Bad with Computers

I have nothing to do except dwell here playing this game with my “friends.” The summer sun is so scorching. Banging a ball against a concrete slab is mighty stupid. Angelo has one of those hundred-dollar graphite rackets, and I just use my father’s handed-down wood jobber. Being nineteen is hard. At least I can buy cigarettes. 

I’m ambidextrous, I tell Angelo. I can play with two hands. Though it takes a while to change grips. 

Tommy, learn a backhand, so we can try to win some money, he tells me. 

The cops across the playground in their undercover car talk about me all the time when I’m in the park. 

He uses both hands so you don’t know which one is the murder hand! a cop says to the other.

Whoa! the other cop says. 

Their voices sound like the cop who arrested me for graffiti. Good thing they didn’t know the obscene things I sprayed. “Chester the Molester” was a bit over the top. A little unusual I can hear them inside their black Dodge. 

I hear it, but Angelo doesn’t. He must think I’m kidding when I tell him the cops talk about me at night. 

The ball is just behind the wall. A nice joint would do well to make this boring paddleball more interesting. Everything is brighter with that stuff. Too bad I’m in recovery. Angelo’s somewhat smart—he never did drugs although I’m sure he’d be a lush like his mother. 

It’s time for me to smoke a cigarette to catch my breath. That nicotine kick just makes things right. Maybe I could get another cup of coffee from the deli. But it’s too hot. 

Angelo points to Larry coming with his paddle ball racket across the park. He’s another delayed person like Angelo except he can’t even read because his learning’s so fucked up. 

Ayyy! Angelo says. Crazy Larry!

Hey! Maybe we could get a game going with Charlie Glasheen, Larry tells us.

Only people in gangster movies talk and act like us. People always think those with Brooklyn accents are criminals. What a terrible stereotype!

Charlie can beat all of us, I tell them. Better not bet him. I want to have enough money to smoke. 

The cop car pulls away from across the park. A gaggle of teenie girls jog as part of some sort of team or something—possibly softball. The short shorts and those skinny wrists and those dainty bodies shine in the bright sun. They must be in middle school. They are growing into their smooth long legs. Love those prickle breasts as well. It’s a crime that those short shorts make them look so leggy. Like The Blood Brothers song, “Through the screen door, your thoughts are quarantined,” “My name is Denver Max. Won’t you come sit on my lap?” All their songs are about me. 

I need to get a girlfriend, I tell my associates. Someone better than that Helena. 

She was hot, Angelo says. You tend to talk about getting a girlfriend like getting a new computer.

My computer crashed again, but I fixed it and reinstalled windows, I tell him. 

Of course, Angelo says. 

He’s got that sarcastic smile as if something’s ironic to him. 

Larry opens his dumb working class mouth: she broke up with you. 

Whatever you say, I tell him. I broke up with her. She got her tentacles on me and wanted to get pregnant and stole my fucking passport on a trip to visit colleges my mother brought us on. 

I bet Larry’s cop dad is a fucking retart like him. Idiot wants to join the military to shoot people. He probably doesn’t know what a passport is. He’s so much bigger than me; I’d better be careful. 

I wonder how those wars are going…. Did they kill enough people? I tell Larry.

Larry is stupefied and stands there sullen. 

We’re helping them, Larry tells me. We’ll never forget. 

Maybe you could support Washington’s schemes, I tell him.

One shot, one kill, Larry tells me. I have this neighbor who’s a crackhead and a child molestor.

Why would he say something like that so specific to me?

How does he have the time to do both? I says. 

Things are getting a little touchy right now. Larry’s not supposed to know these things unless fucking Angelo told him. Fuck. Whatever, no one’s going to rat me out.  

Angelo interrupts: Charlie’s coming. Let’s get a good game going. 

I light up another cigarette to catch my breath more so. The girls jogged back and are making through the park again. The smoke is so warm, and I breathe it. I wipe the sweat dripping down my forehead. 

After this bullshit is over, I’ll go home and sleep for two days on this Seroquel bullshit.  

***

Drug Treatment. What am I realizing at the “Realization Center” anyway? This rich girl stole eight-hundred bucks a day from her father to do blow for a very long time ‘till he found out. All these fucking rich people in Manhattan. If I had a loft or brownstone in the City I’d be happy. And that neon-haired porn model of a CASAC. And this other girl says she’s a lawyer and she’s with us kids in this young group. Something don’t add up. Another blowhead. 

