Reduced-fat cottage cheese is no longer on sale, which mucks up everything. All Gerard wants is to save 72 cents; that’s what he had counted on the current mission to produce, and now he has nothing. He possesses a grand total of $5, $3.50 of which is earmarked for two 24 oz. cans of Coors Light beverage. The mission is a low-fat, diet-friendly lunch to impress his increasingly disenchanted girlfriend, Stacy, and the mission is now caput. Paying tax had been out of the question from the beginning. He was going to the raid the give a penny, take a penny. But now cottage cheese is $2.21 plus tax and not $1.49 plus tax, and no amount of give a penny, take a penny can bridge that gap. So you know what he does? He flags the stock bitch and says, “Something’s not right.”
The stock bitch looks bored. “With what?” he asks.
“Cottage cheese is supposed to be a buck forty-nine.” Gerard holds the sale ad up for inspection.
“That sale ended yesterday,” says the stock bitch, smiling and pointing to the date, which does not in any way lessen the humiliation.
“Whatever,” Gerard says. “I can only pay a buck forty-nine.”
The stock bitch shrugs. “I really don’t know what to tell you.”
“Tell me you can make it work.”
The stock bitch shrugs again and looks at the other shoppers who are loitering because Gerard is making a proper scene. The four of them, with overflowing carts, stop, watch, but not a one offers to alleviate Gerard’s pain with a donation in exchange for the free show. Nothing. Not even a word of encouragement.
“Unfortunately,” says the stock bitch, “there’s nothing I can do.”
“Come on,” Gerard pleads, “I need this for a buck forty-nine.” He holds up the package of cottage cheese.
“It’s out of my control,” the stock bitch says, and goes back to his stock job.
It’s right then and there that Gerard decides enough is enough.
###
Outside, he goes to the pay phone to call Stacy and let her know that everything, including lunch, is officially shit canned, but when he dials the number, a man with a Scottish accent answers.
“Just let me talk to Stacy,” says Gerard. It’s not any big shocker that she’s cheating.
“Stacy who?”
“Just put her on the phone, man.”
“Apparently,” the man with the Scottish accent says, “you dialed the wrong number.”
“I can’t believe this,” Gerard says, possibly crying. “I was just going to say goodbye to Stacy and then go kill myself, but now you’re jerking me around and playing dumbass games.”
“If anyone is wasting anyone’s time,” says the man with the Scottish accent, “rest assured, it is certainly you wasting my time.”
Gerard summarizes everything he’s feeling at this moment by yelling, “Fuck Scotland.”
“You’re more than welcome to try.”
“If I knew where you were at,” Gerard says, “I’d come kick the shit out of you right now.”
“Oh really, tough guy?”
“Yeah,” Gerard says, “really.”
“Well then,” the man with the Scottish accent says, “today is your lucky day,” and he proceeds to give Gerard directions.
###
Gerard is standing in the parking lot throwing warm-up punches, when, from atop the three-story building, the man with the Scottish accent yells, “So you actually showed up.”
“That’s right,” Gerard says, still warm-up punching. “Let’s do this.”
“You tough guys are all the same.” He levels a rifle in Gerard’s general direction. “You show up to a gun fight with nothing, not even a knife.”
Bang, bang goes the rifle and shatter, shatter go two of Stacy’s car windows. “Ha,” the man with the Scottish accent yells. “How do you like that, tough guy?”
It occurs to Gerard as he shimmies underneath the car that the man with the Scottish accent bears a striking resemblance to Sean Connery, the Sean Connery, the original 007, otherwise known as Bond, James Bond, et al. The Scottish accent, the steel-gray beard, and the bald head are the three primary indicators. Sean Connery or no Sean Connery, Gerard agreed to a fist fight, not a gun battle, and yet here he is, yet again he’s been tricked. “You pussy,” he yells.
“Oh, I’m the pussy?” the man with the Scottish accent retorts. “Ha! You’re hiding under your car, and I’m the pussy?”
“Put down the gun and fight like a real man.”
“Okay,” he says, but doesn’t put down the rifle.
Gerard starts to climb out from under the car and is promptly shot in the forearm.
“You mother fucker,” he yells from back beneath the car.
“Let that be a lesson to you.”
“You shot me.”
“No shit, Sherlock, this is what’s known as reality,” the man with the Scottish accent yells. “Feel free to take a look around.”
Gerard does not answer. He needs to buckle down and figure some things out. Gerard no longer believes Stacy is cheating. He probably did just dial the wrong number. Gerard is, however, positive that that is Sean Connery. That’s a fact, beyond certain. The thing Gerard cannot figure out is how exactly he might live to tell about it.
###
Gerard eventually figures it out. It costs two more car windows and he gets a little scraped up, but he doesn’t get shot again and is now delaying going to the emergency room in order to give Stacy a firsthand account of his encounter with Sean Connery.
