Vestal
Tags: Short Story, Fiction, Life, Idiocy, Bullying

Vestal Coffin, outside of his appearance, could be described as a pragmatic man. Mostly. He knew what made him tick and he made no extenuation or excuse for what he was. He did what he could with what he had and put no stock in frivolities.

He was a complete shit by anyone’s standards, even his own, but most pragmatists are. Hoping for sunshine and rainbows is not at all the pragmatic way. Pragmatism dictates you play the hand you’re dealt. You don’t go sniffing for aces that may or may not be in the deck. Wish in one hand and shit in the other; see which one fills up first. No sense in wasting time wishing you could fix something that can’t be fixed. That’s what Vestal thought. It’s best to just get on with it, with how things are, and make the most of it. In that regard, the brutal truth — something that walks hand in hand with pragmatism — sometimes steps on toes and hurts feelings, thus, the “complete shit” persona.

Albeit, there are a great many shits in the world, few actually set out to be a shit. At our birth, even before some say, certain guidelines are written in our hearts by the very hand of God. Everyone knows they are there, even atheists―it’s probably what makes them so angry when the holy sort rubs their nose in scripture. We have our morality and ethics built-in, it’s just that some people choose to ignore them or give themselves credit for their existence. I can’t imagine the Almighty constructing a turd intentionally.

That said, Vestal was certainly a shit. If he could have had it otherwise, he would have, but his practical way of thinking disallowed him entertaining unicornish thoughts and ‘once upon a time’ ideas. And, given his particular physical peculiarities, he knew that “otherwise” would be costly, both mentally and financially, if not impossible. Had he not been born a pragmatist, it would have been forced upon him. “You can’t change the weather,” Grandmother had told him. “You damn sure ain’t gonna change those ears.”

From his earliest recollections, due to his peculiarities, Vestal had been a target of ridicule. Not jesting and ribbing, but vicious and evil abuse.

Sadly, insensitivity and cruelty is not limited to the shits of the world but distributed fairly evenly among children. Vestal was too short, his mouth was too wet, and his ears were unfortunate. For this and these, he paid dearly.

He had thick, old man ears that looked as though they’d been frozen and thawed and refrozen many times in the harshest of winters. His mouth was red and ripe, like a festering wound that would not heal. Every girl in school was taller than Vestal by at least an inch, and usually much more. Even those two grades below him. He had a handful of peculiarities to be sure, and any one of these would have been akin to a death kiss amid judgmentally cruel and malevolently unfiltered school children, and he had been thrice cursed. A triple-whammy. This is not to mention his bulbous nose. He didn’t have a bulbous nose yet, not at an early age, but it was obvious one day it would be.

The psychological thrashing was a constant in young Vestal’s life. It would be fair to say that even grown men, jaded and hardened by life, had they been subjected to the same abuses as Vestal, would have succumbed to the vicious emotional onslaught. Not Vestal, whatever he lacked in appearance, he made up for in mental fortitude.

What doesn’t kill us, makes us stronger, was Vestal’s thinking. Ever the pragmatist. In time, he learned to carry his burdens with relative ease.

Vestal’s grandmother, who Vestal was required to refer to as such, was a pessimistic pragmatist, therefore, she never parsed words with her grandson. His peculiar physiognomies, she felt, dictated he be made aware of the hardships, brutalities, spites, and general nastiness of life, early on, as he would face many. To roll a turd in powdered sugar and pretend it was pastry was folly in her book. She knew a kid with ears like Vestal’s was bound to get caught in his own loop as far as social acceptance, so she always gave him the bacon without the sizzle.

Grandmother told Vestal, without tact or hesitation, that his mama had tried, with much vigor and copious doses of Jim Beam, to drink him out of her womb. Her drunken labors had undoubtedly, resulted in his stunted growth and other peculiars. Grandmother was of the opinion that Vestal’s ears had been pickled in his mother’s alcohol rich amniotic fluid sometime during the third trimester. His mother’s drinking had become exceptionally intense as the end of her pregnancy drew near.

