Punkzilla (12 page)

I’m writing to you from a picnic table behind the motel. I’m under this ancient tree with maroon-colored leaves. There’s a huge spiderweb from the tree that attaches to the motel and I keep waiting for some big hairy spider to come out like a tarantula or a black widow or one of those giant camel spiders from the Iraq war like one of the ones E showed me on his computer before I left for Buckner. Anyway P it’s a pretty artistic-looking web and there are like five flies trapped in it and one of them is really struggling to get free and I have to admit that I’m sort of getting off on it like I can’t wait for the spider to come and eat all the flies and maybe torture one just for pleasure.

Next to the picnic table is this little swimming pool. It has a diving board and there are a few lounge chairs scattered around it but there’s a NO SWIMMING sign and there are all of these dead things floating in it like mice and bugs and frogs and the water is all murky and green and looks like sewage. There’s probably a bunch of snakes wriggling around under the surface too. I wouldn’t go in it if you paid me a thousand bucks.

I’m not exactly sure what town I’m in but I’m somewhere near Buffalo Wyoming. There’s no lake near the Lakeside Motel. At least not one that I can see so I think the motel must be built on a foundation of bullshit. Maybe there used to be some prehistoric lake where the dinosaurs used to bathe or swim and it dried up and they filled it with dirt and trees or something? Or maybe the person’s last name who owns the motel is Lakeside like John Lakeside or Kevin Lakeside or Rodrigo Lakeside?

When I said good-bye to Dave or Dan or Dale and the old lady with the leaky eye not much happened. I was hoping they would offer me some cash or a box of Slim Jims or like a gift certificate to McDonald’s or something but they didn’t. Dale or Dan or Dave DID wind up buying me some waffles at a Denny’s though so I finally got to eat which was cool but I got diarrhea pretty bad and almost ruined a rest stop bathroom. There was only one stall in that bathroom and this little black kid was waiting to use it and now he’ll probably hate white people.

Back in the Lincoln I wound up falling asleep for like four hours. For a second I thought maybe Dan or Dave or Dale and the old lady with the leaky eye tried to poison me because people carry vials P. They carry vials and put little pellets of cyanide between your pancakes when you’re not looking. I had never felt that sleepy before in my life.

When I woke up we were stopped at a traffic light in a small town and the old lady with the leaky eye was staring at me. She was completely turned around in her seat with her face sort of perched on the top of the headrest. I was like “What?” and she said “You got one heckuva snore on you shrimp” and then she sort of imitated me snoring and I have to admit it was funny P.

Anyway they wound up dropping me off at the Lakeside Motel and I’ll probably never see them again.

I didn’t have enough money for a room because it’s forty-two bucks a night and I only have eleven left. I thought I could just hang out in the lobby and crash on the sofa till the girl behind the counter got sick of me. For a while she was pretty talkative and maybe even sexually obsessed with me. Her name was Erin and she wasn’t too pretty but I would have probably let her give me a hand job. She had these big sad eyes and pimples along her hairline and this nose ring that you could barely see like a little speck of glass stuck to her nostril.

Erin’s mom and dad owned the motel and she was on spring break from college and she was pissed because most of her friends were at some resort town in South Carolina called Myrtle Beach and her parents made her come home to help out at the motel. She said she was fine with it though because everyone gets mad herpes in that resort town. Herpes and crabs and this other sexually transmitted disease that makes you get lockjaw.

Another fact about Erin was that she was a freshman at North Carolina University and she wouldn’t stop talking about their men’s basketball team and how even though they lost some players to the NBA draft that they were going to win the national championship at the end of the month. She was wearing a light blue North Carolina hoodie and even her keychain had “TAR HEELS” on it. Man P skeezers who love sports are not cool in my opinion. Edward would have probably loved Erin for that very reason. She had pretty nice titties to be fair. I never got too good a look at her ass because her hoodie was hanging down over it. It made me curious to see it though which scientifically speaking is an effective technique that other girls should try. Erin’s best feature was her hair. It was even better than her titties. It was the color of butterscotch pudding. E would have definitely been into her P. I can just picture them walking around back in Cincinnati like at Eastgate Mall like holding hands and eating one of those big soft pretzels with mustard on it.

