Cleaver Read online

  Cleaver

  By: Wes McCloud

  Copyright 2019 ©

  Cleaver

  Copyright: Wesley McCloud

  Cover Illustration and Design: Wesley McCloud

  Editors: Jon Hardy, Morgan McCloud, and Otis McCloud

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in retrieval system, copied in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise transmitted without written permission from the publisher. Product names, brands, and other trademarks referred to within this book are the property of their respective trademark holders. Unless otherwise specified, no association between the author and any trademark holder is expressed or implied. Use of a term in this book should not be regarded as affecting the validity of any trademark, registered trademark, or service mark.

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  “Life is a series of dogs.” – George Carlin

  CHAPTERS

  LEAVE IT TO CLEAVER

  THE SICK AND THE DEAD

  SEÑORITA AKITA

  IN DOG WE TRUST

  DEAD, WHITE, & BLUE

  THE LORD OF THE FLEAS

  MAKE ROOM FOR MADDIE

  ARE WE HAVING GUN YET?

  DOGS AND MONSTERS

  I DREAM OF GREENIE

  TAKE ME DOWN TO THE PARALYZED CITY

  WITH DOG ALL THINGS ARE POSSIBLE

  Leave it to Cleaver

  Hello, my name is William Cleaver, but you can call me Will or Bill, actually just call me Cleaver. I’m that guy coming down the hill right there. I shouldn’t be hard to miss, I’m wearing a gasmask with goat horns on it and there are wiener dogs strapped in baby carriers to my chest and back. Oh yeah, and there’s three dogs tethered to me with leashes helping me fight off these asshole zombies. But we’ll get to that later. I’m going to do that age-old ( worn out ) storytelling thing where I give you a tiny taste of a later action sequence and then pull you out then start from the beginning. So here it goes…I was an ordinary person just like you. Well, at least I used to be; Glass eyed, zombified, with my face buried in my phone. Judging my self-worth by the number of likes I received for posting pics of my own mundane existence. Social media...the internet....When did the world become so fake and rehearsed? Certainly it didn't happen overnight... Plastic. Plastic. Plastic. Everything plastic. Fabricated news. Fabricated bodies. Fake statuses. Fake situations. Fake...everything. After awhile even the truth seemed fake.

  Everyone was in some competition to see who the most miserable human being was. We were living in a time of the social justice warrior and outrage culture. Screaming the worst of obscenities at one another behind the safety of our screens. People were arguing with their feelings instead of facts and they had all become proficient at finding problems. Solving them? Not so much. I saw about fifty memes a day talking about problems, economic, political, social, you name it. But not one suggestion on what the hell to do about any of them. I guess that was up to the “no good asshole and / or bigot” who was supposed to be reading them and changing their ways, because ‘I’m right and you’re wrong’ and there’s no room for anything else.

  It was now acceptable for people to lie to prove points, because the ends justified the means. At least that’s what they’d brainwashed themselves into believing. Posting videos of fake altercations and fake statistics to draw attention to issues that aren't even issues. Millions of us were showing the ugliest of ourselves for the sake of supporting politicians that didn’t give a shit about us. All while we got fatter, dumber, slower, sadder, and numb. Numb, yes that's it. That was the worst one of all. That's what I was, numb. Dead but alive. No sense of anything; ambition, love, happiness, sadness, anger - the spectrum of things that make humans, human. Just getting up everyday and doing the same bullshit, over and over. Brush your teeth, comb your hair, drive to work, go home, repeat. Eat, shit, work, sleep, pan through Facebook, die. And then I did it. One day I laid my phone on the counter, picked up a hammer and bashed it to bits. Why did I do it? I did it to escape. Don’t even tell me you never thought about it. I scooped the tiny remains of that glass and plastic corpse into the trash and sat there, just staring...and you know what I felt? Nothing. It wasn't enough. I didn't even panic. There was no "What the hell did I just do?!" moment. I got up and walked to the living room with that hammer still in hand. The news was on, regurgitating that same old bullshit. I threw the hammer right through the screen and everything went quiet. Everything except for the tiny plinking of the remaining glass that rained down onto the floor. I started to feel something...I went round the house, gathered the computer, the iPad, the laptops, every piece of shit thing that tied me to the misery that was the World Wide Web. I lined it all up in the yard, grabbed a sledgehammer from the garage and, one by one, blasted it all into oblivion. Every fall, every reverberation of the wooden handle that bit the nerves in my wrists was one step closer to freedom. I committed mass electronic homicide that day, destroying damn near everything I considered to be a time-sucking parasite. And then, with my task complete, I sat down in the yard. Not on a chair, not on a cinder block or a stump, I sat there in the realness of the grass. I ran my fingers through it. I looked to the sky, watched the clouds, watched the leaves blow in the breeze, watched a bird fly by, I even watched a fly land on the fresh dog crap that was only feet from me. The dog...I’d almost forgotten about him. He sat there on the patio, staring at me, still recovering from the mayhem moments before. Despite all that, he had that look. You know the one, the look of judgment. That same look they give you when you pass gas in their presence. He realized that I had finally flipped my shit. Hell, maybe I had. No, I definitely had.

