Among other things
I couldn’t wear khakis that night. Khakis are what nice people wear to Red Lobster on a Thursday night with the family, not to this. What if I were to get Mario’s blood on them? Mom would definitely notice.
What was I was doing? I couldn’t get myself to stop and think about it, I couldn’t afford to panic. But see, this is one thing I know, however big whatever you’re doing, however terrible, anybody can do anything at any time. All you have to do is not think; just take care of one small thing at a time. I had to get dressed.
I threw my khakis in the corner. My room was covered with posters and carpeted with clothes. My bed was unmade and my closet door was broken. It smelled sweet like pot and salty like sweat. I guess I was pretty typical.
There was a pair of green camouflage shorts on my bed, and though the camo was appropriate, the shorts part really killed it. Way too informal.
There was a white Metallica t-shirt on the floor, but in case things went wrong I didn’t want this to be one of those “metal made him do it” deals.
There was a pair of ripped Levis, which I brought up to my nose and sniffed. The jeans had the familiar stink of pot and rum and puke, which meant that I had worn them to Bacon’s party the previous Friday. This made the jeans a good choice; after all, that was the night she told me it happened. That was the night he crossed the line and I decided I had to kill him.
Still, the jeans didn’t carry the right mood. They were the artificially faded kind and looked much older than they really are. I used to look so young.
What do you wear to a murder? There’s no TV show or advice column for that, at least not yet. I figured whatever it was it had to be casual, but somber. Dark colors for sure. You have to wear a black suit to bury someone, and this was the opposite side of the funeral coin. Black then. Black is also practical; blood dries into a dark brownish maroon that’s almost invisible on black. I thought of the clothes I had worn to my grandpa’s funeral.
Grandpa’ had been a world class asshole, he never really came down to Florida to visit his son’s family, but somehow it was expected of us to go visit that bastard in Vermont when he died. He was one of the first one’s to die of a heart attack while fucking his mistress on Viagra. The family sued and got a big settlement from the drug company. Dad would finally be getting his hands on some real money. Mom and Dad always fought about money. To this day I remember how happy Mom looked when she took me to JC Penny to buy a suit and a black overcoat for the cold funeral in the north.
The real bitch of it of course is that soon after Dad got his hands on the money he split for Atlanta with some 25 year old blonde chick with killer tits. Man, she had some great tits. I almost couldn’t really blame Dad for leaving. In the end though, he got his. Him and his lady got into a car wreck on I-95 and died instantly. Mom didn’t buy me shit for Dad’s funeral.
The black overcoat from grandpa’s funeral would be perfect. It was a typical south Florida spring night, but that didn’t matter. At these sorts of events it’s more important to set the right tone than to be comfortable. That’s why armies used to wear those cool bright red uniforms with flashy gold buttons. You want to look good while killing.
The coat reached down to my knees and had buttons on both sides; it reminded me of a movie I saw about hit-men. I wanted that night to be just like a movie. Nothing personal.
I had gotten a guy who called himself a hit-man to help with things, but I didn’t trust him. My girl had told me about him and she kept insisting that I get him to help. His real name was Stephen, but he called himself Mark-1. He acted like he’d killed a bunch of motherfuckers, even though he was only three years older than me at 19. When I talked to him, he laughed and seemed really happy to do the job (and for only two hundred dollars!). He said he’d come by the canal that night and make sure we weren’t doing things like a bunch of dumbass amateurs. Fucker. He talked like he was running the show. Mario had to know I was killing him, and why. Still, there was no way Mark-1 would show up wearing anything as badass as the black overcoat.
I walked over to the closet in my underwear; I dusted off the coat and put it on. Veronica walked in; I had given her a key to the house so she always let herself in. She immediately started to giggle with that high and fast squeal of hers.
“Shut up bitch,” I said.
Veronica had been my girl for almost a year. She told me I had been her first, but that wasn’t true. I knew because Mario said something about one of his buddies from Miami fucking the hell out of Veronica in the backseat of a Honda Civic. That was the kind of shit Mario liked to do, to find the scab and rip it off. I pretended to believed Veronica, I wanted her to be just mine. The thought of her touching another dick made my stomach turn upside down and my eyes go blurry and I felt like puking my fucking guts out. I couldn’t really help that, it just happened on its own. Funny, to this day I feel like that.