Erin was watching TV in the office. I think it was a DVD of some shark movie from the nineties starring LL Cool J. I kept having this weird fantasy that she would lift her hoody and flash me but things like that never really happen right? At least to me they don’t. I’m sure guys like Brad Pitt and Leonardo DeCaprio and LL Cool J get that kind of special treatment from mad West Coast skeezers but you have to win an Oscar or be voted sexiest male spy of the decade to earn those sorts of privileges. I’ll probably wind up dating some shy girl with a neck brace and an ass shaped like a stop sign and she’ll NEVER lift her hoodie for me not even if I pay her.

Erin let me use the bathroom in the little motel office and I tried to take a mini-shower in the sink which is something I did a lot in Portland because the community shower on the fourth floor of Washington House always had trash in it like a half-eaten burrito or a paper plate with ketchup on it or something. Once there was this old man sitting down on the shower room floor. He was naked and his chest was all saggy and bald and he was clipping his toenails. When I walked in he said “THERE’S my community!” He like totally shouted it at the top of his lungs so I turned around and went back to my room.

In the motel office bathroom there was a real bar of soap none of that pink squirty stuff. I washed my face and wet my hair down and gargled some cold water and changed into a pair of Sam’s sweat socks which actually fit me pretty good. I was really starting to feel better even though my scalp itched and my teeth felt coated with germs.

When I came out Erin had turned off the TV and started acting suspicious. First she said “Did you just shoot up in there because if you’re like shooting up or doing crack or something I’m going to have to ask you to leave.” I told her I didn’t do anything and then she said “Well did you like SNORT something?” and I told her I just washed up a little and I showed her how my hair was wet but she still wouldn’t believe me so I pulled up my sleeves to prove I didn’t have track marks and then she put on some lip gloss and asked if someone was coming to pick me up and I said “No” and she said “You just like hanging out in motels?” and I said “Maybe” and then she crossed her arms and said “Are you like homeless? Because no offense or whatever but you sort of smell like you are.”

My face got hot with embarrassment and now I live in terror about having BO total terror P but I figure it could have been my jeans because they tend to get smelly. They would get that way especially in Portland because I didn’t wash my clothes much there.

I told Erin the skeezer that I wasn’t fucking homeless and how I was on my way to seeing you and how I had been on that Greyhound and got jumped in Idaho and how I had to hitch a ride with Sam and his mom and another one with Dale or Dan or Dave and the old lady with the leaky eye who kept calling me shrimp and Erin was like “If you’re gonna lie you should be more creative.”

I swore to her I wasn’t lying and showed her my puffy eye and the scrapes behind my ear and she said it didn’t prove anything and then she asked me my age and I told her the truth and she said I was younger than fourteen and that pissed me off and I didn’t even bother telling her that I’m going to be FIFTEEN in like nine days. I didn’t even bother because I had decided right then and there that she wasn’t worth it. It’s weird P just when you start telling people the truth they don’t believe you. I have to remember that I do.

Then she said “Why do you dye your hair are you tryin to change your identity or something?” and I told her I liked it black and she was like “You’re obviously SO blond. You should get your roots touched up” and then I said “I’m not a fucking girl okay?” and she said “For a minute there I wasn’t exactly sure so thanks for clearing that up.”

Man I had a desperate urge for a cigarette right then. A desperate desperate urge P. I asked her if she really was confused about my gender and she said she thought I might be “some little dyke-job from Gillette looking to hook up.”

Then I said this P I said “Do you wanna see it?” meaning my dick and she KNEW I meant my dick because you could see it on her face. I don’t mean you could see my DICK on her face I mean you could see how she knew what I was talking about on her face. I swear I said that P and it made me feel so much better.

She stared at me for a second and said “Look I don’t care if you stay here but my mom is coming back in like an hour and she won’t be cool with some homeless kid or whatever you are just like setting up camp in the office. This is around the time we start to get customers. In fact in about twenty minutes a bunch of those truckers down the road are gonna start getting rooms.”

