The Able Mexican

Suicide

2010-11-08T12:50:00.000-08:00

When somebody commits suicide, those amongst the living begin to recount their own lives. One tries to recall dark memories in their own lives of being incapable of connection, of feeling the whole weight of the world tearing at their chest. A rose growing among weeds. They try to imagine emotionally isolating moments in life that can only be solved by poisonous pills or by activating the simple mechanics of a gun.

After somebody commits suicide “the living” begin debating. Why didn’t they ask for help? How could they do something so selfish? “The living” do anything they can to reassure themselves that they had nothing to do with the suiciders’ abrupt end. No amount of emotional pain felt by the living can ever amount to the constant anguish that the suicider must have dealt with every day. I don’t believe suicide is selfish. I think that the living have to say that suicide is selfish because they are too scared, or unable to commit to something that is so permanent, like death. They view the life of the suicider through the prism of their own brain chemistry and cannot comprehend “why somebody would do such a thing”.

I can sympathize with the suicider. In some weird way I think that I actually envy her. I spend days upon days wondering if she discovered something about this world that I will never stumble upon. I begin to believe that she somehow peeked behind the curtain and the overwhelming reality of what she observed somehow tormented her to an end. I wonder if she found some kind of edge on humanity, a horrifying symbol or some type of beautiful literary device hidden between all of our monotonous daily motions. I feel jealous right now, like somebody who will never understand the literary allusions of a Joyce novel. I feel like I will never witness a sunset, even though I have perfect vision.

We miss you Alicia Mize. RIP

The Babies Are Crying

2010-09-25T21:11:00.000-07:00

My girlfriend’s roommate, Tawdry, wants us to go out with her to celebrate her second successful abortion. Melanie, my girlfriend, tells me this over the phone. In desperate need of alcohol, I hang up and head down the street to the small dive bar. I am supposed to meet the girls there in thirty minutes.

I park my Ford Escort in a handicapped parking space and walk into the bar. I look around and do not see my girlfriend or her roommate anywhere. I hate being in places like this alone. I am always uncomfortable around people that I do not know. All of the patrons look up at me in unison and stare at me with their blank, lifeless eyes. My dying soul will resemble theirs soon. Slowly and inevitably, I am merging into the heart of their flock. Individuals do not stand a chance against the encroaching hungry teeth of life. I let the stares of their judgment pour over me. Under my breath, I am cursing my girlfriend for not arriving first.

It seems like days pass, before the girls finally walk in the door. Both of them are already hammered and they are singing, “We are the Champions” at the top of their lungs as they stumble up drunkenly to me at the bar. The regulars do not seem to mind the racket, however. Apparently, the drunk and disorderly are well received here. Melanie orders shots of Cuervo for all of us and tells her roommate to get a pool table. Mel steadies herself on a barstool, looks me in the eye, and asks boldly, “Why are you so weird?”

I wonder if she knows that I hate her. I am so embarrassed by her appearance that I do not like to take her out anywhere. She has masculine features that make me feel like less of a man. Her shoulders are broader than mine, she has bigger hands than I do and her countenance looks like Patrick Swayze’s. There is nothing for me to do. I am not good-looking, I lack self-confidence, I work at Arby’s and I do not think I have ever experienced any emotion in my life that was not a product of pain. Unfortunately, I had to settle. A six-foot three-inch Amazonian with the personality of a snail is all that I can attract. Redeeming qualities are absent. Just the memory of the acrid aroma in her apartment is enough to make me gag. The scents of cat piss, cigarettes, incense and cheap perfume always hang thick in the air like a painful blanket of stench. Sometimes, when she goes to store, I will stay at her apartment and punt her cat around her place like a soccer ball. I do not have a grudge against cats, I just hate my girlfriend. I wonder if she knows that the only reason I am dating her is that she is the only girl that will have sex with me on a semi-regular basis. And when we do have sex I always try to imagine myself ravaging Jennifer Love Hewitt or Britney Spears or Cristina Aguilera.

As Melanie and I make our way past the drunken natives towards the pool table, we notice Tawdry sparking up a conversation with some random shlub and his schlubbier friend. She invites them over to play pool with us. Tawdry adjusts her bra and then walks over to me to get her shot of Cuervo. I tell her in a respectful tone, “Congratulations…you know… on the whole abortion thing.”

