SCREAMING BATFISH BLUES #2
BATFISH
ISLA MUJURES
Steve Earle’s Copperhead Road was blasting out of the tinny sounding speakers as I watched the lumbering beast walk into the bar.
“How could a normal woman fuck a dwarf?” was the first thing that came out of the piehole of my best friend/partner, Artimus, as he settled his fat ass down on the bar stool.
I tried not to wince, while acting at the same time like I hadn’t heard the remark. Not for my benefit. But for the benefit of the elderly couple from Missouri, who were sitting just four bar stools down, sipping on their banana daiquiris. Very sneaky like, I tried to turn the music up.
I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about until I observed a rather striking topless woman walking down the beach with what could have been either a midget or a jockey.
“That’s not a dwarf, that’s probably a midget,” I half whispered.
“Dwarf, midget, big deal. I saw a broad fuck a donkey in Tijuana once and I can almost understand that more than I could see fucking a midget. At least the chick in Tijuana was getting paid.” Artimus belched
out between chugs of his beer.
That did it for the couple, who hurriedly packed up their beach gear while I idiotically called out “Come again”.
“What in the fuck is wrong with you?” I raged at Artimus who innocently looked at me and said “Did I ever tell you about that place? It was called the Blue Fox. Man, what a fucking joint that was. They sure don’t make ‘em like that anymore.”
What can you say to man with logic like that? I had first met Artimus about a year ago, when I had just gotten to the island and he was the exact same person then as he is now. He’s about six foot four and about two hundred and fifty pounds soaking wet. Which he normally is. Wet that is. The guy sweats like a whore in church. He claims it’s because he’s from somewhere in South Dakota and his body has never gotten used to the humidity of the island. I think it’s just because he’s a fat bastard.
With Artimus, what you see is what you get. Literally. Artimus told me the very first night that I met him that he was on the run from thelaw. Claims that he was on the wrong end of a marijuana deal gone real wrong and that he was a wanted man in the Badlands.
He very well could be. But I’ve been through the Dakotas many times and it just doesn’t strike me as a hot spot for pot cultivation or sales.
Every time that Jimmy Buffett song, A Pirate Looks at Forty was playing on the CD player, Artimus would get all choked up and blurt out “That’s me man, that’s me.”
Especially if he had been drinking, which was damn near always.
I had asked him one time if he should walk around with his shirtoff so much, since he had two very unique tattoos he had gotten while in the Marines. One was of a mouse perched on his shoulder nibbling on a slice of cheese with tracks running up from his asshole. While the other one was inscribed HERE’S THE BEEF across his stomach with an arrow pointing down to his crotch.
When I had pointed out that those very distinct markings could very well single him out to law enforcement officials or vengeful drug dealers(since I couldn’t imagine there is anyone else in these parts or anywhere else for that matter who has those exact tats). He had replied “Fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke”.
In spite of all his faults he was a helluva lot of fun to hang out with and we had a nice little illegal business on the side going on. We both had fake Canadian passports that we used monthly to fly over the gulf to Cuba to buy cigars. We then sold them one at a time to the tourists on the beach or in the cantinas. Some of the dumb bastards paid up to fifty dollars a cigar and when we couldn’t get over to Cuba, we’d substitute Mexican cigars, but sell them out of a Cuban box. Very sweet deal.
“Hey dude, what’s up with you? I can’t believe that you’d get all bent out of shape over those two fucking yahoos hearing a little dirty talk. Shit, he’s probably so worked up now he’s going to rush the old lady back up to the room and lay the pink steel to her.”
I was standing behind the bar and looking out over the ocean and worrying. I had been doing a lot of that lately. Worrying.
“I don’t know man,” I replied while watching Artimus work his fat gut over the bar counter to grab another beer out of the cooler. “I just can’t shake that bad feeling I’ve had since I saw that guy down by the fishing
charters the other day. I know him from somewhere”.
“Well if he’s gotten you this squirrelly, maybe we should just look him up and give him a good old fashioned ass beating!” Artimus boozily replied.
“Goddamn it Artimus, kicking somebody's ass is not the answer to everything and stay the fuck out of the beer cooler. It’s 12:30 in the afternoon and you’re already three sheets to the wind. Plus, Orlando is starting to notice that books aren’t exactly balancing out to the amount of beer that I’m supposedly selling.”
For some reason those words triggered like a mini flashback in my mind. All of a sudden I think I had a good idea who the guy by the fishing boats was. I mean it looked like the guy but only with more hair. But maybe he had gotten out of the Navy or maybe he was wearing a rug. He looked a lot heavier too. Maybe it wasn’t even him. Damn it!! My mindwas racing and I couldn’t get it under control. Too much coffee or not enough beer.