She was pretty mean when she said all of that but then she sort of went soft and said that I should go hang out behind unit seven because her mom never went back there. I asked her why her mom never went back there and she said it was because last year some trucker from Fort Collins Colorado hung himself from the copper birch which is the tree I’m sitting under as I write this P the one with the maroon leaves and the spiderweb! How spooky is that! I keep thinking I’ll look up and see the ghost of that trucker in the branches with a noose around his neck or like a fucking raven perched on his shoulder.

Then Erin said she had to go restock the candy machine and left through the back of the office. I was seriously tempted to see if there was any cash behind the front desk like in a cigar box or just in some drawer but I didn’t want to push my luck.

I was about to go find unit seven when this weird guy wearing a black silky on his head came in through the front door. He was dressed pretty normal with jeans and a plain white T-shirt and a pair of white Nike Air Force 1s. He was really skinny and his face was all pale and oily. He said “Is Erin around?” His voice was high and sort of gayish-seeming but I don’t mean that in a bad way P it’s more of a scientific observation. What I mean to say is that I’m pretty sure some homosexuals sound more like women than men wouldn’t you agree being one yourself? I’ve even heard some in Portland who sounded like they were from England.

I told him that Erin just went to go restock the candy machine and he said “The Blakes get all over you if you’re late paying your bill.” I asked him who the Blakes were and he said they were the owners of the motel and that Erin was their daughter. He said he actually liked the dad whose name was Jerry but that Erin and her mom were ruthless little bitches and they would start sliding notes under your door if you were late paying your bill. Then he said “I’m Lewis by the way” and we did a normal handshake. I was expecting him to be all limp in the wrist but his grip was firm like almost as firm as the Major’s I shit you not P.

Lewis told me he had lived at the motel for six months and that he kept expecting the Blakes to cut him a break with a cheaper month-to-month plan but that it never happened and then he asked me my name and I told him and he pulled out a pack of Marlboros and I didn’t even need to ask he just sensed my desperation and offered one and said “Yep that’s me. Supporting the youth of America. Guilty as charged.” And then he lit me with a cheap Bic.

After we smoked for a minute he asked me if my dad was one of the truckers down the road and I said no and then he asked me if I was related to the Blakes and I said no again and then he said “Who are you like one of Fagan’s boys?” but I had no idea what he was talking about and he told me about some movie called Oliver and said it was one of the greatest movies ever made and that he learned more watching that movie than he did “moving up the glorious ranks of the Nevada public school system and matriculating to Colorado College” whatever that meant. The cigarette tasted so good I felt like I wouldn’t have to eat for a week.

Then Lewis said “You’re not from Wyoming I gather?” and I almost told him I was from Cincinnati but I couldn’t because I was suddenly feeling racy like I really needed my medication to focus on what was right in front of me and I hadn’t felt that for weeks P I shit you not. He said “Don’t be nervous I’m just a harmless country boy from Effingham Illinois” and I told him I thought he already said he was from Nevada and he went “I was born in Tidewater Florida spent my youth in the middle of Illinois and my adolescence and early adulthood in Reno Nevada. It’s sounds complicated I’m the first one to admit it but fear not” and I said “Who said I was afraid of you?” and he was like “Ooh toughness I like toughness. Wish I had a little more of that myself” and then he made me feel guilty about him giving me a cigarette and said something about how the least I could do was engage in some small talk with my fellow man so I told him how I was in Portland and then we smoked some more and then I told him he was weird-looking and he said “Weird’s not always a bad thing.” Then I asked him why he wore the silky and he said it helped keep the bugs out of his hair and then I told him he looked weird again. I’m not sure why I had to say it twice. He was like “You’re from Portland and you’ve never seen a guy like me before? Where’d you live in the planetarium?” and then I told him how I wasn’t FROM Portland but how I just lived there for a while.

He made smoke rings and I thought it was weird how he might be gay but was doing such a macho thing. Remember how the Major used to make smoke rings before Mom got him to quit smoking the Lucky Strikes? How he would do three of them and then blow out the third one and how Mom would wave them away but it would be like she was sort of flirting with him? That was probably the only time they seemed like they actually liked each other.