THIS IS ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT ME
There was a cowboy that lived in New York City. He was what Latinos called a bad hombre. He had a six-shooter that always, always shot every shot. If he didn’t hit his target, he would always hit something. For a normal bueno person, this heightened risk of hitting an innocent woman or child would make this weapon unconscionable. But this was a bad, bad hombre.
He didn’t say much. Actually, he didn’t speak at all. He lived under the bridge on the city side of town. He smoked Black & Milds down to the filter, and when the flame got down to the wood, he smoked that too.
Under the bridge, he kept a tight crew: a hairless rat the size and temperament of a battered husky. In the summer, it sweat buckets. The rat didn’t have a name because the cowboy had never thought to name such a creature. The rat drank Mad Dog 20/20, an enriched, exotically flavored wine. The exact price was something neither the rat nor the man had ever learned. Every day around 4:00 PM, the cowboy went to the liquor store and stole a bottle or two. Threatening the Chinese liquor man with his pistol, the liquor man feared the six bullets that cascaded out of the gun would damage his finer, more expensive products like Hennessy, and Don Julio, which were popular with the public housing residents across the street. The Chinese liquor man liked the cowboy and looked forward to these regular robberies.
The cowboy mainly ate cabbage. For warmth, he burned trash. The fumes smelled really bad, and the smoke let all his enemies know where he was. His lair was decorated in a postmodern style, which was in vogue at the time. For a bed, he had a pair of wooden pallets. For a window, he had a hole in the wall. For a bathroom, he had the street. And for a maid, he had the street cleaners.
When he needed to cut his hair, he went to the dusty baseball field next to his house. He put sunflower seeds in his hair and lay in the wiry yellow grass. The birds that ate from his hair pulled it one strand at a time, breaking them at their weakest point, leaving only the strongest strands intact.
For a wife—well, this was the issue. The cowboy had no wife. He was banned from every bar in the city for his bad attitude and horrible aim. Women would come to his lair to see what all the hype was about. When he heard them approach, he hid in his trunk with his dirty socks. His rat chased them away. He was relieved when he heard their screams.
The cowboy had a sinking suspicion that if they didn’t get chased away, he would disappoint them—if not immediately, then soon after the novelty of being with a bad hombre had worn off. After they left, the cowboy would drink the enriched wine with his loyal rat. He poured the drink into the rusty cans he had bought off Amazon for target practice. The cans still held liquid because the cowboy had never got around to practicing.
The cowboy preferred the Orange Jubilee flavor, which reminded him of a certain wrap-around porch and wet air. The rat preferred the Havana Red, which reminded the rat of the previous time it had drunk the beverage. The two drank in silence, but not because they had nothing to talk about.
The cowboy had hurt a lot of people. He had betrayed everyone he had ever met—even his loyal rat, who was too drunk and rat-like to remember. He had never been formally charged with a crime because they were so blatant and random—their damage so random it seemed like each stray bullet was an act of God instead of manslaughter.
He knew he was going to Hell. He had known this since the day he was born. When the priest baptized the baby cowboy, the water boiled, steaming up the stained glass. When he was three, he started shaving. When he was ten, he had his tenth birthday.
The years passed, and everything remained similar. The rat's tail gained rings. The cowboy lost more hair. Mad Dog 20/20 released a new flavor: Kiwi Lime, which neither rat nor man enjoyed.
One night, the cowboy awoke to a girl in his cave. She stood over him with a smug look on her face. The intrepid girl had a short haircut and a racially ambiguous skin tone. The cowboy pretended to be asleep. He heard the drunken snores of his loyal rat echoing around the cave. Through squinted eyelids, he noted the girl’s filthy socks, which had given her the deftness of foot to make it this far.
“I knew you weren’t as bad as they say,” said the girl.
He lay there with his eyes shut, thinking of his next move. He decided she could either die or stay forever. He attempted to run his tongue over the back of his teeth like he used to do when he was in a pickle.
The cowboy sprang up, grabbing the girl by her tight little bob. He pulled her hands behind her back and tied them together with a rope he had constructed out of dental floss—thousands of feet of dental floss, all braided together, forming a sharp, minty rope. Then he tied her legs. Then he threw her over his back and made his way to East Broadway.
When he got to the subway turnstile, he jumped over it because he was evil. He tied the girl to the dirty tracks. There she lay, bound and gagged amongst the cans of Diet Coke, chip bags, and a basketball that belonged to a kid that really needed it. The train was seven minutes away—not long enough to give up, just long enough to be annoying. He had gagged her with one of her socks, but now she seemed like she had something important to say.
There were a few minutes to spare, so the cowboy untied her from the tracks and brought her back to the platform. He pulled the gag from the girl's mouth and gave her a swig of Orange Jubilee to wash the taste of her deft feet from her mouth. She hadn’t cried the entire time, but she was crying now. He looked in her eyes, which had turned green under the fluorescent lights of East Broadway. He felt the rumble of the train and tensed his body, ready to throw her back to the tracks after she had said her piece.
The girl swished the enriched wine around her mouth and spat it onto the tracks in an impressive stream. The liquid sizzled on the third rail.
“I love you,” said the girl.
The cowboy leaned in to kiss her. The train was almost there when their lips first touched. The girl moved her tongue forward like the French do. She searched in the cowboy's mouth for his tongue—for surely such a scoundrel should have a scoundrel's tongue. But her expedition was for naught, for the cowboy had no tongue. He had gambled it away many moons ago in a card game with his father and the Chinese mafia.
The girl pulled her head back. And the cowboy knew that his greatest fear wasn’t a fear but a reality. He had disappointed this girl just as he had predicted he would. And he cursed his loyal rat for falling asleep, and he cursed the Chinese for taking his tongue, and he cursed the whole city of New York for hating him so—and he leapt in front of the Brooklyn-bound F train, obliterating every last scoundrel scrap of this evil man.
And the girl wept on the platform, for it wasn’t disappointment that she had held in her eyes but surprise.
The next day, the whole city sat in mourning. The funeral was held at City Hall, as it was the only venue that could be booked on such short notice. As the cowboy's body had been obliterated, the city had killed the loyal rat as a proxy, tying a black ribbon around the hairless neck that had sweat its last sweat. The casket was carried down the marble steps into a hearse. And as the girl was the only one to love him, and as she didn’t know much about him, she told the amassed City of New York about his tongue—and how sharp and sexy it was, and how it made up for all his murders, and general unpleasantness, and how she was the only one to ever feel it because she was the only thing that the cowboy had ever loved. The hearse made its way out of the city as she spoke.
As to where the hearse went, no one ever thought to ask.
Illustrations by Max Sweeney.