A Rough Sketch of Cowboys and Indians and Zombies

With his index finger and his thumb, Martin Zipper turned his hand into what an adult would consider an “L” turned sideways but what he knew was actually a six shooter, the likes of which John Wayne once used to rule the West. He could still recall the films, could still smell the weird stench that plagued his grandparent’s trailer home, could still hear his grandfather quoting each and every line, could still quote the lines himself. It was hot then; it was hot now, the trailer serving as a metal can that concealed the intolerable Arizona heat with them and the insects that flew in from the open windows. “Bang!” he shouted, “Bang! Bang! I know you’re back there, Johnny!”

“Your bullets can’t go through walls!” a faint voice retorted, failing to even project at the necessary volume.

“Yes, they can!”

“No, only Phil’s can! You already have invisibility!”

The Heavenly Affairs of Tyler Patton

  Tyler Patton was black, or African-American, or a nigger, or what have you. He did not know when he ceased to be black, but when they spoke of him now, they used the past tense and not only in regards to his ethnicity. Yes, he was black, but he also was an honor student, he was on the track and field team, he was a bassist, he was alive. Supposedly, all of those aspects of his character ceased to be. He was no longer black; he simply was.

            Of course, he never considered himself black anyway—not in the sense that society considered one black. For one, he had never set foot in a ghetto, and all black men, all black men of merit, hailed from the ghetto. Eazy E, the man he had idealized since he had been capable of such a fixation, came from the ghetto. Died there, too. But Tyler's mother begat her son in a Presbyterian hospital, in close proximity to at least two coffee shops where seldom an NWA track was heard. 
            Tell them where you’re from, Tyler:
            “Straight out of Plano.”
            A suburb of Dallas … doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, does it?   He possessed no gold teeth though he had had a couple of fillings, he did not drive a Cadillac, he did not own rims for his non-existent Cadillac, he did not play nor did he enjoy watching basketball, he had no aspirations to rise from rags to riches, he believed most fried chicken was too greasy, and he had never met a watermelon he enjoyed. Now, he did not simplify those qualities into a prototypical black man. He would not even consider that portrayal a stereotypical black man, but somewhere in his sub-conscious, he figured he should have been that person, should have crafted a more suave and seventies-soul-brother persona. In his thoughts he sounded smooth, hearing the voice of a middle aged Barry White rather than the scrawny teenager who actually spoke and earnestly believing that smoothness to accurately speak on behalf of his character, but that man--that negro Casanova--existed only in his father. He was not his father, a man as black as society defined black, and now, and not only because of the condition of his deadness, he would never be his father. With surgery, he could have been his mother, and without it, he still possessed the nerdy suburban mentality she held. However, as much love as he had for his mother, he did not want to be that person. He wanted the “Black Power,” television negro, character—the black men who made records, made money, impressed women.
         Yet he was no better or worse for not being that person. And now, he was nothing at all. He simply was.

A Rough Sketch of a Man Lost in Thought

  “Have you ever been in love?”

  The question, regrettably, conjured thoughts of the women currently locked in his basement without food or water to nourish her. It had been the first time he had considered her existence in the past few days, and what a place to do it—empty coffee shop, nothing but a day old croissant in his stomach that would not have been sold had he not been drunk enough to purchase it, seated across from a man whose name he could not remember and whose face seemed evil enough to be suspect. He first wondered if she were hungry, for he was hungry, only capable of thinking of others as they related to him. How much time had passed since he had last been home? The days had begun to blur into a singular haze; his last meal, that he could recall, came by way of a trash can and a diminished sense of self-regulation. He could still taste the dirt on the french fries, the mold on the half eaten roll, the piece of cardboard he had mistaken for chicken skin because it was that greasy and he was that inebriated. By now, her last meal might have been her own arm, though he figured her jaw had likely weakened, making it difficult to chew through the muscle—and she had some muscle through which she would need to chew—in order to make the task worthwhile. He almost felt cruel when he imagined it, but he could no longer remember the circumstances that had led to her detainment. Admittedly, he had a history of making irrational decisions in the wake of minor discrepancies: the most recent of which was choosing to get drunk at nine in the morning because he could not find his car keys. Of course, forced detainment of a woman he once claimed to love had to have now topped the list of poor and irrational decisions he had made. Still, shame crept into his emotions when he pictured her—not as she was in his basement but as she had been when he called her “honey” and “cutie pie” and “kitten dumpling”—when she would jokingly refer to him as an alcoholic, playful punch his shoulder and skip off into the distance, instigating a chase, and he would take off after her, wanting to wrap her in his arms and squeeze her until her heart popped onto his plain, black sweatshirt, kissing her neck all the while.