Veronica came to me and with a cute tone said, “Aww come on don’t be like that, I think that’s a good look for you.”
She ran her small hands down my stomach and into my crotch. She was a tiny girl, only 5 feet tall with a bruised black eye and smooth black long hair almost to her ass (my favorite part). I’m a lanky 6’1” with thin calves and scraggly hair. How I got a pretty thing like Veronica in the first place, I will never know. Love is blind, among other things.
Her cold hands made me jump but I started to get hard into her palm as I said, “Help me choose something.”
“Oh, I don’t think that’s what you want me to do right now. I think you want me to do something else.” She slid her small frame to her knees. I’m not going to go too far into detail here. But Veronica knew me and she took care of me.
Afterwards we lay on my bed and smoked cigarettes. She blew smoke rings into the air and we were both totally relaxed. I felt guilty for feeling like that. With my fingers I traced circles on the soft skin of her chest that was pink and left a fading white mark like new velvet. I don’t know if this is word for word what we said, but it’s the general idea of our conversation.
“Are you ready to do this thing Jeremy?” she whispered.
“I don’t really know. I think so.”
“You have to go and do this baby, you have to go and do this for me tonight.”
She got on top of me and stared me directly in the face, her long black hair making a little canopy around our faces and in the dark all I could see was the puffs of smoke coming from her mouth as she whispered.
“You gotta do this. You can’t let him get away with what he did to me… he put his hands on me baby. He rubbed his big fucking disgusting hands all over me, all over my neck like he was gonna choke me, and my…my…baby he touched me and he fingered me. He held me down and he put his-”
“Ok fucking stop!” I pushed her off and onto the bed. “I can’t stand to hear this shit. It makes me go crazy.”
She put her small hands on my shoulders, “But baby I just don’t want you to back out of it now. I don’t want you to feel like you’re doing something wrong. That fucker Mario deserves it! He put his dick inside me.”
“Fucking stop saying shit like that. I heard you before.”
“Who’s side are you on? Don’t you love me? Mario had no fucking right to do that. I love you baby and you gotta do this for me if you love me.”
Throughout this entire thing, I don’t remember having ever seen Veronica cry.
“Veronica, believe me I love you. I wouldn’t let somebody hurt you and get away with it… and I’m going to do this thing tonight. But I don’t want to talk about it. OK, I just want to do it and not think about what I’m doing ever.”
At that point my mother came in. She screamed in her raspy nasal voice.
“What the hell did I tell you about smoking inside the house?”
“What the fuck did I tell you about knocking before you come into my room?”
I threw the pack of cigarettes at her. She picked them up, scoffed, and walked out.
“Come on, let’s get ready. Help me choose something to wear,” I said.
She looked around the room. “Hey, that’s my shirt! You want to wear my shirt?”
“You’re not helping,” I said to her dryly.
“Sorry. Umm… I don’t know. Wear whatever you want.”
“Well if I knew what I wanted to wear I wouldn’t have asked you, would I?”
“Jeez. Sorry. Umm… I don’t know what you want. It’s not my fault I don’t know what you want.”
“Nope, nothing’s ever your fault. Christ. You can never help me with anything.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean? And I help you with stuff.”
“No, I asked you to do something small for me and just help me find something to wear and you can’t even do that for me.”
“Alright fine! I’ll help you choose something to wear. Don’t act like such a little girl.”
“What the fuck did you just call me?” I raised my hand but caught myself.
“Nothing. Just wear those khakis over there.”
“No you said something; you called me a little girl. I can’t fucking believe you called me that after what you asked me to do and what I’m fucking doing for you. And no smartass, I’m not gonna wear those fucking khakis.”
“Well see, I try to help and you don’t like what I chose. So don’t blame me.”
“I do blame you,” I said under my breath.
There was a silence.
“What?” She said in her angriest tone. For such a small girl, she could be very scary sometimes.
“Nothing. Give me the goddamn khakis.”
