3. Diary of a Male Prostitute




• I can’t apologize about this. What I saw looked like cottage cheese microwaved over a shriveled slice of ham, and it smelled like it.
  
  It’s hard to apologize about saying something like this once you know what I had to go through earlier this morning. I slept with a woman old enough to be my grandmother. Her name was Evelyn.
  
  She reached over to the oak nightstand and turned over her husband’s ivory-framed photo. She told me she’d put him in a home a month ago. She smacked my head while I was crouched between her legs and told me I was nothing but a cheap whore.
  
  “You’re a dime a dozen,” she yelled. “You’re nothing!”
  
  She threw a glass of wine at my face. I could taste blood on my lips mixed with the Merlot as I flaked away a few tiny shards of broken glass from my cheek. It was probably a 1985 vintage judging by the heavy flavor and the way it flowed down the back of my neck like nasty syrup. Among other things, part of my job description involves researching wine etiquette. I have to research everything-etiquette to please these old women.
  
  For just once I’d like to get a woman below the age of 55 who isn’t drowned in perfume that smells like funeral potpourri. Most of them are saggy and wrinkled like a wet newspaper. Sometimes they even ask me to take out their garbage or feed their little poodles after a session. What’s worse is they force me to listen to stuff like the Everly Brothers or Fats Domino, while I swallow the few grains of pride I have left and make all of their dreams come true.
  
  I would rather be washing dishes for some Sou chef downtown, or cleaning urinals. But cleaning urinals doesn’t pay $350 a pop.
  
  My best friend Kevin spends most of his day serving liquor and manicotti with side dishes of sautéed shrimp down at Ocean Side. He’s really happy. But happiness doesn’t make payments on a 07’ Shellby GT 500 Mustang. And it certainly can’t provide a decent apartment in Manhattan on Broad Street, overlooking Radio City. More importantly, it doesn’t cover the cost of in-home hospice care for my terminally ill mother. Her brain is slowly withering away into jelly. She has Creuzfeldt-Jakob disease.
  
  The doctor dumbed it down for me like this: “This a rare disease. Prions are proteins that live in the tissue of the brain. Think of them as little bugs. They degrade the other proteins in the cells of the brain and cause these degraded proteins to grow rapidly. The brain cells get crowded with these proteins and eventually the normal cells stop functioning.”
  
  He looked down at the floor and rolled his thumb around the silver circle of his stethoscope. He said she didn’t have more than a year, a little over a year if she’s lucky. Her brain will be pudding before I turn twenty-five.
  
  I’m waiting on my next trick, watching each ash of my cigarette flutter away. They float through the dank, peeling, motel window like feathers. If I could only fly away with them on their dusty wings. I bury my head so low it touches my knees and think of how beautiful it would be to join them and leave this all behind.
  
  Evelyn's words nag me. “You’re a dime a dozen…you’re nothing!”
  
  It hurts because it’s true. I’m nothing but a vessel, a scrap to be plucked up and used and tossed away. I only hope this next trick will be safer. I received a call earlier today from a new client. I’m supposed to meet her in ten minutes, but I don’t even know what ten minutes equates to.
  
  There aren’t any clocks in my apartment because time doesn’t really exist for me in the normal sense. For me, time is measured in tricks. After my third or fourth trick my stomach starts growling. Normal people call this noon. Usually, I’ll head to Ocean Side restaurant and talk to Kevin and gorge myself with lobster or garlic shrimp.
  
  Kevin loves listening to my stories because it breaks up the monotony in his normal-Joe life. Kevin’s a good friend and he tries not to lecture me, but by the end of lunch he’ll be shaking his head. He’ll look at me with his round, five o’clock-shadow-face. His blue eyes seem to turn a shade of gray as he wipes the counter and looks up at me.
  
