And if Billy could just walk through a supermarket and buy his groceries every Sunday, his bag of oatmeal, his three dozen eggs, and his six fucking pounds of lean beef, well, would that be too much to ask?
Billy had just been minding Billy’s own business, there in the fated cheese aisle. Billy was looking for the large containers of low-fat cottage cheese, all that muscle-building and testosterone-pumping protein inside just begging to be spooned out and digested, converted into fuel that Billy would put to better use, you better bet your ass, than the sludge-pudge belly-bursters with their carts full of barbecue chips and cherry cola and Hostess Ho-Ho’s, which these Ho-Hos who walked the aisles could suddenly snatch off the shelf with a fraction of their former remorse because “chocolate was an antioxidant now.” Ha! As if that could possibly slow the fury of the righteous heart attacks boiling up their fat tracks en route to their overworked and exhausted arteries, God bless the disadvantaged workers of the world, big and small.
(Billy, as you’ve noticed, doesn’t see anything wrong with anger if it is an honest and righteous manifestation of the truth.)
The problem was, Billy had forgotten whether the cottage cheese in this particular grocery store was put with the rest of the cheese or with the milk, which it often was, even though it was called and therefore was a cheese; refrigeration requirements notwithstanding, the perpetrators of such inexcusable organization ought to be blasted in the chest with a rifle. There are precious few things can be taken for granted in this world, and while it apparently asks too much of the Lord’s tendency toward intervention to separate the earth’s land and people according to what by rights ought to be theirs, society would be settings its standards far too low if it sat by and let the same situation develop in miniature in its own local grocery stores and supermarkets.
This, then—the finding of the cottage cheese—was Billy’s mission, and Billy’s bane, when he felt a finger tapping on his shoulder, surely what the rhinoceros must feel of the pecking from the birds on his back. Billy turned around only because he assumed, naturally, that the offender was an employee with the answer to his cottage-cheese question. Instead, he saw a twenty-something child of predominantly Irish descent in a backwards baseball hat. The child pointed at Billy when he turned around, and said, “Oh my god, you are the Indian from DeathKillers 2!”
Billy sized the child up. Billy is always sizing people up, because people are always smaller than he is and who doesn’t like to feel big? Thus reassured, Billy looked down at the child’s basket and stuck his hand inside to shuffle the contents. He really should have known. There was no cottage cheese. Billy turned away to resume his search.
“Uh, okay…can you…Mike! Hey, Mike! Come here! Excuse me.” The child again. “Hey, can I get your autograph?”
Billy tried to ignore him but the tapping continued. “Here, just use my grocery list.” So Billy grabbed the list and scanned it. But his suspicions proved acute: no cottage cheese.
Billy had been right all along.
“Autographs on the website,” Billy said, and let the grocery list float to the ground. “Twenty-five dollars. Where is the cottage cheese?”
“What? Twenty-five dollars? Oh come on, who’s going to pay for that? Come on man, I’m a fan. I own DeathKillers 2. How many people can say that? You’re like a C movie star. Matt! Hey, dude, look—it’s the Indian guy from DeathKillers 2! Oh come on, man, just sign my grocery—”
Billy felt a surge through his veins and he seized the child’s shirt and pulled him in close. The child’s lips quivered in puerile fashion.
“My people,” Billy said, baring his teeth, “are called Native American.” Then Billy took a large breath in order to thunder: “Where is the cottage cheese?”
Billy heard a splat-like sound and thought that maybe the child shat himself, but it was just the grocery basket, which had fallen to the ground.
“I’m sorry please let me go,” the child said, wriggling now and trying to worm his way free. But Billy had too tight a grip for worming. “I don’t know where the cottage cheese is, you psychopath! You fucking crazy Cherokee!”
Though well aware of his cinematic shortcomings, Billy was nonetheless ideally suited for certain parts, thanks to his uncanny ability to bypass those higher intellectual functions that are a hindrance in times of acute stress and to assume a more primal role. His most famous: Clawing Bear the DeathKiller. And while Clawing Bear the DeathKiller is just a character in a movie, a ruse, a charade, the primordial nature on display in this near-cult classic is real, as innate to Billy as a blink.
And there are moments, like this one in the grocery store, in which Billy is unable to contain the DeathKiller inside.
Of course to others, it is never such an artistic transformation taking place but something much less creative; they will blame—not at the time of course, but later, when they look back and recall being, let’s say, thrown into the eggs section of the breakfast aisle and then repeatedly and furiously kicked in the ribs while lying fetal in a giant pool of shattered raw yolks—they will blame without fail Billy’s temper, Billy’s volatile hormones, Billy’s uncontrollable rage. What the doctors called his “problem.”
But at this moment Billy had another problem, less important but more immediate, and that was the tazers. How the police had arrived so quickly Billy would never know. Billy suspected them from time to time of following him in anticipation of a misstep, waiting to pounce and send him back behind the thick bars. Their tazers ran lightning all over and through him until his legs gave way, and all the personas inside Billy’s head, the angry with the thoughtful, came together in dream as the titan met the floor.
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