Saturday's Storyteller: "He explained it to me quietly. 'There comes a time in everyone's life when they need their asses kicked, just to keep the wheels turning.' That explained his business card."

by Belinda Roddie

He explained it to me quietly. "There comes a time in everyone's life when they need their asses kicked, just to keep the wheels turning." That explained his business card.

It was two thirty in the morning by the time we sat down in the cheap twenty-four hour diner, where he had agreed to meet up with me. As I chowed down on pseudo-Belgian waffles, he stirred a cup of coffee that seemed so corrosive that I imagined it could chew away at the tiles embedded in the walls if poured onto them. He didn't drink it. For obvious reasons.

"So what do you want me to say?" I asked with a bemused half-shrug. "You need an ass to kick?"

"No," he said. "I figured you did."

"Not anyone I can think of off the top of my head."

"Oh, c'mon, kiddo." He began dumping processed "sugar" into his mug as he spoke, the concoction gaining the color and potentially the texture of wet cement. "No one? Not even a family member, an ex-girlfriend, a fairweather friend...Hell, a co-worker who pissed you off?"

"I'm a very laid-back kind of person."

"I don't buy it," he muttered. "Not for one damn second. I've known you for how many years of my life, Mel? I've seen the way you've ticked since grade school. You wouldn't have decided to see me after so long if you didn't want a favor."

I bit my lip. "You do owe me."

He did owe me. High school had been a very bad time for him, in terms of the good old narcotics. He had been caught with crack cocaine in his pocket, and I had drafted up an unfathomably bizarre tale about how a drug dealer had forced him to take it and sell it or else his whole family would be shot down from their living room windows while they watched the local news. It turned out that a drug ring did indeed exist in town, and when they broke up the group, the cops very clearly thought I was telling the truth. Sometimes, certain things worked out for me in a faux ESP sort of fashion.

Noticing that I still had his card - now all folded up into the tiniest square I could muster - he swiped it from me and returned it to its former state, albeit wrinkled. He handed it back to me as if he had just gotten the idea of offering it, allowing me to scan the print again. It didn't say anything cinematically cheesy like "Mercenary" or "Diplomat." It said, "Conflict Mediator." And he wasn't talking about the middle school sit down at a table and let each other talk method.

"I'll give you a couple of days to mull it over," he said as he rose from his chair, the sludge untouched in his cup. "If I don't hear from you, I'm leaving town and you won't hear from me again."

"Wouldn't dream of disconnecting," I snidely remarked, but he was already halfway out the door, pushing past a sleepy-eyed trucker who had just meandered in for French toast and an orange juice for the road.

***

His name was Cooper Madison. My name was Melanie Ephraim. He and I were both gay as neon signs in Las Vegas, and we both knew how to do vengeance. Only lately, he had gotten a whole lot better at it than I had.

While he made a "profession" out of his and others' grudges, I found a way to stifle my emotions. Enacting revenge on folk who rubbed me a little more than the wrong way had finally started to get me into trouble, especially in my late twenties. In university, it had been tolerable - even considered jokes by people who didn't know any better. But now, with my attempting to hold down a full-time teaching job at the closest low-income school, it wasn't that simple.

I of course had my fair share of people I dealt my metaphorical cards with. It had started with a straight-up knock to the nearest cheekbone that usually turned into a muddy fist fight. I threw a punch better than most men I knew, and I had done my fair share of at least snapping cartilage. As I got older, it became more of a revelation tactic. As in I would attempt to expose people for who they really were, whether at their workplace, their classes, their homes, or even their warm little beds where they fucked someone who wasn't me.

Cooper and I had banded together due to one common interest: Retaliation. We both knew we were homosexual pretty damn quickly, and whenever someone of the same sex messed with us in high school, we had each other's backs. It wasn't until I found out that Cooper had poked holes into one boy's condom when he porked my first ex-girlfriend that I realized that he was a lot more serious about the strategy than I was. Or at least in the more severe degrees of it.

In the end, I had tried to let it go and Cooper hadn't. He had resorted to being a bit of a rogue spirit in terms of where he lived and what he did. Last I heard from a shared friend, he couldn't hold down a job for more than three months at a time until some revenge involving shit, blood, or real tears got in the way of the manager's stuffy routine. Given how long his hair was, I wondered if he could even afford a good barber. Or if he just didn't give a fuck about it.

Still, for those two days, I refused to call Cooper. Even as I carried through my typical classroom rituals with the twenty-five or so kids who didn't care, I didn't think about the possible targets I could direct him to. I thought I didn't want to, but in the end, it was hard to put my finger on what I was reluctant save for the fact that I didn't want to get caught or lose my job. His number lingered in my phone, and I never made a move to call it.