  He pauses, and that serious look floods his face. He repeats a sentiment along these lines: “I have no problem with what you do, Nate. But man, what about when you get older? You won’t be a tall, muscle-bound blonde forever, bud. When you get old you shrink. I’m not even going to get into diseases. And the drugs.”
  
  When he does this routine time itself seems to stand still, because he’s completely focused on me and I know it’s a heartfelt compassion. He’ll sigh just barely enough for me to notice. But afterward he’ll give me a warm smile and bring me a beer, to let me know he’s not judging me and that he cares about me. It’s good to know there are a few Kevins out there in a big city like this. Everything moves so fast it’s easy to get lost.
  
  By my eighth or ninth trick the sun is almost down; most people call this evening. But all this means to me is it’s time to take the subway back to my apartment and do my nightly shot of Anadrol.
  
  Paying the overhead cost of steroids is worth it for the time being, even though it will be cournterproductive in the long run. The nature of this business is that everything is worth it for the time being, whether it is or it isn’t. In this business you quickly learn to stop pretending there’s a future. You don’t even live from day to day, you live from trick to trick.
  
  My job depends on being fit. Steroids keep my tanned biceps and six-pack up to par. It also gives me that boost to be able to hit some nightclub downtown after a long day’s work. After months and months of having sex eight or nine times a day I can barely walk around in my apartment. But after the shot, I’m able spend a couple of hours at the club. After the club I return home and go to sleep. The process starts all over again the next morning.
  
  I’m selling little pieces of my soul for $350 a pop or $700 an hour. If chains, handcuffs, or any other weird fetish is involved the price goes up. Sometimes they’ll want me to roleplay a scene in which the husband catches us. He’ll be hiding in the walk-in closet with a baseball bat or a golf club, watching me have sex with his wife. When I finish, he’ll come barging out wide-eyed, weapon raised in hand. The last time we did that he hit me. I’m not sure if it was intentional but they’re on my blacklist regardless. Evelyn is about to be put on it as well.
  
  The sad truth is, I don’t care about the pain or abuse as much as I do about looking ugly. In this profession I can’t afford to have my face caved in or my teeth knocked out. I have to be a six-foot-three machine of stamina and beauty. I’ve got to be Adonis. I can’t sell my soul to someone with my face caved in or missing teeth. Sometimes I wonder if I even have a soul left.
  
  Sometimes on Sundays, when I’m cruising around in my Shellby, I often think about Kevin walking home or taking the subway to his tiny alcove he calls an apartment. I picture him untying his apron and reaching into his pockets to pull out a wad of money. I almost feel pity for him, seeing that plump grin on his face, and his bright blue eyes opening wider.
  
  I pity him because he’s holding the crumpled wad up to his face with both hands like he’s found a pot of gold. He’s got what ninety, or a hundred dollars? Maybe today was a good day and he made a bill and half, maybe even a little over? Even the Italian marble tile in my apartment is worth more than all of his assets combined. But then I see him taking off his red and orange-stained apron and throwing it into the hamper. At the end of the day my dirty apron is still on. It never comes off.
  
  For the last nine months I’ve constantly lied to myself. I try and convince myself that self-respect and dignity are overrated in a cruel city like this. I have to believe everyone has sold out in some way or another. These lies have served as my armor. After Evelyn, the coat finally seems to be rusting and I can see who I truly am through its tiny holes. I ask myself often if I’m doing this for my mother Lois, or if it’s just because I have not the character to turn away from the road I’ve paved.
  
  Not many people wake up one day and decide to become an alcoholic or a prostitute. The sad truth is, sometimes it’s easier to accept misery than to change.
  
  Sometimes what you think is a one-time event tumbles into a lifestyle, and before you know it, you’re in a dark, underground culture without a warden to release you from its clutches. I’m not saying anyone is necessarily trapped and that they don’t have a free will. I’m only saying that sometimes living in misery is easier than doing something about it. It’s safer. You know what to expect with misery, especially if you’ve lived with it all your life. Change is harder; it’s something that requires work.
  
