DON’T SHOOT ME,
I’M JUST THE METER READER!

by
Jonathan Logan


For Maddy


Preface
My version


Bad luck had followed me everywhere, every day of my life, and led me to hell on earth, a terrible place, like a never-ending void filled with an eternal inferno of excruciating agony. Whenever I truly needed a friend, bad luck was there to intercede, like an envious child. Every time I shunned adversity, adversity found a way to provoke me into trouble; every time I seemingly triumphed over a desperate situation, a desperate situation, with bad luck’s help, still found a way to prevail.
As my children and I faced hunger and homelessness, I found myself spilling my guts to a kindhearted social worker. As if it had the right to hold me accountable for life’s misfortunes, bad luck, knowing that my ex-wife was missing and that I had motive to hurt her and no alibi, taunted the kindly social worker to judge me to be guilty.
All I ever wanted to do was take care of my kids; when I learned that their drug-addicted mother had lost them, and that a judge placed them into foster care, I went to court to rescue them. How could I sit back and do nothing when the greatest miracles of my life needed me? If they were your children, wouldn’t you have done the same?
Yet, no matter how discouraged I was, no matter how hard the social worker, a lawyer, and a judge worked to find me guilty of murder, I didn’t give up. I kept fighting to prove my innocence.
I heard the clatter of jingling metal; I saw the callous police officer remove the cold, steel from his belt. He carefully placed the handcuffs onto my wrists and closed them forcefully, and as he took me to jail, I still believed that my luck was about to change for the better.


Revised Preface
by
My cellmate, Brandon Moon


Freaking bad luck had stalked me everywhere, every day of my life. It guided me to hell on earth, to some shit hole, like the restroom at the Greyhound bus depot in Grand Junction, Colorado (and I’ve been to that bitch and it is a shithole). Whenever I needed someone to grope and snuggle me, bad luck dicked me over, like some backstabbing bitch. Every time I shunned bad luck, it found me to be a hot and sexy whore to slam around; every time I seemingly smashed bad luck, some asshole, with bad luck’s help, beat the shit out of me, kicked me in the nuts, and put a shiv in my heart.
As the man fucked my children and me, I found myself laying down my rap with some douche bag social worker. As if it had the right to hold me accountable for life’s misfortunation, goddamn bad luck, knowing that my crackhead, whore, bitch ex-wife probably got capped by some dope peddler, and my only excuse being that I was smoking ganja and hanging with the homies, that fucking femenazi social worker called the fuzz on me.
All I ever wanted to do was take care of my kids; when I learned that their crackhead mother had lost them, and that a Judge Judy copycat placed them with a foster bitch, I went to court to rescue them. Yet, no matter how discouraged I was, no matter how terribly a douche bag social worker, prick lawyer, and a Dick Cheney judge beat me like a rented mule, I refused to give up or give in; I bitch-slapped bad luck and triple-dog-dared it to throw down.
I heard the clatter of jingling metal; I saw the pissed off pig remove the cold, steel cuffs from his belt. He looked like a psycho John Burger, as if he just graduated from zombie boot camp; he marched toward me like a fat Nazi. After he slapped the handcuffs sharply onto my wrists and closed them firmly enough to make me cringe my minge, I knew I was fucked.


