A new friend of mine, Pickins, likes to arch his eyebrow and say, “Jedge not, lest ye be jedged.” I like that, and he’s promised to teach me how to just raise one eyebrow and not the other. Pickins reads only the Bible. “Vengeance is mine” is tattooed on his right forearm. My tale is not one of vengeance or wrath though. I mention this only because I admire how he’s got that scripture curving around a black skull with pennies in the eyes. Pickins leaves no selection for potential adjudicators, nothing open to interpretation.

I do a lot of reading myself these days. My spare time is boundless and our library is quite extensive. I don’t make too many forays into the Good Book. I rely on Pickins to hit the highlights for me. But I spend a good deal of time with Bertrand Russell, Mark Twain, and the stoics of old. Seeing as how I faltered somewhat in the traditional scholarly pursuits, I’m gunning for the title of self-educated man. Maybe this helps me get my story across. Maybe it’s just a way to spend time, the worthless currency of a bankrupt life.

I feel I have to start with a Basset Hound puppy. No. Before that. I’ll begin with a boy who thought himself a man before he was, and became a man, irrevocably, before his time with childish things was done. I felt it happen. Initially, I had designs on manufacturing real impact to mark a turn in my road. I prayed that the hound dog and the brick and all that followed would cause my road to wind around the bend and intersect another, where I could make a sharp left and floor it. Tear the rearview off the windshield and toss it. A lazy little country road disappeared behind me, under me. I find now, in six lanes of metaphoric traffic, the super-heated concrete interstate does not turn but slightly, does not rise, and intersecting roads invariably pass beneath me. The exit signs appear occasionally, but the mirage of promise or lack of preparedness or my shear forward velocity make it impossible to get over. This is what happens.

Rather, this is what happened.

I made some mistakes.

The day after my fourteenth birthday, Daddy died. Car wreck. A week later, my mother moved back into the old house, and she made entirely too much noise. At fifteen, I was a lean 6’3”, and looked old enough to occasionally get away with buying alcohol. I considered I had as much hair between my legs as any alpha male and resented all attempts at parental constraint. At sixteen I filled out physically and emotionally, and came to the conclusion I had a brimming-full satchel of high school and high school ways. There may well have been sighs of relief in my absence. I didn’t see a trace of a truancy officer, if our little school had one of those. Not even a letter to the house. Freedom is what I desired yet, alas, the struggle for it was not what it was fabled to be. I don’t recall struggling.

Then, never one to squander momentum, I pasted myself firmly on the hip of Chloe, the first girl I ever laid naked with. I waited for her to finish her senior year and we left town, hand-in-hand, in a beat-to-shit Grand Am bound for Denton. She would enroll at The University of North Texas and I would take the GED and follow a semester behind her to an as yet unspecified degree in something. Something prized in the job marketplace, to give our future some promise. A few speed-bumps materialized in that path which threw us off course slightly.

For her part, Chloe commenced to pissing away her college fund post haste. There should be some principle to apply to the dedication she demonstrated in paying for courses and books, then sleeping. It wasn’t parties, or drinking, or even drugs and friends and a cumbersome extra-curricular schedule that hauled her down. It was the weight of her will. It was a single-minded doggedness to remain still. Asleep mostly, sometimes she watched soap operas and dropped Merit Ultra-light butts in her half glass of orange juice, extra pulp. As I say, principle. With an undeviating costume of quilted warm-ups and flip-flops, unkempt red hair, and a perpetual stinking glass of ashy OJ, Chloe set to proving and reproving the only pearl I gleaned from the first six weeks of tenth grade physics: Objects at rest tend to remain at rest. The guy with the falling apple and ridiculous wig said that.

Three things fell upon me in rapid succession once the Pontiac came to rest in Denton. One: All things cost money. Orange juice, cable television, rent, and food being of paramount concern. Two: I did not have a college fund, and the whole GED thing suddenly seemed too restrictive to be a viable option. It threatened to encumber my recent emancipation. Three: Chloe had no interest in laying naked with me any longer.