  My hand is on the cell phone now. I’m going to tell Kevin it’s over.
  
  “Serving food can’t be too hard,” I tell myself out loud.
  
  I’d have to give up the apartment, the car, and move back home. Before I hit the speed-dial there’s a knock on the motel door...
  

2. Interstate Deathwish




• At any given second I could die. I’m parked sideways on I-65 north in the middle of the night, halfway on the actual interstate and halfway on the shoulder of the road. Fog blankets the entire area.
  
  It’s the most dangerous part of the interstate near my apartment because it’s where I-65 curves sharply for a long stretch, almost in a complete circle. I know this because it’s where Gwen died. I park here every time.
  
  Most accidents within a five-mile radius occur at this stretch because there’s a ramp wall blocking the view around the entire curve. It’s impossible to see if anything is ahead of you or behind you. Even on a clear night the only landmark visible is the very tip of a yellow Waffle House sign off the next exit ramp. With my headlights and brake lights turned off I’m a guerilla disaster waiting to happen.
  
  I’m in the back seat masturbating right now, like I do every time I park on the interstate. Sometimes I like to listen to Everly Brothers or Patsy Cline, other times I listen to some of that newer music with more rhythm like Justin Timberlake.
  
  Headlights are blinding me and horns are blaring, their pitch becomes higher the closer the vehicles get, and lower as they pass.
  
  Whhhherrrrrrrr!
  
  Little drops of rain pelt the foggy windshield. The medley of rain and wet pavement wafts through the window and fills my nostrils.
  
  Cars and trucks swerve into the other lanes to avoid me, and the rush I’m getting is inexpressible. I can’t speak from personal experience, but I ‘m sure crack-cocaine can’t deliver this kind of ethereal high, where every five seconds a horn could mean I’m about to have my brains splattered all over the inside of my car. My hair is standing up on the back of my neck, and the inside of my scalp is tingling.
  
  I’m in a little, red 89’ Ford Escort. I could have brought my beat up Oldsmobile, but the Oldsmobile is bigger and safer. If I get hit in this little Escort, the chances are I’m more likely to die.
  
  No one can fault me for a lack of creativity. The Russians have their roulette; the Swiss have their William Tell, and the Japanese have their Kamikazes. Scholars can hyper-analyze these games to death and say they’re Freudian death wishes, or something deep and complex with roots in Greek mythology. But I think the reasons are simple; every society is plagued with boredom and will go to any lengths necessary to alleviate it. I just have my own fresh little spin on these cathartic games, my car parked sideways in the middle of hundreds of miles of dark interstate, waiting for a vehicle.
  
  I’m pretty much the opposite of a Kamikaze pilot. I like to purposely stack the odds against me. I won’t even venture out unless there is at least a ninety percent chance of rain that night. To increase the chance of fog accumulation I try and make sure the humidity is around one hundred percent.
  
  Joan says I’m delusional and psychotic, but in my opinion is she’s just a student working on her college degree, pretending she’s a therapist. I was caught last summer by INDOT (Indiana’s Department of Transportation) and sentenced to six months of inpatient therapy at Greenleaf, and six months of outpatient therapy. That’s where I met Joan.
  ***
  
  That summer, I parked in this same spot at night, with the lights off. I was working away at it, with my eyes closed. I hoped a drunk driver or an eighteen-wheeler would slam into me, or that a cop would walk up and catch me in the act.
  
  I was working away…almost there, thinking of Succubae. They ripped into my back with their talons and seared my flesh, sucking every last drop of life force out of me. Horns blared and the headlights created a laser light show inside my car. The Everly Brothers were dream-dream-dreaming away, when I heard a tap on my window.
  
  An INDOT worker stands outside my window, blinding me with a flashlight. That doesn’t stop me though. A minute later there’s another tap and three more people at my window, this time in police uniform. My back seat looks like someone blew their nose on it.
  
