first pages...

monday night.

Thousand Acres Mental Facility is a large, solitary stucco eyesore that eats up two acres of previously undisturbed land, a structure that seems to exist in its own forlorn space. The facility is strategically placed about fifteen miles from the nearest housing development. That way, if any of the whacks wasting away inside the stucco prison ever escaped, it would take one hell of a stroll to come into contact with the sane folk of Suburbia. The sane folk of Suburbia. An interesting notion that any of us are sane. We’re all a little fucked in our own way. Some of us are just diagnosed as being fucked while the rest of us hold onto the hope that we soon will be. I’m still waiting for my diagnosis, anything to explain the way I feel, the palpable unease of living in a world where Chaos walks unobstructed and carries a vengeful stick. But I digress.

To describe the inside of Thousand Acres as bleak is an understatement. It is sterile and colorless, with white linoleum floors and even whiter walls. It smells of despair and disinfectant, a scent that never ceases to turn my stomach. A constant, quiet murmur channels and weaves itself through the facility, occasionally replaced by an overhead page or bloodcurdling scream.

At the moment, I am standing in the corner of the building’s break room, within inches of the soda machine, clutching an ice-cold Pepsi. My orderly scrubs match my overall appearance. Disheveled, unkempt, whatever. My name is Walt Stutters and I am eighteen-years-old. Admittedly, I am not an eye pleasing guy. My face is a mixture of unevenness. My nose is large and slants slightly to the right. I have almond shaped eyes that mirror color of the sky; although it is important to note that they are the color of the sky when it is gray and overcast. My mouth is shaped so that it seems I have a perpetual frown and people are always telling me to cheer up.

I was graced at birth with a bountiful bouquet of mop-heavy, dirty blonde hair, a condition that keeps my locks in constant disarray. For what it’s worth, I am okay with my appearance. I am resigned to the fact that I will never be good- looking. But, hey, at least I’m not ugly, dismembered or retarded. I’m not being insensitive here, I’m just thankful that I fall into the category of average or mediocre. Seriously though, wouldn’t it suck to be retarded?

Back to the soda machine, where I've been cornered by shift manager, Derek. Derek is average looking but extremely well-manicured. He is coiffed, tweezed, teased and gelled in all the right places. To me, he stinks of a closeted homosexual, masquerading as a macho womanizer. I'd like to say to him, Derek, it's cool man. You don't have to pretend anymore. You like penis. Whatever. Vagina isn't your thing. Come out of that stuffy closet and embrace your identity. At least you'd have one.

He's cornered me to tell me about what he did on Friday night. My shift is over and all I want to do is drink my Pepsi and go home.

"So dude, I like had her bent over my Futon and she was screaming like a tea kettle!".

Derek proceeds to scream like a tea kettle. I look around to the other Orderlies in the room who are doing their best to enjoy their break in spite of Derek.

Derek is still screaming as he pushes me out of the way of the soda machine. Pepsi splashes across my arm and I nearly fall over. He begins to dry hump the soda machine.

"This will give you a better visual!".

Derek continues to romance the soda machine while I look on, perplexed and a little bit fascinated. As I stated earlier, all of us are fucked in our own way. Derek is no exception.

"Derek, I should really--"

"After awhile the screaming got annoying! So to shut her up I gave her a few swift donkey punches!"

More fucky fucky with the soda machine. My tolerance level of watching someone sex a soda machine has now been breached.

"Derek, my shift already ended and I--"

"Wait, hold on! I haven't told you the best part!"

I sigh but submit.

"Okay, but please hurry."

"Alright, so I'm about to pop my cork, I've got my "O" face going, the whole nine yards. All of a sudden I hear footsteps coming down the stairs. I look up and my mom is in her bathrobe carrying a 357 Magnum! She'd heard the screaming and thought someone was getting murdered!"

Derek laughs and slows his hip gyrations. Disgust imprints itself on my face.

“That must have been weird."

"Nah, man. I just told her to put the gun down and go back to bed."

This revelation disturbs me.

"You mean you kept going?"

"Oh, yeah. The "Derek" never passes up an opportunity to have his penis cup runneth over."

He winks at me. I hate when people wink at me.

“Derek, I don’t even know what that means.”

“Someday, Walt. Someday you’ll know.”

I’m not convinced of this.

“I should get going. It was nice talking with you.”