Number three is of no consequence. The feeling became mutual so quickly that it seems like a joint decision. We were trash without the excuse of coming from a trailer park. I don’t sleep with trash. Evidently, neither did she. Numbers one and two had to be addressed though. Since Chloe was busying herself with a 0.023 GPA and could not be bothered, and seeing as how I was a dropout with no immediate prospects for advancement, I sought a career in petroleum products marketing with an eye toward a specialty in point-of-purchase retailing. I was soon snatched up by Foster Baker Shamrock Quickstop on I-35. I brought home $1148 a month. I lied about my age, because the Shamrock sold beer.

The Campus Square Apartment complex was the least comely rodent hovel in town. It might have ranked up there with the worst shitholes in the state. They got $350 a month, utilities included, for a block cell with an adjoining kitchenette because they were only half a mile from campus. Cable was $29. We had no phone because Chloe’s mom was a walleyed, rabid gryphon of a beast and she’d have used my convenience against me. Groceries ran us another $400 a month. Cigarettes cost us a little, and I drank the rest. Sometimes there was enough cash for her to smoke a little weed and I snuck some away to buy tablets to write my ‘world of want’ and other fabulous things into being. I horded gimme ball-point pens from wherever I found them and advertised their logos in a coffee mug under the couch, with the tablets.

In that box of roaches with a door that wouldn’t lock and windows that wouldn’t raise, I found a remarkable thing. This thing had apparently nested itself in the trod-down carpet scraps with the mildew and vomit stains, waiting lo these many months for someone to discern its odor among the others and recognize it for what it was. A festering epiphany, so rotten that it had to be on the bottom; it was the seed of philosophy. I found that modern freedom is everywhere. Our freedom is cheap like air. The romantic sense of freedom doesn’t belong to our time. We pimp it out to whatever point we’re making when we use the word. Freedom itself then, is our whore.

And that’s incredible for a child of sixteen, a fancy and a horrible thing. A philosophy. Because it’s not here, it has none of the restraints of fact or fiction. It’s true, because it’s there. That’s both when the road beneath me turned to a swift onramp and when I was not an old kid anymore, but an ignorant man. In addition, we got ourselves a neighbor. In 2G. He was a bricklayer.

For a while he was a neighbor. Then he was a bastard. For a fleeting instant, Mason was a murderer. Then he was inconsequential. Just a bricklayer. Hence the name, and hell if I know what his mother called him. If I don’t seize on the singular truth of what he was, the entire story from thence is too slick to hold. It becomes the theology of my late youth and can only be discussed in circular terms and glimpsed rarely in the periphery.

Mason was the one tenant in Campus Square who did not go to the University. He showed up next to us and set to making demolition sounds at nine in the morning, one hour after my shift at the Shamrock ended; fifteen minutes after I had finished my sixth beer of the morning and needed sleep; thirty minutes after, should she have risen and actively sought higher education, Chloe would have begun her Thursday macro-economics class. It woke the both of us. I sprung from the hide-a-bed and knocked over a Tropicana ashtray cocktail getting to the wall to sound my disapproval on the concrete blocks with my fists. It made a pitiful slapping noise that didn’t carry near so far as my screams at the pain of it. None of my protesting bested his rotary hammer, or circular saw, or whatever monstrous fucking power tool Mason had wailing next door. I thought I heard him singing in the lulls.

If I were the only shirtless man in boxer shorts stomping around and cursing in public at those apartments, it would have had more impact; and, of course, it would have been a better class of place all together. But the scene wasn’t strange in the least and didn’t impress Mason much when he finally came to swing his door out of reach of my slapping palm. He was a little man, only about five six, with a scruffy three-day beard and protective eyewear. He had cement dust on his face, darkest beneath his nostrils.

He looked up at me and said, “What?”

“I’m in 2F, is what. And that shit is loud. What the hell’s going on in there?”

“I’m hanging my bed.”

“Huh?”

