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I’m five or six years old and playing with the kid next door who likes to undress his sister’s dolls and put fishhooks between their legs. Our houses face a busy two-lane highway, trucks and travelers all day and night.  We’re in the front yard playing with matches when I decide to cross the highway we’re not allowed to cross.  I look both ways and misjudge distance and speed and some guy has to slam on his brakes as I run out in front of him and across to the other side.  It’s a fucking rush so I take off back across to the starting point and tell the kid now it’s his turn.  He makes it to the other side but on the way back a car skids to a stop and honks and honks and he freezes in the southbound lane.  His mother comes running out from the house and grabs him up and tells me to go home.  The thing I still remember about her is that she has a couple of big hairy moles on her neck.

It’s 1978 and I’m renting a clapboard dump high on a Silver Lake hill looking out toward Hollywood.  The guy next door, on the other side of the wall, tells me he used to be a Black Panther and he did time for murder and he steals cars for a living.  I ask him if he can get me a car in the two-hundred dollar price range and he tells me he’ll keep an eye out.  He lives with his sister who is a whore and totally blind.  I ask her if she’s ever accidentally climbed into a cop’s car but she doesn’t have much of a sense of humor.  Late one quiet Friday night, I’m reading and have the door open when the sister next door starts screaming.  It’s not my business but it continues for a while so I go next door and knock.  The Black Panther opens the door and apologizes for the noise.  His sister is on the floor in the middle of the room pulling her hair and beating on her head and screaming.  I ask him if she’s alright and he says she will be in a little while.  I go back to my place and open a beer and a little while later she stops screaming.

When I was in high school there was this kid named Carl who had a cleft pallet and honked like a goose when he talked. He was probably the worst-looking kid in town; he had acne and he was pigeon-toed.  One day, on my BSA Hornet motorcycle, in the school parking lot, Carl rode his bycycle into my path and I centerpunched him.  Carl and his stack of books and his lunch box went flying.  I rode around him and I imitated his goose voice.  “Hey Carl, watch the fuck where you’re going?” Other kids were watching and I did a wheelie and zoomed out into the traffic.  I wonder if Carl remembers it the way I do.

Blaine tells everyone he knocked out his father's teeth with a baseball bat.  No one really believes him though everyone figures he's capable of considerable violence.  Blaine is quick to explain how he's only known J-Boy for a couple of days yet he's gonna fuck up anyone who messes with J-Boy or his dog, Judo.  J-Boy hopes to avoid violence though he likes to imagine Judo grows to the size of a wolf and then fucks up all the assholes at his command.

Martha likes to look pretty when she goes to Starbucks and panhandles.  A modern do-gooder couple invite Martha to join them under a green umbrella.  The guy offers her a drink and bite to eat.  Martha sits and asks for a lemon cake and a caramel macchiato.  The woman goes inside to buy Martha’s goodies and the man asks Martha if she is enjoying the beautiful weather.   Martha says she used to wear a bikini before they were popular and all the other girls were jealous.  The guy says I’ll bet you were beautiful and she says don’t patronize me, I know what I am.  The guy sputters confused apologies and then goes quiet.  Martha says it’s a beautiful day, I’m going to the beach.

The guy’s wife, Jackie, comes back to the table with a slice of lemon cake and the macchiato.  Martha tells her that’s not a macchiato; it’s supposed to have ice cream in it.  Jackie says I’m pretty sure that’s a caramel macchiato, it’s not a cold drink, you can’t really put ice cream in it.  Martha says it’s not what I asked for, I asked for a macchiato.   The guy, Jackie’s husband, tells Jackie, maybe she should go back and check, get Martha the right drink.  Jackie glares at her hubby, takes a five dollar bill from her purse and hands it to Martha, tells her go get your own fucking drink.  Martha takes the five, the cake and the caramel macchiato and walks down to the beach.

In my early twenties I had a job traveling about making yearbook-style family portrait pictures in churches.  I had a blue paper background, a set of four strobe lights and a posing bench where I could build people compositions.  I photographed a Viet Nam vet with no arms or legs.  He didn’t want his wheelchair to show so I picked him up and put him on the posing bench.  I moved in closer than the usual head and shoulders, cropping out everything that wasn’t there.  He told me he killed four gooks and he would do it all again.  He told me it was God’s will.  I told him to look at the lens and look happy and then I made the exposure.

The bloody Mexican runs and stumbles toward me like he’s trying to catch up to himself.  The strobe puts spots in his blurry eyes and he growls at me.  He could use another drink but the bars are closed and his pockets are empty.

This babe looks like a deluxe blow-up doll, all pumped up and ready for action.  Some guy is going to get more than he deserves and she’s going to make a little money.  It’s a sad cash-up-front romance but sometimes that’s not so bad.

