CHARLIE HEART

CHAPTER ONE: I HATE YOU CHARLIE HEART

         My story is one you aren’t going to like. Chances are, you won’t like me much either. Not very many people do. That’s okay, thats what I’m here for. So you can hate me, tell all your friends, then move on forgetting my existence when the weekend hits. People forget most of what they hate on the weekends, that’s why Corporate America designed and instigated them.
         The truth is, I don’t really care. I don’t care about you, or your happy little life. My story is a lesson learned. The most important lesson anyone could learn., and that, over everything else is probably why you won’t like it. It’s not a nice little tale of two cute people, who fall in love, fall out of love, then make up just in time for the credits to roll.
         You know that saying: What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger? Well I like it said: What tries to kill you, makes you beautiful.
         This is my story. Now stop reading before you’re too offended to breathe.

I HATE YOU CHARLIE HEART

         Little Jim pulls down my Golf Magazine and sticks his ugly little face at me. He says his grandma has something called 'leukemia,' but he has a difficult time saying the word. Every vowel is a painful stretch for his ugly, little-boy mouth. He looks like he's testing it out, like it’s going to blow his teeth out if he isn’t careful with it. He could probably taste mommy’s soap bar from the last time he tried out a new, scary word.
         I look at him and smile the way you do when you don’t want to.
         He says, “Is she going to die? Are you going to fix her, Charlie?”
         I guess it's easy, when you're seven, to think I'm a doctor. To think I’m a hero. To believe that Charlie is here to save the day and make his world a better place. I’m not really here to fix Grandma, but how do you carefully break a little kid’s heart?
          “I’m sorry Jim, your grandma is going to die.”
          This makes him scrunch his face up into a little boy prune. Not in a droopy pouting way, more like in an adolescent frustration kind of way.
         Little Jim’s blue-collar parents sit in a corner of the hospital waiting room. They stare me down like scared, dirty pigs sending disapproving looks and snarls. If they had it their way, I'd be full of bullets and my body tossed behind the shed for one of their pit bulls to tear through. But they have to act grateful; after all, I am offering them a service. They don’t have the money to pay the doctors, and even if they did, deep down, they wouldn’t. Everyone knows if Grandma dies soon, money gets handed out, lots of money. If Grandma doesn’t die, well, she isn’t worth much to anyone then, now is she?
         Cancer is like karma: sometimes it takes, sometimes it gives.
         I put my magazine back into reading position, trying to ignore them. Jim climbs into the seat next to me and pretends to be me, with the legs crossed and the slightly careless slouch.
         His parents snap at him to come back and sit with them.
         “Don’t sit by that man, that’s a bad man,” they whisper. Then slap him in the back of the head.
         Like most kids, they never listen. So, he sneaks back to me, three, four, five times. Mom and Dad seem busy anyways, until they realize he’s gone; then it’s all hands and loud words again.
         You know how it goes, curiosity turns into defiance, and defiance leads to seeking attention, and somewhere inside the messed up wiring of your brain, you think that any form of attention subconsciously equals love. You know, you’ve done it, you’ve been there, you’ve felt it.
         Let me tell you about love: later in life, love hits a fork-in-the-road, and you either choose the ‘crazy’ road, or ‘the pretend you’re not’ route. Then, in the last couple minutes you can breathe you realize you took the wrong one, always. No, I have not died before. Yes, I’ve seen it played out, more than a few times.
         This was going to be Jim’s life story, I can’t help but see me in it.
         I undo the top button of my three hundred dollar Armani dress shirt. He pretends to do the same.
         Now he’s in my ear, whispering. “Mommy and Daddy don’t like you, Charlie. They say you're a very bad man.”
         I don’t say anything.
         “They say you're the worst kind of man.”
         I look at him.
         “They say you're not really nice, only to get the money, like an evil snake. They said you are a snake, Charlie. Are you an evil snake, Charlie?”
         I have been called evil, and a snake, but never together in the same sentence.
         A nurse comes out of the room, and says that the patient wants to see someone named Charlie Heart. "Is there a Charlie Heart here?"
         “I’m not an evil snake, Jim. I’m just a friend of your grandma’s.”
         Jim just stares. I look around, then slip him a hundred dollar bill. His eyes grow huge. I tell him not to let his parents know and not to spend it on something stupid.
