Originally published in Verbicide issue #17

When the guy in the blue jeans and an army jacket walked into the lobby I was half-turned away from the front door, so I didn’t see his left side; I didn’t see his eye patch and that hook/pincher contraption.

What? Oh, he got that in the war.

Which war? That’s funny. You know which war. The one over in Iraq — the second one.

What? The war ended in 2003? Says who?

He went into Tony’s office and then Tony called me over and told me to sit in on the interview; he said, “This one looks interesting.”

And then when I went into his office and sat down, I saw the guy’s face, that wicked scar, and that hook. And I sort of knew what Tony meant, but, I don’t know, I got a bad feeling from the guy right away. A heavy vibe, like he wasn’t there to fool around. He seemed very, very serious.

Yeah, I guess that’s true. He was serious, wasn’t he?

Tony broke the ice. He’s a pro. He knows how to talk to people; you should see him with the girls. It’s amazing. They come in there looking for modeling work, or better yet, already wanting to be an actress!

What? Yeah, okay. Sorry. The guy in the army jacket, yeah…

Tony said, “What can I do for you?”

And the guy said, “I’ve seen your site.”

And Tony just sort of nodded, and the guy said, “Pretty extreme.”

Right away, as soon as he said that, I knew he was going to be trouble. It happens a lot. More than you’d think…but never that bad.

And Tony must not have picked up on it because he said, “We aim to please.” He said it like the guy was going to laugh but the guy was like a block of wood. He was cold as ice, man. Serious. It took a long time in between the time Tony would say something for the guy to say anything back. It was weird. I think Tony thought it was funny, at first.

There was this long, long silence. Tony looked at me from the corner of his eye and sort of winked at me. I didn’t do anything. I tried to pretend like I didn’t see. The guy in the army jacket was looking all over the office, craning his head to let that one good eye take in his surroundings. I could tell he had been a soldier just by the way he carried himself. I’ve got a cousin in the Marines; he’s in Afghanistan right now…

Yeah, sorry, didn’t mean to be getting off track like that.

So, finally the guy says, “I have a big dick.”

Just like that. He was looking at Tony like Tony was supposed to break out the champagne, or something. Tony laughed, right out loud, in the guy’s face. Tony looked at me but I was trying to pretend I wasn’t even there, you know? I don’t go for fucking with guys who’ve been crippled, know what I mean? That ain’t my thing. I don’t make fun of fat people, retards, nobody.

So Tony says, “What?”

He says, “What, you?”

And the guy says, real calm, “Yeah, why not me?”

And Tony just pointed at the dude’s face. That nasty scar all down the left side and that eye patch.

And the guy says, again, super-calm, like he was holding in all this energy, this anger: “You never see the guys’ faces.”

You know, Tony had to admit to the guy that he was right! The dude wasn’t lying; you never see the guys’ faces. Just their big dicks choking girls until they puke.

But Tony just pointed to the dude’s hook. He pointed to the guy’s left hand, what do you call those thingies?

A prosthetic device? Wow, that sounds heavy. I saw something on the Discovery Channel about slick high-tech rubber hands that could pick shit up and do all sorts of things; they were for Gulf War vets. I wonder why he didn’t have something like that?

What? Oh, yeah, well, Tony was getting tired of this guy. I mean, this all sounds like it happened fast but this part took forever. There were these long, weird silent stares from this guy, and Tony said something sarcastic like, “There’s specialty sites for that sort of thing.”

And it was weird because I think I coughed or something right then because I remember very clearly that when Tony said “specialty sites” the guy suddenly spun around and stared at me, real hard. It was like he was just realizing that I was in the room, too, and it startled him. He looked pissed.

And Tony asked him, “Where did you get those scars, not from eating pussy?”

He was trying to use that line from the movie Scarface. Tony was always quoting movies and shit, that was his thing. The guy swung back around from looking at me to face Tony, and — after staring at Tony for what felt like five minutes — he said, “Iraq.” That’s all, just one word. He said “Iraq,” like that was supposed to explain everything.

