"Why I Don’t Deserve to Be in Jail This Halloween" by Itto and Mekiya Outini

Today on Midwest Weird: "Why I Don’t Deserve to Be in Jail This Halloween" by Itto and Mekiya Outini.

Itto and Mekiya Outini write about America, Morocco, and all those caught in between. They’ve published in The North American Review, Modern Literature, Fourth Genre, and elsewhere. Their work has received support from the MacDowell Foundation, the Steinbeck Fellowship Program, the Edward F. Albee Foundation, and the Fulbright Program. They’re collaborating on several books and running The DateKeepers, an author support platform.

Midwest Weird is an audio literary magazine from Broads and Books Productions. We’re the home of weird fiction and nonfiction by Midwestern writers.

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Episode Transcript:

This is Midwest Weird, an audio literary magazine from Broads and Books Productions.

We’re the home of weird fiction and nonfiction by Midwestern writers.

Today’s episode: "Why I Don’t Deserve to Be in Jail This Halloween." Read by Itto Outini.

Yes, I admit it: ever since you people threw me in here, I’ve been rehearsing. That’s right. Rehearsing. In fact, I’m still rehearsing—because you’re not here, are you? Because you haven’t come and dragged me from this dingey cell into your nasty little interrogation room—but you’d better not tell me that rehearsing means I’m not telling the truth.

The fact is, I’m nervous. I bet I wouldn’t pass a polygraph test right now, and that’s not because I’m not telling the truth. It’s because I’ve never been arrested before. Trust me, you’d be nervous too if you’d been through what I’ve been through, getting arrested on Halloween night of all nights, caught red-handed in the middle of…well…all that.

You can see for yourself that I’m blind. It’s all too obvious, isn’t it, with these big, huge, milky eyes bulging out of my head? My father used to make me wear dark glasses. I wouldn’t wear them. Why should I? No one else was. I couldn’t see why I should have to. God made me this way. If you don’t want to take a good, long look at what God did, doesn’t that say something about you? He said I was scaring the children—my little brother, and my nephew, and the neighbor’s kids—but if you ask me, I was giving them an education. Showing them that God has a sense of humor after all, and He’s not afraid to use it.

Just ask yourself this: how could a blind man have done what you think I did?

People are always asking me, “How can you take a shower when you’re blind? How can you microwave your dinner when you’re blind? How come you have an iPhone when you can’t even use it—you’re blind!” They never believe me when I say I found a job and a place to stay all on my own—well, not exactly on my own, with the help of the social worker, but without any help from my father, which is the main thing. My father kicked me out the day I turned eighteen. He doesn’t care what happens to me. I found the social worker’s office on my own.

The social worker—her name was Roony—was about my mother’s age and very sad. She would spend our sessions telling stories about her life, how she used to go for long walks on the beach, collecting shells, but then one day she heard about the horseshoe crabs, how they’re being harvested for medical research, and how that’s making them go extinct, so she got involved with an organization that was trying to save them, but the organization failed, and the crabs all died, at least on that beach, so now she helps blind people live their best lives. She would always finish with five minutes left in our sessions, and then, realizing that she hadn’t done anything, she would go into overdrive and sign me up for every program she could find, whether I needed it or not.

The technology classes were useless. I’d already learned how to use my phone, and with the computer, they kept teaching us the same thing over and over, from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. every day for six weeks, how to push the same four keys.

Roony also got me signed up for mobility training, but the main thing I learned there was that when someone comes to help you cross the street, it means they don’t respect you as an independent American, so you should yell and hit them with your cane.

The most useful thing Roony ever did was help me find the job, on the assembly line at the factory where they make white canes. I’m the one who found the room. It was the very first listing on Craigslist. I messaged Alex, and he got back to me that same afternoon. I still remember it word for word:

Yeah, room’s still available. Meet me at McDonalds. We’ll get to know each other. By the way, I’m a nudist.

That was one of his little jokes. At least I figured it was when I met him, and he came and led me over to his booth, and I knew he had clothes on because I could feel his sleeve. Right off the bat, he seemed like a pretty nice guy. He offered to pay for my milkshake and fries, which was great because the factory pays me five dollars an hour. When he went to order, I heard him offering the guy at the counter a drink from his flask. I couldn’t hear what the guy said, but Alex has a really loud voice, like someone put a scoop of gravel in a blender, and I heard him say, “Well…more for me!”

Over shakes and fries, we talked about our lives. It wasn’t really an interview. He said he was a mechanic and liked fixing old cars, but not one of those rednecks who has tons of old cars up on blocks in his yard. I said I worked in a factory. He said he lived alone because he was a nudist, but being a nudist doesn’t pay the bills, so he was looking for a roommate. I said I was making five dollars an hour plus SSI, and I was tired of the shelter. They’d put me in a fancy hotel while I was in their training program, but then I finished the training program.

