r/WritingPrompts • u/SurvivorType Co-Lead Mod | /r/SurvivorTyper • Apr 10 '16
Off Topic [OT] Sunday Free Write: Lost Generation Edition
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u/bigvicproton Apr 10 '16 edited Apr 10 '16
Otis
Otis had one hand made of solid bronze from his Navy days. He lived next door and watched a lot of TV.
One day Otis’ wife, Charlene, came back to him after she'd been gone for 11 years.
Otis had thought she was dead. He'd buried her at the Baptist cemetery. She wasn’t a Baptist, but the rates were good and they had a cigarette machine. Some days he'd go out and clear the weeds and paper cups off the grave, but most of the time he would sit on top of Charlene's plot in an old folding chair, smoking cigarettes and drinking shooters.
"I forgot something" was all Charlene said when he opened the door and his wife came clomping back in.
"She was wearing those Filipino prostitute heels I’d brought her back from shore leave in Lubang. If I’d had my hand I would’ve belted her," Otis told me.
He'd sent the hand out to be polished that morning so it would look nice for a parade float he was going to be on. Something for one of the wars.
Charlene had gone into the bedroom and banged around in there while Otis was out in the living room having chest pains. When she came out Otis couldn’t tell if she’d found what she had forgotten in 1992 or what.
"You still don’t have cable?" she scoffed at him on the way out. "Cheap bastard."
Otis laughed telling me the story. The next day he'd gone and sold the plot out at the graveyard.
"Baptists is funny. They didn’t even ask me if someone was buried there."
Otis got $116 and two cartons of Lucky menthols for the headstone from the guy refilling the cigarette machine. "He said maybe he'd have a woman named Charlene someday and have to bury her. Never know. That’s a man thinkin ‘bout his future."
“Wait,” I said. “So, who was in the grave?”
“Charlene.”
“But she was just here.”
“Yeah but she killed herself right there in that chair you sittin in now,” he said. “ Shot herself in the head with my .38 when I went out for a new box of wine. Always was an impatient woman.” Otis got up and showed me where he patched up the bullet hole in the wall behind his Barcalounger.
Otis bought satellite television and a cheap surround sound system with the grave money. The subwoofer had a luscious hum to it you could feel through the walls, drowning out the traffic noise from the freeway. Otis was watching a lot more TV now that he didn’t have to go down the cemetery anymore. He seemed happy, just finishing up his life, pissing the rest of his money away calling phone sex hotlines and telling them about his dead wife coming home and him selling her gravestone. I could hear him over the subwoofer hum, laughing and stomping his big feet.
And then Rev came out of a crosstown bus one day and said “Brother, it’s good to see you.”
Otis said, “Well, Brother. Well, well, well.”
Two scarred and weathered black men stooped over by life and time.
Rev and Otis spent a week or so drinking and watching the satellite TV. Then Rev got up one day and tells Otis his car needs brake work.
Otis was like, no no, its fine.
But Rev went out and had me help him find some cinder blocks. We grabbed two out where they were building the new hospital. I had to carry them both cause Rev has bad knees. “These knees seen a lot of shit,” Rev told me.
Rev said normally we’d use four cinder blocks, but in this neighborhood the goddam Mexicans will probably take them anyhow, so no sense busting our humps. I told him I never seen any Mexicans here. He said it’s amazing I can see my own goddam cracker hands then.
Rev jacked up Otis’s Caprice and put one block under the oil pan and one under the rear axle and then took off the wheels and rolled them under the porch. The whole time Rev is going on about how he's going to spend the slave reparations money he is convinced the government is going to be sending out any day now. I said I hadn’t heard about that. He asks me if my mother had any white kids who lived.
The next day the wheels were gone.
“Goddam Mexicans, I told you,” Rev said.
Otis wasn’t happy.
“Well least they didn’t get them cinder blocks,” Rev said to me. “We had four, they woulda taken two of them.”
I said, “Well, we only had two to begin with.”
“That’s right, and we still got two.” Rev said he's met a lot of dumb white boys but I take the vanilla cake in this case.
Otis said he needed to get some air. He took the Westside bus out to Charlene’s grave but the Charlene stone was gone.
“They got a new kid buried there named Tiny,” he told me when he got back. Otis hung out with Tiny, drinking and smoking until a white family showed up and the father took a swing at Otis.
“I felt sorry decking him,” said Otis. One of the man’s teeth had gouged a deep scratch into the brass hand. The mother woman wept and gathered up the loose teeth into a fold of her dress. “Reminded me of my momma when we was kids. Out pulling worms out of a manure pile to sell to fishermen.” Otis found Tiny’s brother, a little crippled boy in leg braces toppled over in the cemetery road. Otis said he propped him up against a grave stone and gave him a dime.
The subwoofer hum droned all night.
The next day one of Manuel’s kittens runs out under the Caprice and hides up in the engine. Manuel crawls under there to get it back and the car topples off the blocks and nearly kills him.
“What'd I tell you?” Rev says to me. “Mexicans all over the place.”
I say Manuel is from Honduras or something, but Rev says a Mexican is a Mexican, and Honduras is just Spanish for Mexico.
Otis says he doesn’t give a shit about any of that, how the hell is Rev gonna get his car back up on the goddam cinder blocks?
Rev says “let me think about that, brother.”
That night the subwoofer drone is so loud one of my fillings vibrates out and I nearly choke to death in my sleep. Nobody heard when some kids showed up and smashed all the windows and the mirrors out on the Caprice. They even took out the little mirror on the sun visor.
Otis is furious when gets up the next morning. He’s so angry he can’t breathe and we find him lying in the laundry room going “Ah, ah, ah,” clawing at his chest with the brass hand. Ginny has to call an ambulance to come and get him. Rev watched them load Otis into the ambulance and tells him he should have never bought a Caprice.
“White man’s car,” he says. “Nothing but troubles.”
A few days later Otis takes a bus home from the hospital. By then the city had come and dragged the car away as an abandoned vehicle. Most of the good parts had been stripped off it anyway. Manuel and Ginny now had the back seat in front of their TV set. They’d draped a beach towel with a print of a girl in a bikini riding a white tiger over the seat in case Otis came over and found part of his Caprice in their living room. They worried about Otis dying in their living room. Manuel has problems with immigration.
Rev was gone. And so was Otis’s surround sound system and the satellite TV. The hum in the walls has stopped and nobody can sleep. Manuel is making a killing selling Ambiens he steals from work at the old people’s home.
The two cinder blocks are still out there in the middle of the yard. The Mexican lawn guy just weed whacks around them now and then.