Derek smiles and puts up his hand for a high-five, the lamest of all human celebrations. I grudgingly oblige. Derek slaps my hand with excessive force and it careens back into the soda machine. My knuckles connect with the metal edge of the machine and the nerve endings on the top of my hand come screaming to life.

Derek laughs again.

“Sorry Stutters. Sometimes I don’t know my own strength.”

He kisses both his biceps while I subtly clench my hand trying to mask the pain.

...............

The black of night is intermittently lit by street lamps, which offer me a slight reprieve from the enveloping darkness. The parking lot is nearly empty. In fact, the nearest car to mine is at least ten spaces away. My BMW 2002 is aglow under one of the street lamps.

I am almost to the driver’s side door when my eye catches an inconsistency. I bend towards the hood and lean my head to the right and to the left. No scratch, just bad lighting.

Satisfied, I dig in my pockets and fumble around for the keys. Suddenly, I am struck by a strong gust of wind. I shield my face from the dust particles and let the brief wind pass on. I rifle through my pockets once again in search of my keys. Yet again, my attention is grabbed by the front portion of the car.

This time there is a piece of rubbish lodged in the windshield wipers. I descend upon the debris and snatch it from the wipers. It is a shredded piece of a torn 4X6 photo, which has the picture of a ravishingly beautiful woman.
Her hair is long and flowing and her eyes are pure blue warmth. She is wearing a green summer dress, which accents her natural glow body. Her smile is radiant, with a stance that breezes past carefree. Her hand is interlocked with another but the picture is torn in a way that I do not see the other figure. My eyes dance across the picture, exploring every part of her form.

A car door slams shut, breaking me out of my rapture. I take one last, longing look at the picture and then send it fluttering to the ground.

I enter my car and sit for a moment. I think of what a fool I would be to leave the picture behind.

I am out of the car in a flash and I retrieve the picture from the black tar.
I sit again in the driver’s seat and pull the picture out. I wonder what it would be like to smile the way she’s smiling. To be so at ease with the world and your place in it, that you could smile like you mean it.

...............

tuesday morning.

I leave my house and my eyes are heavy as they adjust to the glare of the early morning sun. Sleep came in fits and I was less than eager to embrace what the day had to offer. I am off to school now, but first, I'd like to give you an idea of where I live.

My parents and I live in a house at the end of Prancing Angels Street. Our house is 2800 square feet of pure boredom. There is no architectural significance to speak of, a dwelling that exists solely to define one’s social class. The most impressive thing about our house is how effective it is at being unimpressive.

There are four bedrooms and three baths. My bedroom is on the second floor and my window overlooks the rest of the street.

There are twenty houses that make up our street. We are house number TWENTY. The “custom” built house to the left of ours, looks suspiciously like our own. The house to the left of that one resembles ours also. Each house is spaced exactly sixteen feet apart from one another. The whitewashed picket fences that align each of the meticulously manicured lawns show off a gleam that even Tom Sawyer's Aunt would be envious of.

Every other house has the same color scheme. My parents said that we were fortunate enough to get the favorable color scheme, white, with soft blue trim. The less fortunate odd-numbered houses received the dreaded color scheme of white, with pink trim.

Our next-door neighbor, Patrick Smith, the tortured owner of house number NINETEEN, is always complaining about the injustice of owning a home with PINK trim. He has written over a hundred letters to the Homeowner’s Association explaining why he believes it is unfair that just because he lives in an odd-numbered house he has to settle for the “sissy hue that unfairly adorns my trim and in the process subjects me and my family to unrelenting scorn and ridicule from the neighbors that live in those damned even numbered homes, with their precious soft blue trim”.

He has actually almost come to a physical altercation over the matter, when on one Sunday not too long ago, Bob Deveney, the notoriously macho retired General and owner of house number SIXTEEN went for his morning jog. Patrick was out watering his lawn when the General trotted by.

“Hey, Patty, nice pink trim! Your wife said it matches perfectly with those pink panties you like to wear, you sissy woman!”

Apparently, all of Patrick’s pent up aggression over being denied by the homeowner’s association and constant heckling from the “even-numbered” people exploded in one reckless moment. He dropped his watering hose, and, in his robe and slippers, took off across the half-watered lawn in pursuit of General Deveney.

His face contorted with rage and punishment on his mind, Smith took a flying leap over the white picket fence that bordered his yard. There was one glaring problem with that fateful leap. Patrick is a middle-aged white man and white men, especially of middle-age, can’t achieve vertical.

