Away

So there it was. Death. Floating about in front of him like an obese fairy. Some random kid, murdered in public by some psychopath. The cops had already caught him, and he just stared the cameras in the face, saying he didn’t know why he did it, while blood coated his eyes and made him cry tears of blood. Yet, despite the great “tragedy” that had befallen the general area of Castle Apartments, it didn’t even register to Ol’ Johnny. He had seen so much of it already, a stabbing didn’t faze him, merely bringing a flash of blue eyes to his memories. He’d grabbed the suitcase. The gas station was closed, probably forever. It was on the news, it was in the newspapers. God, he thought, look at the magazines, already looking for something symbolic and idiot to blame. Video games, religion, politics, how the murderer had been raised, and what could have happened instead, every time that human insanity reared its head, more “rational” minds quashed the images of it, refusing to acknowledge that human’s and acts of evil didn’t go side by side, they were practically screwing each other on the sidewalk these days. So he left, got on a bus, and took it over the edge of the known universe, and when he looked back, he say a young man with blues eyes looking back. Johnny looked, then turned around, and fell through the cracks.

Numbers.

Life for Johnny was extremely mechanical and numbered. Everything had a number, and a place, and a time. His mornings began with his medicine, 2 pills for pain, 3 for the kidneys, 5 for a random assortment of other things. Afterwards he would have 2 eggs, and over the course of the morning would have 3 glasses of water. Depending on the day, the weather, the general feel of the air, he could have anywhere between zero customers and 41 on a Monday. On Saturdays where the people of the area tried desperately to leave for some better area with hygienic bathrooms and clean streets, they came to him. He could have over 101 customers some days. Then as the afternoon rolled around he ate and drank various things, rarely healthy for him. It was a point of pride, somewhere deep in that puttering heart, that he could down 5 whole bottles of whiskey in 3 minutes if he wanted too. He didn’t, but he could. Then again, he could have taken the suitcase and left to see the world one last time before he finally stopped creaking around, but hadn't. By the time the evening rolled around, which for Johnny was about 5, he closed up shop. He set his own hours, and the government hadn't decided he had to go away just yet. He could sleep for 11 hours straight, and often did. The suitcase had been sitting for over 997 days, more than 10 sets of 997 days in fact. So would he. Mechanical, but with a heart inside indeed, because as no one else knew. There was a worn and weathered picture of an enormous greyhound being held by an equally as enormous man. There, in faded marker at the bottom, were the words, John and Chuck. This photo of course was back in Johnny's room, where no one had ever seen it, but it was there, and it warmed his heart every time he saw it.

Vacations that never happen are the worst

Inside of Ol’ Johnny’s room, there was a suitcase. It was old, about as old as him. It was made of some unknown material, but if you looked at it you might say it was leather, if that leather had been calcified be the heat of the meteors that destroyed the dinosaurs. Inside that suitcase was over $100,000 dollars in cash, a set of clothes, a pencil, and two extra sets of underwear. It had been sitting in Ol’ Johnny’s room since he had got back from the war, and the moment he had heard that Mari had left him for another man it had stayed there. They had been going to get married, travel the world for a while. Instead he had inherited his father’s horrendously badly maintained gas station, and hadn’t left since. Now, he couldn’t leave. Though he didn’t really have to anything anymore besides sign papers and ensure that the gas pumps worked, and that there actually was gas in them, he didn’t do anything but the most basic of human functions, yet he was still there. A rusty old cog that only barely needed to be left in the machine so it could function.

He stared at the T.V. as it pumped out its daily slobber of overly biased information. He’d never been for any specific party; it never seemed to make much difference to him. He glanced upwards though, as a loud sputtering accompanied quite possibly the pinkest…anything that he’d seen in his life. It had wheels and someone inside at another, so it was likely a car. The sheer brightness of the car nearly blinded him though. God, she was so young. Youth, something Johnny had always ignored, staring him in the face. “Life passed you by! You’re nothing but a relic that hasn’t fallen over yet!” Life seemed to chortle at him as she paid, and left.

