For a Good Time, Call*

The words fall from my mouth like tacks. Fuckfacescumbag, I am going to cut off your balls and shove them down your throat until you choke, you little bitch...sometimes it comes out so hard and fast it doesn't even make sense. Dickfuckfartface, and then I feel a little silly, like someone shaken awake from a fugue state not knowing where I am or how I got there, speaking in tongues, so I push the button to disconnect, say one last fuck you to nobody.

They tried to scam my mom. "They" a non-entity of a well-known scam wherein someone calls you saying they know you bought pharmaceuticals online and there's a warrant for your arrest unless you pay a $3,000 fine to U.S. Customs via a wire transfer to the Dominican Republic. Which, dude, I know. But when my mom told them she has cancer and needs pain relief, something to sleep, they said they didn't care, that the DEA was on their way to her house right now. She was scared, and let's face it: I feel guilty. I can't do enough, be there enough, say the right thing in this very wrong situation. How dare they make her feel small? So now I call them.

Another "they" this time...They say that you should envision cancer as a thing, a bundle of all the negative, that with each radiation treatment and chemo it is blasted and shrunk, made impotent, but I have not been able to envision anything until now. This scam. This phone number that I call now, it is the cancer. Cancer with an accent  on the other end of an overseas VoIP phone number. Drug Enforcement Agency, he answers, always the same voice gravelly and garbled, and while I have reported the phone number to the real Department of Justice DEA, I also don't expect they will ever catch him. So I call. Sometimes a few times each day. I don't try to disguise my voice but he is too greedy to notice. Sometimes I threaten him, tell him he has fucked with the wrong family, as if we are some mafia familia and not just a bunch of watered down WASPS. Tell me, I ask, when I kill you, do you want to be listening to Metallica, or maybe some Hank Williams Jr.? Other times I thank him, tell him that I don't know what to do with this anger I have over my mom being so sick, that I am grateful that I can direct my hate, track him down...sometimes I don't know where to go with this and I sputter.... Most of the time, though, he asks for my name and phone number so he can have the DEA agent call me before they "reach my house." Veronica Swish, I say, Gail Brinerd, Jennifer Rosenstonenstein, and I give him the phone number to the city morgue, mortuaries across the country, the San Francisco DEA Office, the FBI's Fraud Unit, and then I hang up, picturing him standing in a hot kitchen somewhere calling.

Of course "they" also say that revenge is a dish best served cold, and there is nothing cold about this. My heart lurches each time I call; I am alive, rattled. I think about that possibly fake Buddha quote, "holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die," but I can't stop. I find myself thinking of other phone numbers I could have him call me back at, things I could say, as if I could change his mind, make him say sorry, make it stop. Because the thing with cancer is that it renders you irrelevant. None of this matters, nothing that came before and nothing that comes after. Cancer is a fake voice on an island halfway across the world via an ip address you cannot trace, and all I can do is set my phone to private and call back.


*Seriously. If anyone needs a good outlet for anger, I'll give you the number.