“Thanks,” she says dryly, “I am so happy right now.”

Tawdry is a fat, pale, unkempt redhead who loves NASCAR and the Blue Collar Comedy tour. Her body odor wafts off her, up and over the burly perfume, and into my nostrils. She lifts up her shot glass and salutes me as she says, “This one goes out to the best $300 dollars I ever spent!”

We both down our shots in picture-perfect harmony. She looks at me and adds, “I am so glad that the baby is dead.”

I mumble under my breath, “I think the doctor should have killed you and let the baby live.”

She inquires, “What was that? I can’t hear you.”

“Never mind.” I say.

Mel and Tawdry select their pool cues from the wall and start placing the pool balls in the ratty, plastic triangle. I tell them to go ahead and play with the shlubs and I will sit back and watch. The thought of having to talk to these shlubs stresses me out so bad that I notice that I am grinding my teeth together. A picture of me stabbing them with my pocketknife flashes through my mind but then I hear someone on the radio singing: “It’s getting hot in here, so take off all your clothes.” Those words ring like a siren in my head and I try to contemplate their meaning and ultimately decide that a real-life human could have never written such chaotic prose. Only a dead machine could be capable of writing such a lifeless verse. My head jerks back and forth around the dimly lit room in search of the man behind the curtain. There is nothing there. Nothing there but the flock.

The pool game begins as someone breaks. On the muted TV hanging above the bar, there is a closed-captioned news story about a 12-year-old girl that beat her father to death with a hammer after he raped her. I pondered on whether or not the little girl will receive the death penalty. At the bar, a man with one arm and vomit on his shirt is hitting on a fat, old woman. I have to down another shot to expunge the brutal, honest horror of this obvious display of sexual selection.

Back at the pool table, I notice that one of the shlubs has taking a liking to my girlfriend. He stands behind her with his arms around her waist as he is whispering something in her ear. Mel looks me dead in the eye and does not try to pry herself from the shlub’s embrace. She turns around slowly and mechanically in his arms, reaches up and kisses him. I try to muster up some type of emotion. Something, perhaps, that I think normal people might feel. Jealousy falls flat, anger does not materialize. I actually just feel sorry for the shlub because he is making out with a manly woman; a manly woman that smells like cat piss and cigarettes. My mind drifts suddenly to something more beautiful, something intangible that stands at the polar end of what I am experiencing now. All I can think about is the Paris Hilton sex video that a friend of mine from Washington State e-mailed me today. It excites me to my core to think that Paris Hilton will do things that I have only heard about and have never experienced myself, firsthand. I start picturing myself slowly taking off her clothes as she whispers commands into my ear… when suddenly my girlfriend noisily sits down on the chair next to me.

As my mind wandered into the only place that it finds ecstasy, a good amount of time must have passed, because now Mel is completely obliterated and her breathe smells like vomit and tequila. She has her head down on the table and she is crying hysterically. She jerks up suddenly, and throws her arms around my neck. I ask her what is wrong, surprised at how genuinely concerned I sound, and she manages to say through her tears, “I am dying.” She puts her head back on the table and resumes crying. At this point I know there is no chance Mel is going to let me have sex with her tonight. A couple seconds pass before I say, “You look like Patrick Swayze.”

I walk out of the bar alone, get into my car and start driving back to my apartment. I try to convince Paris, in my head of course, that nobody will ever stand between us. I drive like a maniac into the dark, moonless night with my windows rolled down. My stereo is turned all the way up. It is so loud that I hear no music, just the white noise of the speakers exploding and the passing wind beating on my eardrums. I run over a cat. I cannot stop laughing feverishly at the thought of my girlfriend dying before the night’s end. My car lurches the last few feet into the parking lot and I run up the stairs to my apartment and I turn on the computer. The monitor casts the only light in my dark lonely room. My stash of pot is still lying on my dresser. I roll a joint and take my first few puffs as I sit down at the computer desk. As I begin to bask in the comfort of my digital romance, I hear a baby’s cries coming from somewhere outside my window. I cannot help but think that he is crying because he just found out how shallow and soulless life really is.