Yeah, I guess it does. I don’t know. I ain’t ever been through a war. Except what happened that day. I guess that was like a war.

I think Tony was starting to feel bad for fucking with this guy. At first I think he thought the dude was some street person or something, but after he found out the dude had been in the war and everything, he tried to mellow out. He asked the guy, “Was it pretty bad over there?”

And the dude answered right away that time. He held up his hooks and said, in this weird, choked sort of voice, “No, it was like Disneyland.”

And Tony was real uncomfortable, I could tell. He was trying to cover it up by being funny, but it wasn’t working. He said, “ Well, uh, thanks for helping to make the world safe for eight-cylinder engines but we can’t use you, no matter how big your pecker is, sorry.”

Yeah, he even said he was sorry.

The dude in the blue jeans and the army jacket just sat there. Tony looked at me and sort of made this gesture like, what can I do? And then he looked at the guy and then he sat back. Tony sat way back in his chair and gave the dude a real long look of his own.

Something lit up behind Tony’s eyes and he said, “Oh I get it.” He’d finally figured out what the guy was really doing there.

Tony said, “You’re surfing the net and see your sweetie pie paying the bills with her poontang while you’re off bringing freedom and democracy to the diaper-heads, right?”

Like I said earlier, it happens all the time. Really. We weren’t hiding. We weren’t doing anything illegal. We weren’t doing anything wrong at all.

Tony was getting angry, I could tell. He started really getting snide. He started sneering at this guy, “So now you come home and you’re feeling a little inadequate, a little angry and upset and confused.”

Then Tony leaned forward and put his hand on the desktop, near his telephone.

He nodded at the phone so the guy could see it and he said, “You think you’re the first jealous boyfriend to come in here looking for trouble?”

Tony showed him the red panic button. He should’ve pushed it but I guess he underestimated the guy. I mean, really, who would think to be intimidated by some guy who is about five foot ten, couldn’t weigh more than 150 or 160 pounds sopping wet, and who’s got one eye and his left hand missing!

Tony showed him the panic switch and said, “I push this button and a crew of Samoans will be in here to take you apart.”

Which was bullshit, of course. I mean, yeah, we had Tom and Minnesota Dan and Henry Hank Henry, but they were from Wisconsin or someplace. They weren’t Samoan. But they were big motherfuckers. Not that it did them much good.

So, anyways, Tony told him, “If I push this button a whole crew of Samoans will be in here to take you apart.”

And I think what he said next got him killed, or maybe the guy was always planning on going off on everybody like that, I don’t know. But Tony, Mr. Smart-Ass, said, “A crew of Samoans will be in here to take you apart—” and he looked at the guy and smirked and said, “What’s left of you.”

And the guy swooped with his hooky-thing and slammed it down on top of Tony’s hand. The cops said he sharpened them on a grinder or something; they’re not supposed to be sharp and pointy like that.

Well, that dude moved fast, it was the scariest goddamned thing I have ever seen or ever hope to see, I swear to fuckin’ god. He slammed that hook into Tony’s hand and it stuck it clear through, pinned it to the desktop and he was screaming and blood was squirting and I was in shock — it all happened so fast! And the next thing I knew the dude stood up and with his right hand he went into his coat and he had a gun and he put it right in Tony’s cheek and blew his fuckin’ teeth out through the back of his head.

I was heading for the door when he shot me. He shot me right here, look, right in my side here, right below my armpit. The doctors told me if he’d been a little lower he would’ve got me in the liver and I probably would’ve died.

What did it feel like? It hurt. Really fuckin’ bad.

I went down, right in the doorway, and I stayed there. My lung was filling up with blood and I was coughing blood all over the place. The sound of the shots brought Tom and Dan and Triple Hank, that’s what we called him, and from my position on the floor I saw some of what happened next.

Do I what? Do I have dreams about it?

Yeah. Yeah, I have nightmares about it. A lot.

