2013-03-10 - 10:50 p.m.
Mike Mulligan The Christian Electrician Turned �Badass� Copper Thief
When Mike Mulligan woke up he realized he had been out of work for three weeks�three long stinking weeks. Currently, he lived in a tract house in Hollywood Park, Sacramento with his wife and two cats. An electrician, Mike Mulligan was fully insulated against the emotional shock of jobs slowly trickling into nothing, but this time the jobs dried up along with his bank account and conjugal satisfaction.
Lying around, unable to get out of bed, he was woken up by the shrill angry sound of dishes.
�Do you even know how to wash a dish?� she exhorted.
�I�m depressed. I think I need pills,� he ejaculated, weakly.
�You don�t need pills, what you need to do is to man the fuck up!�
It�s not like she did much to add to the kitty. Part-time dog walker? How much energy could that possibly require? Nevertheless, he loved her and besides, he had made a commitment. As his mother had counseled him countless times, �You�ve made your bed�now lie in it!� His family, while low on funds, was quite wealthy in wisdom.
He watched her enter the bedroom getting ready�smooth alabaster, yoga and dog-walking firmed body slipping on the finest of underclothes, perfuming itself into a flowery, but fleeting perfection.
�Where are you going?�
�Out�
�Where?�
�Curtis motherfucking Park�
To do what?�
�Walk dogs, what the fuck do you think I�m doing?�
�Well, you look nice. Honey, before you go, do you think I could get a frozen pizza?�
�Honey before you go, do you think I could get a frozen pizza� she mocked back.
Standing around in his pajamas, looking forlorn and trying to dust the cobwebs of a 10:00 a.m. wake up time out of his eyes and mind he thought to himself briefly about an article he�d read and how resentment was the hallmark sign of a relationship quickly headed past the nadir and into the abyss. Was this relationship at the nadir he thought quizzically? Resentment often took the form of mockery. His wife mocked him, frequently and remorselessly. He penciled a note in his calendar to make sure to call his mother later in the day to ask for marital advice. And later that evening, he realized that he must have misplaced his post-it note and would have to delay it until tomorrow.
�Milquetoast. A shrinking violet. Will fall over in the wind.�
�There is no bark on them trees. Weak, effeminate and shrouded in a lack of will.�
These are the words he thought would be used to sum up his character, if his character were blurbed about in a novel. The critics would lambaste him.
It was at this instant, that he took it upon himself to be rechristened. Like Dennis Rodman after he was traded from the Detroit Pistons, he would become that most male and dominant of the species. He would transmogrify himself into...the badass.
Many people automatically think, just because you�re an electrician, you�re gruff, but he was no rough and tumble blue-color guy. He stayed away from all substances�coffee excluded, and he never ate red meat, because his mother had told him that it �excites the blood.� He was also a deeply devoted Christian who had gone so far as to call his business �Anawim Electric�after the unwanted, the destitute, the poor and hapless. His mother had warned him not to marry �the heathen.� But he had always had a good heart and he felt that he would be able to convert her. It was all a matter of finding the right switches and opening up the energy to the source at the right time. The switches, on or off, controlled the completion of the circuit. He had also, always liked a challenge, but in the 18th year of marriage (they had married very young) he realized that it was hopeless and he began to give up. The fact that she was barren and her womb polluted by years of stinkin� thinkin� did not help marital matters. It was time to rewire the circuitry of self.
Thirty-Nine years old was never to late to become a badass. As he looked through his things, he noticed several bibles that had been highlighted in six different colors. Each color had a different meaning and his annotations were extensive. He threw the books out the door and noticed that when flung open, they looked like dead birds. He went through the garage and next to an old, dusty copy of �The French Connection� was a 15 ounce container of lighter fluid. He walked back outside right there on a random patch of grass, he started a bonfire. He pretended that the smoke was the old Christian and good manners, all the milquetoasty ways leaving nothing but the ashes and heat of 100% pure badass.
Next he went to the tattoo parlor. He ordered a large, gaudy, but somewhat psychadelic tatoo of a creepy looking older man standing behind a buxom brunette. Her torso bare, his eye was doubling as her nipple. The nipples on the woman that was being etched into his chest were out of this world.
He picked up an old copy of Cosmopolitan when the tattoo was finished and ordered four piercings. One through the ear, one for the nose, a tongue piercing and the last one was for the penis. None of the piercings made him nervous, but thinking about the upcoming penis piercing made him shrink back in fear. As he leafed through the old besmirched copy of the Cosmo, he realized he was reading Cosmo and so he deftly traded it out for the less milquetoasty and more badass publication of Field and Stream. As he did this, his eyes glanced furtively from side to side to make sure nobody has bared witness to his reading of Cosmo.
As it came time for that fourth piercing, he changed his mind. He went home bloody and in pain, but the pain was also a little bit revivifying, not unlike a pleasurable ache everywhere. The pain must have been lubing up his neurochemistry to release some sort of natural opiates along with hefty doses of testosterone, because as he was driving home, he started to notice the asses on all the women. It was a warm day in early March and the women must have been trying on their
He knew that he had to quickly make money. He dipped some toast into his milk and thought about how to get something going. He wanted coffee badly but remembered they were fresh out of Maxwell House. Thinking about walking to the Starbucks, he reached into his pocket and pulled out some change. After separating it from the pocket lint, that�s when he got an idea. The Abraham Lincoln on the penny might as well have been speaking to him in some oneiric mushroom fantasy �Become a copper theif Mike, think of it as your personal Manifest Destiny. This is the land of plenty. You are innovative!
He called his friend Doug. Doug had worked with him on a few jobs and like Mike, was currently out of work.
