guys in Famous Stars And Straps T-shirts look over at you from the pool table at the other end of the bar, where they have been trying with minimal success to balance a pitcher of Coors Light on the tip of a pool cue.  One of them mutters 'cunt' and the other one giggles.  You roll your eyes.

You glance at the phone as you run a towel over the surface of the bar.  What the phone looks like is it's black.  What the phone sounds like is silent.

"Did I ever tell you that I had a sexual act named after me?"

You look over at Richard.  "In Vietnam, right?"

What Richard looks like is old.  His skin is made up of dry, cracked leather and you have never seen the top of his head beneath the army cap he always wears.  Richard's left leg was blown off below the knee by shrapnel in the war.  He has a prosthetic leg but apparently it's quite painful to walk on, so he ends up usually carrying it under his arm and hops back and forth to the bathroom.

Richard has been coming to the bar you work at during the day from 3:00 to 8:00 everyday since you started 3 years ago.  Richard is your best friend.

"That's right, Vietnam."

You smile and pull your hair back into a ponytail.  "Tell me all about it."

Richard takes a sip of his White Russian between nicotine stained lips.  It's obvious he enjoys this as much as you do.  "Well it's simple really.  I was on MP duty and I decided to get myself a whore."

His stories are most commonly centered around the bustling prostitute situation in 'Nam.  "Wait," you interrupt.  "Is this the one about how you didn't realize you were fucking on an anthill until it was too late?  Cuz I've heard it already."

Richard shakes his head.  "No no...this is a different one.  Anyway, so I take her into the chopper, right?  I lay her down on these flak jackets and she takes this questionable looking condom out of her little peasant dress and tries to grab my junk.  So I say no, no, mama-san.  Richard-san in the mood for some spelunking, and I go down on this little broad faster than a broken elevator.  And she's screeching and hollering and basically making a scene until I finish, wipe my mouth, and go back out on MP duty.

"Right," you reply.

He takes another sip of his drink.  "Then my buddy Harris decides he wants a go at here, and when he goes into the helicopter I just hear what sounds like an argument.  You know, what an argument would sound like when two people who don't speak each others languages try to argue.  But I just minded my own business and he comes out with all his clothes on and storms off.  I asked him what was wrong and he says that I am one sick motherfucker.  He says that the little vietnamese mama-san wouldn't let him fuck her, but she demanded that he gave her some "Richard-San."  Then she pointed."

Richard points downward in the universal gesture for "gimme some head."

Your listening, but your staring at the phone.  "That's classic, Richard."

He looks at you.  At the phone.  "So, he's not calling, eh?"

"Is it that obvious?"  You sigh.

"It was only a couple of dates, right?"

"Yes, but-"  you prepare to give a complete diagnosis of what the situation might be, why he won't call, why you want him to call, etc etc etc.  However, before you can, Richard interrupts you.
"Becca, it's a certifiable fact that the more you stare at the phone, and the more you try NOT to stare at the phone, the more the phone will stare right back at you in complete silence.  They are selfish, unfeeling machines that have no concept of how insanely inappropriate it is to not ring when you want them to."

"Well, I don't do that all the time," you say.  "Only when it's from a certain number."

"I could give you some advice, but I don't think your evolved enough as a human to take it."

"Try me."

He winks lecherously at you.  "Make tender love to a tired old alcoholic who still has 'Nam flashbacks."

You sigh, then turn around.  You pick up a sharpie and look at the paper on the wall.

On the paper under where it says "Number of Times Today Richard Has Requested I Make Tender Love To Him" are 8 vertical slashes.

You add a ninth slash.  Richard giggles into his white russian.

Later that night as Richard is bunny-hopping to the bathroom, he topples to the ground and lands on his colostomy bag, spewing its contents all over the carpet.  But your too occupied to notice, still staring at a phone that won't ring.

Today, that old man you tied to a chair and burglarized will leave you his all his earthly possessions..

Magnanimous, the old bastard was.