High school-aged boy talks of heroin—never tried that. Must be good, I guess. People really frown on that stuff. He says how he failed his classes and his school dean of students caught him with the shit in his locker and sent him here. Typical story.   

You could go to AA, NA, or Smart Recovery, the sweet CASAC tells the group of druggies. 

As opposed to dumb recovery, I says.

The group laughs but the sweet one’s eyes slit and her lips move into a straight line. 

That’s what you’re doing, she tells me. 

I’m glancing—maybe staring—at this coke-addicted lawyer girl. I hate coke—it makes me crazy and anxious. She has a skinny frame and dresses in a fancy business-like getup with a girl-blazer and pants. Her blonde hair and blue eyes resemble a lot of the Russian girls on my computer. She must be rather old—maybe twenty-three. Her pale face has little color on it and her forehead has no wrinkles. 

The group finally ends. “Lawyer” girl is in front of me. She blinks and bares her deleterious smile at me. 

How about you go to a meeting with me? she asks me.

Why am I going to reject her? I can’t tell her that girls who do drugs are poisonous, especially those you meet in drug treatment. And I can’t say that she’s mighty intimidating and way out of my lower-middle-class status—if she is really a lawyer. And I have a lot of things to hide. 

I have a jealous woman at home, I says. 

A girlfriend? she says. 

She speaks with a Midwest accent. One of those people who made it elsewhere and moved here to get more. She’s out of my socioeconomic class. And way better than me.

A mother, I says.

Perhaps that was a bad and embarrassing thing to say. She’s looking down. Things slip out of my mouth with recklessness. 

I see, she says. 

I’m pure. Sex is for procreation. There’s my good Catholic teaching. Maybe I should be a priest if God was real. 

Time to go to see the shrink. I’ve got to impress him. 

Dr. Khan, he’s like a Muslim invader. He wears a gray suit and a long collar. His office is barren and utilitarian unlike the pretty CASAC’s kitschy office with HOPE and RECOVERY signs and posters of assorted cliches in it. He’s a young dude. Must have just got his diploma. I don’t feel safe under his care at all. All the better—I can get the good stuff.

The cushoiny chair braces my back. Dr. Khan looks at his desk. If only I could steal that prescription pad he’s got. 

 The Adderall is working great! I says. I can play video games good and wake up in the morning. Really doing the trick, Doc!

It’s a controlled substance, he says. You have to tell me if you’re having symptoms and your mood is unstable, so I can discontinue it if need be. It will make you worse.

Not at all. It’s making me incredibly good at Counter Strike. I’m really feeling better than when I took that Psychological Withdrawal at Binghamton. I’m not losing it anymore and my head is clear!

That’s good, Dr. Khan says. So, no changes needed?

More drugs is always better. Seroquel makes me sleep for twelve hours a clip. But I don’t need to tell him that. I like my medication the way it is. I can’t even notice the lithium. 

Nope. I’m doing incredibly well, I says.

Make sure to schedule an appointment with me in three weeks instead of two since you’re doing so well, Dr. Khan says. 

There, the session ends. On to another long sleepless night. Now I don’t have to take the Q train to the City more often. 

***

The bus is moving, and I can’t hear the cops over the thick-Brooklyn-accented older girls talking. City buses are so much slower during rush hour. So many people here. I can smell potpourri cologne. 

And then I axed her, the fat one with the belly says, who do you think you are grabbing me? So he stopped. And then I says, look at me and stop looking at that jailbait. 

He must be a pedophile, the other obnoxious sycophant says. A perv.

Are they talking about me? Gasp. Better distract myself. They must be seniors in some CUNY college with their full bodies and plain looks. What a terrible word, pedophile. I’m not a pedophile. 

