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The KIDD…

The night before seemed like a fantasy of screaming and anger, and this was why things were as they are in the mornings… Things thrown across the room, and heated insults over who is a whore and who is the lame helpless parasite, and other such things… Kent Derby had to go somewhere to clear his mind of the restless baggage, and decides to visit his grandfather, the ‘S’… He was sitting in the easy chair with a can of beer in one hand and cigar in the other, yelling at the top of his lungs at the television as he was watching a visceral sports event on the screen, and he was loud enough to make the KIDD wince… He coughed a bit inside the cramped interior of the trailer, filled with the noxious vapor as it clung to every surface in the room, and the ‘S’ leaned forward in his chair turning slightly… The dark shades were drawn, the small television at the center of gigantic speaker cabinets, but the ‘S’ still wore the goggles inside this dim monochromatic lighting… Chomping his nasty cigar between his teeth, his gnarly wrinkled face mouthed the words, “…you’re not one of them, kid, sit down.” Kent moved a stack of old newspapers off the love seat as the ‘S’ turned the volume down low with the remote control in his grip… Carefully setting his beer onto the folding tray next to him, he raised those goggles above his eyes, and stared blankly at Kent first… Then a smile began to gather at the corners where it would proceed to inspire a wildfire of familiar recognition for his own flesh and blood right there on the spot… He laughed out loud, chuckling for a quake.

“Hey, KIDD, I didn’t even see you come in… It’s a good thing you didn’t try to call to make an appointment, the only thing that seems to be working is that damn fax machine, and I can’t call the phone company from here,” he stared at Kent with his cryogenic grin, and proceeded to tell him all about the tax attorneys that had come to talk to him… “Those bastards thought they had the gall!” The veins throbbed right out of his neck as he went on about their misdeeds… “torturing me with their government-inspired call to action, saying things like how I owed them this or that amount of money, but I knew that they just wanted my blood.” He was breathless.

The ‘S’ fell back into his chair, and huffed and puffed a bit before he smoked his cigar again… The KIDD was stunned, and realized now that his family would probably never evade the government’s throttling hand, here was the best living example of someone who got out… Yet his home was thoroughly trashed, and he always stayed inside his home for fear that ‘they’ would come and take him away… ‘S’ explained time and again who ‘they’ were, but never gave a name or identified any particular person behind the conspiracy… He actually thought that his home was bugged.

It was but only by his own admission that he bugged it himself to keep the stories straight, keeping track of hundreds of tapes by the time the digital age rolled into control… There was never enough time, money, or equipment to stay absolutely safe from harm, but the KIDD’s grandfather was certainly going to try… Just as he began to contemplate his only close relative’s neurosis, the ‘S’ pulled out a water pipe from behind his chair, and placed it on the folding tray… From the same side of the chair, he pulled a large sack of marijuana, and placed that too upon the tray.

“Hey, KIDD, you want some of this?” ‘S’ looked at him and pushed the pipe a little forward… KIDD shook his head…