The Mexican in the Bathroom

By

Weldon H. Sandusky

I

THE GAS STATION

 Oh, well, quite right, Weldon H. Sandusky had hoped to raise an issue. That is to say, distinguish nothing from something, indeterminate space from space, a being from nothingness, an atom from quarkish chaos; therefore, the creator, none the less, of the Mexican in the Bathroom, like a wave from a sound from an atom from, then, nothing; and, on the other hand, a person--Weldon H. Sandusky--cashier-at a gas station. Not at all successful at his ploy, financially speaking, he uses anyway the cyberspace of freedom, the fringes of quantum mechanics, the guttural humor of gigantic ‘Mexican’ rippers produced mechanically with hand and mouth to attract so said “Homos” to coordinate positions, Titantically, so to speak, that don’t exist, for if they did, would then, there be a kind of New Age Atomic Reality, a kind of off-Broadway identity, a copyrightable fixation and not merely just hundreds of rather indescribable chains of farts!?

 A calm man in his fifties, cashier cleanliness, divorced, disassociated otherwise from social pressures, except-money--he has paid his rent, bought his food, and, now, awaits the night-really a kind of misnomer--a Mexican in the Bathroom……..

 That night, three-o-clock A.M. or so, bongo!---gush!---rip!---, hand-to-mouth, colossal, gigantic, an episode begins. Tutorial, the telephone, the satellites, the veritable electron itself begin to obey this Mastermind’s kind of idiotic outcry. Internet domains rush to command the signal like a door knocking somewhere, private -800- listings, satellite broadcasts, even fictitious “walk-ons” that might pull up to the pumps have all been institutionalized to breathe deep “deliciosítas”, “hydrogenás” of rich power, for, which, many, going along with the unknown, unlicensed, unidentifiable sound, do. A jeep full of high school girls playfully passes the gas station—under control. Hundreds of listeners nationwide pretend they don’t know they’re listening to the said pirated signal. What before was somehow aimless, chaotic, Titanic space is thus being stealthily (the cashier looks quickly at the pumps), “illegally” broadcast.

 No particular motive in mind, mastermind Weldon is now controlling a vast enterprise of wiretap-like “Homos” sniffing the air like so many Nazis, and, perhaps secretly, too, hoping they can become a Mexican in the bathroom. The night moon hovers in the sky over the door of the gas station like a huge ball electron punctuated only by waves of ripping Mexican farts—instructions to ‘grab on them,’ “bondos” magically forming-listeners and perhaps Direct T.V. viewers transformed into insiders and who Weldon claims through his Mexican alter-ego, Franco Lopez, are Conspirators, fictions part of theory, entities part of his own private little world.

B

Not so long ago Weldon, the sudden Mexican in the bathroom, would never have dreamed of such intrigue. To the then student of literature and later student of law there was only his wife, a secretive lover now and then ( he begins to stock cigarettes) his eyes still furtively now and then gazing towards the pumps, caught, mainly, though, in the act of being a night man, a cashier. His outer person tells nothing of tragedy, a divorce following his graduation from law school:

 “Can I help you, mam?”

 “Ten dollars on pump number 3,” says a nondescript woman looking at the blank Weldon wears on his face. Salem, Marlboro ...he is all but a national fictitious identity of the airwaves and certainly nothing of any conspiracy--a lone wolf passing gas in the night to arouse “homos”; but, yet, a kind of moon-like huge tear does perhaps hang in his eye visible not just only as a feeling (“Marlboro 100’s” he mutters to no one) but also as a reminder that back many years ago Weldon H. Sandusky was committed to the State mental hospital claiming in his defense that his brother and wife along with the State were involved in a conspiracy to unlawfully commit him. Though the court denied his claim and found him insane (he begins to clean the fountain area); Weldon, no doubt, holds his Mexican Franco persona as a kind of lingering retaliation, even, indeed, as a kind of offering of himself as an electronic idol to carry the burden of proof onward, beyond judgment, beyond facts beyond law into—he pours coffee beans into the coffee maker—when bongo like an explosive rip a Ford Explorer pulls in followed by two other color-only-cars, perhaps Fords as well, for gas and maybe cigarettes. The beans gyrate like some kind of huge brown molecule, pump noises fill the air and a girl is denied access to the bathroom, the interior of the station locked at night to prevent robbery.