“Well, Buddy-Boy,” he said at the end of our conversation, “this sounds like a match made in heaven. I’m going to shake your hand now.”

We shook hands.

I’m telling you all this so that you’ll understand that Alex is my best friend. I never had any reason to kill him.

He helped me learn my way around the house when I first moved in and logged me into his WiFi network, but after that, we didn’t see much of each other. He works all day. I work all night. He would get home around 8:00 p.m., when I was just waking up. My Uber would pick me up at 9:30. I would finish at 6:00 and get home around 6:30, and we’d overlap for a couple of hours, but then I would crash, and when I got up from my nap, he’d be gone.

One nice thing about Alex is that he always wanted me to feel at home. He’s a hoarder with a lot of junk lying around, but just for me, he would make little pathways from room to room, pushing stuff up against the walls. He also asks me what I like to eat, then puts it on his Walmart order. Later, I find it in the kitchen.

The Walmart deliveries were another reason I started thinking Alex had been joking about being a nudist. The delivery guys never said anything about his being naked, even when he was there. “No, thank you,” they would say politely, declining his offer of a drink from his flask. “Wish I could, but I’m on the clock.”

“Oh, well,” he would say cheerfully. “More for me!”

He also tries to make me feel included every time there’s a holiday—which is more than my own family ever did. For Easter, he hid eggs around the house, where he knew I would find them. He even put one in my bed. It was a real egg, too, not a plastic one. When he heard me scream, he came and helped me change my sheets.

For the Fourth of July, he bought a ton of fireworks without telling me and put them all outside my window, and then, around 7:00 p.m., he set them off. It about gave me a heart attack. I jumped out of bed and ran downstairs to find him and cuss him out, but I couldn’t really be angry because he kept giving me sparklers. He had about fifty of them. He kept lighting them and handing them to me, one after another. “You can’t see them,” he said, “but the noise is the best part. The noise and the smell.”

It was the same with Halloween. Starting about two weeks ago, he bought a bunch of life-sized zombi mannequins and set them up around the house. Whenever I would bump into one of them, it would make a horrible screeching noise.

Don’t believe me? Go and see for yourself. Go back to the house—yes, yes, if you insist: “the crime scene”—and you’ll find those zombis. Try bumping into one. See what happens! Now, imagine that you’re blind, and something makes a noise like that, right in your ear. What would you do?

I must’ve destroyed about ten of those mannequins. Alex thought that was hilarious. He would come home and find them on the floor, ripped apart.

“Look at you,” he would chortle. “You ought to try out for UFC!”

The first time was an accident. I was on my way to the kitchen, and one of them startled me, and I screamed and jumped back and knocked its head off with my cane. After that—after I saw how funny Alex thought it was—I started doing it on purpose.

“I can’t wait for your quinceañera,” he would tell me, “so I can get you a piñata!”

Do you see where this is going? Are you putting two and two together? That’s what you people are supposed to do, right: put two and two together? Go ahead, then. Better yet, try putting yourself in my shoes. You’re coming down the stairs, and there’s one of those mannequins lying at the bottom, in your way, for you to trip over, and you do trip over it, obviously, and kind of knock your head against the wall on your way down, and that makes you pretty mad, but luckily there’s a mannequin’s right there for you to take it out on.

How was I supposed to know that it was Alex I was beating on, passed out drunk at the foot of the stairs? He’s never drunk so much that he passed out before. Not since I’ve been living with him. And how was I supposed to know he was completely naked? And how was I supposed to know he’d gone and left the front door open? And how was I supposed to know about that mother and her little trick-or-treaters standing there on the threshold, looking in? It’s not like my father ever took me trick-or-treating. Trick-or-treating’s the last thing on my mind on Halloween.

Until she started screaming, her and her three kids, just like my little brother, and my nephew, and the neighbors’ children, all of them screaming at the top of their lungs—how was I supposed to know?

But that’s you, isn’t it? That’s the scrape of your key in the lock. That’s the creak of rusty hinges. That’s you opening my cell. Finally! You’re here to cart me off to your nasty little interrogation room, where you keep your torture implements, your waterboards, your thumbscrews…whatever it is you use to wring confessions out of people.

Why don’t you save us both a lot of trouble and use your head: why would I want to kill my best friend? Haven’t I told you everything?

But, no, I haven’t told you everything, have I? This whole time, I’ve just been rehearsing in my head, rehearsing and rehearsing…but now, come to think of it…

My mind’s gone blank.

Completely blank.

What was it I was going to say?

Itto and Mekiya Outini write about America, Morocco, and all those caught in between. They’ve published in The North American Review, Modern Literature, Fourth Genre, and elsewhere. Their work has received support from the MacDowell Foundation, the Steinbeck Fellowship Program, the Edward F. Albee Foundation, and the Fulbright Program. They’re collaborating on several books and running The DateKeepers, an author support platform.

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