of God, so that makes hate an’ stupidity an’ general pissiness okay, right?
Fuckin’ asswipes. They preach love an’ understandin’, but you take one fuckin’ step that’s wrong an’ you’re marked for life in their eyes. You want any help from ‘em? You gotta be what they want you to be. You gotta change into what they think is right. You gotta live how they tell you to fuckin’ live. An’ if you don’t? Just try an’ get ‘em to turn one fuckin’ hand for you. “I may be a Christian, but I do not believe it when Jesus tells me to love my neighbor as myself.”
Yeah, I know the Bible. Some of it. That fuckin’ priest that’d come by County thought he was gonna make me into one of his boys. Not like that, but as “a soldier in God’s army,” was how he put it. We’d sit together in his office twice a week, chattin’ about life an’ the meanin’ of God an’ how I got so off track an’ all that shit. He’d quote verses an’ tell me where they were in the Bible. He even gave me a small one so I could look ‘em up. An’ I did start lookin’ through it, more an’ more, tryin’ to figure out what the hell’d gone wrong with my life. Wonderin’ if maybe there was an answer in those tremblin’ little pages.
Now I gotta be honest -- I was goin’ there at first ‘cause it gave me a breather from dealin’ with all the shit you got in jail. Even a dinky assed county joint. Dumbshits tryin’ to prove who’s got th’ biggest cock on a twenty-four-seven basis. Takin’ letters an’ pictures an’ socks from guys that’re weaker than them. I mean, it’s pathetic, rippin’ off somebody’s fuckin’ toothpaste to prove you’re a man. Some guys had cigs stashed away, or bottles of whiskey or bits of chemicals, an’ they’d swap ‘em for protection. Or drugs. An’ sometimes a bunch of the “big dick” boys’d gang up on a new kid, wrap him in a blanket an’ fuck him, like hidin’ him made it more like they were fuckin’ a girl. Stupid. An’ me, I was sick of it. Sick of fightin’ the little fucks off all the time when they wanted my shit, even after Paco. Sick of gettin’ into noise-fights over if I gave one of ‘em a dirty look or not. Sick of always havin’ to watch my back in case some “big dick” who didn’t believe the shit spread about me decided he wanted to make me back into his new mouth. That’s why I never missed Father Tello’s little meetin’s.
He was all about readin’ the Gospels an’ followin’ in the teachin’s of Christ an’ all that. So that’s what I read. An’ what’s really funny is, for about ten minutes I sort of believed in it. Matthew, verses five through seven. Sermon on the Mount, he called it. All the stuff about not judgin’ others an’ lovin’ thy neighbor an’ doin’ unto others like you want them to do to you. An’ I’m thinkin’, Shit, I wish I’d been told about this shit. It was somethin’ to live by, a guidebook for a kid who was tryin’ to figure life out on his own an’ doin’ a pretty fucked up job of it.
Y’see, my mom...well, let’s face it -- she was a slut who’d do anything for a drink, though she’d never admit to that now. She’s all married an’ respectable an’ born-again into the middle class with two daughters that’re honest kids, not fatherless bastards like me an’ my brother. She really said that to me, once, leadin’ up to tellin’ me how I’m the bastard she didn’t want to have. But since she lived in this dinky-assed town in Wyoming an’ the guy who usually did her abortions’d been slammed into jail an’ the nearest legal clinic was in fuckin’ Denver, I got born. Considerin’ how I “turned out,” she felt it was too bad she couldn’t make it to Denver.
Y’know, we spent more’n six years in that stinkin’ hell-hole of a Wyoming town. With my mom turnin’ tricks at the truck stop
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