Chapter One


They gave me one of those questionnaires to fill out that asked if my mother was a drinker and/or took drugs, and if my dad was mentally and/or physically abusive, and if I ever had thoughts about committing suicide, and a whole bunch of other crap that would explain why it is I’ve been so damned miserable. I never considered any of that stuff to be the cause of my malaise, but, then again, if I wanted to get out of jail, I had to convince them that medication and counseling could help with my rehabilitation, them being the jail’s intake psychologists. Nevertheless, I wasn’t going to play their little mind game and throw my parents under the bus. My father, God rest his soul, was far from perfect, but I wouldn’t have called him abusive, and my mother—she’s eighty-six and as sharp as a tack—never drank or used drugs any more than any other woman who grew up during The Great Depression. As far as suicide was concerned…well…the thought of dying had crossed my mind a few times, but I never acted upon those thoughts; nor would I ever. Still, I thought it might get me out of jail if I claimed to be depressed, so I told the intake officer that I was going to kill myself. He informed me that, if I truly felt that way, he would force me to strip naked and lie on a freezing, concrete floor inside a bare, eight by eight foot, padded room for my entire ten-day sentence. I changed my tune, and decided to tell the officer why I was so damned miserable. I told him that I had been under a lot of stress, and things hadn’t gone all that well for me over the years, and that was the chief reason why I had been so angry and out of sorts, and why I found it necessary to slap my out-of-control son in the face. The only thing that kept me going, kept my spirits up, was the fact that my daughter, Emily, was waiting for me to get out. Both of my kids were in a homeless shelter. It wasn’t too far from the jail, but since I hadn’t seen them in a few days, it felt like they were a million miles away. Emily wrote me letters every day, but the goddamn social worker delivered them to me once a week. Emily enjoyed writing letters; she took after me when it came to that, which really pissed off her drug-addicted mother. She wrote to me about the shelter, and how much she despised it, and how they made her get undressed and searched her for drugs, and how her brother, Luke, cursed out the social worker and sprinted ten blocks before he was caught and brought back to the place kicking and swearing. I had changed my mind about social workers; I didn’t like them anymore and neither did my kids, so don’t even try to tell us that they are there to help kids and families, because they’re not. The intake officer said he empathized with me because he had an ill-behaved teenage son of his own, but he recommended that I just do my time, and pray to God for direction. I nodded in agreement, and sat there waiting for them to transfer me to a permanent cell.
Even though it was summer, my teeth were chattering inside the jail’s holding cell. The damn place was freezing and there weren’t any windows to let in sunlight. On top of that, they made me sit on a stainless steel bench, in handcuffs, for three hours. At last, this sergeant named Bain, a powerfully built man with a thin mustache, fingerprinted, and photographed me—or at least he tried. The stupid fingerprinting machine stopped working, and when I recommended he pull the plug and let the machine reset, he glared at me. Ultimately, after about twenty minutes of striking the machine and cussing like a truck driver, Sergeant Bain asked a female officer named Shore if she could lend a hand, and she came in and did exactly what I suggested: yanked the plug out of the wall socket, and reset the damned thing. I guess it was okay for cops to have anger problems and beat on things, but it wasn’t okay for me. I was a parent and expected to keep my cool.
“It’ll work fine now,” Officer Shore declared, licking her glossy red lips. She looked like a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model packed into grey slacks and a navy blue blouse.
I liked Officer Shore, and I would’ve felt better staying in the intake area talking to her; but, instead, Sergeant Bain led me to a shower and told me to get undressed. I was so embarrassed and dejected, but I did what he told me to do. Once stripped, Sergeant Bain told me he needed to check me for drugs, to bend over and spread my ass cheeks; but as I turned my ass toward his face, Bain hollered, “Not toward me! Turn around, bend over, spread your cheeks, and cough!” How was I supposed to know? I’d never been in jail before. After my shower, they gave me a pair of white jockey shorts, an orange jumpsuit, and a pair of orange sandals to put on; they furnished me with a two-inch thick pad, a blanket, a towel, wash cloth, toothpaste, and toothbrush, and then they escorted me down a long cold corridor to my inmate dorm.
