The Power of Spitting Blood

Yes

About a year back, during the stale and fragile spring months, right after the big fire that killed all of the Mayor’s famous iguanas, Justin Hastings Jr. slept with a girl with droopy eyes named Molly Wesson at a motel. The motel was just past the concrete mouth of the highway. The motel had a pool with dirty water and a broken soda machine. Justin and Molly spent a weekend there and had sex most of the ways you can. Their room was on the second floor, which was the highest and most romantic floor to be on. After their sex having they would watch the news, still mostly naked and glazed in fresh beads of hump sweat. Molly was very particular about which news anchors she liked and which she didn’t. She held grudges against some and seemed to regard others as good friends. To Justin they were all the same. They were medium-well hamburgers reading from teleprompters.

Besides her droopy eyes, the important thing to know about Molly was that she had just recently married one of Justin’s best friends. His name was Mike Iago and he was a journeyman butcher. Mike Iago was a good guy. A damn good guy. Just painfully decent. Justin genuinely liked him. When the abridged events at the motel came to light, most of Justin’s friends (other than Yeahbaby and Scary Harry but neither of them had ever possessed what you might call anything like a moral compass) were quick to abandon him. Mike Iago really was a good guy, whereas Justin was aloof and prone to sarcasm and people were never sure if he was making fun of them. Life in the Central Valley, not great to begin with (unless you were a lizard or soil oligarch), became unbearable.

Because he was a newly-minted pariah, Justin knew that he needed a change of scenery. The world around him was so inhospitable, so aggressively anti-Justin, that drastic measures were requited. He knew that some things were impossible to wait out and this was one such thing. So, he moved across the country, to a place called Dundalk. He had never heard of Dundalk, but he had an old internet friend who claimed to have a vacant room for rent and that was that. Dundalk it was. As it happened, Dundalk turned out to be a tense and soggy suburb of Baltimore. Justin carved out a dark life for himself there for just over a year. He ate at the Arby’s by his apartment near every day. He gained weight. Sometimes, very rarely, he cried. More often he punched his pillow until he was sleepy.

He occupied himself by writing screenplays on a typewriter he had found at a yard sale. Most of the keys worked. Justin knew perfectly well that writing screenplays was sad, but it was the only thing he could bring himself to do and he liked the sound the typewriter made. When he sat before it and struck its keys he felt transported to some old-timey newsroom, click-clack, cigar smoke, click-clack, banter with friends, click-clack, loose thin-ties and whiskey and deadlines. And dames.

During his exile on the East Coast he had only hit it off with one girl. Her name was Chloe. Justin suspected that she didn’t exactly have the time of her life when he brought her to his room. He shouldn’t have talked about his typewriter so much. Chloe was a polite girl. She worked for a bank. Her eyes were not droopy in the least. She was quite beautiful actually, which he wasn’t entirely comfortable with. He didn’t know how to entertain someone like that. A beautiful person with a real job, someone who referred to her college years as “undergrad.” She drank, but like a normal person, someone with limits, someone who belonged to society. Justin did not drink like a normal person. He drank like there was nothing else to do. She showed him pictures of her dog. It looked like a dog. As they sat on his bed, Justin searched his music library for songs that were not from the High Middle Ages. He settled on “Lollipop” by Lil Wayne. He thought they might kiss, because their arms were touching a bit, but she had to leave early. Big day tomorrow at the bank!

Making friends was both difficult and boring, so after a few attempts Justin said to hell with that and committed himself to a routine. He would lock his door, ignore his internet friend, and drink his whiskey sours while listening to his favorite chansons over and over again. And then he would try to write some damn screenplays! The screenplays were almost always about knights and kings and that sort of thing. That was the raw shit he was into. Defending the weak, oaths, the muddy rush of battle, the clarity of chaos.