When the headlamps sweep across the house, she’s standing there on the front step.
“Oh, my God,” Stacy says, and runs to the car. She circles twice and then grabs Gerard, who exited the vehicle during her second circumnavigation, by the shoulders and shakes him. “What did you do to my car?”
She either doesn’t notice or chooses to ignore the bloody rag wrapped around his forearm.
“I know this looks bad,” he says. “Just let me explain.”
Stacy takes a deep, deep breath, exhales, and says, “Go ahead.” She makes air quotes with her fingers. “Explain.”
He explains, but she doesn’t give a shit about Sean Connery.
“What is wrong with you?” is all she wants to know.
This is normally the point when he’ll attempt to give an in-depth analysis and then beg her to take him back. And even with her car all shot up, there’s a chance she might do it. Only rather than begging and pleading, Gerard says, “I think we should break up.”
He stands there and waits for both her response and that feeling he usually gets in his stomach when he says or does something regrettable. Her response comes. It rains down upon him. He stands there and listens to every last word, but he never feels that feeling.
###
Gerard is walking along the side of the road when a cop pulls up next to him.
“What do you think you’re doing?” the cop wants to know.
There aren’t any streetlights, but the different lights from the patrol car’s dashboard illuminate the cop’s long, thin face and shiny bald head.
“I’m going to the hospital,” Gerard says.
When the cop stops the patrol car, Gerard, assuming the cop is going to offer him a ride, also stops walking.
But the cop tells Gerard to put his hands on the hood of the car and starts shining a flashlight in his eyes.
Even when the cop asks, “Did you have some kind of altercation with a Scottish guy earlier?” Gerard still doesn’t think he’s in trouble. He was, after all, the one who got shot.
“Yeah,” Gerard says, and holds his bloody arm up for the cop to see. “He shot me.”
“I need you to put your hand back on the car, okay?” the cop says, real slow, the way people talk to people who they don’t think are going to understand them.
Gerard understands and follows the cop’s instruction.
The cop does end up giving Gerard a ride to the hospital. He handcuffs Gerard and forces him to ride in the backseat though. And once the people at the hospital have determined the bullet went right through and have patched Gerard up, the cop takes him to jail. The man with the Scottish accent decided to press charges.
###
Gerard ends up in a holding cell with some guy who claims to be Jesus and another guy with a handlebar mustache. The guy who claims to be Jesus ran into some other guy who also claimed to be Jesus, they got into an argument over who was the real Jesus, because they both maintained there could only be one true Jesus, the argument escalated, and they ended up beating the shit out of each other.
The guy who claims to be Jesus is standing at the cell door and alternating between pressing his ear to the crack where the cell door meets the doorframe to listen to what the other guy who claims to be Jesus is saying and then pressing his mouth to the crack and yelling, “You won’t get away with this.” His voice echoes off the cinder-block walls of the holding cell.
The guy with the handlebar mustache is talking to some woman named “Debra” on the bright-yellow cordless phone that only makes collect calls. He has the phone pressed to his one ear and two fingers pressed to the other. He’s trying to convince Debra to come and bail him out.
Gerard is sitting on the bench across from mustache man. He already has a headache, and the guy who claims to be Jesus isn’t helping. “Hey Jesus,” Gerard says.
But Jesus doesn’t respond. He’s too busy scrambling to push his ear up against the doorframe as his jail slippers slide out on the concrete.
“Hey Jesus,” Gerard repeats, a little bit louder this time. “I’m talking to you.”
Mustache man doesn’t stop working on Debra but starts watching Gerard. “Please try to understand,” Mustache man continues, “I made a mistake. I realize I shouldn’t have done it, Debra, but people make mistakes. I’m human, I’m sorry.” He pauses and then adds, “I just told you I messed up. I said I was sorry,” etc.
Gerard doesn’t give a flying fuck about mustache man. He’s focused on Jesus, but Jesus is focused on asserting and re-asserting his point, which is, “You won’t get away with this.” Gerard has no idea how long he’s going to be in jail and doesn’t care. He doesn’t know if it’s a good or bad thing that he doesn’t care. What he does know is that he and Jesus are going to have a problem.
The best advice Wayne McMahon has ever received, the advice that inadvertently transformed him into a storyteller and eventually led to the creation of the story you hopefully just read, was also the worst advice he has ever received. Wayne was fifteen and selling weed at the time. This guy everyone called “Boomer” found out that this girl had told the police Wayne had sold her the pot she’d just been arrested for possessing, and Boomer sat Wayne down to have a serious talk about the future. “You know what you do now?” he asked. Wayne was expecting Boomer to tell him to quit selling weed, maybe at least encourage him to stop, but Boomer said, “You become the star of your own movie and just smile in those cops’ faces.” Instead of becoming the star of his own movie, Wayne started watching the people around him starring in their movies and ultimately started trying to tell their stories.
–Art by Felix Lu