Today a lawyer is going to come to your house and read you the will of that lonely old guy you robbed six years ago, the one who came into the bedroom while you were rooting through his dresser drawers and scoping out the jewelry situation. You tied him up and he started talking a mile a minute while you were there. He asked you all sorts of questions about the modern world and you answered him honestly from your street-smart point of view. He found your candor refreshing and he talked on and on, not even seeming to mind that you were upending his bedroom, just as long as you continued to engage him. Before you left, he called you a wise and honest young man and he thanked you for your time. Then you stuffed one of his socks in his mouth, shoved the chair he was tied to over on its side, and took off. You were never caught.

The lawyer will read, ‘To the straight shooter who robbed me six years ago and was more honest and direct with me than all the yes-man assistants I have ever employed, and who was far more endearing than anyone in that terrible family I failed to raise, and who in my final years gave me a glimpse of what it is to truly grasp and grab for an existence, I leave everything.’

You’ll jump up and down, waking your baby. Unfortunately, the family will contest the will for years and years. You’ll be front page news for a very long time with everyone wanting to know what you and the old man talked about. You’ll keep it to yourself until you’re given a huge deal to write a book called, ‘The Old Man and The Burglar.’ You’ll recreate the night in that book, throwing in lots of fabricated details about you telling the old man what it’s like to grow up in the projects and the old man teaching you about the sacrifice people like him made for their country during World War II. You’ll write scenes in which you and the old man cry together, and one scene where you even share a lingering kiss on the lips, your tears intermingling for the briefest of moments.

Your memoir of the old man and the burglar will be a huge hit, and you’ll be glad you chose not to tell the real story about how the old man only asked questions about whether modern girls were taking it ‘in the pooper’ and how long it took before they let you ‘put in the pooper’ and whether ‘the pooper’ feels as good as he’d always dreamed it would those 91 years he spent on this Earth.

Print the legend.

Today, your going to have a duel to the death with your crippled son.

Blasphemy in the Sky

Your sitting in the kitchen with a baby in each arm when you have an epiphany. You are miserable. This isn't the life you dreamed of when you ran away from the moral cesspool of sin that was Los Angeles and settled in Utah and met Jebediah. You had plans for your life, but now your coming to the realization that succumbing to the irresistible charm of Jeb and his bitchin' hat was your ultimate downfall.

Tabitha is sweeping around the stove. She's Jeb's Third-Wife. The only time you ever feel anything remotely resembling pleasure is when you exert your feeble seniority over her as Second-Wife. Whenever she gets too close to you,you'll snap at her like a bobcat. She'll whimper feebly and go into the living room to sob into her apron. God, you hate her.

Tabitha hasn't even had her first child yet, yet you secretly look forward to the day when she realizes that after giving birth to two sets of twins and one set of triplets, her vagoo will have all the comfort and visual appeal of a tractor tire.

Your musing over this when Jeb walks in and takes off his hat. He immediately walks over to his pipe-stand and fills his bowl with tobacco, lights it up.

Puff, puff, pass sucka. You shake your head as if to dispel the thought. Sometimes you can't get L.A. out of your mind.

"Jeb."

He turns around, holding the pipe to his chest.  This is his 'regal' stance. "Yes, my wife?"

"I'm tired of being your second-wife, Jeb. You don't appreciate me! I sit in this house all day and clean and cook while First-Wife plays bunko!" You heft the two babies to try to reposition them as you speak.  After an hour, nursing twins simultaneously feels like holding two boulders that like to yank on your breasts.

"It's your duty as set down in the word of God, my wife. We are building a new world from which all the heathens will take inspiration and repent their sinful ways."

"Yes, well I didn't know building a new world order would involve my nipples getting chewed off daily by all these damn babies."

He looks at you strangely. "Don't say words like that."

"Oh? Does that bother you? Nipples? NIPPLES!" You scream.

He recoils in horror.

"I..I had dreams! I was going to be a Sky-Writer! I was going to fly an airplane write great big words in smoke in the sky, love letters, birthday wishes, movie promotions!"

He flinches again, as if struck. "My wife, Sky-Writing is-"

"The Devil? Everything is The Devil to you, Jeb! Well, maybe there's a devil IN ME!"

You burst into tears and run out the front door, the fact you still have two babies attached to your breasts flees from your mind. You bang one of the babies heads on the doorjamb as you escape and he falls to the floor with a resounding thump.  He screws his eyes shut and tiny shrieks of pain echo throughout the house, but soon the only sound you hear is the wind in your ears as you sprint towards the highway, towards fate.

