Gunsanity

Chapter 1

He was just a bus driver, white, overweight, tired, steering his long red Metro beast back to the yard at a few minutes before midnight. He kept it at an even 60 mph, transitioned to the 2 Freeway south from the 210 eastbound, a few cars whizzing past and around him on the wide, dark freeway.

What a shitty day, he thought to himself. Smelly riders, alotta bums now, bag ladies always mumbling to themselves, never have the right change. God I need a beer…cold…maybe two…ah, fuck it. He knew he’d be hitting the Jack first, a quick shot, then another…

Too sudden to be startled, or to react, windshield exploding, loud, then everything white, a crimson red hole in the middle of all that white, the very last image of his earthly life.

"...and a city Metro bus overturned on the Two freeway near Glendale last night after the driver apparently lost control and slammed into a freeway median. There were no passengers on board but the driver was ejected from the vehicle and was pronounced dead at the scene…."

—Maria Delgado, KXLA Five Live at Five news anchor

***

Chapter 2

You didn’t mow the lawn. The voice firm, thin, serrated.

I’ll do it tomorrow.

After your tennis game?

Sure...after my tennis game.

You won’t be too tired?

No, not all.

What about the spa?

What about it?

Did you check it?

Uh...yeah. A minor lie.

The water looks green.

It’s fine.

You really checked it and the balance was good?

Peggi, I really checked it…used the p-h meter and everything.

He had his black Persian on his stomach, Exene, a geriatric fur ball purring sporadically. He couldn’t see his wife but her voice ambushed him from behind as he reclined on the tattered plaid sofa in his study.

If we just turn it on and let it heat up, the green’ll disappear, Luke said.

He could see her reflection in the black flat screen monitor on his desk.

She crunched mini-carrots from a cello bag as she leaned against the door in a favorite beige suit, her faux blonde hair a helmet on her narrow head. One of her little ruses, pretending to be casually engaged when in fact she was seething, resenting his Friday sick day when she had to work.

The spa. She called it the spa because it sounded better than the hot tub or the Jacuzzi and it cost her nearly as much as a swimming pool to install. Sure, it was nice, and large, and deep, and at this point in their fragile marriage it was the only place where he could get it up without her having to wear props, or talking dirty to him.

Maybe it was the excitement thing, the thought that the hillbilly teenagers next door might be peeping through the tall hedge, learning something about middle-aged sex and laughing at Peggi’s caterwauling just before she came. More likely, though, the sensation of that hot green water swirling around his nutsack, that was the stimulation he needed. Way better than Cialis, too—no headache. They’d done it there the week before, Brit was sleeping over at Melissa’s and it was nice, they fucked for a while and he was able to come without much effort. Later they simmered in the steamy water, talked about drinking wine back when they could, and kicked around summer plans for a Mayan ruins adventure in Honduras. But that positive vibe had long since dissipated and now all he had to defend himself was a 17-year-old black cat on his stomach.

So then what else did you do today? she probed.

I, uh…I did some writing…another blog…

Mmm. And what else?

Luke didn’t care any more that she dismissed his blogging as a frivolous escape from serious obligation. In fact, he quietly relished the notion that she despised his web site, Mandrake’s Take, which he’d mounted a year earlier. He considered it an act of rebellion every time he posted a new blog, and derived extra motivation from the words she’d spouted in a heated clash after reading his very first post, a ranting diatribe against a TEA Party acolyte running for the U.S. Senate in California. All that blogging crap is just verbal masturbation! she’d hollered at him. Verbal masturbation. He loved to write, and he loved to masturbate. Perfect.

Okay…I watered in front. And I really did have a headache this morning.

She made a noise, something between a grunt and a sigh, started to leave, then regrouped.

You wanna go for a walk?

He closed his eyes, rubbed his forehead. She didn’t want to go for a walk. She just wanted to yank his chain and get him off his ass.

Sure. Let’s go for a walk.

***

Chapter 3

They ate dinner in the kitchen nook that night, on the butcher-block table.

Peggi thought it’d be nice to barbecue chicken so Luke scraped the old charred and hardened flesh off the propane grill and laid down thighs and legs that had been marinating in teriyaki sauce while she baked sweet potatoes and made salad.

So I need to create this, like, this diorama that, um, that shows what Twain was trying to say about slavery.

Britney, in her pink Juicy Couture lounge suit sitting next to Peggi. The daughter had her mother’s green eyes, equine nose, pert lips, and big boobs. She talked as she ate, her brown hair up, as Luke cut into an over-cooked thigh and raised an eyebrow, his way of feigning interest in his stepdaughter’s homework.

You mean like a pictorial kind of diorama? Peggi, chewing her food like a sailor, the masticated sweet potato filling the gaps in her capped teeth.

Yeah, like some kind of three-D display...I’m not really sure. I have the assignment written down...I’ll show it to you.

