Don't Shoot Me, I'm Just The Meter Reader! - Jonathan Logan (read me a book .txt) 📗

been looking for a different roommate. I tended to be on the neat side, and I liked it to be quiet, but I had no choice in the matter. As the cell door shut behind me, I pitched my pad and blanket on the upper bunk, and then I sat down on the plastic chair pushed up against the far wall.
“The name’s Brandon Moon. I got sixty-four days left,” my cellmate enlightened me, as he snapped his jumpsuit closed, and pulled a couple of candy bars from under his mattress pad. “I tried to snuff my ex-wife, cap her ass, but the damn gun jammed, and...” He held out one of the candy bars and asked me if I wanted one, and I politely shook my head no. He opened the candy wrapper and heaved the chocolate into his mouth, mumbling about how he traded another inmate a bag of chips for it.
I broadly opened my eyes.
“What’re you in for?” he garbled.
“A probation violation,” I responded. “I didn’t know you could get chocolate and chips in jail,” I changed the subject.
“Oh, yeah,” Brandon assured me, “somebody on the outside puts money in your account, and then you can make phone calls; once a week, you can order shit from the commissary, or canteen, as they call it: chocolate, chips, coffee, paper, and pencil…”
“Paper and pencil, really?” I questioned.
He nodded and hunched down. He yanked a laundry bag out from under his bunk, unknotted the drawstring, and removed a note pad and a pencil. “You can have them if you want,” he declared. “I was going to write to my sweetie, but she ain’t my sweetie no more, since she’s been knocking boots with my twin brother, Tyler.”
I accepted the paper and pencil, and I thanked him.
“I guess I can’t blame her: me being in here for six months, “he continued, “not able to bang her when she needs it. I guess no single woman should be expected to wait for a man.”
As he slipped the laundry bag back under the bunk, I tried to think of something profound to say, but I could only stare at the snake tattoo on his arm. “That’s an incredible tattoo. I always wanted to get one, but I was afraid of the pain.”
“I’m having the freaking thing removed when I get out of here!” he coughed, stretching out on his bunk. “I only got it because that asshole cum dumpster said it was her symbol on the Chinese calendar.”
Once again, I was at a loss for words. I adjusted myself in the chair, arranged the paper on my lap, and wrote my name at the top of the first page.
“Do you have a wife or sweetie to write to,” Brandon blurted out.
“Nope—not really,” I informed him.
“Either you do or you don’t, Brah,” Brandon disputed, “there ain’t no not really when it comes to chicks.”
“I’m married,” I confessed, self-consciously. “She’s—uh—having sex with her lover, in our house, and our bed.”
“That’s fucked up, Brah!” Brandon admonished me. “If the two of you are hitched, she shouldn’t be boinking another man, even if you are in jail. Hell—my sister’s husband was in Iraq for six months and she waited for him to come home; she didn’t screw around on him.”
“Your sister is the kind of woman I’d like to meet, a good and faithful woman. Anyway, that’s why I was planning to write my story. Writing an account of all the foolish decisions I’ve made in my life.”
“I love stories,” Brandon exclaimed. “My mother used to read to me when I was a kid. I wish I could read better, but I was never good at it.”
I exhaled noisily and massaged a dull pain at my left temple. “I’d tell you my story but it’s long and boring.”
“I’m here for sixty-four days,” Brandon chuckled. “What’s more boring than staring at a fucking fly on a ceiling all day?”
“I’m not real sure,” I came back with.
“You never did tell me what you did to get arrested,” he let me know, “or how much time you have to do.”
“Well,” I began, “perhaps I should tell you the whole story, from the beginning. To begin with, my name is Jonathan Logan, I assaulted my sixteen-year-old son—defended myself, really, from one of his many tirades—and I’ll be here for ten days.”