I put the knife in the glove compartment. Our alibis were all set; I was clocked in at my job in the stock room of Winn Dixie, where no one ever noticed me. Veronica had left her car parked in the handicapped spot of her Mom’s apartment complex in the next town over. Her mom was a junkie; she wouldn’t be able to tell if Veronica was in the house or not.
I tried not to think of what I would have to do with that knife. I thought to myself that after I did this thing for Veronica she could never leave me. I had thought she was going to leave me after we had a big fight and I punched her face. She stayed though, and the black eye was healing. Soon after, the Mario thing happened and I felt like it was my way of making it up to her by doing what she asked me to do and kill him. Then she could never leave me. She made me swear not to tell anyone else; it was the secret that would keep us together. I was going to be a hero for her.
Nothing really makes sense to me now, but I remember a few things.
It was way too hot in the coat and my t-shirt was soaking wet underneath my armpits and on my back. And it was so dark when we got there that you really couldn’t see how much of an idiot I looked like in my khakis and black overcoat.
Mark-1 was already there, but Mario wasn’t. Veronica was supposed to have called Mario and told him to meet us out by the canal to shoot off some fireworks and drink beers. It was really important he be there, so I called him and asked him to come too. Just in case.
I was surprised.
I stepped out of the car and walked towards Mark-1. I remember looking back at Veronica in the passenger seat of my car, and seeing her smile. She had such a pretty smile.
Then I saw a white flash all of the sudden. And I felt my face was wet. And I thought for a second that I must really be sweating now. Then I realized I was bleeding. Then I fell down on the wet grass and saw Mark-1 standing over me with a baseball bat. I heard Veronica scream. She screamed, “Do it! That motherfucker hit me! Kill him! Nobody hurts me and gets away with it.”
Somehow I still thought she was talking to me.
The aluminum bat came down again and again like a meteorite shower against my face, my chest, and my knees. I had too much blood in my mouth to scream. I didn’t have time to think.
There is only one reason I am alive. I forgot to tell Veronica that I had called Mario. I saw a white flash and thought it was another hit to the face, but it was Mario’s headlights pulling up to us.
(***I wrote this short story a while back. it was originally inspired by the murder of Bobby Kent in Weston. The short story was denied by my schools literary magazine, so I'm publishing it here.)
What was I was doing? I couldn’t get myself to stop and think about it, I couldn’t afford to panic. But see, this is one thing I know, however big whatever you’re doing, however terrible, anybody can do anything at any time. All you have to do is not think; just take care of one small thing at a time. I had to get dressed.
I threw my khakis in the corner. My room was covered with posters and carpeted with clothes. My bed was unmade and my closet door was broken. It smelled sweet like pot and salty like sweat. I guess I was pretty typical.
There was a pair of green camouflage shorts on my bed, and though the camo was appropriate, the shorts part really killed it. Way too informal.
There was a white Metallica t-shirt on the floor, but in case things went wrong I didn’t want this to be one of those “metal made him do it” deals.
There was a pair of ripped Levis, which I brought up to my nose and sniffed. The jeans had the familiar stink of pot and rum and puke, which meant that I had worn them to Bacon’s party the previous Friday. This made the jeans a good choice; after all, that was the night she told me it happened. That was the night he crossed the line and I decided I had to kill him.
Still, the jeans didn’t carry the right mood. They were the artificially faded kind and looked much older than they really are. I used to look so young.
What do you wear to a murder? There’s no TV show or advice column for that, at least not yet. I figured whatever it was it had to be casual, but somber. Dark colors for sure. You have to wear a black suit to bury someone, and this was the opposite side of the funeral coin. Black then. Black is also practical; blood dries into a dark brownish maroon that’s almost invisible on black. I thought of the clothes I had worn to my grandpa’s funeral.
Grandpa’ had been a world class asshole, he never really came down to Florida to visit his son’s family, but somehow it was expected of us to go visit that bastard in Vermont when he died. He was one of the first one’s to die of a heart attack while fucking his mistress on Viagra. The family sued and got a big settlement from the drug company. Dad would finally be getting his hands on some real money. Mom and Dad always fought about money. To this day I remember how happy Mom looked when she took me to JC Penny to buy a suit and a black overcoat for the cold funeral in the north.