"Great book…The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," Luke interjected.

I kind’a hate it, Britney shot back, hunched over her salad. He keeps using the word ‘nigger’ all the time and I didn’t get that whole thing with the Shakespeare revival show.

She had a way of sneering, Peggi’s daughter, a way of pursing her lips and canting her head that quietly infuriated him.

So mom, can you help me with that later?

Sure, Peggi said, mashing a sweet potato with her fork. Show me the assignment... after the news.

Luke got up, took his plate to the sink and went outside to clean off the grill. When he came back in a local broadcast was on the plasma screen, a slim reporter guy doing a remote from a freeway:

"...in what authorities are now calling a homicide. The victim, forty-four-year-old Garth McFarland, had just ended his shift in his L.A. Metro bus and was driving southbound on the Two Freeway when the bus veered sharply to the left, crashed into the center median and rolled several times. Initially, investigators believed he died from injuries sustained in the crash. But now they say McFarland was shot, either by another motorist or a gunman off the freeway. Witnesses to the crash say they saw nothing unusual prior to the incident so police are asking anyone who might have knowledge of this apparent shooting on the Glendale Freeway..."

That’s horrible. Peggi said in her green sweat suit nestled into the loveseat, looking to Luke like an unripe banana.

Yeah, he answered as he loaded the dishwasher. Probably some kind of road rage…like back in the 90s…remember that? All the road-rage shootings? That’s why I bought my Ruger.

Don’t start the washer until it’s full, she said.

After the news and Britney’s homework and a movie on HBO about young JFK and all the women he banged, Luke and Peggi went to bed. He started to read his latest New Yorker but she rolled on top of him, naked, as she always went to bed, pecked his face with wet kisses and made her desires known. Apparently, the Kennedy movie had stirred some passion.

After vigorously rubbing her clit with his tongue for five minutes until her squeaky orgasm (that she masked by holding a pillow over her face) and the habitual fart that had become a clarion to bail from his kneeling position by the bed, Luke evaluated the rigidity of his erection and decided to go ahead with intercourse rather than ask for a tidy hand job. So that afterwards, despite the day’s quota of irritations, he could at least go to sleep knowing he’d been able to perform, to meet his obligations as a dutiful husband, and that she would reward him tomorrow by leaving him alone to write another blog.

***

Chapter 4

"We are getting reports of an accident involving an overturned commuter van this morning on the Fourteen Freeway near Acton with at least two fatalities, causing a Sig Alert that’s closed all southbound lanes and a major traffic back-up all the way to Lancaster...."

—Bonnie Scott, KROK radio traffic reporter

Peggi had clinical issues when it came to sleeping so Luke had to perform some ninja moves when he rolled out of bed at 5 a.m. every morning. This meant no noise, no sudden movement, and a camping headlamp that he put on to avoid bedroom obstacles while tiptoeing into the hallway.

Britney slept and snored like a lumberjack so he had no problem shambling past her bedroom door before heading down the stairs to let the cats out.

The cats. His custody prize from a dead marriage to the girl he met in college. A thin, toothy blonde, Diana, she’d twisted his heart into knots for a few years until entropy kicked in and the marriage turned moribund. That’s when she got a job managing the office of a sentimental veterinarian in Sherman Oaks and started her collection of strays, runts, and mutts to channel the love Luke could no longer reciprocate. The 22 cats, three mongrel mutts, a pygmy pig and an opossum named Bush finally got them evicted from their cozy two-bedroom rental in Van Nuys and that’s when she said Fuck it...I hate this city and I hate my life! Her friend Tracy lived on five acres in Petaluma and Diana moved there abruptly, leaving Luke with the geriatric Persian, Exene, and a skittish Siamese mix, Zoomer, who’d bitten Peggi twice.

If you expect those damn animals to stay in this house, they will obey rules! Peggi had declared a few days after their honeymoon in Costa Rica, when Luke had moved his possessions and the cats from a rented one-bedroom cabana in Culver City.

They had to stay in the study, the downstairs bedroom where Luke had crammed what remained of his furniture: a cheap metal desk, a couple bentwood chairs, a coffee table, and that sofa Peggi called nauseating. That meant putting litter boxes in the closet and building a clever little ramp outside the window so they could enter and exit the back yard when he was in the room.

Do not let them into the rest of the house. Period! She was adamant about this, claiming their dander got into the noses of the half-dozen patients she saw in the living room of her pea-green, four-bedroom, three-bath French provincial-style home in Pacific Palisades.

Sure thing, darlin’, Luke had pledged.

Still, he derived some adolescent joy from letting the cats roam through the house in the wee hours of dawn as he brewed his coffee and steeled himself for 90 minutes of intense blogging. Zoomer enjoyed digging his claws into her pricey IKEA sectional so Luke had to stay on top of that, and Exene would occasionally toss a wet fur ball on the hardwood floor, but after a few minutes they’d meander to the rear French doors and he’d shoo them into the yard so he could concentrate on his work.