Either the color had washed out of my face or I was shaking like a dog shitting peach pits because for once Artimus didn’t say a thing. I must have stood there for a couple of minutes until finally I heard my buddy say “Dude, you know we’ve been partners for almost a year. Isn’t it about time you told me just what the hell you’re doing down here?”
“You’d never believe a word of it,” I replied.
“Well give me a chance motherfucker. I don’t think there’s anything that you could say that would surprise me.”
I resumed my looking out over the gulf. Now pondering if I should tell this man something that not only could put me below ground or behind bars for a long time if the story ever got to the wrong ears, but could also put his own existence in jeopardy. He could do some serious gum rattling after he had tied one on. Well fuck it. He asked for it. I took a deep breath.
“OK. Here goes nothing. I’m AWOL from the Navy, wanted by the Feds on numerous drug and espionage charges and I was also wanted in California for questioning about several murders, also drug related. There! That surprise you?” I grinned at him. “I almost forgot to include that I’m an escapee from a maximum security mental hospital?”
That surprised him all right! By the look on Artimus’s face, I’m surprised that he didn’t fall right off his bar stool or take off running.
If you didn’t know what it was already. You would think that the Security Hospital in St. Peter, Minnesota was either some sort of a college or office building. It’s a one story, flat roofed, brick structure that’s quite pleasing to the eye. Surrounded by beautiful lawns and groves of trees.
If you just didn’t happen to notice the barbed wire enclosure topped with razor wire around the back of the building. Which if the weather was decent was often full of shuffling and drooling idiots.
I can remember when I was a young lad growing up in southern Minnesota hearing all the horror stories about what went on behind those walls. Of course, then the old security hospital looked more like a prison and was run more like a prison than it is now.
There was a mouth breather for my home town who was only a year or so older than me who had gotten caught raping a gal and had wound up there for observation. Two days later the gutless turd hung himself behind those same hallowed halls. And this guy had terrorized my hometown for years! So shit, I thought this must be one rough joint . But I digress.
I better get it out of the way right off the bat and tell you right now that I am not crazy. Or dangerous. Well, I was dangerous once, but I mean only once. Uno. So how did I wind up in the booby hatch then?
The reasons I would end up in St. Pete is that I was faking crazy to avoid being sent to Stillwater State Prison. If you’ve seen the movie The Shawshank Redemption, you have a basic understanding of what Stillwater State Prison is like. And I have no desire in this or any of my previous lives to get cornholed and turned into some guy’s bitch
.
And I thought a mental institution would be easier to escape from than a prison.
I was working my way back from the west coast and had finally made it back to Minnesota. Duluth, to be exact. But I was short on cash so I was staying at this shelter up off of Superior Street for the night.
The place was crawling with scumbags, so I was just trying to catnap my way through the night, when I suddenly woke up and this huge black dude was standing over me with his dick in his hand. Well I knew what he wanted to do with it.
I already told you that the place was a fucking zoo so I was sleeping with my shank (it was German made, high quality steel, sharp as a cat’s ass), so in a panic I sat up real quick and just slashed at him. Just to try to back him off. But I misjudged how close the fuckwad was to me and sliced the head of his dick right in half.
Of course he went absolutely apeshit and started running around the dorm, screaming at the top of his lungs. The night security staff flicked the lights on and must have called the police instantly because in no time the cops were there and I was wearing silver bracelets.
I couldn’t get out because they lock the doors at night so no one can come in or out. And it didn’t take James fucking Bond to figure out who did it since the guy had fallen half on to my bunk and pumped blood all over the sheets.
I never knew that the penis had some many veins in it.
Right after it all went down I had just sat there at the side of my bed while watching this idiot run around the dorm holding his bloody pecker. That was when I realized that I was still holding my knife. So I stood up and walked over to this old rummy who was sitting up in his bunk with this amazed look on his face, while he watched the rapo, who was now down on his knees making this eerie squealing noise.
I just handed the loony old dude my beautiful handcrafted knife and he slipped it into his
pocket while he gave me this toothless grin.
Anyway. The cops rushed in, saw the blood, and had the cuffs on me quick as a bunny. But they couldn’t find the knife. Not that they really gave it that much effort. I imagine that going to that mission to roust a bum or break up a fight was probably damn near a nightly thing for those guys.
