It was getting clausterphobic. The walls of the club had gotten smaller, the house wasn’t serene, the time on campus, albeit productive, made me feel strangled.

Get the fuck out of dodge, baby…time to head into Nawlins, nobody knows you in Nawlins

. There was a little swagger in the step, each one a little more open. I could feel the plastic mask melt away in the hot humid sun as the car sped down the shitty interstate, lines of convicts working the sides of the roads. I smoked a few joints, a few cigarettes, I listened to loud music, old shit I loved. UFO, the Ramones, Sex Pistols. I felt young again. I needed to feel young again.
It wasn’t something a trip out to your namby pamby beach house is gonna fix, boy.

Well you hear it in your head don’t you, asshole. None of these girls give a shit about you, it’s what they want from you. What you give ‘em, got nothing to do with you. They are ticks, they are leaches. You were just a fucking conduit for their own self centered changes: self confidence, answers, someone to talk to, someone to get em off drugs, someone to make them stop hating.

I was a reason, that was all, never was about me. I could spend hours listening to their sob stories about their friends, and part of me, no doubt, gave a fuck. I would say most of me wanted that, because in their stories I heard my stories. When they sat at my desk and talked about the first time they were touched before they could understand, I relived that moment for myself. When they told me about the anger and feeling of numbness, I was more conscious of my own scars all over my body where I was releasing shit.

It would be fine too if I didn’t hear my father in my head screaming, telling me I’m not good enough while he chokes me with his fists and took his own closeted gay shame out on my ass. His filthy fucking secrets. Nothing I did would ever be good enough and that’s all I’d ever be…

Not this weekend, kiddo. This is alllll you. That bastard got his. He’d come in, after work, while you stood over your Mommy Dearest’s twitching body. Naked after one of her mandatory afternoon naps. Pull you out of school early on those days you know, you dreaded the lunch time bell. But fuck if you didn’t get the jump on him, Anj’. Slamming her face into a counter and cracking her like a walnut. Puberty was a bitch to you, baby-boy. …or maybe to her. There goes the ol’ man’s sweet princess, brain like a yolk from an egg. Good for you, boy. Show him who’s good enough now. You know what they say, man’s never gotta be a man until Daddy is gone

I thought about Ava, about the fear I had when I was near her. There was a fear that her dark side was a reflection of my darkside. I remembered reading old Hulk comics, and knowing the reason both Banner and Hulk loved Betty was that Betty was an anchor to humanity. This was worse. I pulled into a parking lot on the French Quarter and got out of the car and stretched out. I half wanted to find one of my students here turning tricks in a back alley so I wouldn’t be alone, to see someone else’s sin thrown to my feet as an offering. I wanted to know I wasn’t alone but that I was in control.

They always gotta be underneath you, never let em tell you what to do. It’s the words in the books you’re writing right? That’s a girl’s place, to serve a man, that’s her nature, her nature as the provider yaddayaddayadda. All that bullshit you write to keep control, boy. Nobody tells you what is what again. The weak part of you is dead, boy, that’s all you write, you write all that nonsense shit about centering and submission and all it is…is you fucking hiding your weakness, you piece of slobbering bullshit. Daddy was right about you.

A long deep breath as I light a cigarette and take it. There was a satisfied Cheshire smile filling my face with the purple smoke. I knew all the bad places of this town, and by bad, I mean great. I knew where all the junkies hung out, where the assholes were. I strutted around the car, popping the trunk and taking the gloves from the trunk and slowly putting them on. I opened a tool box and took out a tire iron. I whistled the whole time. I whistled the downtempo tune that had played while Aisling was crying on my thighs about the drugs she was taking. I saw her lost face. One more I could chalk into the stable of the broken that would hear the call. Part of me looked up at the dilapidated house two blocks down a side street and wondered if I should be thanking this guy instead.

Everybody gets what’s coming to ‘em. Karma is a bitch, boy. You wanna spend your days all serene, then you gotta pay the piper. You gotta pay the toll. You gotta make your regularly scheduled quota. You can’t forget, and you can’t ever leave it behind.

I didn’t know if there would be guns, but I did know it was 4:30 in the afternoon, and the the mid-morning needles were probably still in effect. I didn’t wear a mask. I didn’t feel I needed to hide anything. Nobody knows me in Nawlins. I cracked a smile. I checked the weight of the tire iron and I took a few steps up the rotting stairs.
Pills were easy to get in Hathian. Part of the reason was shit doctors writing fake scripts, but after I found out where Aisling was getting her shit, I’d asked around, made some calls, people still thought of me as who I’d been, they hadn’t gotten the memo, hadn’t gotten the fax , still thought I was grifting. Maybe I still was. My longest con.

Everybody gets it from somebody. Doc had been pissing his pants that if he’d told ya who he was writing scripts for that he’d get it. You knew better, promised to take care of the problem yourself. The Doc liked hookers, blackmail was a bitch, and now…he’d have one less fucking…

Foot went right for the door and it smashed in. It was a one story shack, probably didn’t have running water, it smelled like shit, sweat, and old laundry. It smelled like sick. I counted off the 4 of them here, saw feet move out the back side window, but that was the foot of a woman. Fat bellied bastard in a Hawaiian. He was Dominican, two white girls at his feet, they all tried to move but I was faster and the tire iron came across his face with a sound I hadn;’t prepared for. A deep wet crunch.

Like Mommy’s head

It made me laugh a bit. Not a crazy laugh like some Irish psycho, it was the laugh of irony, a sick joke to myself, don’t get me wrong, I didn’t enjoy this one bit. His jaw dislocated and his face caved in a bit from the blow, but he moved still and I brought it back around a bit higher. End of that.

The girls were screaming and crying, there were needles and powder all over the table next to me, they didn’t know what to do, too high to think or do anything, their grief in the moment was like looking up from underwater and knowing you won’t reach the surface before you drown. Inevitability. There was blood splattered all over my shirt.

A real sick fuck might have done them, lord knows they were in no position to prevent that from happening, and it would put an exclamation point on power. A even sicker person might have carved em up, fed them to gators or something. There was a line between those who killed like that, there was still a code, vengeance and pain had roots, and they had to be taken away. I was the mighty hand of justice. I was the thing that stood between the dark and the light. I’d heard Aisling’s words and fixed the problem. So instead of some grandiose threat or retribution act against the girls, all I could think of saying was

“No more drugs”

Way to go, you fucking poet. Way to go with that one. That’s a real forboding line, kiddo. I raised you better….

I dropped the tire iron and walked out. I was loose and calm, I smiled a lot, and even remembered to wipe the splatter off my face before I headed down to the hotel. I smiled at a hooker on a corner, she dressed like shit, she smelled like dirt, I paid her to shower with me, and she followed me back. I let her wash me, and I watched her wash herself. I made her shave and do her hair before I slept. She slept on the floor where I told her to, the foot of my bed. I paid her to ignore my wails and sobs, my fetal position, the incoherent things I yelled into the darkness around me

You fucking pussy….never let em see you sweat. But nobody knows you in Nawlins