White Lightning

My family never had much money when I was growing up and couldn’t afford to buy me expensive toys and games like the other kids had. To make up for this paucity of plastic playthings, I developed a truly amazing imagination and came to inhabit a world that was authentic in every detail.

 

My favourite escapist game was daydreaming about being a cowboy. Not any old cowboy, but the greatest gunslinger around. I was a good guy with a hard edge and baddies feared me and my blazing law-bringer because they knew I was super fast, deadly accurate and remorseless in my battle against the forces of evil.

 

Like any decent lawman, I rode a fantasy steed called White Lightning – an equine friend more fleet of foot and more loyal than any other horse in the west. Wore an imaginary Stetson to shade the hot sun from my eyes (even when there was a bit of a light drizzle outside). Had a pretend Winchester thrust through a loop on my fanciful, hand-tooled, Mexican saddle and toted a made up colt 45, complete with non-existent mother-of-pearl handle, carried in a fictional many-notched holster slung low on my hip.

 

In my time as a fake US marshal, I cleaned up several lawless towns, tracked and gunned down many a murdering bank robber and rogue comanchero, butchered the entire Indian nation (in my day, pre PC, the injuns were always the bad guys), created the legend of the mysterious hero on the thundering white stallion and kissed two girls from my school, Sharon and Tracey, whom I liked to visualise as pretty and obliging inhabitants of my tough western utopia – though in reality they were the pillows off of my bed.

 

A large, tatty, soft toy monkey I owned came in handy during my cowboy games and we had regular fist fights, in which I would punch him from one side of the room to the other and back again. We would roll around the floor, Mickey trying to strangle me and then I would gain the upper hand and throw him against the wall like a Vietnamese guy killing a guinea pig.

 

Mickey’s face (Mickey the Monkey) was made of rubber and squashed under my knuckles in a most satisfying manner. Usually, outlaw Mickey was called Roger Cooper, named after a little shit from my school who used to twist my ear or give me dead legs and I would beat him mercilessly. If voodoo worked, Roger would have been black, blue and dead.

 

Anyway, one day, I was galloping along on White Lightning in hot pursuit of a particularly vile bunch of outlaws who had just robbed and murdered a stagecoach full of young women (including that bitch Sharon, who I’d gone off after she spat on my school blazer when I was standing in front of her in the dinner queue), when an unfortunate accident occurred.

 

Just as I drew my shiny peacemaker to bring down the first of the leering, unshaven desperadoes, a mentally constructed diamond-back rattle snake slithered into my path, thus spooking my pretend steed, causing him to rear up and throw me violently to the ground. I hit the mythical desert floor hard and the jarring impact made my dreamt up six-gun go off – the imaginary wayward bullet entering my head via my nose, blowing out my heroic brains and allowing the villains to escape.

 

I was never the same after that.

 

These days, I just drink a lot of White Lightning, rock back and forth a lot and dribble down my chin. I still miss my super powers, though. Particularly the x-ray vision and my bat cape. Wibble.