Mr. Smith didn’t even clear the first rung of the fence as his right foot caught the shiny white post. He fell head over heels, his hands desperately trying to secure the tie that was beginning to come off of his robe. He succeeded in keeping the robe on until his head hit the sidewalk full force, knocking him unconscious and rendering his hands useless. His robe flew open, exposing every bit of Patrick’s manhood to little old Mrs. Bellow who had come out of house number SEVENTEEN to collect the Sunday newspaper. She coincidentally loved every bit of the pink trim that adorned her house.

Out of the twenty houses on my street, only white people live in them. There is not one, single minority living within our gated community. That is not to say that there is no minority presence in our neighborhood. In fact, the same three Hispanic workers that trim our hedges and mow our lawn every Tuesday are hard at work on my parent’s yard as we speak. I usually keep my head down and walk straight to my car without acknowledging them. I will go out of my way to avoid awkward social interaction and conversing with them has painful written all over it.

I hope they don’t think I’m just another white asshole who thinks its okay to hire them for cheap labor. Maybe it’s time I stopped wondering about this stuff and made an effort.

I amble over to the three workers’, cautiously optimistic about the impending interaction. I rack my brain for my limited high-school Spanish. All three of them look up at me in unison and stare with misgiving in my direction.

I level a few sentences at them in carefully constructed Spanish.

“Hi guys! I wanted to say that I really appreciate what a great job you do on my parent’s yard. I imagine you're not thanked nearly enough.”

Awkward silence bites back at me. All three workers continue to stare. I fidget from side to side and bury my hands deep into the pockets of my Chino’s.

I’ve almost given up, when Mexican #1 suddenly reacts.

His suspicious stare turns to a scowl and he raises his trimming shears and points them in my direction. He mutters some angry Spanish words that I don’t understand. I get the odd sense that, given the choice, he wouldn’t have any qualms about gutting me with the shears.

Mexican #2 looks nervous. He gives a furtive glance in my direction and seems to think that I have the intention to grab Mexican #1’s trimming shears and gut him. This is not going well.

I look to Mexican #3 who is on lawnmower duty. He seems to be taking great delight in all of this. He smiles and blows a kiss in my direction. Holy shit. This could not be going any worse. I’m about to be gutted and raped by three migrant workers.

“Alright, well I’m gonna take off now. I hope you have a nice day.”

I walk quickly to my car and open the door. Safely inside, I look back at them. They still have their eyes trained on me. They look to each other and have a quick-fire conversation. All three of them break into hysterics and point at me. I sigh mightily and back out of the driveway.

...............

My drive to school is scenic. I turn right out of my gated community. Head straight on White Upper Crust St. Go two miles, pass four Starbucks, a shopping mall and eight tanning salons. The sixth one is running a two week special. “2 weeks for 29.99! Go from pasty and pathetic to bronze and beautiful!” It should read, “2 weeks for $29.99! Leather skin & Melanoma or your money back!" I turn left on Vapid Soccer Mom Dr. and turn on my radio so that the next three miles don't pass in silence. I’m rewarded with Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes”. I ratchet the volume to a level appropriate so that I can sing along without having to hear my own voice.

“In your eyes, the light the heat.”

Peter Gabriel is way underrated.

“In your eyes, I am complete.”

It’s amazing, the transformative effect music can have on you.

“And all my instincts, they return."

I begin to play the air guitar, steering with my knees. I do so without much grace and nearly drift into oncoming traffic.

"Shit."

I decide air drums are less dangerous so I leave my right arm on the wheel and bang away at the air with my left. I'm like Def Leppard's drummer, the one-armed percussive magician.

A street light interrupts my one-man rock show. My head wanders to the car in the next lane. A hefty guy with a comb-over is motioning for me to roll my window down. It's bizarre but I oblige.

"Hey man, do you mind if I offer you a little friendly advice?” He sounds nice enough.

"I-I guess so."

“I’ve been in the lane next to you for the last couple of minutes. All your jumping and jiving, it's been really distracting. Even more than that, it's been downright embarrassing to watch. Look at my face. It's red with embarrassment."

What the fuck.

"How does any of that qualify as advice?"

He puts his finger up."I was getting to that. Basically, my advice to you, is to stop being such a FAGGOT."

The light turns green and he leaves me in his wake. I shake my head and turn the radio off.

It's amazing, the transformative effect your fellow man can have on you.

...............