When Naomi was young she wasn’t scared of anything.  She was smart and witty and pretty and she didn’t take shit from anyone.  In school she loved public speaking and she traveled to other schools with the debate team.  She was good at art and talked to her guidance counselor about becoming an architect.  She remembers these good things but more often she remembers the bad; what it was like to hide from her mother when she was in one of her moods; how scary it was in the dark of the closet when she knew she would be found.  She almost remembers it with a longing, as compared to now, in the jungle, in the world where all the unknowns trump the beatings she always knew were coming.  Now, Naomi is scared of everything.

I make my exposure from the driver’s seat then lower the camera and wink at the girl.  I think she likes being watched and I think she’s got a denim grip on the guy’s dick with her right hand.  I sit in the car and look into her eyes.  I give my own dick a nice squeeze and share the moment. 

His shoes are too small and the tongues are out.  She’s reading a text reminding her to get milk and cat food.

When you live in a box, you mostly pull yourself around with your forearms.  When you pee, you do it horizontally into a plastic gallon milk jug and the front of your pants are usually wet.  You're always on the lookout for matches and Bics to momentarily illuminate the fuzzy yellow space and set fire to the rock in the pipe, the one thing you have managed to keep hold of.  When the night is spent, you crawl out of your box to meet the day with great apprehension; you stink and your clothes are ragged and your hair is matted; your breath is foul and your sores don't heal, you attract vermin and nobody wants to help you.

One night at Steak and Shake a friend told me about a couple of girls pulling a train at a guy’s house near by.  I knew the guy, he was another one of those older idiots who had his own house and a fridge full of beer, liked to hang out with us teenage idiots.  Tonight he had a house full.  In his bedroom on a double bed, two naked girls were on their backs, and a line of fine young men were awaiting their turns.  Kid I knew was atop one of the girls, so I walked over and talked to him for a little bit but he didn’t have much to say.  He came with an oofph and got up and out of the way for the next guy.  The room stank of sperm and perspiration, beer and cigarettes.  I didn’t stay but when I got home that night I jerked off before going to bed.

Saturday night in Hollywood and most everyone is having a good time.  A cutie on a bench is out for the count while her friend talks on the phone.  A charmer on the same bench expresses himself with his middle finger.

When I was a budding portrait photographer I remember a family of five: mom, dad, two preteen girls and a teenage boy.  I posed the boy and tallest of the girls standing behind the seated others.  I said look up here and say fuzzy pickles and everyone smiled, and as I hit the shutter the kid flipped me the bird.  That’s a picture I couldn’t sell and a frame of film I paid for.  Let’s do that one again, I said, and without the middle finger this time. I smiled at the kid.  Dad stood suddenly and plastered the kid with a fat fist to the side of his head.  The kid staggered around for a full minute while dad sat back down and nobody said anything.  The kid finally made it back to his assigned position and smiled wide for the next picture.

Otis is a security specialist and a film buff and he likes to imagine he is Clint Eastwood in A Fistful of Dollars.  “I don't think it's nice, you laughin'. You see, my mule don't like people laughin'. Gets the crazy idea you're laughin' at him.”

When I was around nine or ten there was a kid three years older than I named Mark Wolford who lived down the street.  He was a bully but we had no common acquaintances and our passing was usually no more than a nod and a middle finger. One sunny day I found myself in the tree-house with a sort-of friend from the neighborhood, Mike, and nobody’s friend Mark Wolford.  Mark was there to show us how he could make sperm shoot from his peter, which was big, and he wasn’t circumcised.  He jacked-off and came three times in a row which was pretty impressive.  One of us, I think it was me, had a pair of dice.  Mark took one of the dice and pushed it under his foreskin, abracadabra, then he popped it back out and gave it to me.  I brought it close and gave it a sniff and it made me retch, which I guess says something for Mark Wolford’s personal hygiene.

 
The next year Mark Wolford moved away and I never saw him again.  Two or three years later my mom read, in the local paper, that Mark had gotten married and a couple of months later she read in the birth announcements that he had become a father.  He was only sixteen years old.  I remember thinking that he had to get married because he jacked-off so much that when he finally fucked someone, he got her pregnant.

This guy’s walker is better than the one I have.  I brought mine home with me from the hospital nearly twenty-five years ago.  I keep it in the closet but for a few times a year when my back goes out and I need it to hobble from room to room.  We learn to live with our disabilities and the hardest part is finding a way to swagger when you’re slow and bent. I wonder if I should get tennis balls for my walker.  I wonder if I’ll still leer at the world and wink at the girls when I graduate to a wheelchair.

When I was a kid I used to spend the night with friends in a tent set up in the backyard.  Then in fifth grade my pop built a deluxe tree-house in the back yard and I slept up there in the summer.  In junior high school I liked to wander in the night and sleep in unlocked cars.  Nobody locked their cars in my little American town and sometimes they left their keys in the ignition.  It was great living in a place and time when people were honest and trusting and I loved all those late night drives.