The baby named Ethan that you dropped will grow up to know that the reason he can't figure multiplication tables and walks with a limp is because his devil of a Mother abandoned him to run off and write blasphemy in the sky, and when he's old enough he'll come looking for you, his eyes full of red unspeakable hate and his bum leg dragging behind him in the dust.

Prepare yourself to duel to the death with your crippled son.

Today, you're going to dance on the ashes.

This morning when you get up you’ll feel a hundred pounds lighter.  You’ll tour the old house, taking time to stop in the dining room where you played trivial pursuit with your daughter at the dining table.  When she was teething she chewed the entire left edge of the table, and you run your fingers along the gnawed flakes of wood and you remember. 

 In the backyard is the tree where you and your fiancé carved your initials inside of a bulbous heart with the sharp spiraled edge of a wine cork.  The wine cork broke near the end and you had nothing to open your last bottle of pinot noir, so you broke it over the railing near the door and watched her for the next hour to make sure she didn’t get any glass in her mouth.  There’s a shard of glass just out of view behind the step as you go back into the house but you don’t notice because you’re remembering.

You go through the kitchen and into the foyer, your nose is crinkling at the smell of kerosene.  There’s some road flares balanced on the umbrella stand.  You pick them up almost as an afterthought, because now you’re thinking of the birthday party where you stumbled home with your future brother in law and he utilized the stand as a receptacle for the violent regurgitation of the eight flaming dr. peppers that he had pounded in the past three hours.  Then you’re out the door and you’re forgetting.

The road flare will come to life with a foopf noise and tiny white spots will obstruct your vision at the sudden burst when the magnesium and strontium nitrate combine to create a chemical reaction in your hand.  You let it roll down your palm and off the edge off the fingers, like you were blowing a kiss.  Watching the flames dance down the sidewalk on its cushion of kerosene and ignite the bushes and the base of your old home is galvanizing, and you taste electricity in your mouth, feel it in your stomach.  You found a way to erase it all, you think.  Looking around you almost feel like someone should say something, but this is not a movie, there is no one there, you’re alone.

The flames chew away for a long time before you hear sirens in the distance.  This makes you think of sirens, and the siren’s song that led you to where you stand now.  I’m sorry I listened, you say to no one as the supports for the porch topple.  The windows burst one by one, and through them you can see furniture, your furniture, left to burn like forgotten guests.  

The sirens are getting closer now.  You close your eyes for a second, then open them and see what you once had is as good as dead, the cinders and smoke the only evidence it ever was something to begin with.  Red and blue lights begin to play along the shadows of the trees down the street and you start walking, but you don’t look behind you to see how bad it got.  You already know that you’ll be back sometime, because you’re going to dance on the ashes. 

Today, you'll visit this room one last time.

These walls will miss you when you're gone.

You've been gone a long time but still, in this room, you can stop and listen to the past. Your blood and your sweat were soaked up by the carpet under your feet and now even though it's years later you can hold your breath and listen to yesterday's ghosts murmur and shift behind the walls. 

Now, as a rule, walls live pretty dull lives...but these walls miss you immensely. The walls think you are extraordinary. 

Your life, as it played out scene by scene in this room, was nothing short of art to them. Seriously, nothing really that great never happened in this room. I mean, there weren't any double-homicides going on in here, no explosions either. But did you know that the walls still talk about that one day when you swallowed enough pills to fill a pharmacy and chased them with a full handle of vodka? If they had seats, the walls would have been sitting on the edge of them, waiting to see what would happen next. 

But the next morning you just woke up and vomited for hours and hours. The walls were so fucking bored that day. 

Don't worry about that though, what you should know is that the walls have been talking, and they compiled a list of the five most interesting things they ever saw while you lived in this room. Here they are:

5. You, climbing drunkenly in through the window with blood gushing from your head.

4. You, wearing a towel, pretending to be a magician.

3. You, trying to mitigate the symptoms of a panic attack by repeatedly banging your head against the bookshelf.

2. You, having sex with another person on the desk.

1. You, lying awake in bed, in the dim light of early morning...staring at someone who is still asleep.

These walls are going to miss you when you're gone.

