A Waste of Oxygen- Chapter 1

Foxy got his lunch before everyone else. He had done so ever since he told the guards he had diabetes, and got a doctor’s note to prove it. He took his Lasagne and sat down at the far end of the long middle table. There were three long tables in the dining hall and this middle table is where all the big players sat. Foxy got by on his stories. His tall tales and his cockiness made up for his lack of any real physical build. It was partly because of his looks that he got the nickname Foxy. He had a thin nose, upturned at the end to show two nostrils no bigger than the marks on the face of a die. His cheeks were sunken and his lips looked like he was continually sucking a boiled sweet. Two sharp cheek bones jutted out to give his head a light-bulb shape. His chin was stencil thin and carried a permanent goatee, even though the rest of his jaw line, and upper-lip, remained hairless. He had a broad forehead, wrinkled by the constant look of surprise he wore in his eyes, which led to a hairline that was constantly pulling further and further back. His hair was light brown and formed a point in the centre of his head that resembled a page in a book folded over for later consideration. He stirred his Lasagne, a watery mixture of red and white that had begun to resemble a Jackson Pollock, and waited for the others to arrive.

‘What the hell’s the matter with you?’ said the Muscle as he sat down. His real name was Fulton but on one of his weaker days he got christened the Muscle. ‘Your face is so long I could see it before I even walked in.’

‘Yeah. You look like the Moaning Lisa or something.’ Borut cut in with what little he knew about the language and culture of the Western world. ‘Am I right?’

‘It’s called the Mona Lisa,’ said Foxy, using his left hand to support his heavy head and form a peak over his eyes. ‘Not the Moaning Lisa, you stupid Dutch bastard.’

‘I am from...,’ Borut used his hand to count the syllables as they left his mouth, ‘Czech Re-pub-lic.’

Sal, a lanky man with a scoured face and no hair to speak of, sat down opposite Borut. ‘Czech, please,’ he said, making a tick sign in the air.

This drew a laugh from the rest of the group. Even Foxy managed a smile. As he raised his head to join the conversation he caught sight of his friend from the neighbouring cell. The old man sat in the far corner of the room on his own. The old man smiled and made eye contact with Foxy. He attempted to drink his water, but most of it fell out and waterfalled down his chin. Foxy averted his eyes downward once more, and resumed stirring.

Fulton, having noticed that Foxy was looking over his head, surveyed the room and he too caught the eyes of the old man. ‘Ah, I see why you’re so goddamn miserable.’ Foxy raised his head as Fulton gestured over his shoulder with his fork. ‘You let Gripes get to you again, didn’t you? He’s a world class asshole, Foxy. He only makes those goofy speeches to give us the shivers. Goddamnit he’s been here long enough to know how to get under a man’s skin.’

‘I know Muscle, I know.’

‘It seems like every other week I have to give you a pep talk, Foxy. I’m having to give you some story to make you leave happy, and I’m getting pretty damn sick of it.’

 ‘That’s ‘cause your stories are never true.’ Sal believed he had gotten the gist of the conversation.

‘They don’t call you Muscle,’ said Borut, ‘because you speak well.’

‘Exactly,’ continued Sal. ‘No two stories is ever the same. Shit, even Foxy’s tales have more truth in ‘em. I don’t think I’ll ever know how the Fox got locked in here with us, but I’ll damn well believe each and every story. What was the last one, huh? Bank robbery? Pimping? It don’t matter. I’ll believe Foxy was a mother fuckin’ multi-millionaire serial killer arsonist before I swallow your tripe.’

Fulton had finished his Lasagne. He had to force Foxy towards the wall to accommodate for his large frame. His prison jumpsuit, fluorescent orange, had the sleeves torn off close to the shoulder. The guards didn’t like it, but he said he had to let the muscle breathe and they were too scared to stop him. His arms were white. Clinically white, like the walls of a doctor’s surgery. Same as the rest of his body. His neck was the width of his head, and his head was massive. A concrete block. All of his features were squared-off. His jaw was hidden behind a full brown beard, and rotated clockwise every time he chewed. He wore a curly mop of dark brown hair that covered his forehead and touched his eyes. His eyes were dark brown too. That shade of brown that, when viewed from the right angle or in the right light, looked deeply black like the darkest depths of a forest on a moonless night. His eyes, to Foxy, looked black now, and were staring straight at Sal.

