New Work by Scott Bailey
Greyhound
I find my boyfriend, not in the future tense, but the one
I’m dating on a porn site, asking for private photos,
poppers and bondage sex, so I jump the gray dog to visit
Mama who’s sure to console me with her casseroles
and cakes, plus I’m a sucker for discipline and told-you-so’s,
whatever it takes for me to write these experiences
up firsthand. I wish I were on that bus that overturned
on an exit ramp and slid into a field, killing three cows,
a deadbeat father and a penniless addict. According
to a survivor in a chat room, one paramedic,
remarking about the fast-food wrappers and lottery
tickets, said, “Chicken nuggets and gambling’s a bad
combination.” But now, my fellow thrill-seeker, look at
this guy who’s wearing a cap with bold letters: “My inner
child needs a spanking.” I wonder if he reads Wordsworth,
but before I ask, I’m interrupted. “Don’t talk to him,”
the Goth girl next to me in platform boots, whispers,
“I know you just got on, like, and I don’t want to scare you,
like, but I’ve been on this bus all night, like, and it’s like,
ahhh, like a mother-fucking, like, end-of-time movie.
And Roberta, like, behind us, like, is on her way to see
her aunt who believes we’re already, like, dead.” I turn around,
expecting to see a woman bearing henna tattoos and sitting
in the lotus position, but she’s pulling a french fry
from between her gorilla titties and humming “Wild Thing.”
But she’s not as gassy as the horse-faced man in front of us,
quoting Cheech and Chong as if they’re a part of God’s plan.
When I thought he couldn’t go on, he stands up and screams,
“I’m a paramedic,” after a woman with untidy, gray-streaked
hair collapses in the aisle, her hand clutching a photo
of a man wearing overalls and holding a Shih Tzu over
a birthday cake. It’s clear that he doesn’t have any training.
Not the dog, but this man saying, “Work with me, work with me.”
I’m reminded of a church service when Brother Roy Ulmer
faints in the spirit, shits too, during a testimony. My cousin
Sybil, a real paramedic, and the only one to go to college
in my church, well, my entire family, says, “This ain’t good.
He ain’t breathing.” If you look up death and excretion,
and you get a page error, you need faster cable or you
have to reset your browser. Apparently, Brother Roy
Ulmer has a good connection. After God jumps into Sybil
and tells her to do what she’s been trained to do—perform
CPR—he comes back to life only to live one week longer,
enough time to finish refurbishing the pine pews with velvet,
and to tell his daughter that she isn’t his daughter. Luckily,
we’re a few miles from the Mobile terminal. While watching
this lady’s body carried off the bus, I smoke a cigarette.
A man walks up to me, shakes his head, and says, “What a shame.”
Surely is, but he’s not talking about this lady: he’s complaining
about the chicken basket he bought in the station deli.
“Shit, look at her,” he says, holding up a potato log, “Ain’t this
the most droopiest thang you ever saw?” Well, I say, I suppose
you don’t know Tony, but before I finish, we’re told to board.
An army cadet sits next to me, and says, “Hell, it’s about to be
nuts to butts up in here.” Sounds terrible, I say, What’s your name?
He’s Sam from Arkansas, and he believes in destiny,
but also the choice to fuck it up. He tells me a bedtime story:
while watching Thriller at his friend’s house, his friend told his dad
to pour his own whiskey, so his dad pulled down his friend’s pants
and whipped his hairy butt with a clothes hanger. I’m shameful,
I think, for beating my ex-boyfriend like a dog, and telling him
that I could care less if he died, but I’m devastated after he throws
himself in front of an eighteen-wheeler. Years later, Sam visited
that old man being fed through a tube. “You’re making the right
choice,” Sam says, patting my shoulder, when I throw my
cigarettes out the window, my only friends who don’t talk back.
Probation
Ordered to do breath tests, I dial a number,
listen to a recording, each morning, for six months.