Chapter Two


Most of the crap that got me into my present quandary started happening in the summer of 1996, when I moved from Hollywood to the Antelope Valley. The Antelope Valley is a part of Los Angeles County, but it’s in the high desert, about forty miles north of Hollywood. Many people think that Southern California is all palm trees, beaches, and girls in bikinis, but that’s because they’re foolish enough to believe all that media propaganda. If all you do is watch television and movies, you’re prone to think that everybody in Los Angeles lives in a mansion and drives an expensive car, but that’s ridiculous: the average person there is as destitute and depressed as in any other place, maybe more so. When I was single and a starving writer, I lived in an apartment on Odin Street, not too far from the Hollywood Bowl, but after I got married and had two kids, I moved into a house on Avenue F in Lancaster, close to the waste management plant. I didn’t decide to purchase a house in the desert because I treasured its putrid air, its dull and lifeless landscape; I bought a house there because I could afford the mortgage. I called Southern California home, but make no mistake about it, there were no beaches, surfers, and bathing beauties in Lancaster—there was no water, either—this was the desert; it was as desiccated and sweltering as the inside of an Egyptian tomb, and every bit as damned depressing.
In any case, just like every other weekday morning, I kissed the wife and kids, and then I parked myself behind the wheel of a Ford Ranger and set out for the forty-mile drive to work. They called it commuting, but they should’ve called it dawdling. The drive to and from Los Angeles wore on me a little bit (does anyone get pleasure from parking themselves in bumper-to-bumper traffic for five hours out of the day?) The only thing worse than driving on the freeway at rush hour, was standing in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles. Not only were the lines despicably slow at the DMV, but also the workers there were assholes; but that was a whole other story.
If there was anything redeeming about driving to work in gridlock, it was that you could brush up on your people watching, and, believe me; you could watch many fascinating people on the Los Angeles freeway system. For example, I once saw a lawyer, he had a dressmaker's dummy clothed like an old woman sitting next to him. The dummy was there to dupe the police into thinking there were two people in the car so that he could drive in the carpool lane. I knew he was a lawyer because he was dressed in a blue suit, he pressed a cell phone to his ear, and he had the letters I-SUE on his license plate. Then there was Lacey, the wannabe actor, smiling and waving at me. I knew Lacey from the commute to work; we both stopped to get gas one morning and struck up a conversation. She worked as a waiter during the day and a stripper at night. I told her I was a writer, and that I would give her a part in a movie if I ever got one of my twenty screenplays produced. I don’t know if she was a good actor, but she had a magnificent smile and a fantastic body. I enjoyed gawking at her. There were many things to gawk at in Southern California: repetitive, never-ending boulevards of taco stands, the occasional billboard advertising soon-to-be-released motion pictures, the brown veil of foul-smelling smog, graffiti-covered walls, and loads and loads of sexy women. I was a devoted husband—I had never cheated on any of my four wives—but I did daydream about other women; and on that day, I was daydreaming that Lacey was getting out of her car and disrobing seductively. Then the bastard behind me tooted their car horn, and I snapped out of my daydream. I considered giving the horn-blower behind me the finger, but thought twice about it after realizing it was another sexy woman. Besides, the traffic was moving and I wasn’t.
On that exact day—which I believe was a Monday, but don’t hold me to it—I was not only on my way to work, but I was on my way to receive a commendation from then Mayor Richard Riordan. I knew that the mayor didn’t really give a shit that I worked three years without taking a sick day, but in order to make himself look good, his consultants persuaded him to shake my hand and take a picture with me. It wasn’t as if I was going to run into the mayor in five years and have him hug me and wax poetic about the good old days when he was mayor and I was winning commendations for working three years straight without missing a day, but it was something I could tell my kids about. Well, the mayor didn’t show; he was stuck in traffic somewhere, and I had to receive my commendation and shake hands with Myron Alonzo Smith, the office supervisor; he was a Waxican (White, Black, and Mexican). Myron had thirty years on the job, and, at sixty-four, was just six months away from retirement and death: Myron had emphysema and diabetes; the doctors gave him no chance of surviving. With my commendation in his hand, Myron wandered unevenly toward me, halting briefly to wipe his forehead with a hankie.
“The mayor wanted me to tell you how upset he is for not being here,” Myron panted and wheezed.
I knew that was a bunch of rhetorical bullshit, but I didn’t let it bother me; I just chalked it up to more bad timing and bad luck. Timing was everything; it was the main difference between good and bad comedy, getting the girl and not getting the girl, being a success and being a failure, or living a dull life and living a glamorous life. I was content just to accept the commendation from Myron; he had worked my job as a young man, and he knew how hard I labored to achieve it.
Anyway, it was a beautiful summer morning, and I was soon on the van with my co-workers, heading out to read electric and water meters on the streets of Los Angeles. Although the temperature was pleasant at that hour, the weatherman said it was ultimately going to get hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk, so all of us except Stanley Barnes were wearing shorts and shirtsleeves. Stanley looked out of place in his trousers, jacket, wool cap, and mittens, but he explained that he had to read the meters in an ice factory, and he was tired of freezing his nuts off. I guess I knew what he was talking about because I had to read the meters in a large laundry plant, and it was hotter than Satan’s ball sack in there.