The real bitch of it of course is that soon after Dad got his hands on the money he split for Atlanta with some 25 year old blonde chick with killer tits. Man, she had some great tits. I almost couldn’t really blame Dad for leaving. In the end though, he got his. Him and his lady got into a car wreck on I-95 and died instantly. Mom didn’t buy me shit for Dad’s funeral.
The black overcoat from grandpa’s funeral would be perfect. It was a typical south Florida spring night, but that didn’t matter. At these sorts of events it’s more important to set the right tone than to be comfortable. That’s why armies used to wear those cool bright red uniforms with flashy gold buttons. You want to look good while killing.
The coat reached down to my knees and had buttons on both sides; it reminded me of a movie I saw about hit-men. I wanted that night to be just like a movie. Nothing personal.
I had gotten a guy who called himself a hit-man to help with things, but I didn’t trust him. My girl had told me about him and she kept insisting that I get him to help. His real name was Stephen, but he called himself Mark-1. He acted like he’d killed a bunch of motherfuckers, even though he was only three years older than me at 19. When I talked to him, he laughed and seemed really happy to do the job (and for only two hundred dollars!). He said he’d come by the canal that night and make sure we weren’t doing things like a bunch of dumbass amateurs. Fucker. He talked like he was running the show. Mario had to know I was killing him, and why. Still, there was no way Mark-1 would show up wearing anything as badass as the black overcoat.
I walked over to the closet in my underwear; I dusted off the coat and put it on. Veronica walked in; I had given her a key to the house so she always let herself in. She immediately started to giggle with that high and fast squeal of hers.
“Shut up bitch,” I said.
Veronica had been my girl for almost a year. She told me I had been her first, but that wasn’t true. I knew because Mario said something about one of his buddies from Miami fucking the hell out of Veronica in the backseat of a Honda Civic. That was the kind of shit Mario liked to do, to find the scab and rip it off. I pretended to believed Veronica, I wanted her to be just mine. The thought of her touching another dick made my stomach turn upside down and my eyes go blurry and I felt like puking my fucking guts out. I couldn’t really help that, it just happened on its own. Funny, to this day I feel like that.
Veronica came to me and with a cute tone said, “Aww come on don’t be like that, I think that’s a good look for you.”
She ran her small hands down my stomach and into my crotch. She was a tiny girl, only 5 feet tall with a bruised black eye and smooth black long hair almost to her ass (my favorite part). I’m a lanky 6’1” with thin calves and scraggly hair. How I got a pretty thing like Veronica in the first place, I will never know. Love is blind, among other things.
Her cold hands made me jump but I started to get hard into her palm as I said, “Help me choose something.”
“Oh, I don’t think that’s what you want me to do right now. I think you want me to do something else.” She slid her small frame to her knees. I’m not going to go too far into detail here. But Veronica knew me and she took care of me.
Afterwards we lay on my bed and smoked cigarettes. She blew smoke rings into the air and we were both totally relaxed. I felt guilty for feeling like that. With my fingers I traced circles on the soft skin of her chest that was pink and left a fading white mark like new velvet. I don’t know if this is word for word what we said, but it’s the general idea of our conversation.
“Are you ready to do this thing Jeremy?” she whispered.
“I don’t really know. I think so.”
“You have to go and do this baby, you have to go and do this for me tonight.”
She got on top of me and stared me directly in the face, her long black hair making a little canopy around our faces and in the dark all I could see was the puffs of smoke coming from her mouth as she whispered.
“You gotta do this. You can’t let him get away with what he did to me… he put his hands on me baby. He rubbed his big fucking disgusting hands all over me, all over my neck like he was gonna choke me, and my…my…baby he touched me and he fingered me. He held me down and he put his-”
“Ok fucking stop!” I pushed her off and onto the bed. “I can’t stand to hear this shit. It makes me go crazy.”
She put her small hands on my shoulders, “But baby I just don’t want you to back out of it now. I don’t want you to feel like you’re doing something wrong. That fucker Mario deserves it! He put his dick inside me.”
“Fucking stop saying shit like that. I heard you before.”
“Who’s side are you on? Don’t you love me? Mario had no fucking right to do that. I love you baby and you gotta do this for me if you love me.”
