California Super Short Stories

Chuckles and Full Pint sat around their shared record player, playing the game they played most nights, drinking cheap beer and listening to cheap records. The rules of the game were easy. Pick one half of a LP or a full 45, and then it was the next guy’s turn. They were currently half way through Chuckle’s pick of side-one of Lou Reed’s Rock n’ Roll Animal.

Punk nicknames were acquired in one of two fashions, either you were so cool you got something great, or, like most, you stumbled into one through unfortunate life choices. Neither Chuckles or Full Pint were that cool.

Full Pint’s real name was Jason Vala, but after a five-day bender of cocaine and Little House on the Prairie he demanded to be called Half Pint; the name of some girl in the show. After a few years of beer and fast food, the once skinny punk had ballooned to 260 and his once demanded nickname of Half Pint was ballooned to Full Pint.

Chuckles’ case was less in-depth. Originally named Charles Dearth, an evening of laughing fits thanks to huffing nitrous oxide and computer cleaner had forever deemed him Chuckles, and possibly borderline retarded.

The pair lived in a seedy part of downtown Oakland, in an apartment on a corner above a Japanese ramen house. The apartment was constantly engulfed in the smell of boiling noodles and pork belly, something both craved and neither could afford.

The apartment gave them a good vantage point of their corner. They could see everybody coming and going. They could see if friends were bumming around, or getting off the bus at the corner stop, or if there was some creditor out there, someone dumb enough to have lent them money.

If I ride hard and I ride through the night, I’ll reach Barstow by morning.

And there,

There, I’m gonna kill me a man.

Don’t know the guy. Never met him. Never had any hatred for him neither. All I have is his first name, an address, a list of things I’m supposed to say when I kill him.

Every week it’s the same thing. One name, one address, one list of things I forget as soon as I’ve read it to the poor sucker on the wrong end of my twelve gauge. Sometimes the name is someone just a few miles down the road, sometimes halfway across the country. Sometimes the name I get belongs to a girl, sometimes to a little kid, but most of them, most of the names I get are men, mid-thirties or forties, balding, in business or accounting, a job that puts their dirty hands in contact with a lot of easy money.

All of them have one thing in common.

All of them are sick.

She had been walking ceaselessly on the Camino Real, the day stretching past the road under her feet. The sky was a clear, bright, blue that promised to cover her for as long as she walked. Sounds came and went as she focused on different groups of scrub brush and rocks. She was tired but in a distracted sort of way. Her chest, right above her left breast ached. She stared at her Doc Martins as she walked down the cobblestones connecting the Spanish Missions of California. Rhythmically the cobblestones asked her who she was, and where she was going. She didn’t know.

“Where does this road lead?” she asked, matching the rhythm. “What cities lie ahead?”

“None,” answered the stones. “Only the Missions lie on this road.”

She rubbed at the pain in her chest. It felt like there was something inside of her, something hard and hot. A small sob escaped her lips but she looked down at her feet, and kept walking.

When she next looked up, she saw a Mission in the closing distance. The sounds of the wilderness stopped as she stepped through the gate of the outer wall. The sun shone down upon the courtyard from an interminable mid-day point. The shadows were small and weak, barely daring to step beyond their roots. She turned to the left and entered the main building.

“Fuck you,” Brian said under his breath as he slapped his palm against his forehead, killing the mosquito that had just bit him. “Mother fucking skeeters. You may have tasted my blood bitch, but you’re dead now!” The afternoon was turning into evening and all the bugs were coming out to play.

Brian sat outside of the service station he worked at, waiting for his shift to end. A fucking dead-end job in a fucking dead-end shithole, off a fucking nearly forgotten highway, in the middle of the fucking California desert.

People think of California in all sorts of ways. Stereotypes about hippies, liberals, homosexuals, and other “fruits and nuts” of the counter-culture; or Silicon Valley tech geeks; or Hollywood greed and glamour; or endless summer days and beaches filled with beautiful people. The truth is that the majority of the central part of the state is like something out of a David Lynch film—a really boring David Lynch film.