The dorm—or pod, as they called it—was at the rear of two solid sliding doors. The escort pressed an intercom button and announced that they were there to admit inmate Jonathan Logan; then the outer door opened and I stepped inside an area the size of an elevator. After the outer door shut, the inner door opened and I shuffled into the community hall. I got a lump in my throat and a panicky shudder down my spine when I caught a glimpse of the other inmates. The damn room was like a high school cafeteria, with white people on one side, Hispanic people on the other side, and blacks in the center. A white female guard who looked like Roseanne Barr sat behind a desk picking her teeth with a safety pin; I had told them that I had a bad back, so she told me to take the bottom bunk inside 107. I lugged my things into the 12x8 foot cell, but a tall gangly fellow with a tattoo of a snake on his left arm already occupied the bottom bunk. I didn’t want to hassle a fellow inmate, but since the female guard told me to take the bottom bunk, I revealed that detail to my tall gangly cellmate, and he told me to go fuck myself. Then he got up, strolled over to the commode—a stainless steel bowl sticking out of the wall—unsnapped the front of his orange jumpsuit, and, with me just standing there looking foolish, proceeded to urinate, squirting most of it on the floor. In addition, he farted and the disgusting odor practically made me pass out, and he scratched his private area. If this had been a college dorm, I would’ve been looking for a different roommate. I tended to be on the neat side, and I liked it to be quiet, but I had no choice in the matter. As the cell door shut behind me, I pitched my pad and blanket on the upper bunk, and then I sat down on the plastic chair pushed up against the far wall.
“The name’s Brandon Moon. I got sixty-four days left,” my cellmate enlightened me, as he snapped his jumpsuit closed, and pulled a couple of candy bars from under his mattress pad. “I tried to snuff my ex-wife, cap her ass, but the damn gun jammed, and...” He held out one of the candy bars and asked me if I wanted one, and I politely shook my head no. He opened the candy wrapper and heaved the chocolate into his mouth, mumbling about how he traded another inmate a bag of chips for it.
I broadly opened my eyes.
“What’re you in for?” he garbled.
“A probation violation,” I responded. “I didn’t know you could get chocolate and chips in jail,” I changed the subject.
“Oh, yeah,” Brandon assured me, “somebody on the outside puts money in your account, and then you can make phone calls; once a week, you can order shit from the commissary, or canteen, as they call it: chocolate, chips, coffee, paper, and pencil…”
“Paper and pencil, really?” I questioned.
He nodded and hunched down. He yanked a laundry bag out from under his bunk, unknotted the drawstring, and removed a note pad and a pencil. “You can have them if you want,” he declared. “I was going to write to my sweetie, but she ain’t my sweetie no more, since she’s been knocking boots with my twin brother, Tyler.”
I accepted the paper and pencil, and I thanked him.
“I guess I can’t blame her: me being in here for six months, “he continued, “not able to bang her when she needs it. I guess no single woman should be expected to wait for a man.”
As he slipped the laundry bag back under the bunk, I tried to think of something profound to say, but I could only stare at the snake tattoo on his arm. “That’s an incredible tattoo. I always wanted to get one, but I was afraid of the pain.”
“I’m having the freaking thing removed when I get out of here!” he coughed, stretching out on his bunk. “I only got it because that asshole cum dumpster said it was her symbol on the Chinese calendar.”
Once again, I was at a loss for words. I adjusted myself in the chair, arranged the paper on my lap, and wrote my name at the top of the first page.
“Do you have a wife or sweetie to write to,” Brandon blurted out.
“Nope—not really,” I informed him.
“Either you do or you don’t, Brah,” Brandon disputed, “there ain’t no not really when it comes to chicks.”
“I’m married,” I confessed, self-consciously. “She’s—uh—having sex with her lover, in our house, and our bed.”
“That’s fucked up, Brah!” Brandon admonished me. “If the two of you are hitched, she shouldn’t be boinking another man, even if you are in jail. Hell—my sister’s husband was in Iraq for six months and she waited for him to come home; she didn’t screw around on him.”
“Your sister is the kind of woman I’d like to meet, a good and faithful woman. Anyway, that’s why I was planning to write my story. Writing an account of all the foolish decisions I’ve made in my life.”
“I love stories,” Brandon exclaimed. “My mother used to read to me when I was a kid. I wish I could read better, but I was never good at it.”
I exhaled noisily and massaged a dull pain at my left temple. “I’d tell you my story but it’s long and boring.”
“I’m here for sixty-four days,” Brandon chuckled. “What’s more boring than staring at a fucking fly on a ceiling all day?”
“I’m not real sure,” I came back with.
“You never did tell me what you did to get arrested,” he let me know, “or how much time you have to do.”
“Well,” I began, “perhaps I should tell you the whole story, from the beginning. To begin with, my name is Jonathan Logan, I assaulted my sixteen-year-old son—defended myself, really, from one of his many tirades—and I’ll be here for ten days.”


