Fifty Shades of Old Trapper

On the day I got out of jail a man fell from the highest peak of Mount Hood. I stumbled back to an empty flat and saw two weeks’ notice attached to the door. My hard-drive with all its information was gone. I had lost the evidence for Charles Manson and Jimmy Fallon's mother's "deaths". 

 

I moved into a house in East Portland with recovering meth heads and drunks, some had a history of violence, "When we were kids in California they'd go out and shoot a man, get 20 years, be out by the time they were 40," I immediately assessed the speaker's age, he appeared about 50, and I was a little concerned. One man from Arkansas said "Ye-ha," a lot, when I asked about this he said, "I just can't help it". Through the day I worked on a tell-all novel at the library, once there was a man sat at the computers who kept saying, "People are dumb, they are dumb, they are really dumb," he made "dumb" sound like "dom" and he would repeat this over-and-over. I sat with the house on an evening and ate, and sometimes there would be a dumb movie on. 

 

Soon afterwards I had to move to Aloha to meet the terms of probation and I registered with an employment agency. They had vacancies available in a meat packing factory called Old Trapper, and although I've been a vegetarian for over thirty years, I really had to work.

 

The main snag was the location of the factory, the South American girl said, "Forest Grove," and I immediately sagged and sighed with disappointment because I'd spent the last year wanting to get away from this town on account of their cruel fake news media department. They were always pestering me. Money was all important, my social housing lasted only two months, and I wanted to fly back to England and so, I accepted the job.

 

I worked with three Mexicans, two males, one female, they were some of the finest people I'd known since moving to the States. They were industrious hard workers, and helpful in teaching me how to use the machine and giving me the lowdown on the basic working and running of the place. They would call me "Amigo".

 

I worked eight hour shifts, four days a week, and I would have a half-hour lunch break and two fifteen minute breaks per day that I would use for nicotine stimulation. For lunch, I would venture further down the long-grid-road to a local convenience store and buy a cheese and jalapeno roll and a hot coffee and I would sit on a rock by an island of green grass that the road forked around and I would sip and eat and smoke. I would watch the cars driving up the hill and sometimes I would be recognised. One lunch-break I went to sit on the rock and I noticed that it had become covered in what looked like white bird poo. I'd mentioned the ancient Egyptian hawk headed God Horus on social-media the night before.

 

I would finish the shift and clock out at four and then we had to sign out too, sometimes their were queues, and afterwards I would walk down the long-grid-road and onto Pacific Highway to catch the 57. The bus would be packed with students. On two occasions I sat across from a thin female with dark hair and she would talk aloud to herself, turning her head slightly downwards and to one side as she spoke. The other passengers seemed somewhat uncomfortable, embarrassed, and inconvenienced by this. Her language wasn't violent at all in content, although she foamed rather unpleasantly at the mouth. I thought she was suffering from some specific neurological complaint, she needed medication and I thought about the police-state and wondered what inhumanity would want to harm somebody suffering like that? That this wasn't the answer. Then I saw that she was holding an orange bag.

 

I would most often alight from the bus at Winco, shop for my evening meal which was often cheese and onion fritters, macaroni cheese, and mash potatoes, and then I would walk up the long-grid-road to Hillsboro library so I could use the machines. I was the person you didn't know about behind the headlines, the person you couldn't see, but because I was working all day, I couldn't see the headlines. The factory didn't allow WI-FI.

 

I would sit next to the CD section in front of a computer screen and scan the Guardian and Mail for relevant content. One day I saw that the Guardian had a photograph of an uncoiled red hose pipe that looked like the sausages I would see on the rack and I realised they knew where I was working. I would check the social media pages of my online celebrity stalkers, leave relevant comments on Twitter. One time I'd said something about "Time out of synch," and that "I love been anonymous," and when I got on the Max train a student sitting in one of the carriages shouted out, "Is that Justin?" I looked at her without recognition and she said, "I don't know who you are!" and I went and sat down at the back of the carriage. The announcements for the stops were out of synch with the stations.

 

After Israel bombed Syria, a history professor was standing at the bus stop outside of the library and he tried to engage in conversation, but I was reluctant to talk, maybe now the dragon on the hill believed what I'd said about Iraq? Before leaving the library I'd left a comment on Twitter about "Women who wear make-up appear disingenuous from the start," and when I got on the bus I had to stifle a laugh because in the first left lateral seat was a girl wearing more make-up than I'd ever seen on a face. The tyrannical police-state in their total paranoia probably thought the online statement meant I wanted to attack girls wearing make-up. She did seem to look worried as a matter of fact, I think I had been paraphrasing Schopenhauer.