I move toward a middle-school girl. She wears a navy skirt and a blue blouse. The uniform for that Resurrection school. She’s hunched over, engrossed in her algebra book. Must be in the eighth grade taking high school math after school. With red hair like a devil child. Her blouse is tight over what humble beginnings of breasts she has, so I can’t peek through the top at them. Love her thin arms and wrists. She crosses her slender legs. Her pink mouth and thick lips are so delicate. She or her parents had parted her bobbed hair perfectly this morning. The hairs on her forearms glow with a reddish tint to them in the sunlight that filters through the tinted bus window. Her merry freckled complexion projects an aura of youthful health. Moi je m’appelle Lolita! Moi Irish lolita. Or does moi mean me? The French song of Alizée in my search results. 

A personification of innocence unlike my whore ex-girlfriend. Her father raped her when she was eight. No wonder she liked me so pathetically much. 

I continue to stand over her. She looks up at me with her green eyes and down into her book. I want to help her learn algebra—I got an A at that stuff in high school. 

Those old women are still talking nonsense: He belongs in jail. He wants to molest them. He wants to rape children.

They must be talking about someone else. I don’t want to give them more to say about my lust if that’s what’s going on. Best not to talk to my fey goddess whom I love so dearly. Maybe they can read my mind since they talk about everything I’m thinking. Besides, a lot of people are witnesses.

A bunch of people are getting off the bus. Standing over this girl is bad when there’s so much space on the bus. Time to take that seat facing the front window. 

I don’t want to get caught. Not only will I know about it, so will she. And people talk. 

***

I’m a little old to be watching TV in bed with my mother. The sheets are a little too soft, and the flimsy pillows lack support for my neck. South Park is on. 

Towelie is smoking out of a bong trying to remember a keycode.

My mother’s voice is subdued because she is half asleep. 

Your father used to smoke pot, and he drank so much he was impotent, she says. He used to call me a whore when he came home. 

Oh, I says.

So that’s why he always used to call her a whore! I see.

We’re good friends. Best Mom in Brooklyn. Back to my room to listen to music slash play Counter Strike. 

Hours have passed. Crank up the AC. She must be asleep. All these stolen songs on my computer and nothing to listen to. Time to stop playing video games for now.

Every man likes lolitas. Avril Lavingne, young Brittney Spears, Christina Aguilera anyone? Forget about that trollish Mae West. Girlish girls are the infatuation of every man in the world wide web. Praise Jenna Haze! I must continue my study of teenage girls. 

Underage porn is the best porn on the internet. Legal porn has so many bloated boring girls in it. I’ve seen this Irina—if that’s her real name—for the past week. Must be a Russian or Ukrainian girl. Delightful. If only I could travel out there and enjoy one of those girls. They probably are my age now anyway. The videos are taking forever to download. DSL is fast but not fast enough. 

Ah yes, Sveta. What a luscious girlie girl. But I’ve seen her wiry body before. I should browse those pictorial sites. MyDirtyDaughter.com will do. I’ll just click and keep clicking on each picture and see where it takes me. 

This girl looks old. But this girl looks young. Click. Blonde hair or Asian. This one looks the youngest—with her girly tits and round bottom. Click. Posing with a banana inside her tiny mouth. Click.

Diesel comes in. I left the door open a creak. Idiot Lab. He always wants to be petted. 

Get, Get, I whisper to him and point to the door.

The dog’s eyes stare downward, and he scampers out of my room. I close the door behind him. Now I hear the cops outside. They’re in some surveillance van on my block. They must be gathering evidence on me. I’ve got to finish myself off.

Back to the porn. This girl looks like she’s seven with no hair and a highly convex mound. Click. Another girl with knob-like hip bones and a ravine of a stomach. Maybe if I keep at it, I’ll get some black girls with pink insides eventually—they’re rare. 

Ewww, one cop says. Look at what he’s surfing!

The cop has a deep voice with a Brooklyn accent. 

What a sick bastard! another cop with a high pitched voice says.
No reason to get distracted. Stop breathing and cross my legs. I’ve hit the jackpot: these spindly tee-tee-teenies are eating a ph-phallus-lus shaped cake. Hah! Click. Take a deep breath. A NYC police emblem! Website blocked! Maybe they’ll be here to arrest me. I demand my privacy. This totalitarian dunghole makes me sick. 

They’ll likely be here to arrest me soon. I’ve got to stand up for my rights! No one should spy on me. I’m not hurting anyone. Time to look through the blinds just a bit so the blinking streetlight taking pictures doesn’t catch me. That’s the surveillance van! The cops went out to lunch. 