Chapter Two


Most of the crap that got me into my present quandary started happening in the summer of 1996, when I moved from Hollywood to the Antelope Valley. The Antelope Valley is a part of Los Angeles County, but it’s in the high desert, about forty miles north of Hollywood. Many people think that Southern California is all palm trees, beaches, and girls in bikinis, but that’s because they’re foolish enough to believe all that media propaganda. If all you do is watch television and movies, you’re prone to think that everybody in Los Angeles lives in a mansion and drives an expensive car, but that’s ridiculous: the average person there is as destitute and depressed as in any other place, maybe more so. When I was single and a starving writer, I lived in an apartment on Odin Street, not too far from the Hollywood Bowl, but after I got married and had two kids, I moved into a house on Avenue F in Lancaster, close to the waste management plant. I didn’t decide to purchase a house in the desert because I treasured its putrid air, its dull and lifeless landscape; I bought a house there because I could afford the mortgage. I called Southern California home, but make no mistake about it, there were no beaches, surfers, and bathing beauties in Lancaster—there was no water, either—this was the desert; it was as desiccated and sweltering as the inside of an Egyptian tomb, and every bit as damned depressing.
In any case, just like every other weekday morning, I kissed the wife and kids, and then I parked myself behind the wheel of a Ford Ranger and set out for the forty-mile drive to work. They called it commuting, but they should’ve called it dawdling. The drive to and from Los Angeles wore on me a little bit (does anyone get pleasure from parking themselves in bumper-to-bumper traffic for five hours out of the day?) The only thing worse than driving on the freeway at rush hour, was standing in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles. Not only were the lines despicably slow at the DMV, but also the workers there were assholes; but that was a whole other story.
If there was anything redeeming about driving to work in gridlock, it was that you could brush up on your people watching, and, believe me; you could watch many fascinating people on the Los Angeles freeway system. For example, I once saw a lawyer, he had a dressmaker's dummy clothed like an old woman sitting next to him. The dummy was there to dupe the police into thinking there were two people in the car so that he could drive in the carpool lane. I knew he was a lawyer because he was dressed in a blue suit, he pressed a cell phone to his ear, and he had the letters I-SUE on his license plate. Then there was Lacey, the wannabe actor, smiling and waving at me. I knew Lacey from the commute to work; we both stopped to get gas one morning and struck up a conversation. She worked as a waiter during the day and a stripper at night. I told her I was a writer, and that I would give her a part in a movie if I ever got one of my twenty screenplays produced. I don’t know if she was a good actor, but she had a magnificent smile and a fantastic body. I enjoyed gawking at her. There were many things to gawk at in Southern California: repetitive, never-ending boulevards of taco stands, the occasional billboard advertising soon-to-be-released motion pictures, the brown veil of foul-smelling smog, graffiti-covered walls, and loads and loads of sexy women. I was a devoted husband—I had never cheated on any of my four wives—but I did daydream about other women; and on that day, I was daydreaming that Lacey was getting out of her car and disrobing seductively. Then the bastard behind me tooted their car horn, and I snapped out of my daydream. I considered giving the horn-blower behind me the finger, but thought twice about it after realizing it was another sexy woman. Besides, the traffic was moving and I wasn’t.
On that exact day—which I believe was a Monday, but don’t hold me to it—I was not only on my way to work, but I was on my way to receive a commendation from then Mayor Richard Riordan. I knew that the mayor didn’t really give a shit that I worked three years without taking a sick day, but in order to make himself look good, his consultants persuaded him to shake my hand and take a picture with me. It wasn’t as if I was going to run into the mayor in five years and have him hug me and wax poetic about the good old days when he was mayor and I was winning commendations for working three years straight without missing a day, but it was something I could tell my kids about. Well, the mayor didn’t show; he was stuck in traffic somewhere, and I had to receive my commendation and shake hands with Myron Alonzo Smith, the office supervisor; he was a Waxican (White, Black, and Mexican). Myron had thirty years on the job, and, at sixty-four, was just six months away from retirement and death: Myron had emphysema and diabetes; the doctors gave him no chance of surviving. With my commendation in his hand, Myron wandered unevenly toward me, halting briefly to wipe his forehead with a hankie.
“The mayor wanted me to tell you how upset he is for not being here,” Myron panted and wheezed.
I knew that was a bunch of rhetorical bullshit, but I didn’t let it bother me; I just chalked it up to more bad timing and bad luck. Timing was everything; it was the main difference between good and bad comedy, getting the girl and not getting the girl, being a success and being a failure, or living a dull life and living a glamorous life. I was content just to accept the commendation from Myron; he had worked my job as a young man, and he knew how hard I labored to achieve it.