Hack Jackson is a bad ass and there is not a street in the world he wouldn’t walk down.  He’s had more pussy than a rockstar.  He was a pool hustler for thirty years and he can still shoot with precision.  He went to the marches in the sixties and he gave Martin Luther King a high-five.  He whupped two big white assholes in a parking lot in 1974.  One of the assholes had a switch-blade knife and to this day, Hack carries it in his coat pocket.  He has loved a few women and he’s had a couple of kids.  He is clean and sober but he’s had a lifelong love affair with heroin.  I take his picture and he tells me be careful brother, there are bad people hereabouts.  I tell him there are bad people everywhere and he tells me yeah, but that doesn’t mean you need to go out looking for them.

It’s late and Desiree is walking alone through the woods.  Two big yellow eyes follow her every move and the cicadas chant like a blown-out speaker, hey baby hey baby hey baby. 

The monster doesn’t bother to hide, to stalk; he thinks he already owns her.  But this time, the monster fucked up.

Sparks shoot from Desiree’s eyes and melt away the monster’s flesh. Her claws are pink and sharp and she lunges like a cat and takes out his eyes.  She opens the monster’s carotid artery with her teeth and rolls him in a ditch to die.

She resumes her walk in the woods and the cicadas have nothing more to say.

Crunch disguises himself as product placement and hopes no one will see him.

I’m nine years old crawling on a clay floor through a cave passage not much wider than my head.  I hate being skinny and small but here in this Missouri cave I can go places no one else can fit.  I come into a closet-sized room where I can stand, with head bowed, and no one but me has ever been here and I feel safe.  I turn off the flashlight and I yell into the passageway, Hey all you fuckers, come see if you can find me!

I’m fifty years old and I’m on my back and a technician pushes a button and the MRI whirs and slides me head first into the tube.  My arms are to my sides like a wooden soldier and no more than six inches is above me.  I feel like I’m in a coffin.  I close my eyes as tightly as my fists and an intercom voice asks me are you all right Scot?  This first one is about six minutes and I need you to stay still. 

It’s 1967 and I know a paraplegic guy who broke his back in a car crash.  He got an insurance settlement and a new Plymouth Barracuda outfitted with a hand-throttle.  He honks and waves me over in a shopping center parking lot.  I’m on my motorcycle and I pull up to his window.

“Hey Carl, it’s good to see you man.  How you doing?  Nice car.”

Carl lights a cigarette with the dashboard lighter.  “I’m doing fucking great, Scotty. I fucking fucked two broads yesterday.  Fucked them like crazy.”

I can see his legs dangling down to the floor, his pants look empty.  “Oh yeah.  Congratulations, man.  How’d that happen?”

“I got chicks all over town is how.  That’s all I do is bang girls.”

A big dumb guy named Mike, walking through the lot with a bottle in a paper bag, stops and slaps a rendition of Wipe-Out on the hood of Carl’s car.  Carl honks the horn.   

“Hey, stupid shit!  Get the fuck away from my car, before I get out and kick your fuckin ass.”

Mike and Carl don’t know each other but I know all the assholes and idiots in this town.

Mike comes around with a puffed-up chest and kicks Carl’s left front wheel with the heel of his boot.  “I’ll pull you out of that dumb shit car and stomp your face, you fuckin’ queer-bait!”

Carl’s wheelchair is collapsed in the back seat. “Go ahead and try it, you fuckin candy ass.”

I’m between them, my bike thump thumping like a badass. 

“Hey, Mike, just cool it.  Alright, man, just keep going wherever you were going.”

“Fuck you too, Scotty fucking Sothern, we both know I can kick your ass.”

“Yeah, well.”

“Nobody’s asking for your help,” Carl tells me. “Fucking shit-ass.”  He flips his cigarette out the window and drives away with his middle finger in the air.

Mike shrugs and walks off taking drinks from his paper-bag.

One night when I was fifteen this older guy I knew picked me up at home and drove us to a gas station where we filled two big red cans for about 75 cents.  From there we drove out to an abandoned farm house on a rocky road.  It was two-story white with a big front porch.  We checked all the rooms for people or anything of value then we doused the walls top to bottom.  I stood on the front porch and threw two lit matches into a gasoline pool in the center of the living room and then a third before it caught.  It went up in an incredible whoosh and singed my eyebrows.  It was a kick and sometimes I wish I could do it again.

 I’m a kid and I imagine I am Superman; my clumsy little-boy body, just a disguise, a mask to hide my secret identity.  I think maybe it can really happen; I still believe in God so becoming Superman isn’t that much of a stretch.

A few years later I’ve abandoned faith and superstition and I want to be a bank robber, a Hell’s Angel and a rock star.  I want to be notorious and counter culture.  I want to set the world on fire and watch it burn.

Then I’m all grown up and I’m just another fucked-up everyman, too filled up with fantasies to function on a get-up-go-to-work-come-back-and go-to-bed level. 

Now I’m an old man and I’m Superman and I just want to fly fly away.

Life is struggle and woe is I.  The gates of Hell are closed and I got left inside.