“I cleared it with the manager. She said it was OK.” He opened the door and showed me. Two four-foot chains hung from the ceiling by eye-bolts and a third hole in the concrete was under way. Piles of powdered masonry were on his carpet.

“Dude, I work nights. You can’t do that shit now. I have to sleep.”

“When do you get up?”

“Normally about four o’clock.”

“Well, I usually go to work about now. But I got today and tomorrow off. I’ll do it tomorrow.”

“After four.”

“You’re welcome. Asshole.”

“And fuck you too.”

That’s how I met him. I came to know him through the ceaseless noises he made. I did talk to him in the parking lot a couple of times. Once he was unloading a bucket of masons trowels and stained overalls from his tattered silver Volvo–that’s how I knew what he did–and the other time he was unloading a wasted road woman with equal care. I spoke to him once more on the landing as he came home and I was leaving for work. He had a Basset Hound puppy in his arms, the only time I saw him smiling. I told him it was a nice puppy.

Time overtakes itself here, without speeding up or slowing down. What in all creation am I trying to say? Chloe and I tied the knot, and I’m wholly unsure how and when that calamity transpired, in the scheme of things.

In the gym the other day, a man named Dink offered me a profound juxtaposition to Pickins’ interpretation of the divine Word.

Dink said, “Times come when we’ll do something because it seems like the next best thing to doing nothing. It’s real hard to stay still.”

I told him, “You ought to write that down. That’s brilliant.”

“Naw, I keep all that shit right up here in my head. But then,” he continued, “sometimes we jump right in the middle of something that’s just stupid. We’ll look around and say, ‘Man, that was stupid.’ All of us have done it at least once.”

“Yeah. And what do we do about those times?”

“You leave those times out. Lie about it. Hell, I don’t know.”

I can’t gather up enough about this part to structure a convincing lie. So, here it is. I decided we should get married. I put that possibility first, on the off chance it’s accurate. Or we decided–or it was strongly recommended via the payphone in the laundromat and we acquiesced–that she and I had better get married. This is as clear as the recollection gets. It makes no difference that I admit it was a mistake. I’d admit to homosexual tendencies toward retarded toddlers and a nasty drug habit to boot if I could pare some understanding from that colossal misstep. As it was, I mailed a letter of permission home to my mother, because I was still seventeen. She said, ‘Oh, honey’ and signed it.

I know the wedding happened in San Antonio. I know I was drunk and she was stoned. I got in a brawl on the River Walk. I remember that. And I tipped a bartender $150 instead of $15 because it was on the hotel tab when I checked us out. We had our song, a special one, but I don’t know what it was. I didn’t listen to music at all for a while thereafter, scared I’d happen across it and recall something else. The drive back to Denton was beautiful in its perfect misery.

From that point on, I spent my nights denying beer to sober minors, selling beer to drunks, occasionally carding people for Penthouse (when I was bored), and dip-sticking the gas tanks before the sun rose. I dusted orange peanut butter and cheese crackers, rotated the old M&M’s to the rack nearest the register, restocked the cooler, mopped, and –despite repeated warnings from Foster Baker against it –locked the doors to get a Whataburger across the parking lot when I was hungry and, from time to time, to take a shit.

I came home each morning with a sack of whatever beer was cheapest at the station. I neglected to card myself. Once or twice a week, I’d stop and get a cup of coffee and two eggs at the Kettle. Time and again I sat on the same stool between two Vietnam vets, Charlie Maliska and Bob somebody. I watched them grab tired, fed-up-to-here waitress ass and tell lies and argue about who ‘saw more real shit in country.’ On a particularly entertaining Friday morning I saw these two clowns dance around the parking lot with a tire tool and a boot knife just exactly like two old men trying desperately not to get hurt. The big black fry cook wanted to bet me he could take them both bare-handed. The waitress, Rhonda, who’s attention they both desired, took a smoke break by the dumpster for the duration because she said it embarrassed her. She asked me why I talked to those two. That confounded her because, she said, I was free to leave and never see them again. She had to wait on them. She was not free.