  I tossed the sledge in the grass and beckoned for him. He ran out and sat beside me, wagging his tail as if to say "Hey, man, I know you lost it, but I still love you. It's all good." And it was all good. We sat there together and watched the sunset, and I realized that was the longest I had paid attention to him in well, forever. I thought about the times he'd bring a toy to me and I’d brushed him away, "I'm busy right now. Go away." I wasn't busy, I was panning through Facebook like some asshole. Neck bent over and metaphorically drooling like the zombie I was. I’m curious to know how much time I wasted taking quizzes to find out which ninja turtle I was or what decade I should’ve been born in. You ever see those cards that say, “How do you keep an idiot busy? For the answer turn this card over.” And you flip it over and it would say the same thing on the back, and then you’d laugh and go “uh-huh, okay.” Social media was one of those goddamn cards. Only we never put it down and shook our heads. We just kept flipping it over and over and over. Jesus Christ, my dog was lucky he even got fed…And in the midst of those thoughts of ignoring him, I wept. And you know what he did? He licked me, because that's what dogs do. You see, they may look at you with judgment from time to time, but at the end of the day, there's no lying in them, there's no hidden agenda. They don’t give a shit about money, fancy cars, social status, political leanings or how many retweets and shares you get. There's only love and forgiveness. And trust me, humans need a LOT of that, even though we don't deserve it.

  When the sun finally hid behind the trees, I rose up. I gathered the remnants of all the machines I had sent to the beyond and threw them into the fire pit on the patio. I doused them in gas and lit them afire using my own clothing as kindling. And there I stood, stripped down to my underwear, gleam of the reflection of the fire in my eyes as I watched my connection to the outside world melt away into a puddle of gelatinous, glass-peppered goop. And in that moment, I smiled. It was a genuine smile, not the one I put on for co-workers everyday, not the one I donned when I saw a m
ediocre meme, it was as real as the flames that burned those devices into the hell where they belonged. Everything changed that night. And I fell asleep with my arm around my dog instead of drifting off while liking pics on Instagram, only to wake up with my phone on my face.

  Morning came, and I must admit, it all seemed like a dream. Had I really destroyed thousands of dollars worth of my stuff the night before? I had. And I still didn't care. I arose from bed feeling like Neo had. You know, the Matrix, that moment he decided to take the red pill and awaken into the real world. Goddamn that was a good movie. And what the hell had happened to movies? All bullshit now. Redone, remanufactured remakes of movies that had no business being remade. Wow, humans had run out of ideas…Music was quite the same. Even some of the comedy was shit now. Stand up specials were like Twitter rants come to life and strung together for sixty whole minutes. Most comedy requires you to step on someone toes, but most of this was just slitting their throats. Hell it wasn’t even funny. It was politically slathered, self-righteous indignation disguised as comedy. Hey, if you want to get up on a stage and simply vent about the current political climate just do it, but don’t trick me into thinking it’s something other than that. It just had me wondering, had we reached our creative apex? Had every song been sung and every story been told? It was a quandary I wasn’t remotely prepared to answer, maybe because I knew the answer was ‘yes’. Or maybe I was just getting too old.