It was snowing like a bitch out when the cops hauled me on down to the county jail. Duluth can get just enormous amounts of snow. Feet at a time, not inches, feet. The cop who was driving was slipping and sliding all over the road. It was snowing so hard that the wipers couldn’t keep up and he had the window down to see.
Since they hadn’t allowed me to get my jacket before they rushed me out of the mission I was kind of chilly. So I asked the kind officer if he wouldn’t mind rolling up the window a tad and was told not very nicely to “shut the fuck up.”
The jail was the exact opposite though. It was hotter than the gates of hell. Even in the booking room where I was stripped bare-ass naked. I then had the area under my nuts and asshole looked at for anything I might be hiding in or up there. Was deloused and then dressed out in these wild orange scrubs like nurses and doctors wear. Only on the back mine said
“COUNTY”.
I was then led to my cell where I met my new roommate. A short, one eyed, child molesting Indian who was on his way, I would learn, to the Security Hospital in St. Peter for the third and most likely last time of his
life. He would probably be taking up permanent residency there since his last offense had been the attempt to molest a little girl in the rest room of the local county courthouse and the people of this fine state were getting good and tired of his shenanigans.
Immediately upon my entry into the cell, Dan (his name), asked me for a smoke. I apologized and said I didn’t smoke, but Dan just shrugged and flipped up his eye patch and pulled a butt out of his eye socket. It was the beginning of a short but beautiful relationship.
Dan had been a ward of the state in one capacity or another for almost his entire life. His whole adult life had consisted of consuming huge amounts of alcohol, Listerine, Lysol, and any street drug he could get his hands on. However, Dan’s body did not process ethanol in a normal fashion and he became quite combative at times, making him a star of all the local
drunk tanks.
In one of these drugged states he attempted to nail his sister which earned him trip number one to St. Pete. Upon his release he celebrated by consuming an entire fifth of generic vodka along with a tab of acid and began to hear voices. These voices told him to rip his eyeball out and pour gasoline into the socket and then light it afire, which he promptly did. Visit number two.
He had been released only a week or so when he attempted to pull the little girl into the rest room of the court house and was now awaiting his commitment hearing. Visit number three and probably a permanent room at the state run asylum.
You couldn’t tell by his appearance if he was twenty five or fifty.
It was with Dan that I began to put my plan together. He had been in county for several weeks now and had pretty much detoxed, so at times could hold a somewhat normal conversation. It was at these times that I grilled him
like a hard boiled detective. What was security like there? Where there bars and razor wire? How many guards? Are you always locked down? Etc.
Dan jacked off like a monkey and didn’t seem to care if I was in the cell or not and he often slipped into psychotic ramblings. But in between, I pumped him for info as hard as I could. The incident at the shelter had occurred on a Friday night so I had until Monday to formulate a plan. I had to act fast before the jaws of justice caught up to me.
I would be meeting my state appointed attorney at 10:00 AM. A rookie straight out of law school and this was to be his proving ground. He was about twenty seven years old, white hair, pink eyes, fat, and with skin as luminous as the snow outside. He looked like an overweight Edgar Winter. All dressed up in a suit I’m sure his mommy bought him when he graduated from law school.
I really never got to know him well, the poor guy. I had taken the opportunity to not shower or brush my teeth the entire weekend and had pissed my pants on purpose. Just that very morning.
The first thing my attorney informed me of was that most likely I was facing a sentence of a year and a day in Stillwater State Prison for a variety of charges. Mainly for assault with a deadly weapon, even though they never found a weapon.
But that was all he got out before I began to whimper, pull at my hair, and rock back and forth like a total fucking retard while clutching my arms.
Snow boy sat there looking at me with a look of pure horror on his face and then hurriedly began to stuff documents back into his briefcase.
My pretrial hearing would be in two days. It went pretty much like clockwork. I still hadn’t showered or brushed my teeth and I put on a performance that would make at least a Golden Globe winner proud. All it took the judge was two minutes of me pulling at my crotch through my pants, whimpering and calling out “Daddy,” and looking around the room like bats were flying around my head, before he ordered a temporary commitment to St. Peter for pretrial observation.
I would be shipped out within the week.
Three days later when I shipped out, poor Dan misted up in his eye and said he’d do his damnedest to look me up once he got settled in down there.
However, the sheriff’s deputy that was going to transport me did not look at me quite as fondly. He remained adamant that I shower before I set one foot inside his squad car.
There was a bit of a miscommunication between the jail staff and when I was escorted into the shower, there stood my nemesis from the shelter. Naked as the day he was born.
