THE ROCK BREAKERS

I was hanging around outside the lab. I was trying to get some sympathy from the doctors. I was whining at them every time one walked past, going "aw, shit, I guess I'm just an ugly little fucker. No one looks as bad as me," making my face all screwed up and wrinkly. I dunno what I was hoping for. Just kidding. I was hoping for a little human kindness. A little milk of human kindness to wet my throat. For some doc to cuff my jowls and say, "C'mere you. C’mon in here. We've been working on something that'll fix you up," and whisk me into the lab and slam my veins so full of serums and tonics my heart stopped. And then when they zapped me back to life I'd look good as fuck. I'd look so juicy. I'd be hot as fuck. I'd have big bulging jaw muscles. Fat chance. It'd never happen to me. I sat there for hours. The doctors never even looked at me.

After a while I got up and started shuffling around like there was something wrong with my leg. Nothing. I hung my arm limp by my side and pinched the skin with exaggerated gestures every time someone came near. "Nothing," I said loudly. "I feel nothing." They didn't care. I looked one in the eye and said, "Do you even care about me?" I'm sorry, she said. She didn't care about me. I knew it. So I sat back down again. You look more pathetic when you're sitting down. You look like you don't even have the willpower to get at a doctor's eye level to get something going. "A hoo hoo hoo," I said, down there on the ground, "I'll do anything for you lordly creatures. I’m lower than a beetle. Step on me, I implore you. Pierce my carapace with your heel. I deserve it." They just walked right past me, into the lab. I stared longingly after them. Inside long rows of white-coated doctors stood at clean metal work benches, new sneakers on their feet, Skechers, lifting beakers of blue liquid up, holding them against the light, pouring them into test tubes, throwing the beakers on the ground, whipping the orderlies with riding crops. Slicing great chunks out of vivisected horses as they coasted by on the conveyor belt and turning to their neighbour to drop the chunks into a plastic bag. Heating iron filings over a bunsen burner. Smashing river stones into gravel. Dissolving bones in acid. I reached a feeble, trembling hand towards the gap and they slammed the door in my face.

I dragged myself out to the street. This was how rock bottom felt. Like shit smeared on a car tyre driving through the mud. I moped around the alley behind the lab. I rifled through the dumpster. I pulled out big bags of expired baby medicines and hair. What the hell did I have to live for. I drank the medicine and choked down the hair and sat slumped against the back door of a kebab shop for a while. My stomach hurt. As if I didn't have enough problems, now my stomach hurt too. Unfair. You kidding me? Ugly as a dug grave, no way of getting prettier, and now I had a sore stomach. It always happened to me. The whole thing sucked. It was an insult. I threw up into the dumpster, which made me feel better, and I thought about how unfair it was that I'd had to throw up just to feel better, which also made me feel better. I was starting to feel pretty good. From a high window I heard sounds of drilling and scraping from inside the laboratory and I felt worse again. I tried to pass out in the kebab shop doorway.

I actually did pass out, and when I did I had a fantastic dream that a rich old guy found me and took me back to his mansion where started a band. It was a ‘60s band. We called each other “dad” and “cat” and wrote a bunch of songs about hot girls and what we wanted to do about them. Each night when band practice finished he’d take me down to the carport and slice open different parts of my body and stuff plastic beads inside to make me look big and strong and voluptuous. In return I had to bathe him. Not a sexual thing. He was old as shit. He had strong surgeon’s hands and could play good rhythm guitar but his body was frail and his mind was falling apart with nostalgia. He couldn’t wash himself. His skin was thick with dead cells. I had to scrub at him. He liked it. Again, not sexual. I’m not into that. Who could begrudge him liking it. He told me about his youth etc. How he got started breaking rocks and moved his way up to the most refined and exquisite cosmetic surgery. The way he made people look would make your mouth water. People left his surgery looking like captivating cubist stacks of spheres and right angles. They bounced and pierced. They bounced while they pierced. As I toweled him down he’d describe in a shaking voice the shine on their taut skin when he was done with them. He’d stroke me weakly and we’d walk by the carport again and he’d take a little more skin off with his pruning shears and stitch me back up. I could have been happy in the dream forever.

When I woke up wolves were sniffing around me. I flopped out an arm and they gnawed it respectfully. My weak pulse kept blood flow in the doorway of the kebab shop to a minimum. The lab was so close. I could hear the scientists inside. They were all fucking. I could tell from the flapping of their coats.

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