  Judge Polinksi tilted his bifocals and looked at me, shaking his cotton-white head.
  
  “Son, we don’t even have laws for this kind of thing, besides indecent exposure and reckless endangerment...which is a felony you know. Are you suicidal…” he paused to look at my rap sheet and then to me, “Mr. Broker?”
  
  I nodded.
  
  I have Obsessive Compulsive disorder and I’m bipolar; that’s what Gwen told me when she was still alive. I hate admitting that but she always encouraged me to so I could move on and get better. Joan thinks my diagnosis is much worse. We still meet once a week. I recall our first session.
  
  “Mr. Broker, ahem, why do you have this death-wish? You’re putting your life in danger and everyone else on the interstate. Could you explain to me why you’re doing this?”
  
  “I can’t afford Cable,” I say, with a serious look on my face.
  
  She doesn’t say anything; she just stares me down with her look.
  
  She doesn’t turn red; she doesn’t even frown at me. She has two colors, a beautiful honey color when she’s normal, and bleach white when she is angry. I don’t think she’s ever happy. Just then she was white. Another indicator if she’s mad or put off is she squints and points her lazy eye at me like a gun. When she does this I can feel needles under my skin. Right then I could feel the needles.
  
  She says in the calmest voice, almost whispering, “Mr. Broker, may I call you Ted?”
  
  I nod.
  
  “Ted, I drive on that interstate every night. I have a three-year-old daughter.”
  
  Then she does that thing with her eyes again, calm as some Buddhist, but supple as a snake, slithering her way into my psyche. The part of my brain that says, damn, she might be right you stupid shit-for-brains.
  
  Joan looks twenty-two but I think she’s closer to thirty. Her raven hair hangs down placidly at her shoulders. Her nose looks like a crooked beak, jutting out from two, tiny, black pearl eyes. She acts like the type who merely studies people, with as much empathy as the little tropical fish in her fish tank. Well it’s not exactly her fish tank; it’s not even her office. She’s doing her practicum right now. I’m just a college credit for her.
  
  But that voice in the back of my head knows she’s right. She might be a bitch of Arctic grandeur, but she has a point.
  
  And, in some ways she is attractive, especially if you like women with lazy eyes.
  
  I've stopped telling her that I'm doing this to be with Gwen again. She doesn't want to listen to that. She doesn't understand me, nobody did except Gwen. After I lost her to that drunk driver I also lost my mind. It wasn’t as if I was the most stable person to begin with, either.
  
  These neuroses didn’t seem to bother Gwen. She was one of a kind, the only woman who could put up with my antics. Even after she discovered I took fifteen showers a day, no more, no less. The sleepless, manic nights when I’d be up in the kitchen boiling eggs or cooking things I’d never eat, just for something to do.
  
  I baked Pumpkin Pie for her all night, as if it were Thanksgiving. Pumpkin Pie was her favorite, and I made sure she had plenty for breakfast. I’d bake tray, after tray, after tray. Weird I know. Any given week and I’d be up all night, buried in a Stephen King novel. I’ve probably read IT over two hundred hundred times during my life. There’s the time I tried to file a lawsuit against myself for reckless endangerment, but she stood by me through it all.
  
  She had a way that made me feel comfortable. She always reminded me to take my medicine. She always brought me Tiramisu cake at the end of her shift because she was sweet like that. She was a waitress at O’ Charlies.
  
  I could smell her before she came to the door every night from work. She didn’t smell like you would think, like a vat of cooking oil or breading from onion rings or mozzarella sticks. She smelled like she did when she left, like that strawberry scented shampoo and conditioner she used. Her red hair was almost the same color as her button-up shirt she wore to work, not a rusty-red but almost bright orange.
  
  She was supporting us while I went to school to study Radiology. I didn’t feel too bad about this because we were also using my mental disability check to cover the rest of the bills. The last night I saw her was two years ago, October 18th. I can still smell the strawberry scent, and feel her kiss. She covered another waitress’s shift that night.
  