Anyway, it was a beautiful summer morning, and I was soon on the van with my co-workers, heading out to read electric and water meters on the streets of Los Angeles. Although the temperature was pleasant at that hour, the weatherman said it was ultimately going to get hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk, so all of us except Stanley Barnes were wearing shorts and shirtsleeves. Stanley looked out of place in his trousers, jacket, wool cap, and mittens, but he explained that he had to read the meters in an ice factory, and he was tired of freezing his nuts off. I guess I knew what he was talking about because I had to read the meters in a large laundry plant, and it was hotter than Satan’s ball sack in there. Our field supervisor, Kenton Kyle Kindred—we called him KKK or Triple K—the van driver, thought that Stanley Barnes was a lollygagger, because he took every bit of eight hours to finish his work; but he liked me because I jogged through my route and finished early. If I completed my route in four hours, they let me go home early, but they still paid me for eight hours.
“You know you got skid row today, Logan,” Triple K proclaimed, smiling aloud. “You usually finish before noon.”
“Homeless zombies,” Stanley Barnes whispered, with a snort.
I don’t know if I mentioned it before, but I worked in some of the best and worst parts of the city; one day I’d be working in Beverly Hills, and the next day I’d be working in Watts. One day I was working Mulholland Drive near Coldwater Canyon and I stopped at Rob Lowe’s house to read the electric meter; what a fucking asshole he turned out to be. He kept berating me and calling me stupid; it took every bit of patience I could muster to keep myself from kicking that skinny bastard’s ass. Many movie stars are assholes, acting like their shit doesn’t stink, but it sure was pleasant working in that part of the city. Skid row was downtown, near Wall and Fifth Streets. It was a very depressing area, and unclean, and it was the place that altered my life. I wouldn’t call them homeless zombies, the way Stanley Barnes did, but there was something terrifying about them. It wasn’t the homeless people that terrified me, but the thought of turning into one of them, being without money and a place to live. Becoming a homeless zombie was worse than being married to a toothless, obese, cow-of-a-woman with the intellect of an anchovy.
I wanted to do my job and get the hell out of there, but the people on the street were not in the mood to cooperate. They were attracted to me like moths to a flame, begging for money, food, and cigarettes. I got paranoid when they started scratching themselves, and sneezing, and putting their grubby hands on me; but at the same time, I felt sorry, and wanted to do something to help them. I didn’t have much cash on me, but they were happy to get anything they could, so I’d give anything I had, food and loose change. As I staggered along, I nearly stumbled over the bodies of the homeless camped out on the sidewalk. I wish I knew the stories behind all of those people, but I was afraid to ask. I imagined that health problems and lost jobs forced many of them into poverty, but whatever the case, I was uncomfortable around them and couldn’t wait to get out of there. I wanted to run away, but not only would I have looked idiotic sprinting down the street screaming, I also needed to finish doing my work.
Just when it looked as though the legion of homeless zombies was going to eat me for breakfast, Triple K. rescued me.
“Hey, Man!” Triple K hollered from the van, “I need you to help me lift a heavy plate from the street.”
Man, I got into the van faster than Clark Kent could change into his Superman costume. “You saved my life, Triple K!” I exclaimed. “Where’s this plate you’re talking about?”
He pulled away from the curb and headed west, acting as if he hadn’t heard anything I said to him. The radio was on and tuned into a song by Do or Die called Po Pimp.
Triple K turned right on Main Street and parked in a no parking zone. “Is this the place?” I asked, again.
Triple K didn’t need to answer my question. He stepped out of the van and strolled toward a group of workers standing near a large puddle of water. I know you’ve heard this before, but it seems like city workers are lazy assholes who—mainly because it is virtually impossible to fire them—enjoy sitting around and looking busy instead of doing something productive. One person, looking sloppy with his belly jutting out from under his shirt, was eating a chocolate bar and another—coughing his fool head off—was smoking a cigarette and squashing the life out of the one he had just finished smoking and tossed onto the ground. A third person, wiggling a pinky inside his ear, was just resting on the rear bumper of a city truck and staring dumbly at the water oozing out of the ground. It bothered me seeing people sitting around doing nothing, but I guess it was really none of my business.
“I guess we’d better lift that plate while the water is turned off,” Triple K declared, and everybody got in position to raise the three hundred pound covering off the water leak.
If somebody had a video camera, they could’ve gotten some hilarious footage of five middle-aged men in shorts, chubby and sweaty, hairy legs and fat rear ends hunkering down in the sunshine, heave hoeing out of sequence. Then the fun ended when a sniper took aim and shot me in the lower back. I dropped to my knees, screamed out in pain, and collapsed face first into the water.