“Even as a drunk, she was a failure,” Grandmother had often said. She always said it in a way that scolded Vestal’s absent mother, though it more than hinted Vestal’s existence was a mistake. Grandmother’s words lay blame on his mother but the look in her eyes implicated Vestal as an accomplice.

Pragmatically, Vestal didn’t think he could have applied any corrective measures as a womb-bound fetus, and Grandmother, he was sure, was well-aware of his limitations as an unborn. Still, Vestal knew she considered him to be at least partly to blame for his mother’s handiwork.

It was also made clear to Vestal, early and often, in no uncertain terms, in various ways under Grandmother’s practical form of child-rearing, that she saw him as more of a burden than a blessing. “You’re more of a burden than a blessing,” she’d say.

Had it been a cute and cuddly baby that her daughter had dropped on her doorstep, she might have felt otherwise. She might have even made some attempt to provide a nurturing environment, but Vestal, from birth, as was Grandmother’s observation, destined to be ugly as the day is long. A nurturing environment would have done him no good, and, given his physical circumstances, it would have made him weak-minded. The boy needed to be strong in both mind and spirit if he were to survive.

Her pessimism told her the societal herd would eventually drive a kindly fostered spirit with big ears to the wayside and leave him for the lions. Her pragmatic side told her it would probably be for the best. However, her standing as a good Christian in the eyes of God prevented her from throwing him in a gunny sack and drowning him in the river. Therefore, the boy needed to be emotionally hardened if he was to stand a chance. Vestal never held it against her. He figured he’d have felt the same way. As stated, he too was a pragmatist.

Grandmother couldn’t fathom even the ugliest of girls developing an interest in Vestal, not of the romantic sort. He’d been an ugly baby and she knew it would only become worse as he got older. What would she do when he came of age? Without a bride, she feared he would be impossible to shove out of the nest. She had no intention of being stuck with him until her dying day, so, she taught him to work with what he had.

Vestal Coffin was smart as a whip, even as a toddler. Grandmother had recognized this. If he had any hope of success in life, his mind would be his ticket to ride. But she also knew most people―most people being womenfolk―will always pick a beautiful idiot over a runt with a quick brain and big ears, so, his success would have to be categorized monetarily not generically.

“Smart people make lots of money,” she’d told him. “Money will make you happy,” she’d told him. “Life is much more happily looked upon by a rich man.” And to her satisfaction, Vestal agreed. Thereafter, he’d saved every penny he earned. As has been stated, he was smart as a whip. She’d thought she had solved the woman problem with a financial substitute, but she’d been wrong. She saw money as a replacement for women, Vestal saw it as a means to an end. He would buy women.

As has been stated, Grandmother was a God-fearing woman, and she seldom questioned the wisdom of Almighty. She knew he had a plan, and as complex as the world’s problems were, she was aware it wasn’t always going to be raining daisies and lollipops as the Good Lord went about conducting his will. That said, she verily wondered if it was altogether wise, God making an ugly duckling, one that no one in their right mind would want to have and to hold, as horny as a three-peckered billy goat. Vestal was forever fondling and touching his privates. It vexed Grandmother greatly. He did it so often she marveled that any skin actually remained on his willy.

“Dear God,” she’d pray, “since you cursed me with this deviant little bastard, why don’t you pass me a nickel every time I catch him plucking at his pecker?” She’d prayed in frustration and jest, but it didn’t hurt to ask, and if God wasn’t aware of Vestal’s shenanigans already, she felt it was her Christian duty to bring it to his attention.

She knew sexual frustration was a powerful force in nature. If left unfettered, it drove men to commit desperate and heinous acts. No one was ever inspired to help the poor or take up missionary travels because they were horny. Throughout recorded time, nothing good ever came to a man who followed the designs of his willy. Someday, rich or poor, the ugly boy would fall into ruin, dick in hand. She was sure of it.

It was true. Vestal was a pecker-plucker. Always had been, at least, as far back as he could remember. He saw nothing wrong with it, it felt good and it set him at ease. Many times, after Grandmother had forced him to become well-acquainted with scripture, he’d dare her to find a Bible verse against it. The best she could come up with was Onan spilling his seed on the ground and the Almighty smiting him dead. Vestal, as he was smart as a whip, corrected her. God had killed Onan, not for wasting his seed, but because he didn’t obey the Almighty and perform his familial duty. God didn’t say a thing about him whacking off. He figured if God had something against one beating one’s meat, he would have said so in Genesis before mankind had a chance to make it a habit.