 With their departure Weldon surveys his domain of fifteen years: soda pop, candy bars, oil…at last entering (a “shut eye” still on the pumps) the cooler which, of course, needs stocking. There, in a frozen world of soda pop, this fiction of love and money and law and science seems to him really after all the years vague and pointless—mounting cases of Coke and Pepsi and Dr. Pepper, as it were, abstractions about force, bongo (Weldon rips one off)-“Breathe deep homos,” he insists. “Grab on to the ‘electros’,” and, then, individually, like a wave of some nothing, he lets singular bottles of Coke make their way down little plastic aisles to face the glass doors of the cooler in the station, the doors locked, the pumps huge red, white and blue giants outside, waiting, quietly, for cars. It is quiet save neon mixed moon light in an otherwise aimless world. ‘Zonco’, he, hand-to-mouth gives once more his beleaguered battle cry. It’s almost two a.m. in the morning in Dallas, Texas.

 Business is slow: an elderly Black janitor, a young man, some real Mexicans, as he slowly, if not tediously, stocks candy bars imagining to the contrary of random events—the beep of a truck backing up, a security car’s warning lights flashing somewhere, he exist not as an input (a kind of long number), but, as a really, real person whose feelings--he hesitates from firing, only the thought there--are somehow significant data, a minute output of love and hate and anger that when transformed push and pull imaginary clogs on a machine in God’s mind for, he thinks, slamming a Baby Ruth into position, nothing can be created or destroyed, no two objects can occupy the same spot; and, then, well, then, he begins stocking assorted gums--Doublemint, etc.. there are physical constants, temperature, amounts of force, amounts of electricity, elements, compounds, and yes the great chain of DNA on and on and on including delete and mutate, and, Weldon, excitedly, rips a huge blast off: “Come-on you ‘Homos’-go for the power!” A girl waiting at the cashier’s window looks embarrassed she’s disturbed the night man.

 “Can I help you?” he asks.

 A “twenty” covers a fill-up and more that might follow--cigarettes, etc. Weldon watches her--a kind of goofy molecule polarized by another two vectors in space--when, suddenly, apparently, her cell-phone rings and a night-bird zips past in the artificial world of the gas station. With cigarettes, the change is $3.20 which Weldon gives her. “Have a good night,” he says kind of mechanically after all the times he’s said it. With her departure, the night begins to end-bathrooms, mopping, trash, then his morning relief cashier, a woman, Sondra, with 52 double-D breasts.

II

MEMORY: MOTHER’S HOUSE

 

 Weldon thinks, thought-flash-wishing-almost he weren’t really this cashier-crazed-scientist-sour grapes-almost sixty-year-old, to a time twenty years ago: it’s early sunrise at his mother’s house near White Rock Lake in Dallas, a kind of post-Seventies, hippy, long-hair man, Well Done, Wel Don, Well Done-if you prefer-arising, divorced, fresh out of a private mental institute, unemployed-with nothing better to do than think, talk to himself and play the guitar sitting obscurely in a lawn chair in his mother’s front yard. In fact, this Weldon, he is out his mom’s front door, his guitar tagging along behind, as well as a coffee pot, will not leave to go anywhere, to do anything, to see anybody for four years; and, then, he will leave under arrest to be transported, court house and kangaroo included, to the State Mental Institution in Terrell, Texas. BIG TIME! Two-time looser!

 This morning he is ‘chipper’ and indulgent in academicism, jurisprudential, philosophic considerations, however!

 “Why not Jesus now?” he lets a passing bird know.

 “And is he not now in you?” says the bird back.

 Cars, houses, bushes, neighbors, anyone, anything, pose as potential enemy examples for what, he, Weldon, the lawyer, the student, teacher, counselor, posture as a burgeoning theory that he will eventually use as grounds to dismiss a five-thousand dollar back-child support subpoena. He sips on coffee, strums on the guitar, distinguishing in a freshly composed song Hollywood and Sex versus the Church and Love while White Rock community life passes slowly down the street, his mother’s house a Graceland as it were and he a neo-Elvis:

 “You can’t get married on the Silver Screen,

 Without all the kin-folk in a laundry machine.”