Chapter Three


The door to the cell skated open with a deafening clacking noise, and the fat female guard screamed that it was time to fall out for lunch. Brandon sat up abruptly and shifted his legs off the bunk.
“Ain’t that gangsta: you mentioned a guy eating a chocolate bar in your story, and the chow cart arrived,” he informed me, moving hurriedly toward the door. “You must got some of that paranormal shit going on.”
“Well—at least here I actually get to eat,” I sniggered.
“Don’t get too excited,” Brandon belched, “it ain’t all that good.” He gestured for me to follow, and added, “We’d better hurry and get in line. We’ve only got thirty minutes.”
“All right,” I retorted, placing the paper and pencil on the floor, standing up, and trailing him out into the communal lunch area.
“Oh, and by the way, you should’ve told me about your bad back,” Brandon let me know, “when we get back to the cell, I’ll trade bunks with you.”
I thanked him, and grinned.
I was the new person in the pod, and was the very last inmate to receive a tray. They gave me a hot dog and a bun, beans, and carrots; a plastic spork and a plastic mug for water. I scanned the room and noticed an empty place to sit at the black table; everybody in the place looked intently at me, waiting to see what I would do. Brandon and a few of the Hispanic inmates ate their lunch standing up, in the far corner of the hall. I didn’t care that the people sitting at the bench were black; I wanted to sit down and eat, so I meandered over toward the table, but before I could get there, a Hispanic guy with terrible acne and a scar on his right cheek took the spot. Nobody glanced at me or said anything. This huge man with arms as big as my waist and a spacious gap between his two front teeth scoffed his hot dog down in two bites, and with food still in his mouth, in a rich droning voice, said, “I think you’re sitting at the wrong table, Beaner.” Then this tall and wiry man, with tattoos on both arms, and razor bumps on his face, wanted to know if he was stupid or had a death wish. Before I could walk away, food and bodies were airborne. I guess I shouldn’t have been amazed that a brawl broke out between the inmates, but I was, and it could’ve been a lot worse if three or four guards hadn’t rushed in to break it up. The Hispanic guy and the wiry guy both got dragged off to the hole, which was a dark, padded room at the rear of the pod where rabble-rousers were sent to cool off; they usually went in kicking, cursing, and screaming, but came out a few hours later quieted down.
Anyway, there were freaking beans and carrots all over the damn place, and it became clear that nobody was going to clean up the mess. I don’t even recall how much time had passed, but I placed my tray on the table, swept the dropped food out of the way and I sat down.
“You remind me of Ving Rhames,” I told the big guy, spooning some beans into my mouth.
“Wasn’t that the brother in Mission Impossible?” The older black man next to me asked.
“Yup.” I answered. “You want my hot dog?” I asked the Ving Rhames lookalike, picking it up and handing it to him.
He never said a damned word; he just snatched the hot dog from me and shoved it in his mouth. I polished off the beans, and then I got up, placed my serving dish in the lunch cart, and proceeded back to the cell. Brandon had already swapped bunks with me; he was staring into the small mirror above the sink picking a pimple on his nose and farting. Man, that guy sure had intestinal problems; of course, eating all those beans didn’t help things.
“What the hell were you doing out there?” he asked me.
“What d’ya mean?” I acted as if I didn’t understand the question.
“Those brothers are bad-asses and killers,” he told me.
“They’re not that bad,” I assured him. “Besides, if you can’t beat them, join them.”
The electric cell door crashed shut; I sat on the lower bunk and picked up the pad and pencil. Brandon acted as if he was going to scramble to the upper bunk and then abruptly stopped, lingering over me like a hangover, a pain that just wouldn’t go away. I really wanted him to go away but he wouldn’t.
“How did you get them to let you join them?” Brandon questioned me.
“I offered the leader, the big guy, some food,” I replied, “and I complimented him; I told him he looked like Ving Rhames.”
“Who?” he appeared puzzled.
“It doesn’t matter,” I changed the subject. “Now, where was I in my story?”
“In the water, on the street, with a bullet in you, probably capped by a gangbanger driving though the hood,” Brandon reminded me, kicking off his sandals, climbing up onto his bunk, settling down in to hear the story.
“Ah, yes,” I replied. “I had been shot in the back!”


