Interlude Stories: Bobbi Lurie

ASSIGNMENT - BOBBI LURIE

The way old people look: comical and useless.

I love looking at young girls. I no longer expect them to have sex with me. But I still look.

When I see an older woman, I feel repelled. Their flabby bellies, jiggling upper arms, swollen legs, drooping faces, covered with make-up.

I really shouldn’t blame it on older women. Even when I was a young stud and some broad got all dolled up for me so I’d fuck her, I’d try and sneak out before morning so I wouldn’t have to kiss her bad breath mouth or see her without make-up or make small talk at breakfast.

Still, older women are disgusting. I have to write about this because I think it might be an enjoyable part of this essay for that bitch who runs the show. She’s just like them, wearing long, shabby dresses, hair obviously colored or else the gray coming through like in “The Bride of Frankenstein.”

I see old women walking with their daughters. Their sons can’t be bothered. I mean let’s talk about sex. No, let’s not. I can’t have sex anymore myself. I can’t afford Viagra.

Oh shit, writing this, I’m sick of what appears to be reality.

My daughter tells me I’m a disgusting chauvinist but she isn’t looking too good either. Not since she had those brats. I begged her not to have kids, to keep her youth. But she knows she’ll be an old lady someday in some rest home and she’s probably just planning ahead, hoping for visitors. What she doesn’t know is: it isn’t our kids we want to visit us. Children are nothing better than any other relatives we couldn’t wait to run away from. Now my daughter wants me to act like a loving grandfather to the brats she gave birth to. Just like my dead wife: they all want you to be happy for the thing you didn’t want them to do.

The preservation of the human species is not something I’m interested in. The sooner we blow up the planet, the better.

My parents sent me to church. Sure did. Jesus died for our sins. Yeah. Yeah. All that crap about eternal life. Eternal life is exactly what I don’t want. My mother could never stop herself from talking about it, how our whole family would be reunited and live together forever with Jesus. Living with my family forever is the greatest torture I can imagine and being preached to by Jesus...

I hope to go to hell. That gives me a lot of leeway. I feel like an ass writing all this to nothing and no one. The poetry person in the prison is forcing me to write about my crimes. I can’t stand her or her class and she knows it. She disgusts me. It’s more painful than being raped to sit beside her and be forced to listen to all her optimistic crap about humanity and art when she is such a pathetic part of the shit hole.

Her poetry class and her do-gooder attitude plus this thing she has about the power of personal expression, lines and stanzas and rhymes or whatever. It was more than disgusting watching the guys who tried to rape me reading their poems about feelings. Even if they did it in what she called slam, it was still a bunch of self-pitying shit by some morons. As if you could slam your way through everything by screaming. Power is the name of the game. Not words. I have no power and it’s embarrassing writing all these words with this chewed-up pencil.

So this do-gooder with the body of a stuffed sofa, glasses, no make-up, this sexless dog who calls herself a feminist, lost her cool and told me to sit in the interrogation room and “write about your crimes if you can’t get into creativity and saving your soul through poetry. Poetry is like religion. It is holy. It could save you.” There we were again: a woman talking to me about religion.

O.K. so I was arrested for indecent exposure. I know I’m a bow-legged old fart, far from being the stud I once was. It probably was indecent being as I know how bad I look but every man knows what it’s like to show a woman his cock. I don’t care if my ass is hanging down to my ankles now or if my body is ugly as sin. I wanted some attention. It was for my mental health.

I know I’m not going to turn this paper in. Those assholes could send me back to isolation for my “bad behavior.”

Nothing is spoken straight here. It’s ridiculous that they hired this poetry bitch to squeeze the truth out of us...as if.

Even the psychiatrist is a liar. These pills are not helping me at all. They only make me tired. They blame everything on depression and maybe they’re right but I don’t know how a pill can help a man who has lost everything he ever lived for.

I was helped by wearing the proverbial raincoat and letting all the little girls see my pee pee as they might still call it. It’s like sex. It’s like having a hard cock with an unwilling virgin. All shock.

Let their boyfriends know he wasn’t the first one. That was my anti-depressant. No way they can make it up to me with pills.

I’m looking for a rope so I can hang myself in my cell but the guards are always watching us and my fat, smelly roommate is there with me 24 hours a day except for the hour with his therapist but then we often go to our therapists at the same time to talk about bullshit so it’s hard to find the time to do the deed and be done with it.

Actually, my life is easier in the cell than it was “out there” where I couldn’t afford the rent or anything else.

My daughter came to see me once. We didn’t talk. We spoke a few lame words and then she just gawked at me as if I wasn’t her father. She stayed five minutes tops and said she couldn’t leave her brood of crude little creatures at home alone with a babysitter for too long.

She had all the kids write me a card saying “we love you grandpa.”

What a pile of crap.

BIO: Bobbi Lurie is the author of three poetry collections: Letter from the Lawn, The Book I Never Read, and Grief Suite. Her poetry has been published in numerous print and on-line journals, including, Gulf Coast, New American Writing, American Poetry Review and Otoliths. She has published numerous short stories, essays, art, book and drama reviews in both Great Britain and The United States.