Vestal played with himself from a curious primal carnality hidden deep within him, he didn’t think he could stop if he tried. Grandmother had asked both God and Jesus, many times, to intervene, but she’d either used up all her prayers on other stuff, or They were busy with world peace and had no time to invest in Vestal’s tallywhacker.

His masturbation, if not truly habitual, had become necessary rote by way of instinct more than gratification. His chronic fondling caused Grandmother to stumble upon his private moments too many times. In such instances, Vestal was undeterred in his endeavor, he would complete his task whether she left the room or not. His homuncular stature would have inspired the medical ancients to write volumes. His incessant masturbation would have confirmed their beliefs of the tiny man in the spermatozoon. The homunculus embodied! He would have defined for them the endless looping infinity.

To Grandmother, the boy looked possessed. His glazed eyes appeared to look past reality into deviant dimensions. Two small windows into Hell, she thought. His breath, in rapid and ragged pants, pulsed his open sore of a mouth. His engorged ears twitched spasmodically. His motile hand furiously pumped at himself outside of conscious thought. Was he possessed, she wondered? She called upon God each time the boy involved himself with himself to have mercy on his soul. Still, she knew, the sins of the father compounded with the sins of the mother, she worried. The boy had been twice cursed. The child was Hell-spawned.

Vestal’s mother was like-minded in that regard. She allowed that her womb had been cultivated with the seed of a hell spirit, as she claimed to have been raped by a demon behind a revival tent down in Galveston. She said it was on account of the purity of her spirit she’d been singled out and sowed. However, if one were to do the math, her gestation period exactly matched the shore leave for the USS McGillicuddy and the pregnancy was more likely the result of fornication in the dark balcony of the Majestic Theater. Albeit the math pointed at the U.S. Navy, Grandmother leaned more toward the demonic explanation.

By the time Vestal was ten, he’d read the Bible three times cover to cover. He’d been forced to the first time, the next two times, he just wanted to better understand the book. Before he turned eleven, he knew more of what was in the dusty, old tome than most of the preachers who thumped it for money. He wasn’t sure it was all true, but he could not deny the intelligence that went into the book. He truly admired it.

Whether or not God actually existed, mattered little to Vestal, but, he knew the only true shot at a global utopia was mapped out in the pages of the Holy Bible, though most people would never know. If they hadn’t drawn this conclusion in two thousand years, they never would. The path is wide but the door is small, did not refer to man’s penchant for sin, but to their unwilling and self-serving nature and their blatant laziness. Most people won’t put in the effort it takes to understand the book, to realize the single, simple act it takes to get inside the Pearly Gates.

Vestal assumed Heaven must have a finite amount of space, and knowing this, God put his puzzle in plain sight and made the answer so simple a smooth stone could understand it, then he camouflaged it with effort. Only the most convicted and resolute, who took the time to understand the seemingly nonsensical stories, would gain entrance into Paradise.

If God truly is omniscient and omnipotent and omnipresent, he must have purposely avoided Vestal’s school. Vestal had to attend school and acquire an education without the assistance or protection of God, and he caught hell. School was a hopeless place for Vestal; a brutal region of doom located between Purgatory and the whipping post where Dante’s horned demons beat pimps and seducers. It was utterly devoid of mercy. But be that as it may, through applied pragmatism and Grandmother’s hardening, he survived.

And though God stayed outside of school grounds, he had not forsaken the boy entirely. Either out of a sense of guilt or merciful fair play, God had adorned Vestal with, along with his peculiarities, perhaps, in spite of, a superior intellect. Grandmother’s suspicions were realized. The boy was smart as a whip. God had made him a genius-level thinker of thoughts.