If I hear Bailey, Bravo, or B as in Busted,
my ass struts to the big house where a guard
shakes my hand on the way in, on the way out a scanner,
his middle finger joy-riding my palm,
a similar shake from an old man called Tater Head
who hung out at the store across from my house,
buying me jerky and spicy nuts, inviting me to his trailer
any time I want. I decline his offer, I’m six, he’s sixty,
I feel too welcomed, if you know what I’m saying,
but I groove with this receptionist slash breath-tester lady
sporting acrylic pink nails with diamond tips.
She reminds me of my sister who tight-rolls her jeans,
paints her face like Tammy Faye, mine too,
when I tag along on a secret date, too young to stay alone:
Mom’s in the hospital, Dad’s preaching at Sweet Water Church,
two counties away, both of them unaware of us
speeding down a dirt road in this sinner’s truck
nearly turning over after missing a cow, him shifting gears
between my legs stinking of spilled beer,
his husky voice, “Dumb heifer liked to kill us,”
his cassette player blaring Def Leppard’s “Love Bites.”
If you play this tape backwards, you’ll hear “Jesus,
Christ of Nazareth, can go to Hell.” Terrified,
I want to go home, they want to screw, do the nasty,
he wants up in her guts, so they drop me off
at Grandma and Grandpa’s, during a storm.
No one’s home, the doors locked, the windows
nailed shut, so I run to the barn where a mule’s stomping a snake,
not testing this snake’s behavior, not waiting for venom
to prove itself. Out of breath, hungry, cold, and horny,
I take a disco nap in a hay loft, my hard-on jumping with thunder
trotting on a tin roof, my dreams so big, my chest may burst,
give in to hope, swelling. Half awake, I wonder, what if a mother ship
dropped me off for kicks and giggles, in rural Mississippi?
What if I’m a crossbreed in a fundamentalist experiment?
“What a riot,” they say, watching the video feed,
“That fuckin’ faggot is trying to speak in tongues,
trying to prove himself to others, that he’s human.”
What if the world has ended, the righteous on that escalator
to Jesus, and I didn’t make the cut, didn’t make it?
I can either prove my faith, die a martyr, or burn in a lake of fire, forever.
That was then, this is now: Feeling the vapors of my past,
this present, I say “Thanks” to the receptionist
who says, “That will be five dollars,” after I breathe into a tube,
humming a certain octave. Proven sober, I walk home,
weighing my actions, pissed off at the world, at myself,
yet eager to prove myself to the powers-that-be
dehydrating my goat, harassing my chicken, stalking my spirit.
I’ve dealt with challenges far more grave, more eternal than this,
so why rest easy, now, why stop breathing, unraveling that noise within?
Jail
God sends a friend to love me, but not the way I want it.
“Maybe that’s best,” Mom says, “He’s straight, he’s a dog with problems.”
I know—he can’t forget his divorce, how he wants full custody
after she broke his nose when he said her pussy’s like a wet paper bag.
All of which is no wonder, she’s a gold digger, and his life’s hard, sister.
I can’t help him. Only he can, but I doubt it. He feels sorry for himself,
ruling his nest like a cock, pecking chicks out of line.
I can listen, but Jesus, I have limits. If I hear one more
goddamn word about his father’s colostomy bag, his sister’s
single breast, his other sister on a breathing machine, in a coma,
I may punch him. I’m not insensitive. I’m a hopeless romantic,
lonely and sexually frustrated. O only if he loved me, perhaps
I’d put up with his bullshit. “Not ever and not today,”
Mom says, “Plus he don’t deserve you, he’ll fuck a jackass if somebody’d hold it still.”
Now I have yet another issue, like making bail. Dad’s the only landline number I know,
he comes through, but I must wait, he’s in another state,
and it’s so freaking uncomfortable and unpleasant in a cell with twenty guys.
I’m wearing Leon County underwear, for Mary’s sake.
Lo, damnation, just when I finish counting from seven hundred backwards over and over,
nine hours in, my falling-asleep method, they move me to a stained leather chair
facing a camera, a television broadcasting a court room, a judge dressed like an upright crow
with a You-fucked-up face. I’m asked if I’m who they think I am.
I say, “Yes sir. I hope so, sir,” and I’m pushed through a door where guys