Today, goddamn if you aren't gonna have some mediocre sex.

Do not attempt without blind wingman.

Today, what you're going to do is go out late at night and find yourself some pretty little thang, only just 21.  Or maybe 19.  She'll be wearing gym shorts at the bar, and she's mincing around the vomit by the pool table in her flip-flops so as not to taint her feet.

You're gonna go up to her and hand her a long island iced tea (which you have already sneezed in, as payback in the event that she shoots you down) and state; "Listen baby, I'm not normally this sort of fella, but I'm gonna regret it forever if I don't come up to you right now and tell you that if you and I were squirrels, I'd bust a nut in your hole."

Right here is where you'll raise one eyebrow, what you think of as your "cheeky grin", but unbeknownst to you it just appears like someone poked you in the eye.  Luck is in your corner though, she's way too hammered to notice or to retain standards of any kind.  She'll rip the drink out of your hands and pour it down her gullet like a champ, then the two of you will scramble out of the bar so fast her boyfriend won't even see you leave.

You and your little love dumpling will proceed to your studio apartment and the both of you will have sex so completely forgettable, and so not even worth the mess, that it makes you want to go home and slap your Mama!

Today, you will be kidnapped by Ted Nugent.

"I smell fear"

At some point today, you will gradually emerge from a blackout. You are disoriented, slightly vertiginous, your skull pounding, the room barely in focus. This confuses you. Then, moments later, you hear the sound of a lone man's booming voice shouting, "IT AIN'T ROCK-N-ROLL IF IT AIN'T LOUD!!!" With that, everything will suddenly become clear. That's right, you have been kidnapped by Ted Nugent.

The most important thing to remember now is not to panic. Ted Nugent is a physically powerful man, yes, probably stronger than you, and likely armed with at least a Bowie knife, a velvetine bag of enchantments, saltpeter, nanotechnology, and a lightweight crossbow...so do not try to take him down. Doing so will only end this on his terms.

Knowing the identity of your captor is crucial to your escape. First, this knowledge eases your state of peril, helping to dissipate some of the terror associated with believing your whereabouts are a complete mystery. That earned calm buys you time to plan an exit strategy. And this is where a little patience can really pay off.

Since you've been kidnapped by Ted Nugent, do not make your move until he starts playing "Wang Dang Sweet Poontang." This opportunity might not present itself until late into his set, possibly as an encore, and may require enduring several mawkish, remedially patriotic ballads. Empty your mind, and sit tight. Wait for it. Now, when Ted Nugent wonders, loudly, if there's "any sweet poontang in the audience," do not answer. THIS IS A RHETORICAL QUESTION. It is not for you, no matter how sweet you believe your poontang to be. Instead, use the question as the starting gun to your crawl to freedom.

Slowly, and with caution, proceed to the nearest EXIT sign. If you can't see any signs – if there's a burlap sack over your head, for instance, or if your eyes are bound by a Damn Yankees bandana – just follow the scent of venison chili. This aroma will lead you toward the exit. On the other side lies the relative safety of the Kentucky State Division Three Invitational Chili Cook-Off that has organized Ted's concert. Do not exit yet. Wait a moment longer.

When Ted Nugent unfurls a giant Confederate flag in the middle of "Wang Dang.." – that's when you make your move. The crowd will be on its feet, saluting the flag, and you can use their natural cover as you inch toward the exit. THIS IS EXTREMELY IMPORTANT, and will remain the decision point standing between you and your liberation. If you leave too soon, TED NUGENT WILL KILL YOU WITH A FLAMING ARROW.

However, if you hold your position until the Confederate flag comes out – and it will come out – you will be able to stay low, letting the audience block Ted Nugent's sight line. Ted will not shoot at his fans, because he knows they will, in all likelihood, shoot back. Exploit this weakness to your advantage.

On the outside, use your environment as social camouflage. Grab some chili – the good kind, made by the Klan. Then, proceed to the parking lot, hotwire a Chevy (DO NOT HOTWIRE A FORD!), and drive to freedom. For Ted Nugent, the hunt never ends; for you, thank God, it just has.