  Six hours later it was all over the news. Her body looked like nothing more than jelly, oozing with red pus. They never caught him either. From the scratches on the roof and from eyewitness testimony they say she was run off the road by a large, red, flatbed truck. Apparently he was drunk or high, weaving in and out of his lane.
  
  That’s partly why I’m sitting here, parked on I-65 in this little shithouse-deathtrap with wheels, jerking away. I’m waiting for that ticket to heaven, hoping the same guy will run into me that killed Gwen. If I die or if I don’t die, it doesn’t make a difference. It still breaks up the monotony of my life and you can’t find a cheaper buzz than this. The only overhead is a couple of dollars in gas. You can’t get off cheaper renting a movie.
  
  My therapist tells me I’m schizophrenic, that Gwen divorced me two years ago because of my crazy behavior. She says she's just waiting for the judge's approval to put me away for good. But Joan is just a hater. I’m not going to let her stop me from being with the only woman who has ever truly loved me. That red truck is speeding towards me now and it looks like Gwen's ghost is next to the driver. I’m working away, almost there…
  

1. Friendly Fire




• In the military, the most tragic war stories sometimes never get told. If nothing else good comes of the war, at least I have the chance to tell of Private Tucker’s tragedy. And mine.
  
  We met here in Baghdad, in 2005. He had already been stationed here two years, broken in from one of the very first invasions in March of 2003. A letter came for me in the mail during one of the troop surges. I was called in, unprepared to fight a war that I didn't even know was happening.
  
  Maybe no one is really ever prepared for war. With all due respect, perhaps even the men of steel, the Marines and Seals only want to be here out of a misguided sense of duty and honor. The other type, the ones that want to be here because they enjoy killing are just plain mad.
  
  Tucker and I were nothing but two ill-equipped, sandy-haired babes from the National Guard who could barely load a gun the right way. He was a bricklayer by trade; I was an aspiring writer, taking care of my mother at home in Vermont. She was slowly withering away with Lou Gehrig’s disease.
  
  Many of us sat idle so long through times of peace that war seemed like some great myth, some Greek epic. But when we were called in, standing under that hot desert sun, time stopped and slowly tipped backwards. With the prospect of dying or becoming maimed every day, death was no longer the myth. Reality was violently flipped on its head. Sitting at home in a warm house watching TV became the fairy tale. We were playing Russian roulette on a daily basis.
  
  Tucker and I gravitated toward one another, the same way lonely drunks in a bar seem to sniff out each other's misery. Three months after I landed, my sister Jenny wrote. Mom was at St. Anthony's on her deathbed and my fiancée Crystal was cheating on me with her high school beau. She said she was sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but that it was better to find out now than later.
  
  Coincidentally, Tucker received his Dear-John Letter three days after mine. His brother was "taking care" of his wife while he was here fighting the war. They were living the high life in a Condo near Bradenton Beach for the last two years.
  
  That night we sat in a dusty dive, an old abandoned school that had been remodeled into a place where the soldiers could kill themselves with whiskey.
  
  Tucker looked me in the eye, putting back shot after shot of rum, daring me to keep up. We were drinking not only to spite ourselves, but each other as well. Not a single word was exchanged. We were playing a game of roulette; each shot of whiskey was a bullet. We wanted to see who had the stones to take it the furthest. I didn't think things could get worse, but they did.
  
  A few weeks later, we were sent about fifteen miles north of Baghdad. It was one of the most volatile regions, constantly bombarded by insurgents. We were doing a recon mission to find munitions bunkers, and garnering a rough estimate of how many rebels held the area down.
  
  We were hiding next to what looked like some derelict salvage yard. Metal parts of jeeps and scrap were strewn everywhere. A crooked, sun-faded sign hung above the door for dear life. The wood siding of the building was pocked with bullet holes.
  