Chapter Four


When it comes to pain, I’m like a little kid. I’m serious. If I get a paper cut, I shriek and whimper, and I debate on whether I should go to the hospital for stitches. So, with pain ripping through my lower back and both legs, and being wheeled from x-ray to the emergency room, I begged someone to give me some narcotics.
“Would you like a Tylenol?’’ a nurse asked me.
There I was close to dying; a bullet wedged close to my spine, and this dumbass nurse was asking me if I wanted a Tylenol. Then she said something even more humiliating by suggesting that I now knew what it was like for a woman to give birth. My screaming was so earsplitting and irritating that I alarmed everyone in the entire hospital, and a doctor swaggered into the x-ray room to see what was going on.
“Give him a shot of valium and Demerol, dammit!” he barked.
“But he only has a kidney stone, doctor,” the nurse asserted.
“I don’t care if he has a paper cut,” the doctor exclaimed, “He’s bothering the other patients—and me!”
Previously, I told you about how I didn’t like and trust social workers, and I felt the same way about the cops and, for the record, I have to add nurses to that list. I mean, a crazed gang member gunned me down on the mean streets of Los Angeles and almost certainly paralyzed me for life, and this idiotic nurse told the doctor I had a kidney stone. I already had an intravenous line attached to my arm, so once the nurse injected the Valium and Demerol into me, it didn’t take long for the drugs to reach my brain. Almost immediately, I felt like I was stretched out on a massive marshmallow, and I was so relaxed that if a man dressed in a gorilla costume and brandishing a chainsaw had sprinted toward me screaming that he was going to cut my nuts off, I would’ve chuckled. Although the drugs had distorted my perception of objects tremendously, and it sounded as if people were talking at a snail's pace and in echoing voices, I was conscious enough to make out the dialogue between two doctors.
“That isn’t a kidney stone; it’s a water spot on the film.”
“Yes, I see. Well, anyone could make a mistake like that. I guess we’d better send him off for an MRI then.”
I wasn’t too crazy about doctors, either.
On the stroll to the dimly lit and cold MRI room, to guarantee I wouldn’t do anymore screaming, the doctor gave me another dose of Valium and Demerol. The medication zonked me to the point that I scarcely remember somebody placing me on a slab and then thrusting me like a sausage into a gigantic donut-shaped sheath. I swore that I wouldn’t add a great deal of sex to this story, but for lack of a better analogy, I could only compare the event to a woman inserting a vibrator into her—you know—private area. Yes, I was drugged, and in a stupor, but I maintain that I heard the voice of God inside that uncomfortably confined tunnel.
“Jonathan. Mr. Logan. Can you hear me?” a velvety, angelic female voice whispered.
“Humph.” I garbled.
“I’ll take that to mean yes.” The saintly voice continued, “I’m going to need you to lay motionless for forty-five minutes. Do you understand?”
“Uh thump sup.”
“I’ll take that to mean you understand.” After a short break, she added, “You’ll hear some loud sounds; don’t let them startle you.”
Did she say loud sounds? The racket, the pulsating noise, was comparable to a construction worker using a jackhammer a few inches away from my head. Then I passed out.
I know, I know, you’re asking yourself how it’s possible for me to pass out with that deafening racket. The drugs were potent, I was cozy, and I just went to sleep. Besides, what is sleep anyway? It’s just the mind’s way of preparing us for death, and with a bullet in my back, I was undoubtedly close to being dead.
After I awoke, I observed a dumpy-looking, bearded Greek doctor sitting at my bedside. I knew he was Greek because the name Nicholas Pythagoras was on his nametag, and I knew he was a doctor because he had the letters MD after his name. He stuck out a closed fist, twisted it palm up, relaxed his fingers, and displayed a fat threaded bolt-looking contraption.
“This is the Ray titanium cage,” Dr. Pythagoras declared in this raspy voice, smiling enthusiastically enough to reveal coffee-stained teeth, “stronger than steel; lighter than a Q-tip.”
“A Q-tip?” I groaned, bewildered and in pain. “Who are you? What the hell are you talking about?” I took the titanium cage from his hand; he reeked of rubbing alcohol. “This is what you removed from my back? What was I shot with—a bazooka?”
“Shot? Bazooka?” Doctor Pythagoras scratched his beard and a cluster of white flakes waltzed across the shaft of light flickering through the window. “I guess those drugs work rather well.”
“Am I dead?” I wondered. “Is this heaven?”
“No, you're still alive, but there’s a chance you’ll die. I mean, I have to cut open your abdomen, take out you intestines, remove the shattered disks—L5 and S1—and replace them with two of these cages. Then I put the intestines back in, and stitch you up. They call it anterior lumbar interbody fusion; the whole operation takes ten to twelve hours, it’s risky and it’s painful. Afterwards, you could suffer from Failed Back Surgery Syndrome, and, of course, there is the potential for Retrograde Ejaculation.”