JRPerez September 2010

People Suck

2010-03-03T13:11:00.000-08:00

"Note: These are the lyrics to one of the songs from one of my old bands, Wasted Potential. "

People Suck

Everybody is coming after me

But I guess for right now, I am going to have to let it be

I close my eyes and dream about the past

I am beginning to wonder, how much longer I will last

My mind is wasted

I am at the end of my rope

My mind is wasted

I am depressed and I can’t cope

After all this, I wonder, Have I grown?

Why won’t these stupid people just leave me alone?

I have been thinking about giving up this life

I am searching for that one thing, that would set everything right

My mind is wasted

I’m at the end of my rope

My mind is wasted

I’m depressed and I can’t cope

The Lady

2009-08-01T16:25:00.000-07:00

I woke up in haze and I found myself laying in the backseat of a car. The lady was driving. She drove hastily through the pitch-black night on a winding two-lane road. The sound of the tires running on the road made my eardrums wretch in pain. My stomach turned violently while trying to digest the thick scent of cheap perfume that permeated the car. Up was hard to discern from down. Double vision played tricks on my brain. I was in bad shape and I felt that I could die at any second.

When I was finally able to gather strength to sit up, I noticed that my head was pulsating. It could have been from all the coke I snorted. It could have been from the red sand opium I smoked. It could have been from the lady’s incessant rambling. Who knows?

I knew the lady’s type. It depressed me that she was less classy than white trash. The skin that covered her bones was disgustingly over tanned. Sun blotches and stretch marks displayed themselves in abundance. I could just picture the lady in her younger days going to tanning salons, making daily attempts to burn away her insecurities. The lady had always dreamed of marrying a rich man that would take her way from all of her problems; someone that would display her worth to the world through useless possessions and silicon injections. Instead, she turned fifty and remained single. The lady’s hair has thinned grotesquely from the countless years of cheap bleach jobs. It was frayed and brittle. Her desperate attempts to maintain her youth made her increasingly bitter. The lady spoke in a condescending, matter-of-factly way that made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. The lady’s little brain was only able to communicate things such as, “The cigarettes at 7-11 are cheaper than at Wal-Mart,” or, “Look! There is a cow with horns,” or, “Southern Comfort has more alcohol in it than Keystone Light”. I am talking about some extremely intelligent shit here.

As I sat in the back seat, sweaty, dizzy and uncoordinated, I caught a glimpse of the lady’s tired eyes in the rear view mirror. “The lady is a waste of space,” I remember thinking to myself. Fantasies played out somewhere in my brain. If I had a gun, I would shoot her directly in the back of the skull. If I only had an axe, I could chop away at her neck, splintering her spine. I was useless though. I had no obvious means of exterminating her. The thought of being inadequately equipped infuriated me.

She mumbled something like, “There is a white truck,” and I decided immediately to do something about all this. Although my body was numb and my hands were hard to move, I was able to pull my pack of cigarettes out of my front pocket and remove the last one from the box. I somehow managed to throw the empty pack at the back of the lady’s head. She condescendingly stated either, “You are a prick,” or, “I want dick,” I could not be certain. I found a lighter already in my right hand and lit it. I brought the lighter to the end of my cigarette, puffed, and exhaled slowly. Somebody in the backseat of the car with me (or it could have been in my head) said, “You need to kill the bitch.” Whoever it was, I was confident that I had listened to them before. So, I pulled the lit cigarette from my lips and held it in my right hand. The lady said something like, “Its colder in Antarctica than here,” and I sat up straight in the backseat and leaned in closer behind the lady. Quietly, I brought my hand with the burning cigarette in it, right next to her right ear. With a sudden burst of power, I forcefully jammed the burning cigarette as deep into the lady’s ear canal as I could. As the inside of her head began to snap, crackle and pop, the lady let out a high-pitched, wailing, scream. With my left hand, I grabbed the lady by her hair so she couldn’t move and lit my lighter. The flame spread over the lady’s entire head with ease and soon burned her dry and frizzled hair into nothing but a fleshy, black mess that looked just like charred, melted plastic. The smell of cheap perfume in my nostrils was quickly overcome by the familiar smell of burning hair and flesh. The lady no longer screamed. She just moaned like a beast and gurgled like a baby and frothy foam started coming from the ends of her mouth. That was my sign to re-light my now extinguished cigarette and gently begin to push it into the lady’s right eyeball. She barely put up a fight. She might have been in shock or she might have just liked it. I pressed harder and harder until the moisture of the lady’s eyeball extinguished my cigarette. Through the rear - view mirror, I could see that the eyeball had transformed into something resembling a scorched hard-boiled egg with a runny yolk.

