Love and Hate: Part 1 - Hate

Steve never was good at anything. He wasn’t popular or good-looking. He had no talents and he stank. His parents died in a car crash when he was young and he was forced to live in an orphanage run by a psychopath with an abusive staff of perverts because the rest of his family felt they were too prestigious to take in the fat loser. When he arrived at the Catholic reform death camp his family sent him to, all he had was the clothes on his back and a picture of his parents. Steve met his rapist cellmate on his first night at the orphanage as she forced herself on him. After that, the ogre always referred to him as, “Her bruised meat.” She gave birth to their baby in the cell toilet because it was safer than going to the medical ward. Staring into the toilet afterward was the first time in Steve’s existence that he’d ever felt anything like love. The chubby child was taken into care by the nuns.

Vietnam was in full swing and he took a deal to go into the military and get out of the orphanage; maybe one day he could get his baby out too. For Steve, the Vietnam War was like hot piss in the eye and it stung like pepper spray. All of Steve’s fellow soldiers hated his wimpy attitude and they fucked with him constantly. On patrol one day a soldier shoved Steve off the dirt path they were following and he tripped onto a landmine. Four limbs less but still alive, he woke up in a hospital bed to find out his former rapist bitch bunkmate, mother of his child, had runaway with their baby.

Through months of pain, doubt and recovery he damned the very fabric of the cosmos. His dreams were always red. On discharge from the hospital and subsequently the military, he was homeless, broke, lost and rolling nowhere.

He found his only peace with the Madam at a whorehouse on the strip. Whatever he panhandled went straight to her and a chance to rest his head in her lap. She saw something in him that nobody else saw. The Madam saw something burning inside him, yearning and admirable. The hooker came to adore his desire for her and they soon fell deeply in love. It wasn’t long before she went missing. The word on the street was that she had been relocated by her Pimp at his whiff of her love affair ruining his business.

The next day police came looking for Steve at the shelter he frequented. They wanted him as a suspect in the murder of a runaway orphan and her baby from a Catholic Reform School. As soon as they took one look at him the officers chortled and chuckled, “Well shit! Guess this counts you out stumpy. Still, we’d like to ask you some questions?”

After the mock interrogation and notification of the murder of his son at the police station, something snapped inside Steve’s mind. A deep and maddening hate bore down on him. He wanted to slaughter that son of a bitch, that motherfucker responsible for everything: God.

Steve talked a recently released crack-head outside the police station into wheeling him to the door of the nearest neon fortune teller sign in exchange for his wheelchair. Laying on the dirty stoop and knocking, the door opened up to reveal a liquored up crackpot bag lady with a toothless scowl. She blurts, “What the fuck is this shit?” “I want to go to heaven,” he said. “Don’t us all,” retorted the Gypsy. She dragged him in like a lump. “I can’t send you to heaven cripple, but I can give you a glimpse of the spirit world if you think you’ll find what you’re looking for there?” “Whatever lady, all I have to my name is this picture of my parents to pay you.” After minutes of pondering she said, “Sure.” What else was she to do with the hopeless and helpless quadriplegic bum in her parlor? She stared at him with pity and thought; I’ll get rid of this waste for good. “Give me the picture,” she demanded. At her table of tchotchkes she placed the photograph down and said, “I’ll give you a choice. I can show you the spirit world so you can have a peek or I can send you there, where you’ll have your arms and legs back, but you may never return to this realm.” “I’ll take the one way ticket,” he said without hesitation. She knew he would.