Without Remorse

Triangle steals a car.

Brute says this, then tosses me the Playstation controller. Already I'm starting to regret asking him to explain the controls to me.

We're all sitting in Matozzi's dorm room, stoned, watching Brute decapitate police officers with a chainsaw in between bong rips. When I tell him to teach me how to kill without restraint or remorse, he cracks up. "You'e joking, right?" he asks.

He waits for me to respond. I don't. I just look him in his bloodshot eyes.

The smile leaves his face.

"Oh, oh," he says. "You mean in the game." His stoner smirk comes back.

Sitting on the other side of me, Matozzi hits the bong, exhales, passes it back to Brute in silence. Brute flips me the controller before setting the bong on the table. As he packs fresh pot into the slide of the bong, without looking at me, he says, "Okay, I'll show you the basics."

My character, a man on the television screen that I can manipulate like a marionette, he' standing on a street corner after the cops he was slaughtering shot him down in a hail of gunfire. He's in one piece again, though he no longer has the chainsaw.

"The left-hand joystick controls your character's movement," Brute tells me. "Under your right thumb are four buttons. Each is marked with a geometric symbol."

I look down at the buttons, and he's right. One button has a square on it. One, an X. Another, a circle. And on the top button, a triangle.

"The X button," Brute says, "makes you run. Pressing square makes you jump. Press circle, and you will, punch, kick, shoot, stab, or commit some other act of violence. And triangle, triangle steals a car."

The way he says that last line, it's hard to forget. Since I'm high, I almost laugh.

Of course, Brute isn't Brute's real name. His birth certificate says he's Brent, I think. We call him Brute because Brent is a dipsomaniac. Dipsomania is a psychological craving for ethyl alcohol so intense it drives a person to consume anything that has alcohol present, regardless of whether or not the substance is fit for consumption.

Brent ran out of vodka the first night we moved into the dorm in Swiss Cottage. Brent ran out of vodka, so he took a whole bottle of Brut aftershave and drank it.

After that, he wasn't Brent anymore. Not to all of us.

Once our first day of classes was over, Brent put down two bottles of rubbing alcohol and was detained by campus security after they found him puking blood on the hall director's door.

Even for this offense, they still didn't kick him out of our campus' Study Abroad Program, on the condition that he agree to keep his mouth shut. If our gracious English hosts found out the program administrators back in New York sent a potential suicide case over, they'd pull the plug on these little foreign exchanges. Neither institution could afford that kind of negative press.

So Brute, he's still here. We just have to hide all our perfume.

Some people, they confuse dipsomania with potomania. The medical community defines potomania as an intense and persistent desire to drink alcohol to excess.

Potomania. What a crock of shit.

Wanting to be constantly blotto isn't some medical condition. It's not some disease you contract like leukemia or AIDS.

No, we've all made a conscious decision to be plastered at all times because all we want is to be numb. None of us wants to feel anything. Really, emotions can be such a damned drag.

I have been in London for going on four months now. In three days, finals will be over and I will go back to New York. In four months at the Central School of Speech and Drama, all I have learned is that Hans Christian Andersen might have been a fag, I am about to lose my scholarship, this city seems to be shrouded in a perpetual cloud of gloom, and now triangle steals a car.

Brute coughs more pot smoke into the room. He offers me the bong and goes, "When's your stagecraft final?" I take the bong, still playing the video game, and tell him, "Less than an hour."

When I press triangle, my character rips a paramedic out of an ambulance.

"Oh yeah," Brute says, "that's hot."

Pressing circle again and again, I beat the paramedic to death with a golf club.

"Happy birthday, I think," he says.

Since I'm busy trying to light the bong and crash my stolen ambulance into a city bus full of people at the same time, I don't bother to say thanks.

Matozzi asks me if after my final, can he take me out for drinks. You know, to celebrate being another year older. Matozzi, who I think is in love with me, who I can't stand, I tell him nope, sorry. I tell him I already have plans.

"Yeah?" he asks. "With who? A boyfriend?"

"An Israeli prostitute," I say casually, not even looking at him.

To Serve, Part 2

Davis was rummaging through the trashcans in the driveway of his suburban ranch house. He picked through leftover food scraps and pulled newspapers from the recycling pile. He was stacking the papers into a makeshift bed next to the house.