  And so what to do with this brand new day of wide wonder? The brave new frontier of being unplugged and unbothered by the likes of phones, TVs, and worst of all, public opinions. Well, I made pancakes, but more than that, I enjoyed those pancakes. I didn’t shovel them down like every American did when they were rushing out the door because they were always going, going, GOING. I was done with that shit. Done with the idea of dying with the most money in the bank. Done with the idea of owning a summer home. Done with the idea of the picket fence, the seven kids, the wife, the dog, the retirement pension, and the sports car I’d ultimately cheat on my wife in. Well…I wasn’t done with the dog, he was currently sharing my pancakes with me and wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. And I wasn’t done with any of the other things considering none of them existed in the first place. I was thirty-seven years old, never been married, never had kids, never, never, never. Jesus…had I even lived? Was the imaginary, albeit stereotypical, American life I’d just ripped to shreds in my own mind, what I’d been missing all along? Hmm, oh the things you ponder over with pancakes and a pooch. Seriously though, I’d had girlfriends, but none of them were too serious. Obviously there were no kids ( that I knew of ) I owned my own house. A single man owning a house in his thirties who wasn’t a celebrity or drug dealer? Sadly it’s unheard of nowadays, but hold your applause while explain that one. My grandfather was the one who paid it off. He was the one that busted his ass, going without, raising a family, working fingers to the bone to ultimately make that last mortgage payment. And then his wife died. And then he died. Goddamn, life was exhaustingly callous. I’d lived with my grandparents in this house ever since I was sixteen. Why? My mother was a raging drug addict who abandoned us and ran off. The woman has the permanent mindset of a twelve year old. I only hear from her about twice a year. Last I heard she was in Utah, shacked up with a biker named Steve. I feel bad for Steve.

  My father drank himself to death before I really ever knew him. I don’t have much more to say about that, other than dealing with my mom is probably what drove him down that road. Or maybe him doing that is what drove mom down her road. I’ll never really know.

  I have one sibling, a brother, which I won’t bother placing a name to at this point because he’s dead to me. He’s in jail. I think this is his fourth tour through there, maybe the fifth. I’ve stopped counting. He’ll get out in another year and go right back because he’s a colossal dipshit just like my mother. He’s the male version of my mom, to put it blunt. They’ve both stolen from my grandfather and I countless times. I’m better off without them. So yeah, my grandparents were my only true family through most of this trip we call life. They’d always been there for me, and I for them. Sometimes I think maybe that’s why I never went out and started my own life. I just kept watching them get older and weaker and they had no one except me. So I just stayed, picking up the extra chores, getting them groceries, anything. When I was twenty-six, my grandmother collapsed in the yard while she was pruning tree branches that were starting to block her view of the birdfeeders. It was a chore I told her I would take care of about a dozen times, but never did. So I blamed myself for it. By the time I found her, she’d been gone for over an hour. Where was I? Upstairs with my head buried in a video game. The doctors said it was a massive heart attack and she died almost instantly, but there was always that part of me that said, What if? What if I hadn’t been preoccupied with worthless technology and found her and got her to the hospital. Or then again, what if I had just pruned the goddamn trees like I said I would in the first place. I remember things just sort of died around the house right along with that gentle soul. My grandfather was never the same. Everyday he rose from bed, seemed like it was full of purpose, but after we put her in the ground, he changed. The light left his aging eyes. I often found him in the spot she was always in…The breakfast nook, staring out the window at the birds she so loved in life. Drinking his coffee and mumbling to himself on occasion. There was always that part of me that wondered if he blamed me as much as I blamed myself. If he did, he never spoke a word of it. In fact, he never even mentioned her once to me after that awful day. Not even, “Remember when your grandma would…?” Nothing, it was like she’d never existed, which I thought was odd. I knew there wasn’t a day that passed that he didn’t think of her, but he just never said anything to me about it. Maybe it made it real. Final and absolute. I don’t know. So that being said, I never spoke her name or anything of her either. It was like we were mute to her existence between each other. And that’s the way thing stayed, until he got sick.

  I just remember him getting weaker and weaker. Yeah, he wasn’t getting any younger, I could accept that, but the man was just exhausted ALL the time. I found him napping two, sometimes three times a day on the couch. And when he wasn’t sleeping, he was coughing up a storm. I could hear it echoing through the house. Sometimes he’d wake me up at night. Of course he wouldn’t go to the goddamn doctor, he was a man after all. We didn’t get sick, and if we did, we just got over it or died.