Friendly Past

When you’ve lived through a lot of presidents and then some, you might start to lose things. Your keys, where you parked your car, where your socks went, your marbles, even your mind.  But sometimes the opposite happens, and you can’t forget some things or people no matter how much you really want to. So it went with Ol’ Johnny. He was sitting in the middle row of the pews of a little tiny chapel inside an old hospital. The quiet smell of desperation and death speckled with motes of hope was familiar to him the most.  He had also downed a bottle of whiskey not five minutes before, so sitting was not really so much a choice but a necessity. He looked to his right where next to him sat Malibu, his old buddy from his fighting days. Malibu waved. This routine had become ever more common. Flashes from the past kept coming into the present. “How’s, the kids Johnny?” asked Malibu, his faint southern drawl still ringing in Johnny’s working ear.  “I have no freaking idea, last I heard from them was a decade ago, I have grandkids somewhere in France.” Some might think that an old man having a conversation with himself was a striking sense of dementia; Johnny just considered that he was drunk. Ever month or so he ended up in a church somewhere talking to one of his old squad. It wasn’t so bad, even though the first time it scared the beejezus out of Johnny so bad that he was reasonably sure his heart had stopped beating.  In the end though, he enjoyed their talks, even though they were just ghosts in the cobwebs of his mind. So they talked, even as others in the chapel shifted slightly away from crazy old man. They talked about women, they talked about friends, politics, old times, beer, wine and everything else that Johnny could think of or the ghost of his friend spoke up about. It was nice. But eventually everything has to end. The alcohol was processed and appeared in the bladder, and Johnny had to leave. On his way back to the his Gas Station he sighed silently to himself as his age and slowness caused a much younger man who smelled like a cigarette factory lightly humming some tune to sidestep him to keep moving faster. Faster Johnny was not, not for a long long time.

Crunch

A bottle crunched into a his mother’s skull. The sickening crack of bone and the acrid stench of rancid milk and piss were already a constant to young John’s life. A veritable mountain of a man was screaming, his white wife-beater was stained with grease and sweat. Fat meaty arms windmilled as the cascade of insults rammed against the seven year old’s ears. He couldn’t try to stop his step-father, he was too weak. He couldn’t try to run away from this man’s tender care, he wasn’t ever fast enough to escape the house or the beatings that would follow the attempt. He wasn’t smart enough to call the police when this was occurring, or to go to any organization that could possible help. All he could do was sit and watch, because according to Frank it helped him “learn”. Young John did learn, because every time Frank got uppity, Mariana would allow him 3 good hits, then show him that she could not possibly be intimidated. So after the punch, the headbutt, and the bottle, Frank was done. Mariana then sidestepped his clumsy fist and placed her own firmly into Frank’s throat. The sudden expulsion of bile and surprise from his father’s face always made John laugh. His 6 and a half foot mother then picked Frank up and threw him into the wall, making the house shake. This happened every other day in Young John’s home. He then got the fantastic sight of seeing Frank beaten to a black and bloody bereaved piece of barely alive pulp then ordered to clean up the house. Violence was a part of John’s life. It was in his blood, from both sides. It was also in his 3 brothers. So it was that the events within his home were not an hour later repeated by the 4 sons, who then attempted to beat the life out of each other. It could be said that the backyard of his childhood home had been given more blood than water to grow with. His life was not wonderful, nor terrible. It simply was.
One day however, as he was picking up the groceries from the store, he saw his mother and father standing together for the first time he had ever seen. It was them defending some old woman from a couple of muggers. It was beautiful. The way the blood flowed, the screams of pain and terror. Fighting was all well and good, but eventually people will get tired of it and you’ll win too many times. But what clicked that day, was that people who defend others? They’ll never run out of people to fight. Why on earth was Old Johnny remembering that now? It was likely because he was in a bar fight. Why? It didn’t really matter other than someone was cowering and so his back was to them and on the people in front. It didn’t help that there was bit of blood seeping out of his arm from a few weeks back, but he didn’t give a crap. After all, what do those people keep saying? 60 is the new forty? Yeah, so in that case he was a little bit past his midlife crisis.

Go Home!