So I saw Minnesota Dan come through the door at the end of the hallway and he was yelling, “What the fuck is going on?” and I could hear Cheri our secretary somewhere screaming at the top of her lungs — I couldn’t see her but I could hear her screaming her head off. That crazy fucker came out the office door and he tried to shoot me again as he went past me. Can you believe that? Luckily he was moving pretty fast and I was on his left side, but he squeezed a shot at me, almost casually, as he was going through the door. He just missed my fuckin’ head!

I was going into shock by then and I watched as Dan went down. It’s weird but I never heard that shot, the one that killed him. The cops said it was probably because of when the dude shot at me — my ears were still ringing from that.

Tom had been a college wrestling champ, and he got that one-eyed bastard in a pretty good headlock and they went down. I didn’t see this part, but either Tom got the dude’s gun away from him and shot him in the leg, or when they were struggling for the gun it went off, and it blew the dudes kneecap off! But here’s the freakiest thing: the dude’s leg was already practically nothing but metal anyway, so it really didn’t faze him! He was like the bionic man or Frankenstein or something! By that point the guy was on autopilot. He was gone; he was out there, insane. I’ve never seen anything like it.

What? A war hero? I never heard that. I knew he’d been blown apart by a suicide bomber, but I didn’t figure that made him a hero. They’re blowing people up every day over there. I see it on Yahoo News all the time…

What, oh, oh yeah. Okay, well…I heard the shot that blew the guy’s knee apart and I sort of twisted over so I could see down the hallway better. I wish I hadn’t, because as I rolled over I saw the guy swing his left arm and bury those hooks in Tom’s throat. And I saw the look in Tom’s eyes. It was like, what, this can’t be happening! His eyes bulged and then that fucking psycho yanked and tore Tom’s throat out. It was like someone took a can of red spray paint and held the button down, blood sprayed everywhere! The one-eyed guy was covered in it.

Triple Hank was coming down the hall and he had something in his fist. I couldn’t see what it was. But the dude had found his gun and I saw him raise his arm — he was still on the floor, tangled up with Dan and Tom’s bodies — and he fired, I think, three times. The first shot must’ve missed because Triple Hank tackled him, and I think it was then, right as they first struggled, that Triple Hank stabbed the dude in the neck with the pencil. Then he got shot, first in his big belly and then in the heart, which killed him deader than shit, instantly.

Cheri was still screaming like she was being skinned alive. I don’t know why she didn’t get the hell outta there — like I said, it all seemed to happen so fast, I’m sure she was in shock, like everybody else. But she should’ve gotten out when she had the chance. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw that fucking psycho trying to get up. I mean, there he was; he’d already been blown up in Iraq and now he had no left kneecap, and as soon as he got to his feet — shaky, sure, but he was standing up — he started staggering down the hallway, and I could see the pencil jammed through his neck. It was horrible. He was already covered in blood, but the blood that was coming out of his neck, around that number two pencil, that blood looked different — darker and thicker.

Like I said, I have nightmares about it. Still.

I see that demented asshole staggering down the hallway with blood bubbling out of his mouth, making an awful slurping, choking sound. I hear him shoot Cheri. They say he shot her four times! I guess he had more than one gun. That’s what the cops said, they found two guns, anyway, and nobody at our place packs heat. I guess we should’ve, eh? Maybe we could’ve shot back.

I heard him shoot Cheri, she stopped screaming. Then it got quiet, finally.

Yeah, so I’m the only survivor of the “internet porn massacre.” Soon to be the star witness at the trial. They say this trial is going to be a landmark case. Obscenity, Free Speech, Post Traumatic Delayed Stress Syndrome, all that. I don’t really give a shit about any of that. I mean, my boss is dead, my coworkers are dead. I’ve got some fucking post traumatic stress myself, goddamnit! Know what I mean? I mean what the fuck was that guy trippin’ about? And how in the hell did he manage to survive?
—
Raegan Butcher is the author of Stone Hotel: Poems From Prison and Rusty String Quartet. He eats matchsticks and light bulbs for a living and he is the best at his trade.