The Rough Drafts Writing Blog

“Change”

George popped from the pavement like an out of joint thumb. What was he doing here? Surely analysts at the NSA would see him soon in the routine satellite images they were tasked with studying and laugh hard spitting coffee from their noses directly onto their computer screens. He was the first man wearing a tie in the history of the streets of Winslow that wasn’t on a damage-surveying or fact-finding mission in some official capacity.

The people on the street were staring, some in confusion and some with more sinister thoughts. George had been marked for death, robbery, kidnapping, rape, extortion, and even identity theft in the three blocks that he’d walked to this point. He’d been marked each twice. The neighborhood was bad. People that lived to the age of eighteen in a place like Winslow were like Chuck Norris jokes come to life. Did you hear about the time that the guy from Winslow ran around the world and punched Superman in the back of the head? Things like that.

He passed three men sitting on the stoop of a ramshackle brownstone. They gave him that look. The look that urged him to run or be eaten. George pressed on. He wasn’t in for noticing things like this tonight. His stomach churned and whipped itself into fits. Knotted stomach aside, George had some things to prove. He scanned the street as he walked. He was looking for the man he heard about, the one with the guns.

Janine had left him. He’d seen it coming. He always knew. There was always something different in the air. A coldness, a smell, a taste. It was non-specific and it changed from time to next. It was like obscenity for his soul – he knew it when he saw it.

She was cheating on him. It always ended this way. His ennui stood unabated, unmitigated by the fact that this was three women in three years. He found little consolation in the persistence of his also-ran status. He thought that it should be easier. It wasn’t.

It was the same reason as the other times. Janine thought he was great. She didn’t want to hurt him. George loved that line. He wanted to scream “how’d that work out?” at the top of his lungs but he didn’t have that in him. Janine thought he was a really nice guy.

The word ‘nice’ ate George for nearly a week. It made him feel pudding on the buffet at the fat kids’ camp. He had to know. He had to find out.

He followed Janine for three days. He hid behind poles, in shadows, and between cars. He had to see him. George had to know if this guy was like the last two. His fears were confirmed on the third day. He saw Janine leaving her house with a man that must be him. He was rough and muscular. He looked like he knew his way around a bar fight.

George ran up to them. He caused a scene. The man was even tougher than he has looked to George from behind his tree. He was coarse. He spoke like a longshoreman or a truck driver or something. For all that George knew, that’s what he was. Not unexpectedly, things between George and the man-ape became heated rather quickly. George was quickly down on the ground and bleeding – questioning life and his persistent attachment to it.

Ultimately, Janine showed George how much she thought of him by stepping over him as he lie on the pavement with both his body and spirit crushed. George lay there on the hard, cold pavement for about ninety seconds. It was enough. He decided to change. He could be that guy. He could be rough. He could be tumble. He would become unpredictable, unplottable.

He spoke to a shifty salesman at work the next day. Maurice would hook him up with a guy that would get him a gun. George could get a gun in a store. He certainly didn’t have a criminal record. That’s what the old George would do. He thought that it would make him seem more edgy and unpredictable. He thought that it would prove something. God only knows what.

Passing under a pigeon shit-strewn overpass littered nearly equally with broken bottles and men of broken dreams, George saw a man leaning against an Escalade. It was shiny and black with rims that seemed to act as some kind of bizarre amplifier – taking the light from the sun and reflecting it back at a far greater volume and frequency than when they received it. A man stood next to it. George walked up to the man. A massive lump seemed to have moved into George’s throat. As he debated the etiquette surrounding house guests that won’t leave and how, if at all, that applied to the lump in his throat, the man stared at George.

“You lost pal?”
George felt like a complete waste. An utter failure at life. He couldn’t even get the words out. Janine and the others were right. He had the hair-shirt halfway on. The only thing keeping it from sliding into place were the constant air-sluicing reports of the results of his self-flagellation.
“You speak English?”
“Yes.” George had found it. The ability to speak. He had a feeling that it was in there somewhere.
“You need something from me or are you just filing away my picture for later when you get some alone time?”
George laughed nervously. He softly spat out: “Maurice was supposed to tell you that I was coming.”
“What? What the hell are you talking about? I can’t hear you man. Don’t waste my fucking time. I ain’t standin’ out here all night like some kind of asshole for some guy to mumble shit at me.”
George’s terror increased in bounds. It was driven not only by the tone of the words, or the words themselves. It was the look in his eyes as he said them. He fucking hated her for being right. He hated them all.
“Sor- sorry. Maurice was supposed to tell you that I was coming by. I needed something from you.”
“I got a voicemail from Maurice. I didn’t listen to it though. Maurice is a douche.”

George really, desperately hated the way that this was going. The man’s brow was furrowed. His face hard and resolute. He seemed more angry with each passing second. George weighed the situation in his mind. He thought about proving this to himself. He thought about proving it to Janine. He couldn’t speak. He decided to run. It wasn’t worth it. He turned and bolted down the street. He was quickly on the pavement, bleeding from his face.

He looked around. A large part of him hoped that he had died. He hadn’t. He could tell because he could hear the gun thug laughing at him. His laughs bounced, echoed, and ricocheted around the inside of the overpass. George felt it ringing inside of his head. He smelled urine. He decided to get up, to get away. He noticed it when he stood up. He had tripped over a homeless man sleeping on the sidewalk. He sighed and walked away.