By Dear Dirty America
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I was in the Rat’s Nest trying to pick a fight with a
pacifist fucking general in the Marine Corps. I’d heard an aircraft carrier was
in harbor down at Callao, and I went looking for the biggest, meanest-looking
grunt I could find.

I
believed in America. Its ideals. But those ideals had become so warped and
mangled that nothing was left of them but hypocrisy and lies. The mere thought
of living in America again made me sick to my stomach. Better an honest
hellhole like Lima than the plastic smile and the knife in the back you’ll get
at home.Don’t you tread on me, motherfucker.

“You oughtta be ashamed of yourself,”
I told him. “Killing innocent women and children for a living.” I spat on his
uniform.

He wiped the loogie from his jacket
and stood up. “I’ve met your kind before,” he sneered. “Traitors like you in
every port in the world. Not good enough for your own country.” He turned to
go. “You’re not worth the time it takes to piss on.”

“Well God
bless America and pass the apple pie,” I said, and took a swing at him.

He blocked
the blow easily, and sent a devastating punch my way. I closed my eyes and
waited for impact, savoring in advance the coming stars. They never came. I
peeked. His fist hovered in midair inches from my nose.

A crunching
sound of broken bone. The man howled in pain. His forearm bent over the bar at
an unnatural angle.

“Bye-bye,”
a new voice said, and a man took the general’s barstool. He looked far too
young and blond and happy to be sitting there in that filthy bar, chuckling to
himself as the marine limped from the room, clutching his broken arm to his
chest.

“The fuck
are you doing?” I shouted over the noise of the bar.

“Saving
your ass by the looks of things,” he said. “Name’s Pitt. Buy you a drink?” To
the barman:“Dos cervezas, por
favor.”

“Make mine
a bottle ofpisco,”I hollered. “And who are you to get
involved?”

Pitt
cracked his knuckles. “That guy was going to beat you up.”

“Yes. I
know. That was the point?”

Thepiscocame. Pitt poured me a shot. I took the
bottle and drained it in one long swallow.

“Thirsty,”
he said, and rested his chin on his fist. “You want another or should I just
tape a ‘Rob Me’ sign to your forehead?”

“Fuck off,
will you?” I said. “You’ve already ruined my evening.” I looked around the
room. None of the other crew off theUSS
Asswipeseemed incline to
brawl. Not with Pitt at my side. I slid off my barstool, feeling unsteady. “Now
I’ll have to go somewhere else to get beaten up.”

Pitt drank
his beer and laughed. “You are weird, dude. Why on earth do you want to get
beaten up?”

My liquor
tolerance was pretty high but even I was struggling to process an entire bottle
ofpisco.The stuff was raw local brandy, as
nasty as it gets. I held on to the bar to steady myself. “Because I deserve it,”
I said to a puddle of beer on the bar. I sat down and covered my face with my
hands.

He slapped
me on the back. “What can you possibly have done to deserve that?”

So I told
him. I tell everyone. I love to watch their faces change. The horror when they hear
what I have done.

When I was
finished, he just laughed. “Dude,” he said, “that’s nothing. Don’t be such a
fucking wuss. How can you feel guilty about something as stupid as that?”

The world
was spinning now. “Wouldn’t you?” I managed to croak. I reached for my soap
dish to righten the good ship Horsie.

“I do that
kind of shit before breakfast sometimes,” he said. “And I sleep like a baby.
Um, sorry,” he said, catching my expression of pain. “You know what I mean.”

“Tell me
about it,” I said, snorting cocaine up my nose until my septum bled. “Tell me
all about your pre-breakfast guilt-free ways.”

“I’m CIA,”
he said breezily. “An enforcer. Part of the Dissent Suppression Unit.”

“And I’m
the King of Spain. I dub thee, Sir Stranger Who Must Now Fuck Off.” And I
collapsed into giggles.

He pinched
my neck. A sharp pain shot down my spine. “I kill people for a living,
dickwad,” he said. “You hear about the murders in Iquitos last week?”

I squawked
an affirmative, his hand still on my neck.

“That was
me. Strangled three dissidents with their own intestines. Roasted their nuts
over an open fire. They were tasty.” His smacked his lips close to mine.
“Fucking villagers didn’t want us drilling for oil. Thought it might ruin their
precious fucking habitat. Guess what?” He laughed beer smell in my face. “We
run this country. We don’t put up with that shit from nobody. You get in our
way, you object to our policy, you protest our raping your country for money?
Dead. Tortured. Disappeared.”

He let go
of my neck, and I sat back, rubbing my spine.

“Decapitate
dissent,” he said. “That’s what I do. Literally. Kill the leaders, and the
sheep will follow.” He ticked off on his fingers. “Union organizers. Indigenous
leaders. Hoity-toity academics who can’t be blackmailed or bullied. Artists.
Writers. Opposition politicians. We make them go away.” He thumped his chest.
“And I am a one-man disappearing team. I will kill, torture, maim, rape,
sodomize, cannibalize and terrorize until you fucking obey, you stupid fucking
Peruvians.” He leaned back in his chair with a smile. He drank his beer, then
held it to his cheek and grinned broadly. “But after a hard day’s work, it’s
time for an ice-cold Bud. Don’t you agree?”

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