Civility (Prologue)

The sun made its annoyingly bright presence felt at 6:10 am to the residents of Angel’s Pass, a neighborhood with similar looking houses and gaudy lawn ornaments. If one house had been painted blue, its neighbor had another shade of blue painted on its exterior. The assortment of lawn figures included a Japanese Santa Claus (Christmas wouldn’t be for seven months), a bluish-pink flamingo that had a fake cigarette hanging from its beak, a mechanized waving clown whose facial expression made people think it would like to eat their children, and a miniature plaster bikini-clad blonde woman whose fake nipples could put your eyes out.
Two children ran side-by-side to the bus stop, tripping each other on the sidewalk. One of the children realized the futility of this and threw the other into the dead rose bushes of an old woman, long thought to be dead for seven years, the amount of time in which she hadn’t been seen outdoors, at least not to cut her grass. The yard could hide a family of four full-grown midgets. I will pause here to note that for the sake of the story, I don’t have the time to be politically correct; besides, the word midget is somewhat funny. If I had said little people, you might think that I was talking about normal sized people, and the phrase ‘full grown little people’ might confuse you, and you’d have to re-read the passage over and over until you felt like clawing your eyes out in literary frustration.
Hey, it happens.
Anyways, this presumably dead woman’s house too was blue. A special brand called ‘K Blue’, a generic supermarket paint that actually looked kind of green.
Well, I’ve never actually seen paint sold at a supermarket, you might be thinking to yourself.
Shut up and let me tell the story already.
A rabid flea-bitten black Labrador walked down the sidewalk opposite the rose bushes, half of a Siamese cat hanging from its mouth. When he was a puppy, pissing on carpets and humping the legs of terrified children, a cat clawed his left eye. Was this revenge? Maybe. Retribution on the species responsible for his loss of vision? Eh…..Probably he was now just uncompromising and fanatical.
“Pretty doggy,” said a five-year-old girl, pointing at the ratty mass of fur on foot. The girl’s horrified mother hurried her into an SUV big enough to transport the president of Weight Watcher’s and a few healthy friends.
At 6:35 am, every home smelled of coffee and bacon grease, except the old woman with the rose bushes, who I rather have to establish as the first black sheep of the story, since, she doesn’t really do what everyone else does. Not that she has a say. But her unwillingness to participate in the suburban status quo makes her the one to plant the first seeds of insurgence. Nah, she was just a rotting pile of bones. Two Mexican construction workers sat in a Tercel by the framework of a new house, passing a can of barbeque pork and beans back and forth, trying, but sadly unable to read the directions. The can wouldn’t have fed them both anyway.
“No se,” they said to one another. They handed it to their supervisor, who could read as much English as you’d be taught up to, but not including the fifth grade. The supervisor, once considered a child prodigy by his sister/wife/cousin, shrugged his shoulders and threw the can out of the passenger’s side window. The rapid dog caught the can upside the head, sending him into a frenzy of yelping and confused tail chasing antics. He bolted down the street, losing the cat, which ended up being the first thing Sharon Jackson saw when she stepped outside to smoke.
The supervisor, the guy with the trouble reading the can of pork and beans, he exemplifies a larger problem. He would later that day help build a house. You know that crack in your foundation, that uneven place you put the level on, and the bubble floats a little far left? It’s ultimately his fault, him or others like him. Illiteracy is the slow, silent, misspelled killer. But aren’t I concerned about offending illiterates? Shouldn’t I be more sensitive to them, so that I might build a bigger fan base and not alienate those lost souls? Well, chances are, since this is a book, they wouldn’t have made it this far. I can successfully hide my hushed hatred for them several pages in. I will later address the hippie problem in a portion of the story where the as yet un-established main characters clean themselves and/or eat meat.
Sharon Jackson stood outside her house, her lack of make up making her look 41. She was 33. She wore a white bathrobe that smelled of jug wine and slim menthol cigarettes. Under the robe, a set of silicone breasts perked up against the fabric. A little lower, still under the robe, a two-month-old case of Chlamydia festered, untreated. Her husband Marty, read the paper inside, untouched by her bacteria. He hadn’t even seen her fully nude in seven months. After he left for work that day, Sharon would invite over the paperboy and the cable technician to film an amateur porn called Services Rendered. Here, now is an excerpt from the script. Sharon’s screen name is Darla Duzalot.

(DARLA pounds the television set with her fist. She is wearing a blue thong and a blue bra.)
DARLA: Stupid cable!
(The front door opens. Enter CABLE MAN.)
CABLE MAN: My boss said I should hurry over because you have a problem with your cable.
DARLA: All I ever get is fuzz. All I can do is sit around and masturbate with no TV to watch!
CABLE MAN: Maybe it’s the antenna; you need a much BIGGER one.
(CABLE MAN unzips his pants.)
DARLA: Shoot! I can’t afford THAT! All I can do now is play with myself. Maybe you should take a look.
(DARLA masturbates for CABLE MAN. PAPERBOY walks in the front door.)
PAPERBOY: My manger says that you are unhappy with our newspaper. Well, THIS should make some headlines.

And you can probably imagine what that something is. The plot doesn’t really offer much in the way of twists. The cable never gets fixed. And, as you might have guessed, Darla never really reads the paper anyway, so that quandary remains unresolved.
Marty Jackson would take an early lunch, go to Georgetown and spend two-hundred dollars. Eighty dollars on bloody maries and tips at the bar, where he met up with an Asian transvestite who charged him 120 dollars for a hand job.
Across the street and two houses down, Rasheed Lewis and Jimmy Cyrus shared a house. Rasheed was the founder and only member of the black power organization SWIWAF (So What If We’re Already Free), pronounced swee-waf. Jimmy founded a white power group in which the only member was Jimmy Cyrus called SWIIIYB (So What If I’m Illiterate, You’re Black), pronounced swee-yib. Rasheed left ashtrays full of cigarettes around the house, and Jimmy left spit bottles of Copenhagen.
It was their most constant source of arguments.