Excerpt: Don't Shoot the Messenger (Or How We Changed the Block)

Foreword

I have a pen in my head named “Scribbles”. He’s been there as long as I can remember. He used to distract me during AP English when I was supposed to be writing in-class essays. I’d write stories or re-write the essay prompt over and over until it sounded nice to me, sounded like something I actually wanted to write about. Of course often the revised prompt would have absolutely nothing in common with the original prompt except maybe a word or two, like “the” or “some”. I caused my teacher a lot of grief which I always felt bad about because I really liked Ms. Jelnick. She was smart, and I always wondered what made her decide to be a high school teacher, or why anyone decides to be teachers. It isn’t for the pay, and no one can really like teenagers that much. Especially pains like me who insist they have pens named Scribbles living in their brains coaxing them to write anything other than what has been assigned. And this may all seem a bit juvenile, as I am now a 30 year old man and not a high school student.

But I am also not crazy, and that has to be said and believed. Scribbles helped me do a lot of good for a lot of people. He (or she, I’m not sure I’ve always just assumed) might say that I helped him, but I guess it was in fact a team effort. One without the other could have done nothing. Scribbles wants to tell the story, and I think I ought to let him, but be warned he is going to hand a lot of undue credit over to me and I want you to know it was a shared effort.

I guess I’d be remiss not to mention that we also managed to screw things up pretty badly for a couple of people. But the truth of the matter is if I found a bug in my ice cream, I wouldn’t throw the whole thing away, I’d just eat around the bug.

Penny

Penny was a pretty messed up old lady. She had a cute name, and even the curly white haircut that hinted at a charmed younger life and collection of glass kittens on a hutch in her living room, but none of the above existed in her reality. The only thing to be found on the hutch in her living room were about 70 cartons of cigarettes she’d stocked up on when she found out the price of Reds was going up to an unspeakable $7.42 a pack. I found this all out when I offered to help her carry in her groceries. She explained the reason for the stockpile in the most indelicate of terms as I helped her organize the cartons on the shelf. I tried to stack them neatly around a picture of a forty-something gentleman who I knew had to be related to Penny. They had the same short curly haircut. After awkwardly adjusting the frame several times in an attempt to make everything fit Penny snatched the frame off the shelf completely and tossed it into a box of old newspaper on the opposite end of the room. “That’s my son, the bastard”. She went on to explain that he ran away when he was sixteen because he became embarrassed that she’d taken a job as an exotic dancer. She printed that picture out at a Kinkos off his “space page”. His “his space” page, she clarified. That’s the only way she was able to keep up on his life, not that she cared too much about it anyway. He had turned out to be as much of a disappointment as she always expected he would be and hoped he wouldn’t be.