Even in his tender years, Vestal was wise enough to know that, overall, his school chums, malicious as they may be, were figuratively just a fart in a fast wind. One day, soon, they would all be behind him, fuzzy acquaintances and mostly forgotten whatshisnames and whatshernames. Vestal always saw the bigger picture and the timeline in his mind stretched far beyond a gaggle of playground idiots.

When Vestal had reached the sixth-grade, one of his teachers noticed his vision needed correction. In fact, the boy was blind as a bat. His intelligence and ability to memorize anything in an instant had compensated for his poor vision and disguised any need for corrective measures. Of course, he never knew his vision was defective. Without a comparison, he assumed everyone saw what he saw.

Teachers are usually the first to discover a child with poor eyesight and usually do so rather quickly, well before the sixth-grade. However, it is quite possible the teachers had recognized the signs and symptoms early on with Vestal via his constant squinting and they simply chose to look the other way. His perpetual half-closed eyes might’ve, naturally, transferred the normal conversational focus point of the eyes to his uncomfortable looking mouth, as his nose had not yet become bulbous.

Perhaps, his teachers had purposely ignored his limited vision in order to continue to keep Vestal at the back of the classroom, and themselves a fair distance from the infectious looking orifice and unfortunate, elderly ears. Or, perhaps, they were only being merciful and didn’t have the heart to pile pain on top of misery. Maybe, they feared it might be the straw that broke Vestal’s back and they worried the unusual looking kid might be forever destroyed if he had to suffer one more malady.

A trip to the optometrist provided poor Vestal with a pair of glasses designed by the cruellest and most insensitive spectacle maker on earth. They were as big around as a mayonnaise jar and as thick as the bottom of a Coke bottle. Vestal, if he hadn’t been before, was now well and truly fuckered in the looks department.

All withstanding, as was stated before, Vestal survived. He made it through the cruelties that had gone hand in hand with his education. By means of his superior intellect and pragmatic nature, he had shrugged off even the most painful jabs and pokes with relatively few emotional scars and only a reasonable amount of mental anguish.

Normal people, can and will, bury corrupt memories in their subconscious, but with Vestal, he buried nothing, he shook it off with a condescending shrug; and left it behind him. He was content in the knowledge that he was completely surrounded by imbeciles who would soon be gone away from him to sweat through some pathetic liberal arts degree at some unknown college, or conscripted into social slavery as workaday fools. He would leave his mark on the world and toast them with horse piss.

As Vestal got older and neared the end of his education, Grandmother, a forward-thinking, pessimistic, pragmatist, and not one to parse words with her grandson, told Vestal outright he should look for a woman as ugly as himself. The uglier the better. “An ugly wife is less likely to go whoring about,” she said, “An ugly woman will be glad to have you.”

Vestal, always honest with himself, mostly agreed with her, but he wasn’t going to settle. He knew his overly wet mouth, his small stature, unfortunate ears, and coke-bottle glasses were going to be a lifelong hindrance in gaining consideration from the opposite sex. He knew these abnormalities would be deterrents to affection. At least the kind of affection he desired, which was nothing less than bumping uglies with statuesque beauties. So, Vestal set out to make himself rich. There are plenty of pretty ladies out there in the world willing to overlook a few flaws in exchange for a life of luxury. Long ago, he’d taken Grandmother’s advice to heart. “Money will make you happy.” It surely would.

The folderol surrounding movie stars and pretty boys is a delusion born of marketing. What women truly want is money. It’s the natural scheme of things. In the wild, apart from men, there’s but one currency, survival. Survival came in two denominations — food and sex. Early man was probably the same as the wild beasts until some smart cookie with unfortunate ears, who was tired of sorting through the dregs of the cavewoman population, invented banking. Money leveled the playing field. Vestal planned to acquire as much of it as he could.

The Bible says the “love of money” not “money, itself, is the root of all evil,” so he wasn’t the least bit frightened of being wealthy. He didn’t love money, he saw it as a tool. A means to an end. Besides, just because he knew the Bible didn’t mean he adhered to it. God had burdened him dearly, so he figured God owed him a little slack in his rope. When it came time for his rich ass to ride the camel through the eye of the needle, he’d think of something. As has been stated, Vestal was smart as a whip.