         In my line of work you have to be very careful. What I do can turn a whole city on you as soon as you get that signature. I’m a little bee walking into a hive of little, greedy, nasty, jealous workers, and walking out with all the honey because the queen likes me better than all the rest. That's what I do. Bees have stingers, people have guns and knifes. They have fists, ropes, teeth, lead pipes and two-by-fours. They have ways to make you hurt and burn and die.
         I sit down next to the rotting corpse that is Jim’s grandma.
         “How are you, Granny Jones?”
         “I’m in the hospital, Charlie, how do you think?” Her voice is like a rusty tin can full of rat poison and cigarette ashes. Half her face is dead so she smiles with the other half.
         “I love your attitude, Granny Jones, it’s inspiring.”
         “Just cut the crud boy and let's get on with it.” She waves her white, pasty hand around, then slams the flesh back down on the bed and she coughs.
         I go flat, but comply. I pull out the single page document that will change her life, and the lives of all those needy, greedy people that have ever claimed to love her.
         “Miss Jones,” I say quietly, “This is called a viatical settlement. It says that in the event that you die before, in your case, age sixty five, your life insurance face amount will be paid to me in full, instead of your beneficiaries, in exchange to pay your medical bills.”
         She grabs my shirt and pulls me close. “You just make me better...you just make me better and I won’t die.” She catches her breath. Then she coughs a deep broken cough in my face, the kind that everyone in the room can taste. The kind that tears holes into my lungs.
         I usually only sign people up if I know they're goners. According to her doctors, she’s already dead, but I don’t tell her this. It costs a lot of money to keep the doctors from telling her this too. I’m guessing I’ll net about sixty thousand on this case. It’s not a fantastic deal, but it’s worth seeing those dirty pig faces watch me walk away with it, and to be honest, I’ve always liked Granny Jones. For the short month that I’ve known her, she has been more of a mother to me than my foster mother ever was. She would let me read books to her and offer to share her morphine with me. Only true mothers share their morphine.
         She reaches over with her dead rotting hand and signs. She does it because her sixty-fifth birthday is in six months, and she thinks her expensive, lying doctors can fix her problem. She does it because government healthcare doesn’t fix everything and she’s exhausted all her savings on ceramic statues and old doll collections.
         What I do, is help the desperately ill feel like they might have a chance. Old people, people with AIDS, cancer, parasites, ebola, leprosy, or anything worth dying for. I can pay the money to save you, but if you die, you make me rich. Call it what you want -- a service, a robbery -- I don’t care, I’ve heard it all.
         I give little Jim a wink as I leave, and he smiles. I make a mental note to set up an annuity to get him through college that he can access when he reaches eighteen. I’m not really his hero, but some sort of egocentric, narcissistic side of me wants to be. I hope he makes it to age eighteen, which is not likely with those parents.
         Jim waves, and those dirty hairy pigs stare me down as I leave. Their eyes burn laser beams into my back.
         I overhear Jim’s daddy on the phone and I can make out the words: ‘He is just leaving now.’ At that moment, Jim’s mom screams out, “I hate you, Charlie Heart!” This makes me laugh inside my stomach. I don’t let on that I heard her. It could be to much for my laugh, and it might just come spewing out.
         When I get to the hospital parking lot, I notice my beautiful ninety thousand dollar Cadillac XLR has a bashed rear window. There are red-spray painted words, that say hilariously potent things, doused on the side of it. I sigh because sighing seems to be the appropriate reaction for something like this. Crying would just lead to buying another one, (I already have three) and getting angry just never worked too often for me.
         Three guys walk around the corner. One of them has a crowbar, and the other two have rusty butterfly knives. They flip them in and out, in and out, in and out. I’m almost more annoyed of the flipping than I am of the implied death threat. Big, toothless grins pop out of their piggy-pink faces. I can’t help but grin back.
         Getting the crap beat out of you is an occupational hazard that keeps it interesting. Most of my body is scar tissue now anyways. Scar tissue is good. It makes you stronger without having to work out.
         My favorite thing is when the two peons hold your arms back, and the main one rams his knuckles up in your guts, over and over again. After you've had a lot of practice taking this kind of beating, you learn how to time puking your breakfast noodles all over your beater, at just the right moment for the greatest impact. Nothing tops the looks you get from that -- nothing.