YOU ARE AN OBJECT

youareanobject:jerrywinters:

There were five of them, but now there are only two. It’s only noon, so you’re actually making pretty good time.

The first was obviously the hardest to knock off, emotionally, psychologically, but the easiest, in terms of access and logistics. You made an appointment to have a plummer show up at your house at 7:30am. Your parents are gone by 7. Max Verbinski shows up five minutes early to fix your not-broken toilet. He kneels in front of it and you stand behind him, and he looks at the sparkling blue toilet water fill up the tank and he makes a confused humming sound. He goes, “What’s the problem exactly?” And you smash his brain in with the sharp end of a hammer. If you wondering, yes, Max Verbinski, the plummer, deserved this.

One month ago, Mattie, your boyfriend, called you, crying. Five men, he said. You said to calm down. You said, “I can barely understand you…” He said, “They were at the bar all night and…” and he broke down again, and he became even harder to understand, until, finally, he composed himself. Finally, he explained that five men followed him from Rubin’s, the bar downtown at which he works as a bar-back/busboy. These men were bleary-eyed wastes who asked him, earlier in the night as he was filling the ice bins, what the score of the Carolina Hurricanes game was. Now, your boyfriend could be any one of their sons with his mouth closed, but when he talks, the pitch, the cadence, and delivery of words separates him from his heterosexual counterparts. This is the kind of person that some folks are just inherently uncomfortable with—they don’t know why, but it’s there. Like how in African American Studies, you’ll learn that some white folks, in pre-civil-rights America, were more okay with a Black person if their skin was lighter, if they could ‘pass’? You are that equivalent nowadays—you can ‘pass’, so you don’t have the problem that Mattie does. Didn’t. Now that you love this boy, this man, now you got a muthafuckin problem, and you would die for it. These men waited until last call, until Mattie was sure to be alone, and they followed him, made invisible because Matt can’t walk anywhere without blasting his iPod in his ears, so he couldn’t notice the many footstep in the distance, behind him. But he noticed getting shoved forward and scraping his hands and knees, noticed the five men, grown men, hovering over him, calling him every form of ‘faggot’ they can think of, and, take it from us, they don’t know many variations. Mattie noticed their fists and their work boots, and their gobs of spit, the pictures being taken with a camera phone by laughing asshole; noticed the laughter of the other assholes. He knew there was yelping and pain and fear, shock, a feeling like ‘this was going to happen one day, at least I’m getting it over with’. When he noticed that it was over, that he was just shaking on a sidewalk instead getting stomped on, he limped home without turning his music back on; the music had betrayed him. It’s not until he scrolled through his phone and found your name that he even felt how sad he was. He actually thought you’d be ashamed. Instead, you said, “Mattie, I…I’m going to ask you to do something, and it’s going to sound weird, but I need you to trust me. Do you trust me?” There is a sniffly pause as he said, quietly, “I want to.” You nodded, alone in your bedroom. “Okay, good. How bad?” He sighed. “More than I should.” You shook your head. “No, more than you should is exactly how much you should believe in me, because that’s how much I need you. They see you, and they think you’re the weak one, but they don’t know that you’ve been the fucking strong one and I’d be dead if it wasn’t for you.” Mattie chuckled, and sniffled, and said, “Shut up, dude. Just come here. They may have, like, broke stuff. Like bones maybe.” You looked at yourself in the mirror, you said, “Mattie I can’t come over.” “Why not?” “Just listen to me. Call an ambulance, and let them take you to get fixed up. When you get home call me. Just know that starting now, for the next month, we can’t be seen together, okay?” He scoffed. “You are ashamed.” “I’m not. You’re fucking beautiful, what is there to be ashamed of. Fucking trust me. We’ll see each other every night, Mattie, but people need to not associate us with each other.” He spit, you heard him. He said, “There’s blood in my spit and my vision is blurry.” You sighed. “I know, baby. I got a plan.” “Just tell me what you’re gonna do, and I’ll get off the phone, and I’ll call that ambulance so I can get all fixed up, and then I’ll call you, and then you’ll come here, and I can pretend today is some other, better day. Just tell me what the plan is.” You lick close your eyes and say, “I’m gonna be the last thing any of these assholes ever see. That’s my plan, Mattie.”