He made some tiny amounts of money working at an Assisted Living facility, handing people with dementia microwaved dinners and sometimes being corralled into helping wipe a muddy ass. He never finished any of his scripts. Around the second act of his last attempt, a William the Conqueror revenge/noir piece, he finally ran out of money and he called his brother to ask if he could move back to California and live with him for awhile. Soul searching had been a complete failure, obviously. It probably always was! Still, he didn’t regret the time away. He needed that physical distance from Molly and Mike. They were expecting a baby now, which Justin hoped had at least partially ameliorated his horny sins. Perhaps his affair with Molly was what had brought them closer together? Perhaps he was a hero in some way? Anyway, Jake, his brother, was kind, and made no cutting remarks. No remarks at all except come home. Come home, man.

Jake had always been strange and loud and a little too folksy, and though Justin liked him well enough, he was not at ease sharing his space. Jake was a vegan. Jake knew which NGOs were operating in which parts of the Congo. Jake strummed his guitar and sang Bob Dylan songs and thought that was normal. Jake was a do-gooder and do-gooders had always spooked him.

“I’m glad you’re home,” Jake said the night Justin returned to California, “It’s been quiet without you bumbling around.” He was sort of looking in Justin’s direction when he said this. He wasn’t much one for eye contact. Still, he mustered some hidden will and locked eyes with his brother to say, “Let’s cut to the chase. No elephants in the room between you and me. You probably heard Rose left me.”

“Yeah,” Justin said, “I’m really sorry. Rose was great.”

“Was? She’s alive, Justin! Alive and well!”

Jake was poring over what looked to be a topographical map of the Southwestern United States. “I’ve got a pretty idea where she’s going. I figure I’ll catch up to her around Santa Fe. She’s got family there so I expect she’ll linger. Everything will be okay…if I just get…to Santa Fe.”

It was Justin’s opinion that Rose, who was much smarter and far more formidable than Jake in basically every measurable way, would not allow herself to be caught if it was indeed her intention not to be caught. Justin did like her, but he had to admit that she was a bit slippery. Shifty. Honestly, she lied a lot. She lied all the time. And she was a bit bonkers. Mood swings. A dark past. Too much calamity sewn into her. But he did like her. She was something else. She was the wind that scattered. She filled a room with lightning. Am I in love with Rose? Justin wondered. No, but she is pretty cool.

“How was the East Coast?” Jake had not removed his eyes from the map, still tracing tiny lines with a fingernail. “Was it bad? Did it suck shit?”

“Yes, it was bad.”

“You had seasons, though.”

“Seasons are bad,” Justin said, “Winter is a crucible, summer is a slaughterhouse.”

This was a thing he had heard someone say. It was his now. It sounded right, whatever it meant.

“Look at you. Always the grump. Even when you were a baby. Look at that grumpy baby, the people would say. You haven’t changed. Winter is fine! Summer is nice!” Jake said, finally looking up. Seeing his eyes, friendly and wide and so naive, Justin held his tongue and went to the backyard, looking up at the vast tarry night sky, that immense fucking void, and wrote in his Things I Should Have Said Journal.

“Actually Jake,” (he should have said) “When I was young, there was one good thing about summer and that was not having to sit in a classroom all day and pretending to give a shit about learning cursive. But as I got older, waiting all year for a few empty months grew less and less enticing. Summer would arrive and the freedom from teachers became a new kind of prison, the prison of a newly minted ghost on the subway, a fresh loneliness. Summer is for salamanders, fruit flies, and musical theater ruffians. It’s for cheerleading covens and missionaries.

And summer in Maryland? No. Hell no. It held me in its grasping sunshine hands, pummeling my inspiration away one loutish day at a time. With its human shields, its gibbet craftsmen, its umbrella cocktail commissars and earnest champions of the blue pill.

Summer is the perfect storm that generated Woodstock ’99. Summer is the thrum of mosquito wings zooming off with your hard-earned blood. Summer is bees on your food and ants in your beer. Summer is for the robber barons. It is all hangovers and clichéd epiphanies. It’s the time when soul mates reveal their true colors. Summer is failed expectations in a frat-party firestorm. That’s what summer is, Jake.”

Again, he did not say this, because Jake was too invested in his weird map and still heartbroken about Rose. Where had that map come from anyway? How much money did it set him back? Justin never found out.

