The Stretch

She killed him with a screwdriver - his screwdriver. Not in some gone crazy messed up kinda way, so many stabs for so many years of marriage, a bit of torture and all that. No, quick, clean – right through his left eye pinning him to the mattress.
Stella said she ‘felt relieved, like a weight had been lifted off her slim shoulders; better than making a party cake that hadn’t sunk.’
Now Gus Johnson, my old boss at Rowdy’s garage, his wife shall we say, was a little more creative. Poor old Gus had his ears hacked off with a beauty file and fed to the precious pet pooch. His eldest kid’s tampons were shoved up both nostrils - all before his brains decorated their apartment ceiling at 45th Street in down town New York. Mrs Johnson found a text. It spoke about cute lobes and what Gus wanted to do to his Latin mistresses ‘curvy body and swollen hot lips’ – lets just say it wasn’t dancing the salsa. Fuckin mobiles. Mrs Johnson got fifteen years, (she served eight), in Dreamtime Open Air Prison. I got fifteen too, in the super family rat infested, boom boom, fucking Looney Tune, hell hole, high security, god damn prison known as Wateroad. We thought I would get away with it, Stella and me.
‘Plead insanity’, she said, ‘you’ll get a four year run babe,’ she said.
But they, that’s Judge J. D. Jefferson, who ate babies and old ladies for breakfast, saw things differently.
He said: ‘Michael J. Leonard you have a history and not a small one I might add of holding up stores, petrol stations and whatever else takes your fancy; now you have moved on to murder and need to be prevented from killing again.’
He used big words like ‘premeditated’ and ‘misdemeanour’ and that was that. I’m now on year fourteen, month seven, week three and up for rehabilitation workshops soon. I know, I know. Why, oh why, oh why, have I spent just about fifteen years with big, bad bugs and stale sweat and shit for company when it wasn’t my crime? Wasn’t my felony. I know it should have been Stella’s stretch but I kinda loved her you see. In fact, I was besotted with the broad. Bitch.
Now not all bugs were bad mind. There were all types; black, white, creepy and crazy and all with two legs. First there was big Wuppa from Brooklyn like me, well that was home since I was fourteen any road. I was raised in Mississippi, Louisiana, but the old man couldn’t or wouldn’t find work, so we moved up to New York State. The old girl took off and left. Last I heard, Sonny, my brother, said the piece of mutton was out grazing in Texas with some old cowboy. Anyhow, Wuppa was a big black muscle of a man, with a mind crazier than a ferret on bourbon. He said he was inside for ‘shooting bunnies’ but I think he got rabbit and habit kinda mixed up. He had a habit of shooting anything that moved, especially if it wore a uniform and shiny badge. He tore into two of the guards here one day when they made fun of his wild afro hair and was taken off to solitary and ain’t seen him since. No doubt they skinned him. Couple of home boys. But I liked big Wuppa. Never knew why he had that name though.
Then there was skinny, Jack Carter. Real creepy that slime ball. All feminine and liked to keep his nails long like some broad. Four years I watched him being all too friendly with the guards for my liken. You know swapping smokes, favours and cherry lipstick and more I’m damn sure. A right homo. Couldn’t find what he was in here for but I hated him. Ponce.
Last and still here is Irish or Cormac Kelly Junior to his mammy. He got nine years for fraud – some big money laundering job too – a clever one but turns out not too clever for the cops with a friendly snitch on their team. When I first met Irish I smashed his Celtic nose straight across his pretty boy face. I told him the bent one kinda suits him. Anyhow, night after night, he babbled on and on. Stupid stories and airy fairy poetry - the poems were the worse. How many poems did whatever his name, somebody Butler Yeats, write for fuck sake? Did he live with a pen stuck to his fingers twenty-four seven? Anyway, this was in the beginning see – words weren’t my thing. Hadn’t listened to no shit like that since I was in first grade at Prairieville Primary School. I thought rhymes, like nursery rhymes and all, was a girl thing, they could skip and play games to. Not real boys stuff. But, after some time, it kinda grew on me just like Irish.
Then one night, after lights out, Irish started on some poem and I liked it. Really liked it. It was another Irishman, famous though, Seamus Heaney. Now, I won’t say I discovered him, I hate all that shit, but he was a different can of coke altogether. The real McCoy. Death of a Naturalist (ok, the title maybe attracted me) was the job – kinda funny reminded me of my childhood with Sonny in Brooklyn and Louisiana, the good bits. And I got it. I fuckin got it! All the ‘sods’ and stuff and ‘blunt heads farting’ – fantastic! See not all ‘wildlife’ had a gun in its hand in Brooklyn. In fact Prospect Park had a couple of ducks, (mostly they disappeared though) and little birds and toads just like most other places. We would go fishing in the lakes in summer, not that you were supposed to and bring up frogs and creatures – no fish. One day, Joel, my buddy, hooked a corpse, all bloated and naked – a big guy who bobbed about in the water like some swollen shit. Turns out he didn’t pay a hooker what was agreed and her pimp made sure he didn’t live to visit another one of his girls. So I was getting a taste for words, poems, stories and stuff.