You roll the plummer up in a rug you bought especially for this occasion, from a furniture store 15 miles away, in cash, wearing a fake mustache. You put the human burrito in the trunk of your Prius—you clean up all the blood in the bathroom, which takes longer than you wanted it to, but it’s whatever. You drive to the lumber yard owned by Reginald Garver, drive up the dirt drive toward the ‘office’, which is trailer off to the side of the grounds, and you let the car idle there outside of it. You honk the horn and Garver, a tubby man, steps out of the trailer, squinting at your windshield to try and make out who the fuck you are. Engine running, you step out of the car, stand there beside it. You go, “Reggie Garver, right?” He blinks at you. “Who’s asking?” You smile. “Someone that has the most interesting thing you’re gonna see all day.” He spits some type of gunk onto the dirt by his feet and says, “And what would that be?” You raise your eyebrows and walk over to the trunk, he walks over confused, saying, “Now, listen, son, I don’t know what kinda shit your into, but this is business hours, and if you ain’t a customer…” You stuck the key into the trunk’s lock and let the door glide open. Reggie looks at his fallen buddy rolled up in a cheap rug, in your trunk. You go, “Fucked up, right?” Reggie says something about Jesus and stumbles back and you poke him quickly in the neck with a poison-covered needle, the kind of needle people sew clothes with, and Mr Garver tumbles to the dirt. You step toward the body and are surprised to find that your vision is blurred—you rub your eyes with the back of your hand and further shocked to discover said hand now covered in tears, to discover tears dripping down your face. You now stumble back, lean against the open trunk of the car, sit there. You drop the poison needle and scrunch up your face and cough/cry in the empty lumber yard. “I do not want this,” you think. “I do not want this…I do not want this…” You picture the day Mattie told you that he had never technically kissed anyone. This was a year ago. You remember thinking that you first kissed a girl when you were 11 years old, and how could this person go so long without ever meeting someone willing to kiss them? He said, “I don’t think I’m really the kind of thing people want around for longer than a little while, and if you don’t really want something to stick around, then you don’t kiss it.” You remember staring at him. You remember the day was foggy and lifeless, and you remember getting a rejection from the school you wanted to transfer out of county and go to, but were resigning yourself to the fact that you won’t be able to leave this town, at least not for another year. You said, “I want you around.” He smiled and shook his head. “It’s different.” “Why? You don’t know everything there is to know about, Mattie. I’m magic.” He looked at you and you smirked and made a gesture like ‘whadya think?’ He said, “Don’t make fun of me. I’m not beat for that shit. I get enough of it at home.” You put your hand on his shoulder and said, “Look at me, loser.” He did, more like a scowl though. You said, “I want you to do me a favor and always remember me, okay?” You closed your eyes and puckered your lips a little bit, waited, felt the wind pick up slightly, thinking how you’re probably going to have to start wearing an actual jacket soon, how you should spend more time with your parents, how—okay, and so next you’re thinking how immediately you are pulling this thing closer to you, this thing already pressing itself against you, and feeling that feeling when something feels bigger than how afraid it makes you, and your heart swells at knowing it is actually holding fear in its arms, that fear’s lips are pressed against its own lips; how brave this makes the heart feel, how exciting terror can be when you embrace it. You said to him, “Do you think I could practice not letting people down? Practice on you, I mean?” And he laughed and said, “I mean…if it makes you happy.” “I think it does,” you said.

You wipe the tears from your eyes and step away from the trunk. Did you think revenge would be easy? Is it ever really deserved, pain, even for those who have caused it? If all of man is suffering their own version of the sadness life has to offer, then isn’t the test of a good person one who works to diminishing the suffering of those around him, no matter who they are, instead of contributing to it? But you cannot think of this. You must finish what you start, always. And so you think Mattie’s concussion, how sometimes he forgets what he’s saying mid-sentence, how he tries to make his voice sound deeper and walk with his shoulders squared when his father is around, how he flinches if you randomly try to touch him, and how, when those men called him a faggot, he believed them. You think of this as you drag Garver’s lifeless body toward the wood-chipper.

(via youareanobject)