Tablet freedom, from under my sofa. The very philosophic freedom I’d come to think of as ‘the streetwalking hussy.’ I thought about this, standing in our kitchenette, drinking beer in silence as Chloe slept. Rhonda was not free because why? She didn’t have liberty of movement? Of religious practice? Of political belief? She didn’t have the right to vote, to abort a birth, to chose her spouse? No. She did not understand that our blessed virginal word, freedom, was selling herself–even to a waitress–for a breath. I eased my tablet out from beneath the draping sheets while Chloe snored and I wrote these thoughts on the next to the last page. I thought I should begin these tablets again. They were six now, filled chiefly with this one threaded thought. I should start over with Rhonda’s captivity. Go find out more. It was kids, or a husband, or an alcoholic father, or young siblings she’d been prematurely burdened with. Something. It starts with her: Me, Dr. Dropout, and my case study. I could seek more cases. Hell, they’d come to me, right there at the Shamrock. I likely had two in Charlie and Bob. Surely they thought themselves bound by injury, or bound by societal labels. Listen to the tales of imprisonment. Write them. Then… What on Earth is that God-forsaken noise?

Mason’s hound had come of age and developed the opinion that he was truly not free either. He began to bay at the door. There was somewhat of a learning curve that spanned fifteen minutes while I had two more beers and finished my train of thought on the page. Chloe didn’t wake up until that little fucker discovered the reach and range of his natural ability. When he did, he was proud. I thought, this is another set of tablets entirely. The meaning of life was genetic capability, that’s all. The whole mystery boiled down to…

Chloe coughed and said, “Can you not shut that son of a bitch up? Damn!”

So I stomped out and pounded on Mason’s door and the dog stopped. But nobody answered. His Volvo was gone. I went back in and the hound began anew, with fresh lungs and astounding vigor. Soon the soaps were on the tube, loud to overwhelm the howling. Merits went fsst as they fell into the juice. Smoke choked the little space as I tried to cat nap between Chloe’s sporadic rants at Mason’s dog, during the commercials. Had she been seaman first class Chloe, she would have made someone smiling proud with such volleys. She dipped Ruffles into a tub of sour cream and made the most of the acoustic quality of the rustling foil bag two feet from my pillow. But I finally had purpose in my sights and could not be disturbed. I was understanding my condition.

As my condition altered to a state of sleep deprivation over the next several days, so my understanding deteriorated. It became increasingly difficult to reach that transcendental state of objectivity. I was no longer able to concentrate on my work, my true work, my calling, because of my cock-sucking neighbor’s dog and my goddamn wife’s caterwauling. The more my waking hours coincided with Chloe’s, the more I saw how dirty she had become. If anybody ever needed a nagging mother in tow, she did. She smelled and I don’t think she showered much. In a small, non-air-conditioned space, this is irritating. When I felt I was equal to the challenge of the ensuing verbal fisticuffs, I’d tell her she stank. She invariably had some things to get off her chest as well. Something had to give.

In six days, I never passed Mason going out. I never caught him at home coming in. I complained to the management and they taped notes to his door. The next morning, the notes were gone and the dog bawled. When he walked the poor animal at night, he obviously never got further than the second floor landing. The thing defecated right there at the head of the stairs. He must have fed it Beanie Weenie. There were no lights up there, and there was nothing substantial for any of the other second floor residents to complain about by the time they got up and went to class, because most of the crap was stuck on the bottom of my boots. The trail led to my door, not Mason’s.

Then the one time, the last time, for the final scene, all the players were present on stage. Mason was not at work on this Tuesday morning. He was building something with bricks in his apartment. I parked the Grand Am next to his Volvo when I came home. His back hatch was open and there was a pile of bricks inside. I saw him disappear through his open door with an armload. Up the stairs I went, sack of on-sale beer in hand. I reached the landing and, voila!, poo. Not quite dried yet. When I thought about the fact that he not only allowed his dog to shit on the balcony, but actively sidestepped it instead of kicking it off, I became incensed. I needed to fight the little obstinate pecker.