“Did you lose something, Davis?

“No.” He used his ‘I’m busy’ voice.

“Ok, well dinner is ready, If you want to come in.”

“We’ve been through this already, dear.”

As the garage door whistled shut, Carol Young considered her pre-nuptial. She considered the waitress job she carried up until her marriage to Davis back in college. Having not worked for the better part of a decade they had been married, Carol had next to nothing without Davis’ support. Davis, who was now eating from his own trash.

Animals will sometimes eat the feces of other animals, but rarely do they eat their own. Some law of nature tells them this is wrong. Just a thought.

Davis found a plate in the trash that Tuesday night. It was a Corel ware dinner plate, wrapped in Saran. It sat on top of a bed of newspapers that separated it from the rest of the messier stuff in the can. Above the plate were more newspapers, still folded. Under the Saran wrap was a hot meal; a salmon filet smoked with bruschetta style chopped tomato, rice pilaf and two dinner rolls, the Hawaiian style ones he loves. Davis took the meal to his patio, sat in one of the chairs and ate at the metal backyard table, pulled the fork from under the Saran wrap, and ate.

As he ate, Davis felt uneasy about his plan. He watched the sun set over the Salinas Valley with a fork full of pilaf and thought about the church dining room. What was he missing? He needed to make sure that he fit in among the others if his plan was going to work. Still, there was something missing, though he couldn’t put his finger on it. Davis stopped with a mouthful of salmon when it came to him. He stood and chewed the rest on the way to the driveway.

Davis had chosen BMW because the other men at the office had chosen BMW. He had chosen the five series because the other men had chosen the five series. TOSERVE was the personal plate he chose because SERVICE and BRN2SRV were already taken. On this drive, however, choices were not on Davis Young’s mind. Davis Young was looking for a liquor store tonight.

Davis didn’t know many liquor stores. Carol was the only one who ever drank at home, unless there was a party being thrown. In those cases, plenty of liquor was available, and Davis felt the keen edge of sobriety as his peers became intoxicated on his dime. Even then though, Carol did all of the shopping, and he was oblivious when it came to buying booze. Luckily, Davis had chosen the navigation system as an extra because the others in the office did not. He entered “BEER” and came up with one location within three miles.

There was a little gas/liquor store about a mile from the entrance gate to his neighborhood. Davis stepped inside Moe’s Liquors and Spirits for the first time that Tuesday night, though he had fueled there weekly for over two years he was not surprised by this incongruity. He walked up to the clerk and asked what he suggested along the lines of beer.

“Uh, I like fat tire, I guess.” The clerk, a twenty-something with long hair and a week's beard, looked like he knew what he was talking about.

“Ok, I’ll take one.”

“It’s back there, dude, and you have to buy all six.” He pointed back past racks of cheap wine and hard liquor, to a fridge rack full of craft brew renaissance beers. There was fat tire in the middle, next to something called skinny dip, above them was one called IPA, next to that was another with an old man on the label. This one was Old Leper’s Stout. Davis enjoyed the irony in this and saw a bit of the men at the church in the label’s amalgamation of what reminded him also of the album cover of Jethro Tull’s Aqualung, so he pulled one from the pack and carried it to the counter.

“Uh, Dude, like I said you gotta get all six if you want that beer.”

“Oh, but I only need one.” Davis was intrigued, sort of.

“Well you have to pay for the whole six pack, man, that’s the boss’ rule, not mine.” The clerk was getting defensive, nervous. He looked Davis up and down quickly. At a glance, he looked like some thirty year old hipster, dirty, unshaven, but with a certain deliberacy, a refinement. The clerk thought back the psychology class he took during the first of his two semesters at the Junior College. The class he failed. He hastily added, “You know how it is.”

Davis could tell the clerk was edging for a common ground, “Boy do I,” he lied. This was absurd, that he was forced to purchase more than he needed, but this kid was in no position to negotiate, and if this experiment was to work, he had to do it right. Davis went back for the the rest of the six pack. Halfway back to the counter, he pulled his wallet from the grubby jeans. “You take Am-Ex, right?”

“Uh, Am-Ex?”

“You know, American Express.”

“Oh, right. Yeah, we take American Express.” He looked Davis up and down again, definitely a hipster. “Can I see your ID?”