Little Bone Blue

Hey everybody, Maddy here--did you miss me? The good folks at the Independent have asked me to contribute another little opus, because it seems that my crazy uncle Bone has turned up missing. Nobody's exactly sure what happened to him, but the rumors aren't pretty. I guess he grew increasingly despondent over his meager book sales, and like many great writers, started dipping his quill in the sauce. Pity really, that's a damn funny book--I oughtta know, I wrote half of it.

Officially, he's on vacation, but according to my mother, the Boneman's little "vacation getaway" is more the loser-friendly way of saying he escaped from rehab. He reportedly slipped away with nothing more than the shirt on his back, and though his whereabouts are yet unknown, my mother has it on good authority that the silly bastard sold some blood in Barstow for busfare and is headed for Mexico. "Via con Dios Senor Boneman." You were one mucho funny hombre, so I understand.

But enough about that twisted old souse--let me get you up to speed on my pathetic existence. As you may recall, there toward the end of the 20th century I had quite a little romance happening with Piute Jack--that savory slice of hot-blooded native-American manflesh. Practically betrothed, we were--him the zealous returned missionary, me the reluctant but willing would-be convert marching hand-in-hand toward the big white building and then on to the promised land.

Looking back on it all now, I'd have to say the biggest turning point for me, was when he dumped me for a whore. It was all about "primrose promises" and "for all eternity," right up until the whole "whore" thing. If you've followed any of this bizarre saga you may remember that in my last installment, Jack and I had crossed paths with Jack's old girlfriend (see . . . whore) a juicy little Jezebel whose modest ways made Courtney Love look like the Relief Society President. Anyway, the embers of their former passion got a good stoking there at Lake Mead and evidently Jack's since lowered his spiritual sights toward more temporal rewards. If I didn't want to slowly dismember the rotten son of a bitch, I'd probably be proud of him.

Actually I really don't know what the hell happened to my romance with Jack. We left off at the lake on pretty good terms, but all of the sudden the phone calls became fewer and fewer and every time I called him he sounded funny. Not ha ha funny, like someone holding a gun to your head so you don't say anything you're not supposed to funny. I'm not going to lie to you and play this isn't causing me to die a slow, excruciating death every single sleepless miserable, heart-battering night. I really just don't understand what happened what I did wrong, it was all going along so amazingly well. But for reasons unknown to poor little me, it's all ground to an agonizing halt. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck it hurts. Not to mention the regrettable effect it all had on my driving skills. On Thanksgiving I nailed a Lexus, and two days later I took out half a dozen Christmas trees in the parking lot of Harmon's. Ain't love grand?

To make matters oh so very much worse, my Mother decided it would do me a world of good to get away for a bit and spend Christmas with my real dad. Billy, as I've always called him, is a mechanic in Page, Arizona and to put it kindly, the man's not right--in any sense of the word. Thanks mom, basically they just wanted me out of the house so I wouldn't ruin Christmas. But to send me out to Page with Billy was about as therapeutic as taking a burn victim out to Death Valley and dragging him through the cactus. Billy was no more prepared to entertain a morose, broken-hearted teenager for the holidays, than he would've been a pregnant buffalo. He lives in a cluttered little trailer and his television only picks up three stations. The first day there I was so intensely miserable I could barely breathe--I felt like shooting off a flare gun-- "someone help me. I'm very, very unhappy. I might die."

Christmas morning was special. Billy had two gifts for me. I unwrapped the first and was delighted to find the "Beavis and Butthead" hat that I'd left at his trailer a couple years ago "Wow, my hat--thanks dad, you shouldn't have." The other gift turned out to be a little picture frame, that still had the photo of a happy, smiling couple in it. I was so overwhelmed that I had to excuse myself. I went in the bathroom and cried until I couldn't take the smell for another second. True, there's a certain amount of odd pleasure you can derive from feeling sorry for yourself--but this was ridiculous. Christmas morning, and here I am sitting on a foul little toilet, slumped over my sore heart, trying not to vomit--trapped in a trailer for a week with a man as mental as they come. He giftwrapped my old hat and gave it to me. It wasn't a little joke--it was my Christmas present.

After pulling it together as best I could, I emerged from the bathroom to find Billy in front of the football game. I put on my hat and plopped down on the couch and when the dust cleared I noticed Billy was watching me with a look of such helpless concern in his eyes that it caused the tears to spill out all over again. Mercifully he didn't try to console me, he just hopped to his feet, pulled me up by the hand and lead me into the kitchen. He opened the fridge to reveal shelf after overburdened shelf of Old Milwaukee--the official beverage of hell, I was guessing--anyway he reached in and cracked one open for me. A truly awful brew that Old Milwaukee, but just to be sure it wasn't just a bad can, I tried three or four others.

One of the advantages of living in a dinky little trailer is that you're never far from the fridge; and by half time, I must say Christmas was starting to look a tad merrier. I found myself telling Daddy Bill all about my whorror story and he reacted to my tales of woe like any responsible parent by laughing his ass off. Not to be outdone, Billy shared a few sob stories of his own and we spent the next few hours laughing out loud, trying to determine who was the biggest loser.

After the game he told me that out here in the desert they have a unique kind of therapy and he reached under his chair and pulled out the biggest handgun I'd ever seen. He told me to put on my coat and we hiked out a little ways behind his trailer--and to be honest I wasn't altogether sure he wasn't planning on putting me out of my misery. Right away we came upon a hill littered with cans and bottles and in the middle stood a big refrigerator box with a drawn target specked with bullet holes. He handed me the gun and told me not to do any shooting just yet and pulled a magic marker from his coat pocket and walked out and drew the outline of a man on a different side of the box. He turned to join me, then grinned and spun on his heel and drew a few feathers on my target's head. "I see, I gotcha . . . all right, stand back."

He showed me how to shoot, and then stepped back and told me to let that Jack-bastard have it. I shot and shot and shot until there wasn't a bullet left on the premises. Other than the ringing in my ears I don't remember much of anything else about that day. Pretty typical Christmas--drink a bunch of cheap beer, a few hours of drunken ballistic insanity and then pass out before sundown. When I woke up the next morning, my heart was just as broke as ever, and I had a headache that rendered me all but sightless. Which was fortunate because if I wouldn't have been blinded, I might've found the gun.