  Through binoculars, we were watching some kids play on a schoolyard. Some were making flags, others were tossing a ball back and forth. Sergeant Liskey went around the back to take a leak. Tucker lowered his binoculars and took a swig from his canteen, wiping sweat from his forehead. I was still watching those kids play when I heard a click, and a thump.
  
  Before I had time to turn my head completely around, I heard an explosion. A sharp, burning pain like a red-hot needle spread from my left eye and down my cheek. At the same time this happened, Tucker tackled me, or maybe he was blown into me. We never got the story straight. But when you're the one that gets your leg blown off instead of the other guy, you deserve bragging rights for something. I let him have them.
  
  No one knows how we made it out alive. Gunfire splintered the wood building and hit Corporal Atkins. He flopped over in front of me, holding his gut. Blood poured out of his mouth. He choked for a few seconds and then his eyes closed. Three Privates turned the rest of that wood hut into Swiss cheese. I don't remember this, but Liskey said he gave the signal to fall out. After the building went up in flames we hightailed it back to the base in the Humvee.
  
  I was in severe pain. Every image in my left eye looked like a silhouette eclipsed by the sun. Tucker screamed the whole time. The medic gave him a shot of morphine during the ride back, but the screaming continued. His knee, and everything below it dangled like a kite from his body. It literally hung by threads.
  
  After they flushed the pieces of shrapnel out of my eye and cauterized his leg there wasn’t much left they could do. We were to be shipped back home in three days, me with a blind eye and scarred face and he with a missing leg. A day and a half of lying on a bed in the infirmary felt like two months. Tucker only made it worse.
  
  He shoved a nurse when she was late with his medication. He constantly complained and at night I heard him crying. After hours and hours of this I slowly soaked up his apathy and despair like a sponge. It was hard for me to be around him, but at the same time I needed him. He was the only one in the platoon more miserable than I. We were both pretty much in the same position, but it hit him harder. That somehow validated my own sense of survival. Think of it as the opposite of Survivor's Guilt syndrome.
  
  To pass the time we played games with each other. I took care of him for the same reason he let me, out of pure spite and anger. I owed him one, and he took every advantage of it. So I took every advantage of owing him.
  
  Sometimes I would put his tray of food too far from his bed. I'd watch him hobble toward it to remind him that he needed me, and that I was one leg up on him. He would dirty extra dishes, and make extra messes just because he knew I hated cleaning them up. But at the same time, cleaning up his messes made him feel more and more like an invalid, and he hated himself for it. So I took sick pleasure in cleaning up these extra messes he made just to spite me, in order to spite him.
  
  After a day and a half of this we were getting restless. Even the morphine drip wasn’t enough to cure our boredom. We decided to play our old game and head back to the bar for our last night out. We took our bottles of Percocet and I wheeled him out against the doctor’s orders. After his violent outburst and complaining and my antics they didn’t put up much of a fight.
  
  I wheeled him back to the dorm and checked our mail one last time. I received another letter from Jenny. Mother had died. She died whispering my name, looking off into space with those lopsided eyeballs.
  
  What else could go wrong? I thought.
  
  That night at the bar there was something thick and somber weighing down the air. We sat in a corner booth looking at each other. There was a vacancy in Tucker’s eyes that I can’t quite describe, like he was about to ask me permission to do something horrifying and he half hoped I might try and talk him out of it. And as if by instinct I knew what he was about to say.
  
  “Jason, we need to talk,” he said.
  
  I looked away from him and rolled up two cigarettes. We ate some more Percocets and watched the orange moon through the window. He told me he wasn't going back home.
  
  "I have nothing to go back for."
  
  "I understand that."
  
  "No, I don't think you do," he said, chewing another Percocet.
  
  “I’m a brick layer,” he said, looking down at where his leg used to be, “that’s all I know how to do.”
  
