The New Deal

I walked into the machine shop and found the clerk standing behind the counter like some kind of child stuck in a state of obese catatonia . He looked at me through a set of prescribed glasses that had to have been a quarter of an inch thick. He had suckers running down the inside of his forearms and lips that curled into a cartilaginous beak. I took out my gun and shot him in the face and it exploded in what looked like little pieces of boiled shitake mushrooms. He had slimy, stringy blood that spread on the floor like spilled glue. My job was done, for the time being.

I dismantled the gun and dropped it in five different trashcans and stepped onto a train where there were people standing as usual with their faces pointed towards their shoes and there was the regular haze of hostility lingering everywhere. There was a man standing next to me who took a knife out of his pocket and looked at me piercingly with his one eye in the center of his forehead. I took a fork that I’d been keeping in my pocket just in case I stumbled onto free food and I stabbed him in his chest and then used his head to smash a window and then threw him through it. The train stopped and I got off and everyone was still looking at their shoes.

My home was very close to the train station and on my way home I was bothered by children asking for amphetamines and old women with horrible faces trying to sell me ten dollar blowjobs. There were rats scurrying on the sidewalk and as usual I kicked a few by accident and almost stepped on one.

My apartment building was a home to pimps, orphans and illiterate hustlers who’d try to sell pieces of hand soap passing them off as rock. The landlord of the building was dead so everyone lived for free (without heat) because no member of any authority wanted to come anywhere near our rotting little castle.

I went to sleep with a circus of worker cartoons battling inside my skull.

The next morning I had to go see my doctor about the bombardment of depression I’d been dealing with for the past year. He asked if I had nightmares and I told him that I had. The most persistent was a dream where I was watching a movie on the television set that took place in a boot camp where a perverted drill sergeant would force cadets and corporals into sexual situations and then have them tarred and feathered and nailed to a fence and used for target practice. The doctor wrote a prescription which I couldn’t read and sent me on my way promising me that I’d never have to see him again. At the pharmacy I gave the pharmacist the illegible note and he told me to wait five minutes. He came back with a pill bottle full of razorblades and directions for the most efficient wrist slashing. I laughed harder than I’d ever laughed in my life and when I stopped everything seemed so clear. The molested soldiers of my dreams turned into a party of pixies and ladybugs who engaged in a dance of euphoric joy that never seemed to end while fireworks cascaded through eternity in a smiling midnight sky.

I stopped in at a pawnshop to buy a new gun before the day got going. The place was a sleaze pit that should have been burnt to the ground before it was built but it had the best selection in town. I picked up a plasma laser XL7. Apparently the last owner had used it to vaporize his skull in the backseat of a taxicab because his wife had just given birth to a child that looked like an eel. He was a pawnbroker. The kid became a millionaire from investments.