I went inside to set my beer down and–behold–Chloe was not balled up under the covers. The hide-a-bed was still out, unmade, but she wasn’t in it. She either ran out for smokes, or went to class. I would never know which. I stormed back out and bumped into Mason on the stoop and knocked him into the railing.

“Watch where the fuck you’re going, man!” he advised me.

Now I was angry beyond reason. Weary beyond tired. And, as I eventually asserted at the trial, quite insane.

“I meant to do that, you little bastard.” I walked over five or six steps to the pile of dog excrement and picked it up with my bare hand. “Look here. This right here?” I walked toward him.

“Don’t you wipe that shit on me.” He retreated a step.

I looked down, off the balcony, seeking to rid my hand of this stinking load so I could hit Mason in the face, and there below me was his Volvo. I hurled the shit directly down on his windshield.

I said, “Every time I find shit up here when I come home, you’ll find it on your car the next day.”

“Fuck you.”

I made to walk up and pound him. I envisioned myself hurling him over the rail. But he disappeared into his apartment and that immediately brought to my mind the pointed edge of a mortar trowel. I backed up and waited. I heard him cussing in there and he reappeared shortly, with a brick of all things. I can do this, I thought. I can take a prick with a brick.

“Now you look.” And he wasted no time in leaning over the rail, presumably to throw that brick down on our windshield.

Now that I think on it, Chloe must have been down at the 7-11 buying cigarettes or scoring early morning weed from a downstairs neighbor, because her class would not have been out that early. She was walking to our car for something. Otherwise occupied at the time, I didn’t see her. But when I yelled at Mason, something to the effect that he would rue the day, she looked up and probably saw us for a fleeting instant.

I rushed Mason and swung at him. He chunked the brick straight down and missed the car. The corner of it struck Chloe squarely between the eyes. She bounced off the car and I looked down just in time to see her final twitch before she was the lump that would be traced in white. There was very little blood.

I descended the stairs to stand over my wife’s body and meet the eyes of every rubbernecking tenant and passerby until the sirens sounded. Mason had gone in and closed the door of his apartment until the cops knocked. The detectives talked to him first. It was obvious the brick had come from his stash, still easily seen in his open car. Uniformed officers cornered me and made me stay seated on the curb. There were hundreds of people in the parking lot in minutes. Dozens of fingers jutted out at me. I didn’t know if the pointers were saying ‘that’s her husband’ or ‘that’s the bastard who did it, I saw the whole thing.’ Roll upon roll went through the police camera. The clicking was like chattering crickets and I still hear the whine of the motor-drive advancing the film when I think about that morning.

Then the detectives in their basketball coach blazers took me by the elbow into the manager’s office to get my side. That’s what they said, get my side.

“There are no sides,” I told them.

They told me, “Your neighbor said you killed your wife. You better have a side.”

“That’s what Mason said?” Incredible.

“Mason who? Who’s Mason?” They scribbled on ludicrous little flip-open pads. Nothing as grand as my tablets.

“The rotten little fucker with the brick!”

“That’s what he said. You two were fighting and you dropped the brick that killed her.”

“Why in hell would I have a brick?”

“That’s what we mean by sides. Right now, we’ve got witnesses who say you and Chloe argued all the time. We’ve got people from the parking lot saying they saw you toss the brick. The gentleman you were fighting with is willing to testify it was an accident. You didn’t mean to drop it. You can help yourself here, but you better have a side.”

“He’s a gentleman now. You people are asses.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes sir, it is. And what I need is a lawyer.”

They took me to jail and got me a lawyer, a public defender. Steve. I called my mom and asked her to put up the house for bail. She said, ‘Oh, sugar’ and tried to do it, but it had two mortgages already and my lawyer said no bondsman would take it anyway because it was her primary residence. And I was a flight risk.