 “Everyone so suspicious,” he admonishes out loud as if people could hear his voice:

 “I wonder why?” Pause. “But I won’t state the facts less they’re clear and convincing-beyond a reasonable doubt.” A Texas sky full of shadows hangs above like in some kind of Renaissance painting—Weldon, a sort of lonely shepherd, without place or meaning.

 His eyes from the lawn chair circumscribe the circle of his world: a blue with fake wood paneling station wagon--neighbor’s, St. Bernard’s Church-steeple, asphalt parking lot, Mexican yard man; the intersection of Old Gate and Forest Hills Blvd, the huge cottonwood tree in the backyard, Arnet’s, Richard Tucker’s and back, a circle complete.

 “So, I had bad grades!” he mutters to himself kind of gesturing at picking up the guitar for accompaniment. No more résumés, hapless phone calls. Weldon is growing to accept his abandonment, withholding despair very quiet like a drop of water—his son Stephen only now some legal illusion, his ex-wife, a memory to “jack” with, his very soul dying midst schizophrenic fantasies and fruitless ambitions. Save his mother inside the house, old and no doubt saddened by all the events of her son’s life, the future holds no promise—no real family, no love, no property: the gravity of his condition, lost in what seemingly is a kind of slapstick.

 “So I just don’t give a shit,” he nods at a bush. “Everybody can just wonder,” he surmises. “Perhaps God will overhear.!”

It’s nearing two p.m. in the afternoon, passing cars and curious neighbors, a far cry from semester-end examinations and grades but none-the-less for the future gas station man to the now drop-out, life has culminated in just that—grade 77!!!

III

THE GAS STATION

 After stocking cigarettes, cleaning the fountain area, stocking the cooler and mopping so many nights, the multifaceted Weldon indulges in a sort of reverie—a conglomerate nostalgia of grades and school, marriage and insanity:

 “You can’t get married on the silver screen…”

 Zonko - Rip- he produces several compatible bursts, and, then, strangely as if a jury were there, pumping gas or buying soda pop, he will enunciate the refinement of his conspiracy theory, laying down, for example, a procedural rule or then posing a question of law. Weldon turns to the coffee machine-a jury member…

 “Objection, sir?”

 And now to the cash register…

 “That, is hearsay!”

 A car load of girls, no doubt, he thinks, as well, caught up in the trial, deserve and receive a mock burst—ZONKO! “Breathe deep ‘Homas’!” The Dallas police like some alter ego paranoid schizophrenic know--Weldon considers--beginning to count the drawer for Sondra curiously initiating a kind of Poundian canto:

 “Pres’ & the Pope

 Who’s on the dope??

 Must be the ones

 Danglin’ on the rope!!!

 Ah em, ah em, ah em…

 Ah em, ah em, ah em.

 Big Brother and a lonely Man—

 Both ‘homoed’ on the stand:

 Breathe deep, ho-hey, ho-hey,

 Breathe on the power, ho-hey!

 In this frame of mind, a kind of magical relativity results—the gas station, the front yard, school, locked out of ‘his wife’s’ apartment on a frozen Wisconsin morning, arrests in California,…résumé-like events of personal history consume his consciousness—lost in time and space—while he closes the counted drawer.

 “Well, members of the jury…” breaking at once into the canto mode:

 “We all pay—hey, hey, hey-

 the price for the throwing of the rice,

 We all wish we could only be…”

Sondra pulls up! Snap, Weldon erects into normal behavior; but, later, driving home to his apartment in North Dallas, he as well arrives in all the other places like a small dot on an electron or a Hiroshima on a hydrogen atom or a key in all doors—a distant memory anyone, he thinks, plays with—steering the car with purpose, however, and intent upon his recovery and functionality in the everyday working world—white collars, blue collars and …he opens his apartment door.

 Histrionics aside, Weldon now feigns stepping into a Mexican Mushroom—“Yee Haw, Wow…STINKO…What the hell!” giggling to himself.

 He closes the door. No where like home—he eats and goes to bed. A hard day’s night!!! Night, after night after night, exam after exam—cars, telephone numbers, friends—all some kind of a sequence bonded in an affectionate magnetic field: an earth, a moon, a car, an enemy vehicle, an in-law, an out-law, and, so forth, infinitum.