To forestall a routine of sleeping and/or masturbating all day, Justin had taken to spending most of his time at the YMCA playing racquetball with a close-knit group of old men and sometimes a sureño they hung around with. The old men looked like a clan of former wizards in tiny shorts and long socks. The sureño was bald and brawny. He was a mystery. Justin sensed a great sadness inside him. Something had gone wrong and he had fixed the situation, but in doing so he had disfigured his soul in some way. Anyway, he was pretty good at racquetball, but mostly kept to himself.

The old men were not quiet. They blasted out words like a volley of Norman arrows at the Battle of Hastings. Their chatter was a smorgasbord of volumes and cadences, mumbles to half screams. Ultimately, most of their talk was generic complaining or old war stories about getting ass. The old guys had a lot of tips about getting ass. They were very friendly and very gross.

They quickly became obsessed with him, or at least his skill on the court. Justin was not exactly good at racquetball in the classical sense-he was fine-but he had a kill shot of such pinpoint precision and ferocity that the oldsters couldn’t help unveiling their esteem with awes and wows and holy fucking shits. There was not a lick of finesse to Justin’s game, just brutality and a willingness to crash and dive and destroy his opponents by outlasting them. He found he could usually outlast the old guys, probably because they were old and their bones were weak and their hearts likely to explode if they tried to keep up with him. Sometimes the old guys laughed together and dissected his style and his movements, mostly focusing on that kill shot, sharing their experiences with it, talking about it like it was some kind of miracle, as if there was some sort of holiness to his rage.

“Sometimes I pretend the ball is the head of one my enemies, the way Tamerlane or Pol Pot would have,” he told the oldest of the old guys, a former ladies underwear salesman named Billy Gallo, “It’s easy to a hit a little ball like that if you pretend you’re smashing someone’s skull in the heat of battle.”

“Oh, is that right?” Billy laughed. Billy often hid meaning in his laughs.

“Yes,” Justin admitted, thinking of his many enemies and then some of his friends.

Billy laughed again. He was a laugher! And when he laughed he was all gaping mouth. His teeth were worn down like old yellowed tablets. His skin was pink like a slapped cheek, not sallow and grey like the other old men. He had thick freckles shaking up and down his arms, arms that always moved this way and that, choppy conductor sweeps. Italians spoke with their hands (so they said) but Billy spoke with his arms, jabs and hooks and windmills and wingspans. In the showers Justin learned other things about good ol’ Billly, most notably that Billy was a stone-cold racist (he did not care for Mexicans, Islams, or Vietnamese, though he was increasingly accepting of “the coloreds” in his old age) and underneath his billowy t-shirts his body was an absolute mess! Low-slung balls and ribs that looked like bent spears trying to escape, a concave chest you could empty a canteen into, a messy constellation of warts…

Justin felt a little rotten calling such a man a friend, but Billy was gregarious and always let Justin borrow his extra racquet and once even gave him a ride home in his sordid little pick-up truck. There were actual porno magazines on the floor and the warm seats smelled like corned beef hash.

“I knew your brother a little,” Billy said, driving his gross truck, his bony arm languidly hanging out the window as if he were some kind of cool guy. “He’s not…retarded is he?”

“No,” Justin said, though that was not the first time someone had asked, “He’s just like that.”

“We heard was his wife left him. Rose.”

This old pink racist was polite enough, but Justin could not bring himself to chat about his brother’s public disasters with Billy. That was crossing some sort of emotional Maginot Line. He shrugged and hoped that would be the end of it.

“She was too pretty for him anyway, that Rose. I used to work for her daddy. Big Daddy Abrams himself. He used to bring Rose down to the factory when she was just a youngster. I was old even then. I’ve always been old. But I saw that Rose blossom…if you know what I mean.” Billy smiled lasciviously. When Justin kept his silence, Billy added, “Great tits. And you know what? A decent ass to boot! Usually it’s one or the other, at least in my experience. And believe me kid, I’ve got enough experience to kill a horse.”

