Coming Clean

Dennis slid the starched collar stiff shower curtain and stepped into the mildew-ridden, crooked plastic shower. The refrigerator boxed shower sat in the back of his mother’s trailer in the far end of Carmel Pines RV and trailer park.

The soap scum that had formed around the faucet handles made it difficult to start the water and Dennis had to lean into it for the lukewarm trickle that emerged from the rust and iron encrusted shower head. .

The lack of water pressure barely washed the vomit that had caked to Dennis’s whiskers like dried Parmesian cheese on a spaghetti dinner plate. He examined the grime underneath his fingernails and dug them into the sliver like bar of Kirk’s Castille soap in hopes of excavating the blackened compost gathered there. He knew it would take a firehose to blast all of the filth from him. Possibly a baptism.

A Baptism, like the ones that bucktoothed Reverend Jonah Green and his born again followers would do down at the old Clompers Gravel pit that had been made into a pond.

Old Jonah’s acolytes in the pond-water brown robes that had once been pearly white, wading out in muck and sea-weed to have Jonah place his twig like fingers on their heads and submerge them in the stagnant water, full of duck-shit and bottom feeders. Whatever hex he placed on them, somehow they emerged from the silt and scum filled waters, baptized, born anew.

There was the time Dennis and Tommy Ostopovich sat on the far end of the pond, guzzling, crumpling and tossing aluminum Budweiser’s into the pond in a 1-2-3 motion, while Reverend Jonah performed his baptisms for his flock. Dennis heard the ‘tongues’ that Green spoke in and thought it sounded like orgasmic cooing…like the that Vicky girl he sometimes messed around with in her trailer at the other end of Carmel Pines.Vicky stood almost 5 feet tall. Her legs stunted in growth by a disease Dennis couldn’t pronounce. That morning he woke up in her bed, the sheets smelling of stale cigarettes and mountain dew. They smoked pot and she went down on him for what seemed hours, she finally gave up in exhaustion, Dennis unable to achieve rigidity. Dennis sauntered out of her trailer and staggered his way down the gravel lane that ran the length of the trailer park, He dazedly noticed that Mrs. Kellog was gone to work at her job as a clerk somewhere downtown, doing something with phones and pens and calculators.

Dennis climbed in through the back window of her empty trailer, prying it open with a crowbar he hid underneath Mrs. Kellog’s stairs. Inside he helped himself to two frozen sausage egg muffin sandwiches from her icebox. He sat at the green and gray speckled formica table and waited for the microwave to ding. He pulled the two greasy cakes from the microwave with a papertowel…the outer muffin too hot to touch and the grey meat inside nearly frozen in the middle.

Dennis ate them anyway, flipping through a three-week old issue of IN-Touch magazine that was on the kitchen table. Dennis couldn’t read very well, but he was taken with how clean the celebrities looked. How white their teeth were, how cascading and flaxen their hair.

The water trickled luke-warm over his shoulders, pock marked and acned, Dennis coughed in the shower, he knew that what had come next that day, no water could wash away. No, this was a stain on his soul.