Children for one, well most kids are idiots well anyway, retarded, but I can’t say retarded because I live to close to New Jersey, (it’s illegal there,) so much for free speech, plus I wouldn't give them command of their own meals let alone education, so I am fine with them not voting.
I am thinking about other people who can’t vote, like Harry, the walking dead, America's walking dead.
Harry was a round little man, jiggly around the edges. His feet are flat, and slap the ground with a sharp sound as he walks. He sways left to right on each step.
Harry used to work in an apartment building.
It was funny when he used to climb the stairs to work on an apartment in the building he was a super in.
As progress was made he would hack and sweat.
He coughed .
Once at the top floor of the building that is only a three sets of stairs to climb, and he would take each stair as if he carried thousands of pounds on his shoulders. The collar of his unusually splotchy dark grey t-shirt was always soaked. At the end he would need to lean against the wall for a while to catch his breath.
An observer would suspect he wouldn’t make it another day, if there was an observer, though there never was an observer. In his right hand he carried a flashlight turned off, his finger resting on the little button ready to spill light out in front of him if needed not that the hallways were shadowy or the stairwell unlit.
More that the Mag light was a great club, a weapon, a tool to intimidate.
The reason I think about Harry is not that I feel sorry for him. Quite the opposite actually, I despise the man.. Except for one fact:
Harry is a Vietnam War vet. He fought the Viet Cong and the NVC, at the battle of Ho-Bo Hill, stepped on a pungi stick with his left foot and was sent home. Ended up losing most of the foot due to infection, when he got home he was besieged by Vietnam War protesters when he’d go to the V.A. hospital for treatment.
That’s the way things go sometimes.
Then Harry’s bad decisions started.
Eventually he fought back against the protesters with a baseball bat at night with four other men who wore Hell’s Angel colors.
For all he knew the men were Hell’s Angels.
He had no reason to doubt them.
They smashed skulls with a precision he was proud to be a part of. He considered himself to be their leader.
They considered him a little limping pet. In 1972 they stopped smashing skulls. Harry was 25, he looked 14.
This was 46 years ago, his partners were gone, some to prison for long stretches, one to a “good” government job and the last just disappeared. With his cash flow of protester pocket money gone, he sought and won this job of super to a building nobody ever wanted to live in, and most never willingly left.
June 12, 1982 was his last day on the job.
On this day, he reached the third landing and stopped. Leaning against the spit stained wall he hacks a thick ball of phlegm from his throat with such force it dangled from his lips without him knowing it.
The hard part was over.
The stairs were traversed.
The fluorescent lighting in the hallway flickered; it was a cost saving method to use old bulbs, ones found outside other buildings, ones discarded by maintenance people of places people wanted to live.
He could smell the rubbery smoke of freebased cocaine on the air.
Thin lines of bass filtered through the water stained walls of the, as he called it, the jigga bo music.
A dog barked.
Shifting feet and a darkened peep-hole suggest he is being looked at, watched, worried over.
It was the floor’s old lady. One of those who would be carried out. One of those whose phone calls he had been fielding since day one.
My sink’s clogged.
My floor feels spongy.
My ceiling is falling down.
It never stopped, he took each phone call listened a moment, said he’d be right on it, then went back to masturbating, watching TV or whatever mindless choir he had been doing before the interruption. She usually never called back. Probably forgot. He would.
If any of the tenants did call back he claimed to have done the work already. Who could they complain to? A faceless corporation owned the building; he was the only one, the only one that could do anything, the only number they had.
Wiping the sweat from his brow with an upturned twist of his flashlight laden arm he pushed himself from the wall and continued on. Wearing every key to the building’s doors on a ring attached to his belt he moved with a sound every occupant could hear, even over TV’s and music.
It was a hated sound.
The only sanctuary from the jingle jangle was in the shower.
If that showerer failed to hear those keys and they were a female it could be assured at that moment some pertinent maintenance issue would need to be taken care of in that apartment. Thats why Harry loved his job, and he didn’t mind old flesh to gaze at either. He would gaze zipper undone secretly massaging his genitals until the water stopped running and a scream of unexpected fear ruined his upcoming orgasm. Or on the more relaxed occasions he was able to finish the job and leave only a puddle of semen in his wake.
Harry killed the last woman he had snuck up on. It was an accident. She hadn't been in the shower yet and had come from behind as he tried to take a look, She attacked him. Scratching at his face and screaming, the screaming knocked loose a bit more of his sanity and he raped her. Somehow her head had been smashed over and over again with the mag light.
Somehow he doesn't remember doing it.
The police caught him pretty quickly. He dripped a blood trail on top of his bloody sneaker prints down to the super apartment.
They brought him to jail.
His bail was set which of course he did not have.
During arraignment he learned he was going to be charged with breaking and entering and murder one.
He pleads, “Not guilty.”
Before his trial his lawyer got him 20 years for murder two. “Take it,” the lawyer demanded, “they want death if you don't.”
Harry took it.
Prison is a story all in itself.
At the end of it he was a different man. 56, stringy with muscle and crazier than when he went in.
He has to show an address to his parole officer, he lies and uses buddy’s. He needs to have a job, but looking for one is good enough.
He is the enemy of all that is happy and decent. He lives under the Julia Tuttle Causeway. That’s the bridge that leads families to Miami beach.
That is his home.
He and his buddies are rousted every once in a while, but with nowhere else to go he comes back with the others to set up camp until rousted yet again or prison beckons for either a parole violation or another violent crime.
He spends food stamps for food. He gets clothes from the nuns at the nearby Catholic church.
He spends his days pretending to look for work.
Getting a tan and hating.
I wonder which way he would vote if he could.
Harry, though completely fictional, won’t be voting for Barack or Mitt. Harry doesn't even care about presidents or politics.
By the way The U.S. is “responsible for roughly 25% of the world's incarcerated population, yet our entire population is only 5% of the world’s” total, so said a poster on Yahoo answers. No numbers exists for people who have successfully completed parole and are out there floundering without any hope existing under the brand of convicted felon.
We kill people in the country with criminal records. We may not hang them on a noose or shoot them in front of firing squads, but people like Harry will linger on the fringe feeling worthless just waiting till he finds himself again in a situation that means he will go back to prison.
Maybe we should vote for a candidate that has answers for this real unaddressed issue, the walking dead are among us, they survived the gladiatorial school of our prisons. They are dangerous and they aren't waving American Flags and they won’t be standing next to us on election day and they will never try to be your friend and they will never tell you about their story.
Is there a solution for Harry? Or is he just caught in a revolving door of failure that there is no escape from?
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