After a while, Jake called in a favor from one of his normal friends and got Justin a job at an office on the outskirts of downtown. It was data entry for a children’s photography company. You might think the mood of such an office might be jovial or at least neutral, but this was not the case. The office was top to bottom one of the most grim landscapes Justin had ever inhabited. The office and everyone in it was doomed. Being around the other guys who were doing the same job as him was a new sort of horror. These were real bastards straight out of Justin’s nightmares. Some of them slithered and some stomped but they all had shitty sandpaper smiles for the boss. The boss was okay, but mostly because he was barely around. He was always on the phone yelling about payments and then he’d leave and never come back. This left Justin with the other three. Each was as charming as a spray-tanned scrotum. Less charming. Even spray-tanned scrotums had a code, bent to some sort of organizing principle. These three were wild shitheads who behaved like they had no relatives.

Faisal was a boaster, a self-aggrandizing rich boy from up in the hills. He bragged. That was his thing. He bragged about the length of the Syrian Civil War. He bragged about the size of his shits. He bragged about the independent record label he owned. He talked about it like it was a real thing and not something he did in his garage!

Raymond was a drug dealer, and cried about girls. He was emotional, and not the kind of emotional that was commendable He often seemed to be dating three women at once, and lied to them all in befuddling ways. Extremely ornate deceptions. Unnecessarily so. These lies bumped into each other. They created a maze of false worlds built on top of one another. And the lies always seemed to catch up to him and pull him down but still he kept lying. That was his nature. He’d punch holes in the weak bathroom walls and sob as a child would when the lies outsmarted him. But then he would buy a Diet Soda and shift his love and his dumb lies to the next girl.

Faisal was a dope and Raymond a mess, but Charlie was the worst of all. There were plenty of bad or miserable or just plain clumsy stupid morons in the world, and Justin had of course met his share of them, but Charlie was something different, something rare. He was cruel, but not an amateur about it. He was just good at being cruel. It didn’t take him but five minutes to start mentally curating a list of your weaknesses. And for no reason! He was just like that! But it wasn’t just his corpse grin or his incessant mind games that were unsettling. It was that Charlie was willing to throw down on anyone. Charlie had once kicked the mailman’s ass because the mailman had looked at him weird. Justin was not a stranger to violence, but Charlie was an actual fan of violence.

The worst part was the pay. Minimum wage.

No. The worst part was sharing a room with Faisal, Raymond, and Charlie for seven and a half hours a day. But the second worst part was the pay.

Justin’s days at the office mostly consisted of writing letters to Molly Wesson and Mike Iago and sometimes to others that deserved apologies. The letters sucked. His prose was flowery and insincere. Nobody would believe he was sorry if he was throwing around words like “inasmuch” and stuff like that. But he really was sorry. That’s just how he wrote. In any case, he didn’t finish the letters. He just needed something to do to bridge the gap from being around Faisal, Raymond, and Charlie to paying racquetball. The letters did the trick. The letters kept him moving forward and going nowhere.

And then one day the sweet-smelling man who sat behind the front desk at the YMCA told Justin that his free trial membership had expired.

“What does that mean exactly?” Justin asked, holding a newly purchased racquet. He bought it for twenty dollars down at the Big 5. Twenty dollars was not an insignificant amount of money for Justin. He squeezed the hilt. He didn’t care for complications or talking to people.

“It means you have to pay full price for the rest of the month. It’s only a tiny increase.”

Down below, Billy was waiting. Probably warming up and mouthing off at the wall. Maybe he was working on his own kill shot, which was decent for a man over sixty.

Justin continued to stare at the sweet-smelling man, mulling it over, considering pros and cons. The sweet-smelling man (he smelled of tangy cinnamon cologne and grape hairspray) stared back. It was a real stare-off. They were sizing up each other’s souls, and their earthly resolve. Eventually Justin decided that he didn’t feel like upgrading, so he left the air conditioning behind and walked outside. The heat collapsed on him, wrapped around him like a blanket dipped in fire. He felt the sweat behind his knees and the sun pushing down on his scalp. He walked to the café to get an iced coffee and wrote in his Revenge Diary. He attempted to write in his Forgiveness Diary, but the words stalled at the edge of his pencil.