His work: Mandrake’s Take. The creative residue from various obsessions to become first a serious screenwriter, then an award-winning playwright who dabbled in acting, and finally, the owner-operator of his own mega-studio where he would produce powerful films that altered the course of human history. Just like the tens of thousands of other aspiring, soi-disant writers who sat in front of their PCs every day cranking out stories that lacked some key, crucial elements such as compelling plot lines, rich and complex characters, and most importantly, that elusive and rare ingredient called talent.

For a while, his multiple pages of liberal rants, biting movie reviews, mocking celebrity profiles and a retail page—where readers could buy black tee’s featuring pics of his angular face spouting slogans of his own creation—had done much to replenish the self-esteem he’d lost after hitting an alcoholic bottom nine years earlier. The only downside to his blogging, in his mind, was the fact that few people really gave a shit about what he had to say, based on the modest triple digits of his hits counter, and the pathetic tee-shirt sales. He’d sold two.

He considered some options to bolster interest in his blogs: post some amusing vids of his cats chasing each other, or of Peggi snoring naked on the bed; cull the internet for the most obnoxious rumors and gossip about celebrities, pols, and sports stars and write rants based on them; develop a kind of Dear Abbey advice column to help men, especially alcoholic men, cope with marital problems or work-related issues. But over time he discovered that many, many people were already blogging about all of that crap, and that you could find literally hundreds of cute kitty and snoring videos on YouTube.

Then he saw a 60 Minutes report on an FOB, or Forward Operating Base, in Afghanistan, that stirred some fierce visceral passion. YES! America’s useless boondoggle war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban: over 2200 troops killed since 2001, upwards of 25,000 civilian deaths in twelve years, with a country primed for bloody civil war once the U.S. withdrew the bulk of its forces, at a cost of over a trillion dollars to American taxpayers!

The idea of posting socially relevant and meaningful anti-war polemics reanimated his creative energies, and he began to troll the internet for ideas. After perusing nearly fifty blogs devoted to pro-war, anti-war, and wishy-washy middle-of-the-road war views, he landed on a website, TributeMoms.com, where wives of soldiers posted actual letters and e-mails from their husbands serving in Afghanistan. Some of the missives made his eyes misty and his throat thick with emotion as he read about the transformation of vibrant men into sad, cynical, volatile veterans.

The personal accounts of children killed and maimed by misguided U.S. mortars, of vital Afghan livestock shot and butchered for sport by jaded Marines, and of soldiers getting slaughtered in ambushes inspired Luke to plagiarize the letters and disguise them in a format so no one could accuse him of stealing what amounted to honest accounts of a war that could never be won.

And that’s how Sergeant Gutter was born:

Greetings, readers. Today I received another dispatch from Sergeant Gutter, still on station at a remote FOB outside the Korangal Valley. Here he describes the downing of a Blackhawk medivac chopper near Bibiyal: HQ sent our platoon to recon a farmhouse hit by a drone the day before, what they called a ‘bad data’ incident—you know, ooops, sorry we blew the shit out of your whole family by mistake—and see if we could find anyone or anything left to apologize to, and the bad guys knew we’d show up because they gave us a little housewarming party with a hailstorm of RPG’s and mortars. Three of our guys got hit, Corporeal Watson got his junk blown off and parts of both hands and Captain Nordstrom lost an eye, and so we dialed in for an evac and heard the bird about ten minutes later. The firestorm let up and we knew the towel heads heard that chopper, too, so we got on the radio and told the evac team to stand by, the area was super-hot, but the pilot must’ve wanted a medal real bad because he brought that ship in so low to the ground, I mean it was a sight to see, right up until that RPG round hit the tail rotor and…

That’s when Peggi knocked twice on the study door before throwing it open in her pink paisley robe.

Were the cats in the living room? she barked in a gruff morning voice.

Luke peered over the top of the monitor, his desk positioned like a rampart against intrusions.

Uh, no, hun...they went straight outside.

Because I saw a big wad of black fur on the floor and I’ve got Pocahontas coming in today for a special one-on-one.

Must be from last week then, he said dryly, hunkering low behind the screen.

Okay, whatever. Can you please vacuum them up now? Please? She’ll be here in an hour and I need to take a shower.

Pocahontas was one of her patients, the 13-year-old daughter of San Francisco Giants superstar Angel Guerrero, major-league womanizer, HGH juicer and homerun hitter who only saw his daughter a couple days a month, to which Pocahontas reacted by cutting herself with razor blades, smoking crack and having an abortion.

Luke finished an acceptable draft of what would be the thirtieth Sgt. Gutter post, worthy of some special banner graphics he would create with his adequate HTML skills. His salty, war-weary creation deserved as much, having rekindled