I have Always Been a Turd

I don’t know how I do it, but it seems that I summon nasty emotions in even the most balanced of people. Soon I will be Public Enemy Number One, and it will feel so satisfying to finally be good at something.

I rode with my mom’s brother, who happens to be an ATTORNEY AT LAW, down to the station house on North Fountain on Saturday morning, and it was a completely surreal experience to be briefed by your own uncle on what to say to the officials under the harsh lights of interrogation. I was stoked. It seems crazy, yes, but I felt like life was starting. Wheels were in motion that I had spun without anybody else having told me to spin them, and it was causing a freaking whirlpool. My uncle, let’s call him Uncle Ben (because that’s his name, and yes, we have all cracked countless rice jokes over the years, and yes, he hates it, because yes, he’s an overly serious son-of-a-bitch with no sense of humor), seemed to notice the new light in my eye, and he gave me a look that was hard like artic ice and paused his briefing to ask me if I was having a good time. I said, hey, honestly, I gotta say, I love to have new experiences and I am kinda looking forward to seeing what this whole thing is gonna be about today. He pulled the car over so fast I had to throw my hands up on the dash to keep my teeth from getting bashed in. I was like, nice driving, rice-man. And I swear to god, the guy GROWLED at me. Like, spittle on the freaking cage glass growling, and his TEETH were showing, and he spoke through gritted molars with a hatred only barely contained, and he JABBED at me with a shockingly hard index finger right on my breastbone, and I was completely taken aback like miles and said, dude, what in the hell do you think you’re doing?

He had the look of a crazy person, his little wisps of white hair on the sides of his head kind of sticking up crazily from the wind the car windows channeled through his stuffy, old-man car interior (Uncle Ben is like ten years older than my mom at least), and he was like, “Listen to me Pendel, you little shit bag, I always thought you were a severely challenged turd the whole time you were growing up, and me and everybody else in the family is sick to death of you hurting my sister with your bullshit act.”

Wow. Seriously uncool. I had no clue what to say to that, so I just tsked him and glared and said, hey, that’s not nice. I felt completely lame and weak, but my head was so empty. I mean, he ALWAYS thought? Like, since I was a kid? Well, that’s REAL fucking nice. It’s this kind of rank horseshit that made me constantly feel like a fuck-up and a reject even before I was old enough to know that a person could be those things. My own so-fucking-called flesh and blood never even liked me, and then they all wonder how I could turn out to be such a diabolical mastermind of misdirected stomach acid. Well, they all shall pay in due time. Make book on it.

We drove on in silence from that point, except for the exceptionally GAY music that was straining itself through the lame factory speakers in Uncle Ben’s barnacle-encrusted Oldsmobile. Taylor Dane. Fucking make me gag. Easy listening. BAH! Why do they call it that?! It isn’t easy to listen to at all. It sucks donkey cock from here to the river.

By the time we got to the police station I was just freaking fuming and wanting blood but who can you get blood from when everyone around you is drained of all life? The police station was insanely florescent and buzzing, sad and depressing, and all cinderblock, white paint, plastic chairs and no magazines; why would it have to be that way? Why would I expect it to be anything else? Anyway, Uncle Rice walked up to the counter where a cop who seemed bored to the point of death was sitting and flipping through some random sheets of paper. I bet you a night with Camile that he had no idea what was on any of those sheets of paper. And he had a mustache. I fucking hated his very guts just looking at him. I knew by checking out his piggy rat eyes that he had judged so many people, and the very fact that a person could walk through those station doors escorted by fellow cops would get him thinking mean and prissy thoughts about them, maybe even wishing them dead, just as I am wishing HIM dead. What a vicious circle of wishes.

Me and my uncle were shuffled into a room with four or five chairs and a table with cigarette burns in it, which is exactly what I expected, but was very brightly lit, which is NOT what I expected at all. The temperature was okay, too, and that was strange, because I thought the whole idea was to get me all uncomfortable and disoriented until I spilled my pathetic guts. The floor had carpeting, a really short nap and institutional kind of feel on my feet, and there were of freaking course stains on it, and cigarette burns there, too, and the whole room smelled like a place I didn’t want to be. And suddenly, looking at this dumb room that smelled like coffee breath and smoke, that had almost no color to it, that was so bright that every flaw in the walls stood out like chicken pox scars, I felt so low about everything, I wondered how I had gotten here, and was I always destined to be a loser? Was this uncle of mine right? Did everybody hate me since the day I was born and feel my bad vibe pouring out of my blind baby eyes from day one?