"Ejaculation? Are we talking sperm here?" I cried.
"Oh, yes. They'll squirt in instead of out, into your bladder." Dr. Pythagoras demonstrated by running his hand from my private area to my stomach. "But don't worry, you can still enjoy sex."
“Did the bullet cause this?” I demanded to know. “Why would somebody shoot me? I’m just the meter reader!”
“You weren’t shot, Jonathan. You blew out your back when you lifted that heavy plate,” he enlightened me; “I’ve called your wife, and told her I was going to operate.” Doctor Pythagoras’ stomach grumbled louder than I did. “But not until after lunch. There’s a gyro and some baklava waiting for me down in the cafeteria,”
All of a sudden, the curtain around my bed flew open, some older battle-axe-of-a-nurse came blustering in with an opinion as negative as my bank account just before payday, spouting some baloney about it being shift change, and she required to check my vital signs before she could clock out. Doctor Pythagoras scurried out of there, off to eat his lunch no doubt, leaving me alone with nurse nasty.
“What do I get for lunch?” I questioned.
“Surgical patients don’t eat,” she barked, “And don’t be asking for anymore pain medicine because you don’t need it!”
Do you recall how I said I didn’t like social workers, cops, and nurses? Well, I need to add doctors to that list, which, by the way, is a list that seems to be getting larger by the minute. I mean, I guess it’s kind of an over-generalization for me to say all social workers, cops, doctors, and nurses are terrible because I’ve met quite a few excellent ones, but, at that time, I wasn’t pleased with any of them.
Anyway, I let old battleaxe finish doing her vital signs and then I closed my eyes and daydreamed, waiting for my wife to arrive, and waiting for them to wheel me into the operating room. I’ve always been a dreamer; I’ve spent a lot of my life staring into space and visualizing what might’ve been if I had chosen a different path in life.
Instead of daydreaming, I wanted to be pumped full of more drugs and allowed to go to sleep, but the battleaxe nurse wouldn’t give me the drugs, and she wouldn’t turn off the goddamn light shining into my face. I lay there and listened to monitors bleeping and the occasional shriek and whimpering of the other patients, and breathed in that freaking stench of alcohol and disease.
I had a lot of time to mull over my life, and I smiled broadly when I thought about my children, especially when they were small and they would pick the green strawberries from my garden. I would fall down laughing and chase them around the yard; they were so adorable. I wish I could’ve made time stand still. Wouldn’t it be a marvelous way to spend eternity, hanging out with your kids, when they’re young and cute? But, alas, my mind drifted to other times and other places, to people who came into my life, affected me, and then became nothing more than wonderful or dreadful memories.
Some astonishing things occurred in my dreams— in reality, I’m not sure that they were dreams at all—I mean, technically, we’re all just passing through an event; an event that one day will be completely ended, gone forever. But, for now, everything seemed so vivid, so valid, and so vibrant.
I opened my eyes for a moment, and I saw a young man clad in blue scrubs; tattoos of nude women—in living color—covered his arms, his jet-black hair was spiked, and he had a gold ring pierced through his lower lip.
“Those are incredible tattoos,” I exclaimed. “I always wanted to get one, but I was afraid of the pain.”
“Where you’re going,” he guaranteed me, smiling, and adjusting the flow of the anesthesia, “you’ll feel no pain, and you won’t see anything; you’ll just sleep.”
But, he was mistaken: I was wide-awake. I didn’t go to sleep; I sat up on the table, gazed around at the doctors and nurses dressed in blue scrubs and wearing white masks over their noses and mouths, and I asked them what they were doing. They didn’t answer, so I slid down off the table, shuffled over to a comfortable recliner on the opposite side of the room, and proceeded to watch them slice through my lower abdomen as if it were a pork chop. It was extremely grisly watching my blood spurting out all over the place—I mean, goddamn, I could hardly stand the sight of too much blood oozing out of my steak—but it was extraordinarily unbearable with that freaking country-western music playing. Goddamn Garth Brooks. I hated that guy. I decided it was best if I high-tailed it out of that freezing-freaking-cold operating room and went for a stroll. I stood up, turned, and walked right through the wall. That’s the best part of astral projection: the ability to slide through walls as if they were made out of Swiss cheese and to travel swiftly from one place to another as if the whole universe was no bigger than the inside of a closet.


...work in progress...

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Tag der Veröffentlichung: 31.07.2010

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For my daughter, Maddy.