The morning I went to hell I was passed out drunk.
One moment I was lost in the sodden oblivion last night’s twelve-packs had bought, the next a whole passel of cops was rat-packing all over me in my bed, slamming me onto my face to shackle my wrists behind me before I could fight back.
The feel of cold steel snapping shut around my wrists made me relax, despite them ratcheting down tight enough to cut off the blood flow completely and hurt. I’d worn such bracelets more than a few times when I was a kid and the familiarity cut right through my alcoholic haze, made me stop any resistance.
I was wrenched to my feet and propelled out the master bedroom and down the hall, all of the cops shouting: at me, at one another, at the world. As I was staggered toward the front door (or what was left of it, for now it was no more than a shattered pile of wood dangling to the side off the bottom hinge) my son Sam stood mute by the TV holding one of his injection-molded plastic action figures.
Sam’s eyes were bright blue and wide, looking as fake as those painted on the toy dangling limp from his hand. His thumb was rammed up to the root in his mouth even though he was ten and no longer a baby at all. The TV was tuned to one of the cartoons he liked, the volume turned high so the show’s atonal music and manic sound effects blared loud and cutesy-bouncy.
Our eyes met as I was bum-rushed along by the cops. My eyes were bleary; I was dull-witted as a steer headed for the slaughter chute. Sam’s eyes were blank dull stones reflecting the shock unseating his little-boy world.
As they stumbled me out the front door my wife Angela stood in the kitchen with her knuckle in her mouth, biting down on it hard enough to draw blood. Her thick black hair wasn’t brushed and combed into the long shining raven’s wing I so loved to run my hands through; it was tangled and bedraggled, and spilling over her face.
Angela was short and petite. Now she looked shrunken as an abandoned doll, surrounded by all the appliances and furniture we’d bought to shield us from our former lives, from before we’d escaped up here to Stagger Bay. Some kind of message burned from her eyes past her bedraggled locks, but I was too drunk to decipher it as I somehow tripped off the porch and onto my face on the front walkway.
One of the cops accidentally ground his knee into my back for a while, and then they hoisted me into the air by wrenching me up by my hands cuffed behind my back before letting my toes touch ground, almost dislocating my shoulders in the process.
It was Cop City out in front of my house. It looked like the entire Stagger Bay Police Department had shown up to make the arrest. There were so many rollers that just the squawk off their radios would’ve activated my radar back in the day, even inside the house and asleep.
But I was years from the Life, doing my best pretending to be a stone cold Citizen now, and my street instincts were stunted and atrophied. And of course, I was still so drunk from last night’s carouse with my big brother Karl, my brain might as well have been cottage cheese.
All our neighbors were out on their front lawns to gawk at my plight, cookie cutter dolls in a cloned diorama of row houses extending as far as the eye could see down the street. They looked like masquerading demons at about that point; I’ll assume I was imbuing them with about as much humanity in my mentations as they were presently according me.
As I sat in the back of the squad car my bleary gaze lit on my new Ram pickup truck in the driveway, the over-sized black beast I was working double shifts on the loading docks to pay off. I looked at the trim and ship-shape little bungalow Angela and I had somehow scraped up the down payment for, the first and only house either of us had ever owned. Angela watched me from the kitchen window, her face a pale blur as the roller surged away from the curb.
I squirmed my butt around on that hard plastic bench of a seat. It was a suck-ass kind of a homecoming to be sitting in the back of a squad car again after so many years.
“What’s your PC?” I asked the cop chauffeuring me to the Slams, my voice still slurred from the drinkage. He stared straight ahead, giving me nothing more than the close-cropped back of his head to relate to.
“Shut your cake hole, baby killer,” he said. That’s when I had a sneaking suspicion I was royally fucked.