Uncle Ben told me to sit, and I sat (hating myself for sitting on his command but what the hell else was I supposed to do?), and he told me to shut up and listen to him, and I shut up, and I listened to him as well as I could through the constant din of my own bile rising. Uncle Ben grimaced at me, and he rubbed his head in a way that everyone on my mom’s side of the family does when they are presented with an unpleasant task, like he was angry with his own head, and said to me, “Look, when Moody gets in here, don’t talk. I will talk. That’s important. Please don’t think that you’re going to make me look stupid and get even with me by saying something asinine to the police. You’re only going to hurt yourself, Pendel. Okay?”

I shrugged. I didn’t care. I was suddenly drained and felt so moronic and useless and the future was/is black and dim. I felt then, and I feel now, that I am a sham. Even in my increasingly desperate attempt at being a degenerate, I am only a poser. I have no real direction, even in my cynicism, and the worst kind of punk is the spiritless punk. I am the coasting loser. If you don’t get out of my way, I will roll right into you, but probably only like bruise your shin a little.

And so Chief Stephen Moody walks in the door, looking like a drinker but only a moderate one, and he talks by looking directly at me but gets answered by my Uncle as I sit with arms folded, pouting at the dirty table top. And you know the questions asked, where were you on the night of such and such (Camile’s house), what were you doing, (watching TV together, ha ha), when did you leave (not sure). I wanted to get up and shout, I wanted to keep spinning those wheels and keep them moving so that at least my life would have SOME purpose, even if the purpose was to be a pain in the hearts of others, I wanted to shout to Moody that I knew his son Lance, I had gym class with him, and he always got boners in the locker room and that he tried to hide them in his towel but we all saw them, and one time the jocks lit into him so bad about it that he was left alone in the corner crying by a pile of dirty, sweaty basketball uniforms, and nobody helped him, nobody asked if he was going to be okay, and I wonder Chief Moody, did your son tell you about what happened that night when he got home? I bet he didn’t. I wanted to tell Moody about it but I just couldn’t, because in the eyes of my family I had been a loser all along.

I could tell Moody hated me anyway, I know he knows I did it. He brought up the witnesses, and that was the one time I blurted anything out, I just stuck my finger in Moody’s red face and I said, “They’re a bunch of old, blind fucks! They got nothing better to do than look outside every time they hear a door slam! They didn’t see me. Whoever it was they saw it wasn’t me.”

Uncle Rice was embarrassed and told me to sit the hell down. Moody was highly amused. He stood up and told us that all this was just getting a formal statement from me, that they would talk to me more later. We stood to go, and I couldn’t believe that no one had brought up my stupid blog, but then out of nowhere Moody zooms right up into my face and says to me, with this CRAZY gleam in his eye that just screamed “I am going to smile when you die,” he says to me, “I know you gotta make your play, Mr. Haight. But you’re guilty and you know I know it. You’re too stupid to be good at this kind of thing. We have your confession already, and I know you know THAT, too. You wanna make it easy now or keep fighting us?”

Uncle Ben stood in between us and said that he thought it was time for us to leave. He told me again to not say anything. I didn’t. My cage was rattled. I felt like a 5 year old. I wanted to piss myself and cry. I am shit.

My uncle grabbed my arm and dragged me out of the station and threw me in his car. “What was he talking about in there?” I said I had no clue. “Pendel, I can’t help you if I don’t know.” I told him he was full of shit and had no intentions of helping me. No one did. I folded my arms and looked out the window the rest of the way home.

I wonder what community service will be like? What will I have to do? I hope it isn’t old people. Dear Jesus not old people.

So that’s about it. I know I rushed it, but things always seem to take so long to type out. Nothing really happened anyway, just my fate getting drawn out until I feel like it’s not even there anymore.

Oh yeah, on Sunday I made out with Patrice and her tongue was very slimy from cigarettes. It was gross, and I wished I hadn’t done it, because now she won’t leave me alone, but more on that later.

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Tagged with: Chief Moody, Cops, Uncle Ben
Posted in Misadventure