‘Aint that right Irish – I’m getting sort of cultured, yeah?’ Irish don’t answer much – always reading.
Anyhow, Irish give me the reading bug too. He always makes sure he picks up piles of books and magazines for me when he visits the in house library. I started reading everything and anything and now I just can’t stop. Horror, Westerns and Fantasy. I like Marvel Comics best, the superhero stuff. Steven "Steve" Rogers aka Captain America – wicked!
Thursdays, we get to watch films. Clint Eastwood aka the ‘Man with No Name’ is my all time number one hero – fantastic. Me and Sonny would watch those Spaghetti Westerns with the old man time and time over; A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly – that was my all time favourite. Sonny was the good, I was the bad and the old boy was all three. That’s the only time I spent with the old man. Sonny got more attention. One day in the drive-through he touched Sonny’s knee. Sonny, normally the quiet one, grabbed his hair and smashed his ugly face open all over the steering wheel – blood and shit splattered everywhere. The old man never came to the movies again. We didn’t give a crap. The place was always full with car loads of chicks when those hot movie classics were playing. And the cop, ‘Dirty Harry’, fantastic. I have a tattoo, a beast of a forty-four magnum, like the one he used in those Dirty Harry films, decorating my left butt cheek aiming where the sun never shines‘ - ‘Go ahead punk make my day’. I know Irish just loves it when I keep sayin that even though he don’t say nothin.
‘Aint that right Irish? You love it when I say that.’
So I’ve used my head - not just my bare bone fists. Learned a couple of languages; Italian ‘ciao’ and ‘si’ so I can visit someday and I can do a bit of French too, ‘le briquet’ and ‘la biere’ – real useful stuff. So turns out I don’t just have a taste for foreign tongues but a gift too. See Stella said she was, I don’t know, a hundred generation Italian, went right back to Caesar him fuckin self. I called her my ‘Stella Spaghetti’ and I was her ‘Big Mikey Meat Balls’. She said one day we could go to Italy together, visit Rome, where the gladiators fought. She said we could meet all the people she knew, you know, friends and family. But she said a lot of things. A lot of fantasy stuff.
Irish draws figures and weird stuff like fantasy, myths and legends like on those Van Halen album covers. When Stella walked into the Sturdy Maples Motel in the summer of ’85, the first time I set eyes on her, she was singin ‘I got you babe’, looking just like one of those fantasy paintings. A beautiful fairy tale blonde. A painted doll.
‘Aint that right Irish? – she looked like a painted doll.’
It’s right about now that I need to get somethin real heavy off my chest. You know clear up a few things and all. You see, after a couple of months inside Wateroad, I had some mail given to me by Richardson the sleaze of a guard who creepy Jack Carter would sneak off with after lock up. He was grinning like the joker taking a crap and it had been opened like all mail is in here. This was the very first time I’d received so much as a ‘hello’ from the outside. It was a letter, well a hand written scribbled note in fact, from Stella explaining everything she said. The nuts and bolts of how she worked right there in a few miserable and measly lines.
Dear Mikey (babe),
I need to explain everything.
Sorry to have to let you know like this
but, I’m really a man, I was born a man.
My name is Stephan and I am Polish.
Hope things are ok.
Sorry babe for the news I know it will be a bit of a shock.
Me being Polish an all.
S x
Whoa - hang on while I pick myself up and get my heart working again. Sorry babe? Sorry for what? That I am gonna do a fifteen year stretch for you. Take the rap for a Ponce! I swear to god if she, it, or whatever it fuckin was, had been in the room, right then - now, I would have strangled her Adams Apple until it bled cider.
I ate the note – chewed it real good - until it was nothing but pulp fiction – that’s what it was fiction – a joke. Must have been – I would have known. Wouldn’t I?
Ok, so it turns out Stella wasn’t my doll after all or anyone else’s doll for that matter. She wasn’t even a god damn woman. The bitch wasn’t a broad! I always wondered why she and Al never had kids but she didn’t talk about it and that was fine with me. I didn’t want no kids either – no way. And Stella was really ‘Stephan’ from Poland. She was fuckin Polish can you believe it? The broad had lied to me, telling me she was from Napoli, and liked pizza! I wonder if Al knew she’d been lying and was really Polish. Bitch!
Anyhow, me, when I’m outa this joint? After collectin my blue Chevy, checkin it over and getin some dollars, I’m goin all tropical. Irish know I aint travelled much, not out of New York and Louisiana States, so he kindly suggested somewhere real special. I’m off to some place known as Soi Cowboy over east in Bangkok. Funny name I know. Irish says butch American boys, cowboys, just like me hang out there all the time and I’ll just love it and the locals, ‘the katoeys*’ he calls them, will just love me. Irish gets out a week after my stretch, so I asked him to come along you know, take in the scenery and hot girls, but he said he’ll call me real soon when he knows where he’s staying.
“Aint that right Irish? You gonna call me when you know where you’re stayin. Fantastic….