I should wear sheets with holes for the eyes while I slit the tires. I could use the boat glue in the basement and glue my own tickets to the windshield. 

Mom wouldn’t miss this plaid sheet. No one would be upset. It’s 2 AM. No one in my neighborhood would condemn me if they thought I was KKK—racist hellhole. 

I’ve got to write the tickets out with my left hand, so they can’t trace it to me. Here goes. “Stop the spying!” “Care about yourself!” etc. 

One tire down. The knife goes right through these tires so easy. I wonder how fast it could make work of someone’s body. Three more to go.

Time for the boat glue on the windshield. Blam! What a work of art I’ve made of this white SUV police vehicle. 

Back inside. The cops have been silenced. I did a good job of mayhem. 

The sun goes up. I’m still safe in my room. I hear the cop who apparently owns the car and his actually-retarded son talk from out the window. His son laughs. 

It’s not funny, the cop says to his son. We gotta take the bus now. What the hell?

I’ve seen these people here before. How they use a surveillance van to bring a cop to work is beyond me. 

My mother woke up. She’ll see what I did. I’ve got to go outside to tell her everything is alright. I’ve made my stand, and I’ll leave it at that. 

She comes into the living room.

What? What have you done? she says. 

I stood up for my rights! I says.

She says, I’m going to stay home. 

Her eyes are sooo wide and her jaw is sooo dropped. She looks as though she’s holding back tears. She should be proud her son made a protest. If only she understood….

The morning is warm but the day will be hot. My stoop has holes in the mortar holding the red bricks together. Two police cars drive down the dead end. One black police officer approaches me. 

Did you see who did this? he says.

Can’t you just check the cameras in the streetlight?

Stay right here, he says. 

Mom is talking to a group of cops. She’s entranced looking at them. A short cop emerges from the back of an ambulance.

Did you do it? he asks.

Time to say nothing. That’s what they did in Goodfellas. No sense in confessing. The sheet hid my identity from the camera. 

Two paramedics come out of the ambulance. Another black police officer comes behind me. 

Come, he says.

The short police officer stands next to me.

He says, your mother has agreed to pay the damages, and the charges have been dropped. 

I guess that’s a good thing. They must be sending me to the psych ward.

I’m in the ambulance and the cop is next to me. The ground is moving and my neighborhood is going away. 

You guys wear body armor but a cougar magnum could go through it, I says.

I hate cops. They should be shot. I loved Goldeneye. 

Oh. Ouch, the police officer says. So, how much damage do you think is on that car?

Probably about five thousand dollars.

The police officer grins as if he solved a mystery. I gave him nothing to go on.

Coney Island Hospital is a cheap place that smells of ammonia. A pudgy Indian nurse stands in this room with me. She injected me with something but didn’t tell me what it was. This place is so cold, and the light is so dull. 

You’re strong, she says.

She comes out of the back with another shot and says, turn around and don’t look. One, two, thr—

***

It’s nice that this case manager is taking me out for a sandwich. He’s like a fatherly figure to me. He has a balding head and short white hair. His skin is a little dark. He’s a secular Jew.

Noisy diner. Try not to stare at that pint-sized girl with a retainer. Her form is so true. That huge father scares me. What a dirty look he gave me! Pay attention to the pastrami reuben. Look down. Try to say something. 

It says I have cluster B personality disorder in my paperwork at Yager Center. Bullshit. At least they have bipolar right. Gasp, Staten Island diagnosed me with schizoaffective. I’m not schizo anything. My mother’s other son is that. Here’s something to talk about—my journey there. 

I went to the psych ward once because I vandalized a car, I says.

In Brooklyn? How long ago? he says.

Three years ago, I says. Staten Island Hospital is a terrible psych ward. If you don’t go into the dining room for meals, you starve. 

I watched some retar—developmentally disabled guy try to order a bow flex on the payphone to our floor with a credit card he found out of a magazine. An old guy with huge glasses drew spaceships all day. And another old guy stole my clothes. My mother let him because the guard said he had none except what was on his back. I don’t care if he had one arm—he had no right to steal.

And my mom convinced the guy to not press charges because his son was messed up. 

Did you learn anything? he says.

Yeah. If you vandalize surveillance equipment, they’ll send you to the psych ward.