I had no idea he was even in the jail, as I had been so busy honing my mental act and hadn’t really been a social butterfly during my stay. His crank was completely covered in a clear plastic bag under which you could see his tool was wrapped in gauze. Giving it the appearance of a tennis ball wrapped in athletic tape.
He went totally psycho at the sight of me and charged. For a few glorious seconds we went at it, trading punch for punch while the jail staff stood there screaming and caught totally off guard. He was just on the brink of getting the better of me when I slipped a big left hook of his and grabbed his injured prick by its gauze covered package and gave it a big yank. He screamed so loud that I think I still may be able to sue the county for loss of hearing while I was in their custody. The giant dropped faced down into the standing water.
After order was restored, I was allowed to take my douche, as the French say, and prepare for my ride to the bughouse.
Along the way to the hospital, which was almost a four hour ride, we would be stopping at Lino Lakes prison to pick up another unfortunate soul to share the ride. This turned out to be another three time loser in the sex offender field, who went by the name of Ray.
As I said earlier, Minnesota does not like sex maniacs and if you had the misfortune of being
arrested three times for a sex offense, you could be committed to St. Peter after your prison sentence ran out. You would then remain there until a judge deemed you were well enough to reenter society. In other words, you would be there for life. No judge in his right judicial mind would release a three time convicted sex offender if he didn’t have to, especially during an election year.
I always thought it would be cheaper to just to hire three or four three hundred pound ex-football players, outfit them in tropical shirts and pork pie hats, give them each a set of brass knuckles and a baseball bat, and have them go visit the perverts as soon as they’re released from jail. I can goddamn guarantee you that that’s the last time they’d be sticking their dicks where they don’t belong.
No one that I had ever met in my life deserved this fate more than that asshole Ray. He babbled nonstop about how many women he had fucked, beers he had drank, and that he had once had a bit role in the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. They had made that movie in a mental
institution that he claimed he was a resident of at that time.
I believe it was in Washington. He also claimed that he had been railroaded on his last charge. He had conked his sister in law on the head, screwed her, and had been caught trying to hang her. All just a silly “prank/misunderstanding” he told me.
Dan had told me that upon admittance to the security hospital that I would be placed in the classification unit and would remain there for about a week. Which was all the time they really needed to figure out if you were crazy or if you were just scared of going to prison and which was not enough time for me to accomplish what I was scheming.
BUT, if you acted up or were a generally naughty boy, you could be placed in Unit 800, where the committed mentally ill and dangerous inmates were kept along with the other hospital problem children. Then all bets were off. You could remain in there for months while they got you straightened out. Just the place I needed to get into.
By the time we rolled into the town of St. Peter, everyone was tired and cranky, except for Ray. St. Peter is a liberal college town and as we proceeded down the main drag, Ray kept up a running commentary on what he would like to do to every college coed he saw walking down the street, much to the chagrin of the two deputies.
My plan began to fall in place. I felt everyone would benefit from it.
As we rolled up the hill that the Security Hospital sits on, I began to complain that my wrists were really starting to hurt from the cuffs.
Immediately Ray picked up on this and began to call me among other things “a fucking pussy” and a “whiney shit.”
I could see the deputies were squirming in their seats. They had had just about their fill of Ray by about then.
We were taken out of the car and walked a short distance up a sidewalk into a locked reception room, which was monitored through thick glass by a very fat woman sitting in what appeared to be some sort of control center. She had an open bucket of the Colonel and a diet Coke in
front of her.
The officers informed her who we were and she picked up the phone. Summoning guards from inside the facility I gathered.
I turned to one of the officers and pleaded for him to please remove my cuffs. Right on cue, Ray piped in with “what a cunt.”
The officer who obviously by now was sick of the sight of both us, but mostly Ray, told him to pipe down and went behind me to remove my leg irons while his partner took off the hand cuffs.
“Thank you, officer,” I whined as I rubbed my wrists and stared down at the floor while Ray looked on with undisguised disgust. As the officers began to removed Ray’s restraints, I took a slight step to Ray’s blind side and hauled off with a Kenny Norton overhand right that poleaxed Ray with such force that his false teeth flew out of his mouth, hitting the officer removing his cuffs right on the forehead.
Ray dropped like he had been shot. I don’t think he probably was able to get on his feet for a couple of minutes. But they weren’t going to let me hang around and see.
The two officers gang tackled me along with three guards from the hospital that had finally arrived on the scene. I was handcuffed behind my back and marched down to classification where we were met by a professional looking man, closely resembling Woody Allen, who said “Don’t even fucking bother. Just keep on walking and take him down to Unit 800.”
Beautiful!