That was the end of racquetball, as far as he was concerned. He wouldn’t miss it, really. It was just a game and not even a good one really. He walked for a long time, in rhombus routes, trying to get lost in his hometown. Every street seemed to hide a sad memory. All memories were sad, even good memories were sad. He walked past barking dogs that crouched behind rusty fences, past rowdy soccer matches where laughs mingled with Spanish swears. He walked along the lips of dried up creeks, and through a ghost town car dealership.

He was peering into the windows of a little taqueria and thinking about burritos and how one could redeem their sins once and for all when he felt someone very close, nearly right behind him even.

“Justin Hastings?”

A woman’s voice. He turned, expecting the worst, an ambush, a hail of bullets or a soda can hurled at his crotch, his poor maligned crotch. But it was no ambush. Just a long girl with big eyes and a familiar sad grin. She was wearing denim on denim — the Canadian tuxedo — as usual. Rose. His brother’s wife. Justin was not normally an emotive person, but he knew his mouth was hanging open, and his eyes were probably widened all stupidly. Rose? He would have been just as shocked to see Charlemagne standing before him juggling Radiohead CDs. How tall had Charlemagne been? The heights of great men often surprised Justin.

“Thank God I’ve found you. Jesus Christ, I’ve been looking for you forever. I went all the way to Maryland to find you.”

“What? You went to Maryland? What?”

Rose’s held her hands before her, like she was trying to talk Justin from plummeting off a bridge. This did not fill him with any sort of good feeling. She edged closer to him. “I know this is going to sound crazy and you probably just want to go inside and eat a burrito, but you need to come with me. Now.”

“What is this? Does Jake know you’re back? He misses you. He’s going to look for you in Santa Fe!”

“No. He doesn’t know. The Prophecy moves towards an outcome.”

Justin took a step back. Rose moved toward him. She was limping. She still held her arms out, no longer trying to keep him from leaping to his death, but to signal that she came in peace. Like they had never met. Like she had never once told him that while Jake was more conventionally handsome, she preferred his face because it looked like a messy room, like the scene of a perfect murder. Like he had not made her a mix-tape of his favorite final songs. Like he had no idea why Satan’s Creek was so important to her. Like she had never whispered to him about the sickening crimes of Big Daddy Abrams and like he hadn’t sworn never to reveal them. Like they were a couple of fucking strangers.

Anyway, he didn’t like it. He did not like any of it. The ground had grown unsteady. He had two left knees. He lurched and softly crashed into the wall of the Mexican restaurant, the dull edges of old sleepy bricks pressed into his back.

“Listen,” Rose grabbed him by the shoulders and squeezed with iron tipped fingers, “You’re the Chosen One, Justin. I know that sounds fucking crazy. I need you to know that I know that. But the red rooster has crowed. The Star Chamber and the Shadow Cabinet have buried their differences and now there’s no time-no fucking time-to waste standing around asking me what the hell I’m talking about. You need to come with me and then we’ll go get Jake…if they haven’t killed him yet.”

As Rose dragged Justin towards her purple PT Cruiser, his shoes became two slabs of granite. He did not want to be moved. Scorpions had crawled into his ears and had set up camp in his brain. They were going wild in there. She pulled him with all her might and kept babbling about the Signs and the Blood Oath.

But all Justin Hastings could think about was how he was such a fucking moron for not paying full price at the YMCA. He had an amazing kill shot. The old guys talked about it. God damn it, Rose. He had transgressions to make right. He had defeats to twist into conquests. He needed Mike Iago to forgive an unforgivable sin.

Chosen One? Get the fuck out of here with the Chosen One, Rose. Red roosters crowing, Rose? Are you on drugs again, Rose? What kind of drugs? Please tell me you didn’t buy these drugs from Yeahbaby or Scary Harry. You can’t trust those guys.

Rose drove them straight into the night. Buildings zoomed by in his periphery. The windows were rolled down. The night air should have felt nice, but it just felt like warm slaps.

God damn it Rose, why have you always worn denim on denim? It’s strange. Every single thing that has ever happened is strange.