Oh, and the bitch never got pregnant. That made me feel somewhat better about telling him.

***

I heard a knock on my door before sunrise and knew that it was him. Not that I had been sleeping, anyway; it was a Saturday and I wasn't in the mood to waste time with wacky imagery bored into my subconscious with cerebral drill bits. Cooper greeted me in a long coat and boots, despite the fact that it was in the dead of August and the night had never ever cooled down.

"You never called me," he complained as I let him into my living room.

"I told you, there's no one I can think of."

"Work treating you well?" he asked, throwing his haggard frame onto my couch and reaching into his jean pocket for a squished pack of cigarettes.

I knew he was trying to rile me up, or at least get a name. I hovered around the doorway to my kitchen, never letting my eyes settle exactly on him. I focused on the television set instead, just a few feet away from his propped up feet.

"You gonna answer my question?"

"Get those dirty fucking shoes off my coffee table," I said.

He complied. "Just making sure no one's giving you a hard time."

I arched an eyebrow. "The kids are assholes, sure. But I'm not letting you hurt any of them."

"I wasn't asking about the students, you fucking numbskull. I was asking about the staff."

He lit a cigarette, but snuffed it out as soon as I shot him a glare that I had perfected in high school and never changed. It was known to even freeze up the principal whenever I was called in after an average brawl.

"Do they know you're queer?"

I had to stop myself from groaning. "Yes."

"And no one has a problem with it?" Cooper asked.

He had the skepticism laced right into each word, like a thread woven into a shirt seam. I chose not to pay further attention to it.

"Mel, you can try your damn hardest to act like you don't have a vendetta against anyone," he continued. "But as much as you act like you've changed, you can't change the color of an egg yolk. You can't make a steak a pork chop. You may have 'matured,' as you call it...but some habits aren't habits. They're just personality."

"Bullshit."

"You wanna know what I did to that last girl you told me about?" He seemed to revel in it. "Sara Somethingandersomethingson? Back in the summer of senior year, after you had headed off to your little college?"

I didn't want to hear it. I didn't want to hear any of it.

"Well, I let her see exactly what it's like to be us," Cooper pressed on. "To be exposed. To be presented under a glaring spotlight. To be scoured by the eyes of our peers."

I forced a grin. "What did you do, Cooper?"

He smirked wider than I ever could have. "I told them, honey," he simpered. "I told them in a letter. That she had fucked you. And she had liked it."

"You told her parents?"

"Yep."

"The ones who were super Christian?"

"Yep."

"The ones who said they'd rather have a dead daughter than a gay one?"

Cooper blinked. "Well, if you put it like that, you act like I'm the bad guy."

"Sara fucking hanged herself!"

The words erupted from my throat before I could even physically react in any other way. The response was a fierce banging on the adjacent wall. I took rapid steps toward Cooper and reached for his sleeve, but he scooted away.

"That's your cue to leave," I said.

"Don't act like you didn't feel some sort of vindication from it, Mel," snapped Cooper. "She fucked with you. She let you become vulnerable. Would you rather you'd have been in her spot?"

"I wouldn't have died," I snarled. "I can take care of myself."

"Yes," he hissed. "But not before getting literally fucked."

I aimed for his throat and got his shaggy hair instead. The peals of screams I received as I yanked on the locks flooded my sinuses with a crazy rush of adrenaline, and I tore in between the coffee table and the couch just to bring the man to the ground. As I let my knees rest against his chest, it dawned on me, just like the actual oncoming dawn, that Cooper wasn't shrieking in pain. He was shrieking with laughter.

"Nothing like a reminder of your near-rape to bring you back, huh, kiddo?"

"I will fucking murder you."

"Sorry, can't let you do that," Cooper giggled. "I've got clients."


With a deliberate effort, I pulled him up and pushed him toward the door. But even as he left, I knew he'd be back. And I knew that he had opened up a door that I had closed long ago. Because now I was thinking of names. Names of the boys who had tried to violate me. Names of their families. Names of those who had affected me badly at work.

But at the same time, a new name was getting to me, more so than the others. It rose up like bile in my throat. And it was different. This wasn't my addiction to vengeance coming back - this was my full-out desire to cut the cord once and for all and let the poetic drugs seep out of my veins.

I wouldn't let Cooper Madison hurt anyone.

Instead, I would hurt Cooper Madison.

This week's prompt was provided by Ray Nelson.