Cold and dark, cold and dark. I just want to eat a hearty stew of root vegetables and drink burgundy wine. Pass out to the TV. Mind you this is Los Angeles, cold is 60 degrees. But still. Something happens at the end of daylight savings time. The days are already shorter, shorter, the sunset starts at 3. The whole afternoon is weird cold queasy twilight. Then daylight savings ends. Lopping an hour off the light doesn’t seem like a big deal but it is, it’s like getting dropped out of bed into ice water, like throwing the emergency brake on the freeway. Every ancient gene that tells you to hole up with pelts and a fire kicks in all at once. White people are not meant to work in winter. Two hundred thousand years telling you if you go outside and do anything you’re going to die. No fighting it. You can only make it worse by trying.
You can drink your way through it, eat your way through it, sleep your way through it. But the phone is still going off, buzzing, telling you you have to work. Talk to people. The rent is due. The bills. If you don’t fuck soon you’re gonna feel ugly. Have to get dates. Go on OKCupid, go out to bars… work work work. Every conversation is an annoyance, a distraction from what you really want: to crawl in a hole and die.
The police helicopter comes at three in the morning. I am a nonviolent person. But I want a laser pointer. I want to get it in the pilot’s eye and have him flinch and lose the stick for one second. The bird goes down in fire, he burns alive, his children fatherless. Always at three in the morning. LAPD flies low, rattles the windows. Spindly spotlight fingers some cholo’s garage. Engine drone like a whole Stukka squadron, thump thump thump of the blades, the loudspeaker. “JOSE ECHEVARRIA, COME OUT OF THE HOUSE.” Excellent pronunciation, they roll the R’s and everything.
I want a Stinger missile. Heat seeker made to get planes on takeoff and landing. Turned the war around for the Afghan mujaheddin, took out the Soviets’ Hind gunships. I want a Stinger. Hot whoosh of gas out the end of the tube as I launch. Recoilless. The missile streaks across the sky, spiraling as it homes in on the LAPD’s heat signature. The bird spins only a few times since the fuckers fly low enough to almost touch. Plunges half cocked into my neighbor’s courtyard where the barking dogs are also immolated. The other neighbor’s truck with the variable-rhythm alarm that goes off if a dandelion petal lands on its hood explodes magnificently in flame. LAPD pilot emerging from the wreckage with his flesh burned off like a ghoul before he staggers and dies. Jose Echevarria sprints into the night, parkouring over fences, knowing he got a gift from God. He will live to steal car stereos another day. And I can go back to fucking sleep.
I am a nonviolent person. But I bought an axe for my Patrick Bateman Halloween costume. It sits on my air conditioner. I daydream about using it. Mexican kids come to steal my bike again but this time I’m ready. The porch light snaps on and the sliding door roars open fast and there I am swinging, laughing and taking limbs. The kid further from me with the bolt cutters panics as I dismember his buddy. He makes it over the porch rail but stumbles in the rhododendrons, I leap the rail and catch him. Big full body strokes that get him at the wrists and ankles. I daydream about the barking dogs; making meatballs full of poison, ground glass… find my hands pantomiming, forming the meat.
Dark dreams, dark thoughts. Wintertime. Even out here with sunshine and flowers, you carry the cold with you. No way to fight it. Like the man said, don’t try. Suck it up and kill time dreaming of the axe. Wait till it’s over. Two thousand more hours to go.
Underage Ass
Went down the block to get a Patra Burger. The Echo Park Christmas parade was going on. Teen cheerleaders shimmying down Sunset. Mexican Christmas carols play out of Mustangs. Short skirts. Yoga pants. Fifteen years old, tops. Like all straight men, I am powerfully sexually attracted to underage girls. Far more than to women of legal age. If you aren’t, say so in the comments. I’ll know everything else you say is also a lie.
It’s natural, but I feel like a miscreant. Three blocks to Patra Burger. Looking, trying not to look like I’m looking. Young girls shaking their asses in tiny skirts and little black underwear. Lifting one another up to give us all a panty shot. I strain to get an image I can remember. High school freshman’s sweaty taint up in the air with another girl’s hot palm jammed in it. Heaven. Clear skin, long shiny hair. Little budding tits. Firm little apple asses. The nineteen year olds taking veiny cock in porn look like crones in comparison. Any woman of legal age is already past her peak.
This is why I can’t be a teacher. This, and I hate young people and have no urge to help society. But mostly because I’d fuck my students. How could you not. Maybe you’d hold back for a year, two, ten. But one day one of them comes on to you. Every cell in your body was crafted over millions of years for the sole purpose of ejaculating inside ovulating young teens. The smell of her armpits after field hockey practice makes you a beast. You’d crack. Then live in terror. She’s gonna talk. She’s gonna write about her crush in her Lisa Frank diary that her parents dig up. She’s gonna tell a friend who tells her therapist who tells the cops. Suddenly you’re in the chester tank. Sex offender for life. A child rapist. Never work again, live in real danger of being flayed alive by medieval peasant mobs. Neighborhood brutes beat you with tire irons. What if it was my daughter, they say, but really– they’re jealous. You took that sweet pussy they can never have.
One of my art teachers tried to fuck me when I was fifteen. A woman. Not bad looking for forty. But I’m almost forty now, I still can’t fuck forty year olds. It was a boarding school. She had an apartment on campus. Her kids went there too and I knew them. I had a cold. She came up to me at night, in a room under the auditorium where they stored theatre props.
You feeling OK, she asked. Under the weather, I told her. Well, she said, if you want to feel better: come to my place and see me. I think you know what I mean. And she gave me the fuck me eyes.
I think you know what I mean. At first I didn’t. She was first person to ever express sexual interest in me. I was an unfuckable dork and thought I would be for life. What did she mean? Seemed to be something forbidden. Smoking pot maybe? I don’t want to smoke pot with a teach– OHHH.
Oh. I am a person that someone wants to fuck. For the first time ever. Holy shit. She is my art teacher. What do I say, I don’t– OK, yeah, I understand, I said. OK. Maybe some time. She turned around. Walked away. Swayed her ass.
Why’d she want to fuck me, I thought. I ‘m ugly. White. Flabby. I have a cold, my nose is all red…. well, now I get it. Work out all you want and get a nice haircut but you’re never going to be as good to fuck as you were at fifteen. Smooth skin, a little downy hair, a dick that gets hard fast and gets hard again and again. Pert little balls, not the H.P. Lovecraft flesh sac hanging off my battered and impotent member now. She wanted to taste my sweet smelling young dick. She wanted my copious sperm load un-mutated by decades of liquor and cigarettes. In adolescence we are made perfect. From there we slowly rot and decline.
There were handsomer boys. But she took a shot at me because I was lonely. Smart. If I hadn’t been such a cringing virginal pussy I’d have gone for it. If I’d been the way I am now. Do it for the story. For the infamy. Did you hear, Delicious Tacos fucked the art teacher. Rumors spread. Murmurs stirring something dark and unholy in the schoolgirls’ loins. Women only know to fuck men who fuck other women. I’d have been a legend.