 

I would often wonder if the factory was owned by a professor from the university. I'd guessed this about some of the smaller local businesses and been proven correct and I could imagine teams of police, professors and students wasting time watching hours of boring film footage of me working the machine that filled the edible plastic casings with sausage meat. I did my job properly without eccentricity, but if I coughed I would think they will probably interpret the action as though I wanted some small country bombed or hit by a hurricane. They had once manufactured the mainstream news media to make it appear that a serious earthquake had been caused in some South American country after I had walked a circuit around town wearing a red Triple Horn of Odin symbol on a black T-shirt.

 

One morning before the machine was due to be switched on I noticed there were electrical wires exposed and that this was particularly dangerous because there was a section of the machine that through the mechanism of a thin plastic tube sprayed water over the metal unit so the hard and brittle plastic casings would soften and become slick. I called one of the bluecoats over, he was a Mexican and I showed him the problem, how potentially dangerous this was, he agreed and fetched his toolbox and went to work re-applying the plastic coat around the wires. There were three of us working the machine at one time and we could have all been hospitalised or killed. I had thought of something I had said on Twitter, "Putting out fire with fire is stupid, it just causes more fire. We put out fire with water". The following morning the wires were exposed again and I called the bluecoat over and told him, "I will not work this machine when it's like that, too much water". And the Mexican said "Okay Amigo," and went back to work again and secured a solution just as he had done the day before, when he had finished he said, "Just let me know if you ever notice anything else like this again," and I said "I would".

 

The days were long and the shifts were hard, I was asked if I wanted to work more days but declined and when I finished for the day I sat down on the 57 so tired I could close my eyes and a black student sitting at the back of the bus was talking aloud and trying to annoy me. Even the people involved in inventing the police-state profile of lies believed the lies they had invented, a third party would be sure to, and they had manufactured I think five events that had not even happened with black people. Their profile had insisted that I was a comic book collector, this was one of the few things they knew about me the live-feed had said, only I had never been a comic book collector. I didn't have a single publication. They said I'd never had girlfriends and had spent years of my life in prison, all untrue. I had also never spoken aloud to myself on public transport and bothered passengers with extroverted philosophising, like the black student must have been under the impression of. I kept my mouth closed and didn't respond to his barrages of banter. Sitting opposite me was a male student and he was perpetually grinning and I recognised him as the student who had been standing next to me in the cannabis store making his surgical instruments obvious as he pulled them out of a wallet one-by-one before then re-inserting them. This had been the day after my pet kitty had been criminally assaulted with a one inch wound to the head, there was a vet bill which cost hundreds, and the local neighbours in our apartment complex imagined that I must have done it. The crime had been ordered by the twenty year old white female professor who was wearing Madonna's Jew skin pants that were the colour of human skin whilst she had insisted to me that she was a "National Socialist". I had been trying to refute the paranoid tabloid horror story that made me sound like an ancestor of the royal family, or a follower of Cromwell. They seemingly had nothing better to do than apply their favourite fictions to anonymous people passing through their territorial borders. They had the kind of brains that have a proclivity for spooking themselves with the weird biochemical headrushes one gets from watching horror movies or riding roller-coasters, probably noradrenaline.

 

When the black student stood up to get off the bus he said to me, "They should call the album 50 shades of Old Trapper". I kept my eyes on him until he disappeared out of the station.The surgeon sitting across from me was grinning and he followed me back to the house I was living at in Aloha. He was acting as an information antennae probe for the dragon. On the end of the cul de sac was a Sheriff's patrol car parked with a glum looking deputy staring back at me.

 

In the week I tweeted, "I always become Muslim whenever I'm around drunken people," and the university who were adepts at contrarian antithesis, but couldn't think, within a few hours had a man standing on the other side of the garden fence, I couldn't see him, but I was sitting on the patio chair outside smoking a Pall Mall. He was singing drunken songs in a kind of slurred and strangled voice that sounded like Arabic.

 

I moved to another house shortly afterwards. I was living there for a week when after the bus ride back from work, and the library visit, I rounded the corner onto the road I lived off, and I saw a car mounted on a hill, headlights pointing right at me. It seemed ominous to me and I paused in my stride, shopping bags held in hands, I sucked in air, walked up the hill, passing the car, and I could see that in the rear seat behind the male driver was the pop singer Madonna. She had very long blonde hair and was quarter turning to look over at me from profile view. I didn't sleep that night, didn't go back to work.

Author's Note

Out of battery, will edit later.