‘You know why I finished that so quick, Sal?’

Sal shook his head.

‘Because I was going to punch you but I didn’t want to be dragged back to my cell hungry. But then I decided,’ he ran his left hand over his right fist; ‘I like my knuckles too much. Your goddamn sharp head would only dent them. So, you know what? I’m going to tell you another story. But this time it’s 100% true. I heard it straight from the goddamn Lord Gripes the day I got thrown in here. I wouldn’t have believed it so much if I hadn’t heard so many things about it on the outside. He started bawling his eyes out when he told me. There’s something about an old man crying that fucking gets me. Hits me on the sweet-spot and sends me for a Home-goddamn-Run. So I’m going to tell you what he told me. And you best believe this is the truth.’

Years ago Gripes was playing for time out in Mississippi. He had a run-in with the law in Florida over a stolen motor vehicle. He never told me what it was or why he took it. Anyway, he flees to this small town in eastern Mississippi called Enterprise. There ain’t no-one that’s gonna find him because nobody’s ever going to look near Enterprise. It’s a small dead-end town. Barely any people at all. And anyways, the cops in the south are afraid to cross state-lines. But he knows he has to go back eventually, you see? His sister is in Florida and she’s all the family he’s got. He just has to wait 5 or 6 months for the heat to die down. Enterprise seems like as good a place as any to dispose of the evidence and lie low.

‘I could live here,’ he says, ‘if only there was something to do.’ He told me the people were friendly. No drug problem at all, except for everyone enjoyed a drink. There were 3 bars in the place and they were all laid out just the same. The bar itself was a stage in the middle of the room. There were no chairs near the door. Only a juke-box up against one of the walls. There were tables at the far end. About 4 of them, with room for 4 or 5 people at each. There were stools placed all around the bar. You would have thought they were manufacturing them in the store-room. They were always being broken or stolen, but more would just keep appearing. The bars were narrow. About the width of these tables pushed together. But they were long and never seemed to get too full.

So Gripes, being the man he is, decides there’s no better thing to do than just drink his time away. He has made just enough money to get him a place to sleep, and enough left over to enjoy himself every day.

There was a problem with that though. He got more bored than he thought he would and there were some days where he would sit in the bar all day drinking beer and whisky. On his worse days he would blow a fortune on the juke-box. God knows what he went about listening too. He would never tell me. In basic terms he went dead broke pretty quick. He says it was less than a month till there was nothing in his pockets ‘cept lint and tobacco. He needed to find a way to make money, and the locals didn’t make it easy for him.

They wouldn’t take him on the farms. Cotton, cattle, corn. They saw him as the town drunk. Unreliable and reckless. They would never take someone who liked liquor as much as Gripesy did and stick him behind the bar. It would have been way too risky. But Gripes got this idea in his head. About one of the only things he was good at was fighting so he says to the bar-man at The Dusty Bowl one day:

‘How much would you pay me to start a fight?’

‘You’ve been in so many fights in here,’ said the bar-man, ‘I’ve lost count. You’re one fight away from being banned for life. You always drive the customers away.’

‘I’m not talking about starting a fight HERE,’ says Gripes, doing that stance he always does where he rubs his hands and jitters one of his legs. You always know he’s up to no good when he starts with that. ‘I wouldn’t dream of starting a fight in HERE, if you catch my dime? But what if I were to go into The Toad Shack across the street there and flush them out for you? Huh? Do you get me? I would just go in there, cause a commotion, and you just pay me a few bucks for each guy who comes your way with a fat lip and a girl on his arm. Huh? You just stash ‘em in back one of the tables and pay me out front. What do you say?’

‘I say you’re nuts!’ the bar-man says to him. ‘A goddamn certified lunatic. You just go over there and see how you get on,’ says the bar-man, not thinking old Gripes will be back to bother him any time soon.