  I didn't say anything for a few minutes. I sat there, silently smoking that cigarette. It might have been the pills but a faint halo slowly formed around the moon. We chewed a few more pills and washed them down with whiskey. We ordered shot after shot.
  
  "I need you to do something for me."
  
  He wanted me to euthanize him, in front of the platoon. In the locker room, first thing in the morning I was to sneak up behind him and blow his brains out with my forty-five.
  
  "Wouldn't it be so much easier just to take pills, or IV morphine?" I said.
  
  The nurses would probably even oblige.
  
  "Nope, everyone needs to see this. All those people getting discharged, going home to their wives and kids with both legs, they need to see this."
  
  "It's murder. I don't want to go to prison. And why can’t you do this yourself?"
  
  He stubbed out his cigarette and sat silent for a minute, as if he were waiting for some hidden part of him to surface and walk him back out of this dark labyrinth he had created for himself.
  
  “I need you to do it,” he said, “because I don’t have the balls to do it myself. I don’t even want to see it coming. You’re the only one I know with the stones to pull it off. Maybe we could do it together.”
  
  The room was starting to spin.
  
  “What do you have left to go back to anyway?” he said.
  
  He was right. Everything weighed down on me in a way that I had never imagined possible. A man died three feet away from me. I’d lost my fiancée, my mother, and my left eye. With the side of my face disfigured, I looked like a funhouse monster.
  
  Even if I made it out of this insane war alive it seemed I had nothing to look forward to. No matter which way I tried to spin it the forecast always seemed to hold the same thing for me: one miserable and crazy veteran, crying in his beer with a shotgun propped underneath his chin.
  
  It seemed inevitable I told myself, so I may as well get it over with now.
  
  The rest of that night is a blur. I woke up a little after five the next morning in my own vomit. I was still drunk. Everyone had already gone to Mess. I wiped the rheum from my eyes thinking it would clear the blurriness. It didn’t.
  
  I walked over to Tucker’s bunk. He was gone but there were a few wrapped presents, a bottle of champagne and a fruit basket on his bed. I chuckled.
  
  The gun was loaded so I put on my fatigues and headed to the locker room. Tucker was in the wheelchair taking off his shirt. Sergeant Liskey was helping him with his boot and the shower was running.
  
  I turned around, and walked back to my cot. I couldn't do it, especially with Liskey watching. I lit a cigarette and tried to build up the courage while he took his last shower.
  
  After the cigarette I hurried back to the locker room. He was alone, sitting in the wheelchair and facing away from me like we had planned. He began whistling. I crept up behind him, pressed the gun to the back of his head and pulled the trigger.
  
  Time was suspended. His brains seemed to fly out of his head in slow motion, like a beaten pillow's feathers, slowly floating to the ground. My heart didn't beat for what could have been an eternity, or two and a half seconds.
  
  Fragments of his brain speckled the wall, which dripped red with his blood. I put the barrel in my mouth and would have pulled the trigger, but I heard someone call my name. A moment later someone turned off the shower.
  
  I peeked around the corner. Tucker sat on a plastic stool under a showerhead. His hair was still wet. Later, I found out Liskey had helped him into the shower and playfully commandeered the wheelchair.
  
  If I had just finished him before he got into the shower everything would have worked out as planned. I constantly beat myself up for it, even though I know it doesn’t help grappling with those what-ifs. The debate about if my eye were better, or if my vision weren’t blurred from the drunkenness and pill hangover, doesn’t take away the bars in front of me. It certainly cannot give Sergeant Liskey his life back, either. The only real debate now is when and how to kill myself. Otherwise I’ll be rotting in prison for the rest of my life, or worse.
  
  My trial is in three days. Tucker hung himself in a walk in closet a couple of months ago. I’m still waiting for my sister to write back.
  
  In wartime, every day is just another spin of the loaded chamber. In wartime we are all asked to spin it and pull the trigger. Some are lucky enough to win the roulette game and some are not. These are the stories that sometimes slip through the cracks.