Several weeks after Johnny had made it out of the Hospital, fate decided now was the time to take yet another swing at him. As everyone he collectively knew had either died a long time ago, or were busy making sure he didn’t die for whatever reason, one of the few things he had left besides drinking, eating, and sleeping, was bowling. So it was in March on a particularly windy twilight that someone attempted to mug him. It didn’t help that Johnny was also intensely drunk. Not that being sober had anything to do with his bowling ability. He still got plenty of strikes. It was after a long game and Walter’s Lane closing down that he found himself bumbling down an alley towards...somewhere. His mushy thinker box was still very alcohol logged. Unbidden, tears came into his eyes. Times like this he, or rather his imagination, decided to wax nostalgic about fighting in the cold tundra of Russia. So it was then he looked down and noticed suddenly that he was standing in snow, inside a small trench tunnel with snow piled along the sides in haphazard heaps. He also felt about 50 years younger and stronger. Suddenly Malibu ran past him, and the dull muffled thumps he heard resolved into raging artillery fire. Johnny’s eyes blazed, he had a job to do damn it all! He ran out of the tunnel, just in time to see Archer’s squad get torn to shreds by a Kraut mortar shell. He kept running, sliding into cover next to the rest of the squad, no, his squad. Malibu, Preacher, Ken, Smiles, and Cutter all leaned against the rocks, Preacher casually lighting up one of his custom “cigars”. Johnny leaned over the rock and ducked back just in time to get a new buzz cut. “Where is our support Smiles?!?! We’re getting slaughtered out here!” Smiles glared back at him, then revealed the smoking slag that had been their radio. The knife scars that had been used to rip downwards on his cheeks simply added to his glowering countenance. “Oh, ok then. Well...Preacher, you got any more of those “presents” of yours to give to the Krauts?” Preacher just smiled at him, and pulled out of his pants a few IED’s. “Oh course man, I always got some for Pendejos!” Malibu lobbed them over the rocks after priming them, and a few seconds later a deafening explosion rocked the landscape. The cry went up amongst various squad leaders. “Move up!” He waved them on. Then everything went...sideways. He was suddenly aware of far more than he should have been. He turned, knowing exactly who would be there. Same kid. Same blue eyes. A constant. This time though, Johnny was angry. The kraut had out a big knife, not even regulation equipment it looked like. He was saying something, but Johnny never had passed his language classes back in school. He swiped, when Johnny screamed at him “No!” again and again. He missed, and Johnny swung his fists in a dervish, a haymaker, a cross, uppercut. The kid stabbed outwards again, and got the knife lodged in his left bicep, and it stuck there. The kid was startled by this, more so that Johnny headbutted him in the nose. Cartilage cracked and the kid fell down. This time though, he hadn’t been shot. His eyes weren’t accusing, they were terrified. He wasn’t dead or dying though. Johnny grabbed him, the knife not even registering on the long catalogue of pain and scars that was suddenly coming back to him for some reason. “Go home! This is isn’t the way you should die today!!” God he wished he could have said that to him before. Because now he knew. The snow had faded, the rocks as well. They all smoothly returned to being trash cans and cardboard boxes. The kraut had melted into a different kid. His white skin was covered with is own blood, and bruises now clogged up his face. The eyes were brown, and entirely unremarkable. His raggedy Grateful Dead shirt and pulled over leather jacket were now more so ripped, even his tight jeans. Johnny threw him away, and the kid scrabbled home. Johnny snorted, then went home. “He didn’t die this time. I didn’t kill him.” This, for some reason, made Johnny happier than he had been in a long time. He even cried a little.

Live and Let Live

Pain. Blood suckling through an open wound. An old familiar ache. He opened his eyes and as consciousness dripped back into him from an IV drip he heard the age old amalgamation of noises associated with a place of healing. Beeping of life support, soft farts of oxygen tanks, screaming against the heavens as death took it’s toll, joyous tears as someone ducks the scythe. Johnny didn’t move, he’d been shot before plenty of times, and he knew at this point one should just lay still and let the doctors heal you. Not that they would have much to go on this point, because from Johnny’s perspective he was essentially an old gun that no one made the replacement parts for anymore. The only thing keeping him alive now was gristle, stubbornness, and more gristle. The stink of antiseptic and myriad other cleaning fluids burned in his nostrils. His gaze cast about as a lighthouse, until it settled onto a calender. Upon seeing the date his eyes widened. It was in this way that the old man in the Crosslen Wing of the Mael Hosptital came out of his 2 week coma with the first words being “Shit!” This noise startled the young medical intern, causing the seven foot man in scrubs with prodigious muscles to scream like a mix between a small mouse and a teapot that was done. The flower pot he had been idly playing with shattered to the floor. “Oh god! Wow! You’re awake!” The intern began babbling, nothing had prepared him for a man who had been shot and in a coma to come out of it yelling. “Three weeks! It’s been three weeks! Dammit it’s nearly Christmas! My gas station!” Ol’ Johnny was not really yelling of course, he had just come out of a three week coma, so the normal deep baritone was instead a very peeved svelte trumpet. After this other doctors came in, asking inane question and saying inane things, blah blah blahing about bed rest and oh good you’ve made a recovery, and what happened and so forth. This situation continued to develop for the next week, as Johnny got his legs back under him and stocked up on a large number of painkillers. Though they wanted him to stay, he knew he couldn’t. Instead, a fire had been burning inside him. He silently raged at himself for getting injured, losing another few inches off his quite definitely shorter life. He gathered his belongings, the whole week swirled around him. Who had that woman been? Why? He was confused, but the moment he stumped back into his station, back into a constant, he let it slide. Times were too hard. He didn’t want to think about what had driven her to doing what she had done. He wasn’t disappointed either, as without him locking up it had been lightly broken into, only some food and drink were taken. This puzzled him, as he had thought that perhaps it would or should have been bare. Still, opening some extremely illegal absinthe and taking a swig made that go away. Thing’s were back to normal, gun check, key’s check, questioning self’s own mortality. Johnny himself. Still there. So he put up Christmas lights, raised the gas prices to Christmas levels, and put on the radio. The last thing he heard as he sank into sleep was the one of his favorite songs ever, “It’s the mooooost wonderful tiiiime of the year......”.