Don't Shoot Me, I'm Just The Meter Reader! by Jonathan Logan (fiction novels to read txt) 📖

DON’T SHOOT ME,
I’M JUST THE METER READER!

by
Jonathan Logan


For Maddy


Preface
My version


Bad luck had followed me everywhere, every day of my life, and led me to hell on earth, a terrible place, like a never-ending void filled with an eternal inferno of excruciating agony. Whenever I truly needed a friend, bad luck was there to intercede, like an envious child. Every time I shunned adversity, adversity found a way to provoke me into trouble; every time I seemingly triumphed over a desperate situation, a desperate situation, with bad luck’s help, still found a way to prevail.
As my children and I faced hunger and homelessness, I found myself spilling my guts to a kindhearted social worker. As if it had the right to hold me accountable for life’s misfortunes, bad luck, knowing that my ex-wife was missing and that I had motive to hurt her and no alibi, taunted the kindly social worker to judge me to be guilty.
All I ever wanted to do was take care of my kids; when I learned that their drug-addicted mother had lost them, and that a judge placed them into foster care, I went to court to rescue them. How could I sit back and do nothing when the greatest miracles of my life needed me? If they were your children, wouldn’t you have done the same?
Yet, no matter how discouraged I was, no matter how hard the social worker, a lawyer, and a judge worked to find me guilty of murder, I didn’t give up. I kept fighting to prove my innocence.
I heard the clatter of jingling metal; I saw the callous police officer remove the cold, steel from his belt. He carefully placed the handcuffs onto my wrists and closed them forcefully, and as he took me to jail, I still believed that my luck was about to change for the better.


Revised Preface
by
My cellmate, Brandon Moon


Freaking bad luck had stalked me everywhere, every day of my life. It guided me to hell on earth, to some shit hole, like the restroom at the Greyhound bus depot in Grand Junction, Colorado (and I’ve been to that bitch and it is a shithole). Whenever I needed someone to grope and snuggle me, bad luck dicked me over, like some backstabbing bitch. Every time I shunned bad luck, it found me to be a hot and sexy whore to slam around; every time I seemingly smashed bad luck, some asshole, with bad luck’s help, beat the shit out of me, kicked me in the nuts, and put a shiv in my heart.
As the man fucked my children and me, I found myself laying down my rap with some douche bag social worker. As if it had the right to hold me accountable for life’s misfortunation, goddamn bad luck, knowing that my crackhead, whore, bitch ex-wife probably got capped by some dope peddler, and my only excuse being that I was smoking ganja and hanging with the homies, that fucking femenazi social worker called the fuzz on me.
All I ever wanted to do was take care of my kids; when I learned that their crackhead mother had lost them, and that a Judge Judy copycat placed them with a foster bitch, I went to court to rescue them. Yet, no matter how discouraged I was, no matter how terribly a douche bag social worker, prick lawyer, and a Dick Cheney judge beat me like a rented mule, I refused to give up or give in; I bitch-slapped bad luck and triple-dog-dared it to throw down.
I heard the clatter of jingling metal; I saw the pissed off pig remove the cold, steel cuffs from his belt. He looked like a psycho John Burger, as if he just graduated from zombie boot camp; he marched toward me like a fat Nazi. After he slapped the handcuffs sharply onto my wrists and closed them firmly enough to make me cringe my minge, I knew I was fucked.