  One day, he got into this coughing spell that made him pass out right in front of me in the kitchen. I was terrified by the surprise of it, but what made me shudder all the more was the blood covering the hand he was coughing into before he hit the tiles. An ambulance ride and multiple x-rays later revealed the worst fear. Cancer. Lung Cancer. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised, the man smoked the majority of his life, but there’s still that part of you that goes “Hell no, how is this happening?” The prognosis was grim. Three to six months. Of course he refused chemo. He’d seen his best friend Charlie go through it. He said he’d rather die from the cancer than the poison trying to kill the cancer. I have to say, I couldn’t blame him. But I did nothing but pressure him into the treatments, and in the end I realized I was the one being selfish, not him. He was ready to go, to face the reaper with open arms…to go home. I on the other hand, I was terrified by the idea of losing the last family member on earth that gave a happy shit about me. So instead of leaving him alone, I badgered him for weeks on end to at least try the chemo. He didn’t listen to me. And I’m glad he didn’t. He passed away in 2011, one week before my birthday. Happy Birthday to me. Jesus Christ, I never knew what loneliness was till that day. The day I came home from the graveyard and threw my necktie to the countertop and I actually heard it make a sound. It was quiet. That house. Quiet as the hole I had just watched him slip into. But…there was something there. A whine. The clicking of claws across the floor. Jeff. That’s my dog’s name. He was there, the house wasn’t dead. Holy h
ell, umpteen paragraphs into this mess and I just now say his name. In addition to the house and property, my grandfather had brought me a puppy from a man up the street. I remember seeing the sign “Beagle Mix Puppies” tacked to a telephone pole. As sick as the man was, my grandfather actually walked clear over to that house, hand picked a pup, and bought him home. He was there with Jeff, both of them on the couch, waiting for me when I got off work. I didn’t know what to think. Both of them sitting there with beaming smiles. He said, “This is Jeff. He’s gonna be your buddy when I’m gone, okay, Will?” And what did I do? I cried. There sat the only man that ever really loved me holding a cute, tiny mutt, and he was telling me he was going to die. He was saying it out loud. And that wasn’t even what started the tears, it was Jeff’s face. That giant grin puppies have. He was completely oblivious to the pain and sorrow around him. All he cared about was playing and making you laugh. People don’t deserve dogs, they just don’t. He was there for me the day I broke down upon his arrival, and he was there for me the day grandad died. I collapsed to the floor and just let it all out. The tears and the sorrow that had welled in me for the past months just came cascading out into a downpour of all out agony. And what did Jeff do? What dogs ALWAYS do. They smile and tell you everything is gonna be okay and even if you don’t believe it, they do. And you slowly realize, that’s all that matters. So I held him. And cried and cried and he just licked the tears off my face. And how did I repay him over those next six years? I buried my head in my phone and ignored him. The phones…oh the phones. What did humans become? We talk of robot apocalypses. Scenarios like Terminator and Skynet. Ruthless, physical robots walking across the horizon with pulse rifles just mowing every human down till there’s nothing left but bones and ash. But the robots didn’t have to become heavily-armed creatures of our nightmares. They fleshed themselves out into tiny screens that fit into our very palms and started taking us over one click, one like, and one share at a time. And we didn’t even realize it. Technology was changing us. Turning us into socially inhibited bags of meat that barely grunted when a stranger walked by. You’ve done it. You know you have. I know I have. Someone’s walking at you on a sidewalk and instead of saying “Hello!” You point your head at the ground and hope you get by them without an interaction of any kind. Or hell, sometimes you actually walk to the other side of the street. And why? Why do we do that? Is saying ‘hi’ to someone that bad? We do it all the time online, but goddamn when we get face to face, it’s a another story entirely. Jesus…I’m rambling again…Where was I? Yeah the morning after pancakes. Right after breakfast I take Jeff out into the backyard for his morning declarations, and I’m not talking about the religious type. Although I have yelled out God’s name during a few I’ve had right after Thai food, but I digress. He takes his and I take mine. Yeah, no need to re-read that, I took a dump in my yard. Why? Because why not? I never shit outside in my life, figured since I was apparently losing my mind I’d give it a try. I gotta tell you, it wasn’t that great. I don’t know what Jeff sees in it.