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Me: Holy Mother of God, you are just stunning! You are insanely beautiful! Jesus!!
Marion: Thank you, that’s very sweet of you to say.
Me: Your voice is chocolate, French chocolate.
Marion: I see.
Me: I think I need my inhaler. Sorry. Jesus, this is embarrassing.
Marion: It’s all right.
Me: It’s just that you’re so beautiful. You’re luminous, like a cloud made of gold and light.
Marion: I’m just an actress who has agreed to talk to you about my new movie Rust and Bone that just opened in the United States.
Me: Yes, yes.
Marion: It is a wonderful film, very complex and beautiful.
Me: You train whales in this film, don’t you? You’re a beautiful marine biologist! I bet you look even better with your hair wet. It probably changes the way it smells. If I were a killer whale I would do whatever you told me to do!
Marion: Yes, well, the film is about a whale trainer who suffers a terrible accident where she loses her legs. She is both a physical and emotional amputee, and must let love back into her life. It was a very challenging role for me to play, but as an actor all you want to do is discover more about the human soul.
Me: You have such beautiful legs it would be a shame to lose them, even if it was just in a movie! But yeah, I think I know what you’re saying about the human soul. I get it. You were in Batman, too, weren’t you? I always thought you’d make a great Catwoman. Have you ever thought about being Catwoman? You’re more beautiful than Halle Berry times Michelle Pfeiffer times Anne Hathaway times Halle Berry again, plus all the old TV ones.
Marion: I think that they did marvelous jobs playing that role and I don’t think I’d want to repeat work that had been done so well. I like to always do something new, to always challenge myself.
Me: My wife thinks that I’m a real challenge.
Marion: I am sure that she does.
Me: What movie do you think you were most beautiful in?
Marion: It’s been a pleasure Mister Murray, but I am afraid I’m on a very tight schedule and I have an another appointment to keep now.
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You’re malevolent, like the sort of thing a Super Villain might keep in his utility belt.
When I bought you I thought of the aroma of pumpkin pie, I thought of the gentle touch of a mother, a soft and restorative healing force, but what I received was more like a radioactive explosion. What the fuck are you?!!
You gave me a THIRD degree burn!
That’s the Grizzly Bear of burns! Doctors and nurses were peeling back the bandage and looking at it like it was Two Girls One Cup! And these were medical professionals!
You FUCKER!
Your stupid blue, felt cover, which instantly pills– as if it was some fucking Blow Fish– 
just falls off like so much flesh from a THIRD DEGREE burn! It’s useless, nothing more than a deception! You would need to be encased in a one-foot thick case of lead—like a coffin—to protect your victims from your deadly Superheat Technology! What, were you some crazy experiment that the Soviets abandoned because it was too dangerous? I am thinking that you were, you bitch.
And listen Death Pad, I was using you exactly as you were designed and as I was instructed to use you. Was it my fault that I fell asleep while watching that excruciatingly boring movie about whales and that your Deception Cover vanished? No, it was not my fault! It was my misfortune! And then vulnerable while asleep, you heat raped me. You burned a fucking hole in my side! I thought I was having a nightmare about global warming, but no, when I was living a nightmare starring you, the evil kill pad!
My therapist tells me a have an abundance of displaced anger and that it’s up to me how I use it. I choose to use it to kill Super Villains.
I am coming after you, you cocksucker, and I am going to set you on goddamn fire. You will also have to pay me forty million dollars or something, because this fucking burn is disgusting and it kills. In fact, the pain is so great that I am now completely addicted to Percocet, which is the only reason this entire letter isn’t written in capitals.
Watch your back, motherfucker.
Michael Murray
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“Oh, I just feel like stretching, really and thought you might like to sit down, and of course, I am a very, very classy man.”
“No, you’re not. I see the way you’ve been looking at that black girl over there.”
This took me aback.
“What?” I asked.
“Don’t give me that,” she said.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh, you know exactly what I’m talking about,” she pointed to a young woman sitting about 10 yards away. “Her, the one with the tits. I bet you just wanted to give me your seat so you could get closer to her, get a better look, eh?”
“ Jesus,” I said, “I wasn’t looking at her, I didn’t even know she was there.”
I sat back down in the seat.
“You’re at least twice her age. You could be her FATHER,” the woman declared.
Across from me a woman pulled a Kleenex from her purse and dabbed at the conjunctivitis that had taken hold of her left eye, and just over her shoulder her sat a woman of about 60 who had a look of abject defeat and exhaustion to her. Her arms were crossed over her chest and she had what must have been hundreds of old, cutting scars on them. Her hair was colourless and she seemed so spent on this planet as to be virtually a ghost.
The woman who did not want my seat looked back at me.
“What is it with middle-aged white guys and black girls, anyway? I mean, really? You think you have a chance?
“Look,” I said, “ I wasn’t looking at anybody. I’m happily married. I’m just a guy sitting on a subway, a guy who made the huge, terrible mistake of offering you his seat.”
I gave the woman a hard look, inviting her to say something else.
She looked like she was going to say something, but then she bent down, picked a penny up off the floor, put it in a plastic baggie and then moved along to the next car.
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