Chapter One


They gave me one of those questionnaires to fill out that asked if my mother was a drinker and/or took drugs, and if my dad was mentally and/or physically abusive, and if I ever had thoughts about committing suicide, and a whole bunch of other crap that would explain why it is I’ve been so damned miserable. I never considered any of that stuff to be the cause of my malaise, but, then again, if I wanted to get out of jail, I had to convince them that medication and counseling could help with my rehabilitation, them being the jail’s intake psychologists. Nevertheless, I wasn’t going to play their little mind game and throw my parents under the bus. My father, God rest his soul, was far from perfect, but I wouldn’t have called him abusive, and my mother—she’s eighty-six and as sharp as a tack—never drank or used drugs any more than any other woman who grew up during The Great Depression. As far as suicide was concerned…well…the thought of dying had crossed my mind a few times, but I never acted upon those thoughts; nor would I ever. Still, I thought it might get me out of jail if I claimed to be depressed, so I told the intake officer that I was going to kill myself. He informed me that, if I truly felt that way, he would force me to strip naked and lie on a freezing, concrete floor inside a bare, eight by eight foot, padded room for my entire ten-day sentence. I changed my tune, and decided to tell the officer why I was so damned miserable. I told him that I had been under a lot of stress, and things hadn’t gone all that well for me over the years, and that was the chief reason why I had been so angry and out of sorts, and why I found it necessary to slap my out-of-control son in the face. The only thing that kept me going, kept my spirits up, was the fact that my daughter, Emily, was waiting for me to get out. Both of my kids were in a homeless shelter. It wasn’t too far from the jail, but since I hadn’t seen them in a few days, it felt like they were a million miles away. Emily wrote me letters every day, but the goddamn social worker delivered them to me once a week. Emily enjoyed writing letters; she took after me when it came to that, which really pissed off her drug-addicted mother. She wrote to me about the shelter, and how much she despised it, and how they made her get undressed and searched her for drugs, and how her brother, Luke, cursed out the social worker and sprinted ten blocks before he was caught and brought back to the place kicking and swearing. I had changed my mind about social workers; I didn’t like them anymore and neither did my kids, so don’t even try to tell us that they are there to help kids and families, because they’re not. The intake officer said he empathized with me because he had an ill-behaved teenage son of his own, but he recommended that I just do my time, and pray to God for direction. I nodded in agreement, and sat there waiting for them to transfer me to a permanent cell.
Even though it was summer, my teeth were chattering inside the jail’s holding cell. The damn place was freezing and there weren’t any windows to let in sunlight. On top of that, they made me sit on a stainless steel bench, in handcuffs, for three hours. At last, this sergeant named Bain, a powerfully built man with a thin mustache, fingerprinted, and photographed me—or at least he tried. The stupid fingerprinting machine stopped working, and when I recommended he pull the plug and let the machine reset, he glared at me. Ultimately, after about twenty minutes of striking the machine and cussing like a truck driver, Sergeant Bain asked a female officer named Shore if she could lend a hand, and she came in and did exactly what I suggested: yanked the plug out of the wall socket, and reset the damned thing. I guess it was okay for cops to have anger problems and beat on things, but it wasn’t okay for me. I was a parent and expected to keep my cool.
“It’ll work fine now,” Officer Shore declared, licking her glossy red lips. She looked like a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model packed into grey slacks and a navy blue blouse.
I liked Officer Shore, and I would’ve felt better staying in the intake area talking to her; but, instead, Sergeant Bain led me to a shower and told me to get undressed. I was so embarrassed and dejected, but I did what he told me to do. Once stripped, Sergeant Bain told me he needed to check me for drugs, to bend over and spread my ass cheeks; but as I turned my ass toward his face, Bain hollered, “Not toward me! Turn around, bend over, spread your cheeks, and cough!” How was I supposed to know? I’d never been in jail before. After my shower, they gave me a pair of white jockey shorts, an orange jumpsuit, and a pair of orange sandals to put on; they furnished me with a two-inch thick pad, a blanket, a towel, wash cloth, toothpaste, and toothbrush, and then they escorted me down a long cold corridor to my inmate dorm.
The dorm—or pod, as they called it—was at the rear of two solid sliding doors. The escort pressed an intercom button and announced that they were there to admit inmate Jonathan Logan; then the outer door opened and I stepped inside an area the size of an elevator. After the outer door shut, the inner door opened and I shuffled into the community hall. I got a lump in my throat and a panicky shudder down my spine when I caught a glimpse of the other inmates. The damn room was like a high school cafeteria, with white people on one side, Hispanic people on the other side, and blacks in the center. A white female guard who looked like Roseanne Barr sat behind a desk picking her teeth with a safety pin; I had told them that I had a bad back, so she told me to take the bottom bunk inside 107. I lugged my things into the 12x8 foot cell, but a tall gangly fellow with a tattoo of a snake on his left arm already occupied the bottom bunk. I didn’t want to hassle a fellow inmate, but since the female guard told me to take the bottom bunk, I revealed that detail to my tall gangly cellmate, and he told me to go fuck myself. Then he got up, strolled over to the commode—a stainless steel bowl sticking out of the wall—unsnapped the front of his orange jumpsuit, and, with me just standing there looking foolish, proceeded to urinate, squirting most of it on the floor. In addition, he farted and the disgusting odor practically made me pass out, and he scratched his private area. If this had been a college dorm, I would’ve