But Gripes marches over there, goddamn furious at how little he has had to drink that day, and kicks down the door like he’s Billy the Kid or something. He spots his targets. 3 guys on stools at the front of the bar chatting up a couple of ladies. None of them are regulars. He can tell. They’re only out for a good time so he supposes they can get it somewhere else. He marches up behind the guy on the left hand side of the bar. A young man who he notices as the son of the man who owns the cattle farm he was turned away from. He pulls the stool away by the bottom of the legs. Crash! The guy hits the ground and starts turtling around with his limbs flailing. He uses the stool to catapult the next guy halfway to the door. The two girls are screaming. No-one in the bar moves a muscle. They just keep on drinking. The music’s loud and fast and Gripes waits for the next guy to make his move. The last guy looks at his friends lying aching on the floor and decides to take a swing at Gripes. But Gripes is waiting for it. He blocks it with the stool and sends his knee crunching into the guy’s dick. He knees him so hard it must have retreated a couple of inches, climbed back into its hole like a fucking rat. So he grabs the guy’s drink and pours it over him. He holds the stool in the air in front of his chest and gives it a shake. ‘This here,’ he says as he sets it down. ‘This is my seat.’ And the guys leave with their cocks sandwiched between their thighs. And their girlfriends go scampering off after them.

About 5 minutes later Gripes gets back to The Dusty Bowl, says ‘What ‘id I tell you?’, collects a bottle of whisky and a couple of bucks and goes back to his room ready to do the same the next night. He’s lying there thinking he’s a goddamn genius.

It’s a good system and it works for him until they catch on to him at The Toad Shack. The next time he starts a fight in there their getting the Sheriff involved. And that’s the last thing Gripes wants. So what he’s gonna have to do is go to the last bar in town, and pray he sends the people running to The Dusty Bowl. The last bar, The Leopard’s Tongue, was the toughest place in town. Men as hard as steel forged in the sun. They were no strangers to a fight, and all of them were regulars. But he was going to have to front them up, even if he was tired and sore from a couple of blows he had taken the night before. But he didn’t even make it through the first round. The first guy he tried to rough up was twice his size and knocked him out with one swing of his mallet-sized fist.

He woke up on the sidewalk a couple of hours later with a girl bent over him. She had this sponge and a basin filled with tepid water and she starts dabbing him with it and the water in the basin starts to turn orange, then red. He looks down and sees that his shirt’s been changed. It’s clean and white. And he knows there’s something about this girl. Something in the way her long black hair eats up the moonlight. Something in the way her eyes, blue as the water off the coast of Florida in the summer time, never look in his direction. Something in the way she never speaks. There’s something as well about how low her top is cut, and how her knees hover effortlessly less than an inch off the ground. He tries to resist, but he can’t. He kisses her right there, right on her pale lips, and that night they make love and she moans endlessly and the sheets are covered. He knows it’s going to be one hell of a job for the cleaner but in that moment he doesn’t care.

Gripes went to sleep that night with that gapped grin you see every day in this stinking place. He has a girl in his arms and he’s happy. But when he wakes up the girl’s gone and so is his smile. There’s someone banging on his door and he dare not open it because of all the commotion outside. He looks out the window and the whole crowd are looking in, crying for his blood. The black haired girl is on the far side of the street crying her pretty blue eyes out. The Sheriff bursts through the door:

‘Don’t you know what you’ve done?’

It turns out the girl was only 14 and it didn’t take her dad long to find out what she had been up to, and who with.

‘We gotta get you outta here!’ screams the Sheriff. ‘They’ll try you across the state-line, but they’ll kill you here.’

So he jumped out the back window, hot-wired a beat up old Ford and drove away into the break of day.

‘They put out a warrant for his arrest in every state in the surrounding area. He headed east past Alabama and Georgia and was caught right here in North Carolina.’

‘Why’d he steal the car in Florida?’ asked Sal.

‘I never said it was a car,’ said Fulton. ‘And I don’t know why he stole it.’

‘Why’d he head east?’ asked Foxy, eager to understand his neighbour.

‘Nobody knows why,’ said Fulton as he stood to leave. ‘My best guess is he was heading back to his sister in Florida before he remembered he was wanted there too. He probably decided Canada was the best option after that. God knows he couldn’t go back through Mississippi.’

The 3 men who had stayed to listen sat in silence for a moment.

‘It’s time to head back to your cells now, boys,’ shouted the guard.

‘You heard the man,’ said Fulton. ‘It was nice of these guys to let me finish my story, even if no-one believes it.’