 Weldon grows old in his intelligence, the unjuried opinions, the insane proof of nothingness, indeterminate space in a random world of stocks and bonds and trades and options of love and marriage, sex and Hollywood . Beginning to loose consciousness in sleep, he knows he is a failure; and, perhaps, he rolls over, insane!

IV

STEVE RUEGER: GOVERNMENT

 It’s an early weekday morning where coffee in a flag-bearing room with pictures of Presidents and Chiefs of State on the walls is just now brewing. Almost alone sitting at the podium lectern table, Steven Rueger (CIA-FBI tactical liaison) prepared to brief some ten to fifteen agents on what has come to be “Hound Dog”—WELDON H. SANDUSKY. He draws the first cup and others follow: 7:30 A.M. Central Standard Time:

 “Good morning,” and then after a while Rueger begins…

“Weldon H. Sandusky—code Hound Dog is a mentally ill person. He’s been twice committed, facts, no doubt, arising from law found in the Texas State Mental Health Code, to the State asylum in Terrell and to a private hospital for namely, threatened homicide and threats made against the President of the United States. Please review file brief L2.”

 Rueger is a Hoover type, non-descript man in his ‘fifties’ with glasses and an eye for the tactical handling of cases where their disposition has reached a level of ripeness such that the National Security under the Omnibus Streets and Crime Control Act is involved. He continues sipping hurriedly coffee only occasionally looking up:

“A pseudomonas character, Franco Lopez—the Mexican in the Bathroom—of the subject in question has triggered National Security problems not simply because of leaks—unlicensed broadcasts of “the Mexican” but, as well, a dismissed Federal Circuit motion used by subject Sandusky’s effort to likewise dismiss a five-thousand dollar back-child support subpoena served approximately one month before the above said arrest and consequent commitment to the State Mental Asylum. If the State avoids delay of a habeas corpus hearing—(see document: Weldon Sandusky v. Dorothy Edwards, et. al. July, 1984), Hound Dog’s failure to seek relief himself will provoke possible political and legal problems. He, subject, code, Hound Dog, is pirated quite frequently, illegal broadcasts of the ‘Mexican in the Bathroom’ released via the NET, radio, and, we believe, Direct T.V. As well, bootleg tapes of ‘Sanklee’ (another pseudonym) are distributed regionally and nationally allowing airplay inevitably of the artist-songwriter-guitar player, Sandusky. Currently, a blanket has been put on the press to prevent any coverage; but, then, First Amendment Freedom of Speech issues might give problems for Government. Continued wiretaps and surveillance issues might generate a cause of action under the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Hollywood and Government in these type National Security Intelligence cases must be handled discreetly and meet common law and written statutory standards. The Dallas office is consequently herewith advised: Sandusky (code Hound Dog) is not considered dangerous, is not armed but is a thorn in the side of National Security. At a large level the same kind of issue sparks Palestinian-Jewish animosity and anti-Communist withdrawal with honor from Vietnam sentiment. If this man becomes another cold war public figure will Federal and State government be politically threatened? He would be obvious proof of a real conspiracy. He is a lawyer, and all but certainly recovered from divorce, alcoholism and unemployment. He is employed by Exxon/Mobil as a night man—this singular job lasting now more than twenty years. He is in average health with possible prostrate cancer, high blood pressure and attendant cardiovascular, coronary heart disease, a heel-spur on his right foot, 20-80 vision, age sixties, non-sexually active. He goes for walks and lives in Addison, Tx. (See enclosed disclosure brief). Thank you for your time this morning. And, have a good day.”

 Rueger sits down finishing in one gulp his morning coffee.

[to be Continued in Issue Nineteen]

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Weldon graduated from Texas Tech University in 1968-a B.A. in English. He then got an M.A. in English from the University of Wisconsin and a law degree (J.D. l975) from the same school. Divorce followed as did commitment to, first, the private psychiatric hospital, Timberlawn, in Dallas, and , later, the State Mental Asylum in Terrell, Texas. Mr. Sandusky petitioned for habeas corpus claiming a conspiracy to unlawfully commit him existed in violation of his constitutional rights.
Upon release, Weldon got a job at Exxon/Mobil where he worked twenty years as a cashier-nightman. During August, 2005 he underwent open heart surgery at St. Paul’s Hospital in Dallas and have since been declared totally disabled. He has coronary heart disease.