Throughout this entire thing, I don’t remember having ever seen Veronica cry.
“Veronica, believe me I love you. I wouldn’t let somebody hurt you and get away with it… and I’m going to do this thing tonight. But I don’t want to talk about it. OK, I just want to do it and not think about what I’m doing ever.”
At that point my mother came in. She screamed in her raspy nasal voice.
“What the hell did I tell you about smoking inside the house?”
“What the fuck did I tell you about knocking before you come into my room?”
I threw the pack of cigarettes at her. She picked them up, scoffed, and walked out.
“Come on, let’s get ready. Help me choose something to wear,” I said.
She looked around the room. “Hey, that’s my shirt! You want to wear my shirt?”
“You’re not helping,” I said to her dryly.
“Sorry. Umm… I don’t know. Wear whatever you want.”
“Well if I knew what I wanted to wear I wouldn’t have asked you, would I?”
“Jeez. Sorry. Umm… I don’t know what you want. It’s not my fault I don’t know what you want.”
“Nope, nothing’s ever your fault. Christ. You can never help me with anything.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean? And I help you with stuff.”
“No, I asked you to do something small for me and just help me find something to wear and you can’t even do that for me.”
“Alright fine! I’ll help you choose something to wear. Don’t act like such a little girl.”
“What the fuck did you just call me?” I raised my hand but caught myself.
“Nothing. Just wear those khakis over there.”
“No you said something; you called me a little girl. I can’t fucking believe you called me that after what you asked me to do and what I’m fucking doing for you. And no smartass, I’m not gonna wear those fucking khakis.”
“Well see, I try to help and you don’t like what I chose. So don’t blame me.”
“I do blame you,” I said under my breath.
There was a silence.
“What?” She said in her angriest tone. For such a small girl, she could be very scary sometimes.
“Nothing. Give me the goddamn khakis.”
I put the knife in the glove compartment. Our alibis were all set; I was clocked in at my job in the stock room of Winn Dixie, where no one ever noticed me. Veronica had left her car parked in the handicapped spot of her Mom’s apartment complex in the next town over. Her mom was a junkie; she wouldn’t be able to tell if Veronica was in the house or not.
I tried not to think of what I would have to do with that knife. I thought to myself that after I did this thing for Veronica she could never leave me. I had thought she was going to leave me after we had a big fight and I punched her face. She stayed though, and the black eye was healing. Soon after, the Mario thing happened and I felt like it was my way of making it up to her by doing what she asked me to do and kill him. Then she could never leave me. She made me swear not to tell anyone else; it was the secret that would keep us together. I was going to be a hero for her.
Nothing really makes sense to me now, but I remember a few things.
It was way too hot in the coat and my t-shirt was soaking wet underneath my armpits and on my back. And it was so dark when we got there that you really couldn’t see how much of an idiot I looked like in my khakis and black overcoat.
Mark-1 was already there, but Mario wasn’t. Veronica was supposed to have called Mario and told him to meet us out by the canal to shoot off some fireworks and drink beers. It was really important he be there, so I called him and asked him to come too. Just in case.
I was surprised.
I stepped out of the car and walked towards Mark-1. I remember looking back at Veronica in the passenger seat of my car, and seeing her smile. She had such a pretty smile.
Then I saw a white flash all of the sudden. And I felt my face was wet. And I thought for a second that I must really be sweating now. Then I realized I was bleeding. Then I fell down on the wet grass and saw Mark-1 standing over me with a baseball bat. I heard Veronica scream. She screamed, “Do it! That motherfucker hit me! Kill him! Nobody hurts me and gets away with it.”
Somehow I still thought she was talking to me.
The aluminum bat came down again and again like a meteorite shower against my face, my chest, and my knees. I had too much blood in my mouth to scream. I didn’t have time to think.
There is only one reason I am alive. I forgot to tell Veronica that I had called Mario. I saw a white flash and thought it was another hit to the face, but it was Mario’s headlights pulling up to us.
(***I wrote this short story a while back. it was originally inspired by the murder of Bobby Kent in Weston. The short story was denied by my schools literary magazine, so I'm publishing it here.)