At that time, I noticed that the car that the lady had been driving was now stopped in a ditch on the side of the road. The engine was still running and the smell of exhaust brought me out of my stupor. I was able to open the car door and let myself out and into the brisk, dark evening. I looked at the wreckage and realized the car was completely totaled.

After taking a piss on the lady’s twisted and mangled face, I turned around and walked away triumphantly, into the night, with the desert at my feet, having felt that I had done my good deed for the day.

Sunday School Shooting

2009-06-27T10:24:00.000-07:00

Smile with the rest of us, pray for sunshine that is endless
Replace your soul with mine, be less of an individualist

My path, and only my path, shall be the one that sets you free
Stand tall and never falter, do not commit blasphemy

Just be normal for fucks sake
Just be normal for heaven waits

Loosen your mind, and let the shepherd take you too
Where we, God’s flock, will all welcome you

If it is truth that quenches the thirst of your mind
To hell with your soul, you are no brother of mine

Smile when we smile, pray when we pray
Or you will be disowned by us all on judgment day

Let the flock be prepared for an eternal heaven’s stay
You surely will be exiled with all of the heathens
You are as good as gay.

JRPerez

Leaving Colorado

2009-06-25T15:07:00.000-07:00

I am standing here at the end of my driveway, waiting for him to show up. I know that today will be the last time I see him for ages. The dark, heavy clouds mask the morning sun; its cold and it is snowing. My little brother stands by me with a confused look on his face. He is to young and innocent to grasp the weight of the situation. Mom is a wreck. She is huddled by the front door of our empty house in an effort to hide her tears from us. She is unsuccessful, however.

I was supposed to run away last night. Instead, I fell asleep. My gym bag was packed full of sweaters and jeans. I really didn’t know where I would go. Somehow I thought that if I ran away, my mom would decide not to move us away from here. Maybe I thought that my parents would fall in love again in their attempt to find me. Last night didn’t matter now. I fell asleep.

The headlights from my dad’s car are plowing down the street and through the heavy snow. The lump in my throat is the size of a grapefruit. Mom becomes silent. My brother stands ambivalent. My dad’s car pulls up next to where I am standing and parks. My dad opens the car door and gets out. His face is flushed and apologetic. Before now, I have never seen my dad cry. He walks over to my brother and I, the smell of Marlboro cigarettes permeate from his Colorado Rockies jacket. He looks down at my brother and me and says, “I am sorry. Things will work out. I love you guys and you have no idea how much I am going to miss you.” My brother and I are taken into our dad’s arms and he hugs us with all of his might. The lump in my throat breaks free and with it come tears. My little brother starts to cry too. The sound of my mom crying creeps up faintly from behind me. Every memory of my dad passes through my mind and down my cheek. My dad releases his embrace and tells us, “It’s time to go.”

I look back and realize my mom is already waiting in her car. Both of the passenger doors open, begging us to come in. I place my arm around my brother’s shoulders and we walk slowly, sobbing, towards Mom’s car. We get in and shut the doors. Inside, the air is warm and stuffy from the heater. The car lurches forward as I struggle to put my seatbelt on. Through the window I see my dad’s silhouette still standing on the sidewalk next to his car. As we drive by, he waves at us with his face distorted in pain. Most certainly, I will never forget how he looked at us as we drove away.

I know I will never be home again.

JRPerez

My First Post!

2009-04-23T23:28:00.000-07:00

This is odd. I am writing this first blog post knowing damn well that there is nobdy reading it.

I have never blogged before. I do like writing so I figured why not give blogging a try. Seriously though, I am excited about the fact that I may actually meet some people in the blogosphere that share some of my viewpoints.

While I am still working out the technical details of my blog, be sure to check out this band called Bleach. They are a three-piece, all-girl, metal band from Japan. They were featured on a compilation called Japan Nite Out that I happened upon a few years ago. I have been listening to them ever since.

I am excited to get this blog up and running. I look forward to meeting some new people out there.

Until next time...JRPerez