Page 3 of A Long Con

I couldn’t take it anymore. Recoiling from the box, I clapped a hand to my open mouth without realizing I had touched the box. I took several long strides toward the kitchen sink before I remembered it was piled high with the ultimate in grossness. Lurching back toward the fridge, I snatched up the other five Mickey’s Big Mouths and went reeling out the sliding glass door to the backyard.

Sobbing. Crying in that sort of three-year-old way where your entire body is wracked with pain. Those gaping, gasping, ragged sort of nearly silent sobs.

I dropped the beer and fell into a cracking plastic chair where I’d been sitting all week. Joyous yelling and blaring metal music emanated from my neighbor’s, but it was on the fringes of my awareness. I sobbed until my abdominals hurt.

How many TV dinners had I eaten from that freezer?

This thought renewed my babyish bawling. I was glad the neighbors blasted music. Someone might’ve called the cops on me, the way I was howling. Strange thing was, no tears came. Maybe that was part of my brain injury. I couldn’t cry. But I sure as hell could wail. I was sobbing, the hollow, deadly sobs of a mummy with no soul to spew.

I really hoped that Albany, as my aunt called her, had returned to an existence before birth. Premortal existence implies postmortal, and most everyone agrees on a heaven of some sort. Forgetting our life before birth is really a tender mercy. We walk this planet uneasily, banished from our true home. But if our vision wasn’t confined to our current reality, who the hell could tolerate being here now? We’d be so unhappy if we’d kept the memories of our former glory.

I was able to crank the lid off a beer. I almost looked for a place to set the lid so as not to litter before remembering the entire backyard was a trash heap, so I flicked it into the darkness. I’d stumbled on a cat carcass a few feet from this chair last week. It was strange how, even though two-dimensional, it still kept its expression, fur, shiny eyes—though the eyes were both on one side of its head.

I’d had the Humane Society out the week before to catch all the cats and remove them. Some had feline AIDS, herpes, runny or missing eyes. Elaine had been in hospice for a month and some of the cats were starving. Some had already starved to death. The cat catchers found out when they discovered three more corpses. “They cannibalize each other,” the vet told me. “See this skeleton foot? It was found ten feet from the arm.” I’d handed over the cat with two eyes on one side of his head. His expression was of sheer surprise.

Thinking about this, I bawled in between gulps of beer. I wanted to get good and wasted, and I wondered if my father’s booze cabinet was still above the fridge. Elaine never drank, contrary to all evidence. The fridge. I didn’t want to go near there. If I had any money, I’d hire someone to help me clean. But the last sale of my artwork had fallen through before I’d been forced to leave New York. Ash was stuck paying the rent himself. I felt fucking horrible about that.

If the core of our life carries our eternal history, that makes us free. Philosophers have fought about this for centuries. They ask how can we freely choose in a given situation if God already knows what our choice will be? It’s even scarier when you ponder how we can freely pick and select our destiny if God created us. Mind and will, cells and urges, likes and desires? If God really created our soul, couldn’t He have prevented all sin by giving us better dispositions, better climates and towns? I concluded that we weren’t responsible for our sins.

That was how I justified and felt good about craving men. I figured that was a side effect of my brain injury, and if God had afflicted or gifted me with that, then He did not judge me for following through on my new lusts. I know, I know. Age twelve could’ve been when I would have normally discovered I liked men anyway. But lumping it in with my brain injury gave me a free pass.

My head jerked up. What? Did I just see a light inside my house? Probably only a car driving by. But why would the headlights be in my kitchen?

Was this the return of the mystical light I’d seen the other night? At the time, I’d thought it was my imagination. A ghostly burglar had come to assault my mother, to steal some of her clutter.

But now it flashed across my broken brain. It’s a real burglar. The guy was in the kitchen, probably skeeving at the newest kitty corpse, before he moved into the family room.

I leaped like a spring to my feet. Within split seconds, I was in the kitchen, tiptoeing toward that loaded-down table. I grabbed the first gadget on the other side of the wedding cake box. It turned out to be a wheeled pizza cutter. Hey. This might actually work. Padding silently to the end of the cupboards, I peered around. Sure as shit, it was a fucking burglar, flashing his light all over my mother’s hoard. He slipped and slid to a china cabinet where I knew some family silverware was stored.

Yup, he took the entire tray and tucked it under his arm. I had never been a brave or bold kind of guy, except maybe in matters of sex, so it took me a few more seconds to get up the gumption to burst from my hiding place. By that time, he’d jammed a porcelain statue that probably wasn’t worth shit under his arm.

“You trying to rip off my mother’s stuff?” I yelled, or something equally asinine.

The guy spun around to face me, blinding me with the torch. I was just damned lucky he didn’t have a gun. My bike was in the driveway next to the rental truck, but this guy must’ve been accustomed to the house being empty. “The fuck?” he muttered.

I shouted, “Drop that shit, asshole!”

But he didn’t. He clutched the shit even tighter and made a dash for the front door.

Only, it wasn’t much of a dash. The burglar was sliding on a foot of spongy magazines and boxes and cat shit. It was like he ran in place, a wave of moldy papers churning up in his wake.

I was more accustomed to walking on that crap. I closed the gap between us and sliced the back of his leather vest with my pizza cutter. It actually cut the leather, giving me a satisfied feeling. He dropped the worthless statue but kept a tight grip on the silverware as he surfed his way bow-legged to the front door.

“Drop it, you jagov!” But now I sliced only air, and the burglar was in the front yard sprinting across rocks.

I was in my element, running. I’d been a good long-distance runner at school. And I wasn’t carrying a tray of silverware.

But the guy zigzagged between partying bikers, some of whom even reached out hands to slow me down.

“Hey, there.”

“Buddy.”

“Hey, now.”

They were tsk-tsking as their friend burglarized my silverware! I guess they all stuck together.

I finally got sick of spinning about like a dancer in West Side Story, and I paused to yell at a biker. “Watch it, you shitstain! That friend of yours just made off with my family heirlooms!”