Steve and I discussed my defense over a stainless steel table bolted to the floor in Meeting Room 2 of the Denton County jail. I wore cuffs all the time by then, but Steve convinced the jailor I should not be cuffed behind my back because I needed to make notes. I made no notes. I asked Steve for a smoke. He gave me a Merit Ultra-light. I giggled until snot came out of my nose and then the guard told me there was ‘no smoking in this facility.’

Over half a dozen visits, Steve laid it out for me as follows. No chance at getting me tried as a minor, forget it. Also, my in-laws had come out against me. They were saying I was a drunk, and a mean one. I wouldn’t allow them to speak with their beloved daughter on the telephone. They swore affidavits that I assaulted a man on the River Walk in San Antonio. Witnesses say I hated Chloe, we argued constantly. Two gay dumpster divers in the parking lot that morning say I tossed the brick with intent. Mason, of course, swears it was me that dropped it, but thinks it was an accident. Then, finally, they found my notebooks. Steve paused a long time on that point and looked at me until I spoke.

“What notebooks?”

“The ones under your couch. The D.A. is making reams of photocopies. It’s not… it doesn’t cast a favorable light on our case.”

“What?”

He read from his legal pad, “Let’s see, ‘…the whore has sold herself to the masses and must be exposed at the least, if not stoned–biblically and publicly–for her transgressions…’ That really shoots our not guilty plea in the foot, you know. Being as she died of a brick to the head. Also, they’re sending me stuff about bondage and captivity. They’ve taken the manslaughter plea off the table. You’re headlines now.”

“Oh shit.”

“Yeah, I know. But this can work to our advantage, in a way. I want to switch you to not guilty by reason of insanity. Your neighbor will testify that you were in a heated altercation at the time of the incident and with these notebooks…”

“Freedom! It’s about freedom!”

“Entirely. And I can tell you from experience that you stand a much better chance at reaching that goal sooner rather than later in a mental institution as opposed to Huntsville State Prison.”

At trial, my psychiatrist said I was bat shit, because I paid her to. However, I wasn’t able to pay very much and the prosecution tore her expert testimony to ribbons. After listening to the D.A.’s cross and the state doctor, I’m not even sure that my bitch had a medical degree. Her considered opinion was that I was crazy due to many, many incidences of bondage and abuse as a child. These memories were repressed, she said, and the tablets were an attempt to vent these atrocities but this was simply not sufficient to avert the eventual psychotic break.

To which, the state doctor responded, “There’s got to be something wrong with a man who hums bricks at his own wife, but-”

Steve, unwilling to abide such prejudicial nonsense, jumped up and hollered, “Objection, your honor! One brick. It was one brick!”

I’ve started new tablets. Rhonda is up front this time, like it should be. I wish I could talk to her. I have to make up some of her minor details. As it happens, my old tablets are contraband in Huntsville. Inflammatory, or some such bullshit. They are classified as evidence in my appeal, though. So I get to peruse selected passages when Steve comes to visit. They were unsophisticated dribble for the most part anyway.

My new concrete block enclosure is considerably cleaner than my old one, and only marginally smaller. No kitchenette, but a shiny silver crapper on the back wall. And hey, the door locks. My new cellmate, Byron, is more agreeable than Chloe, and bathes more regularly. Also, he studies law. He already knows more than Steve. He saw that I was writing in my tablet from the second day, and wisely admonished me to mail two or three pages at a time to somebody I trust on the outside. Tell them to hold on to it, he said. Otherwise, when I get out, if I try to publish something I’ve written inside, they’ll hit me with some variation of the Son of Sam legislation prohibiting me from profiting off my criminal notoriety. Byron thinks it’s 18 U.S.C. § 3681.

Byron said also, to help my cause when the screeching gryphon descends to sue me, I should write under a pseudonym and change the name of all the people, especially my wife. I do this. I write three pages and mail them to my mom. I told her on the phone to just stack the envelopes up and keep them safe for me. I’ll need them in about seventeen years. She said, ‘Oh, darlin’ and agreed to do it.

§ § §

Marc Phillips is from Texas. He writes fiction and essays..

This piece was first published in INK POT #2 - 2003, a literary journal.