Spitting and gasping for air.
My first question was what in the fuck was that noise? It sounded like a pack of weasels with tin teeth gnawing on empty cans of Mr. Pibb. Was it a saber saw? And if it was who the fuck was running it at this time of night? My eyes slid open a centimeter. My second question was who in the fuck would drive a truck by my bedroom window with trees on the back of it when there wasn’t even a road in my back yard? I kept watching as more and more trees passed my window. This had to be one hell of a long truck. Maybe it was a series of trucks with a bunch of trees on them? This wasn’t making sense. Still more trees zipped by my window. I opened my eyes another centimeter. Had I done drugs before I had gone to sleep? No? I smelled smoke. My eyes opened another centimeter.
“Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucccccccccccccckkkkkkkkkkkkk!” I yelled, as my eyes shot open.
Those weren’t trees passing by my house! That was me passing by the trees! I had fallen asleep at the wheel of my Chevy Cavalier. Sparks like flecks of illuminated dragon spit spewed into the blackness of the West Virginia night as my car ground up against the guardrail.
“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh,” I yelled, as I jerked the steering wheel to the left.
Something else wasn’t right. The inside of the car was quickly filling with smoke. My first intuition was to suppose that the engine was on fire but then I noticed my shins were growing extremely warm. I looked down to see the discarded fast food bags in front of the passenger’s seat were on fire. My cigarette must have blown out of my mouth and landed there while I was dozing.
I frantically grabbed for my 42 ounce coffee and tossed it on the fire. The flames were out but now the car was so black with smoke I couldn’t see a fucking thing, nothing that is except the headlights of a Mac truck bearing down on my going about 200 fucking miles an hour.
“Mother fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuckkkkkkkkkkkk,” I screamed.
I jerked the steering wheel right again and the Cavalier grinded against the guardrail like a great metallic whale cutting through a steel sea. The sparks were incredible and if I hadn’t feared so much for my life I might have gone on watching what for me was a private fireworks show.
“Whoa big boy,” I cried, thrusting the big fish left and then right. .
I began laugh feverishly you see for death was upon me, his bony heels dug into my sides, his dagger like fingers encircling my neck. “Blah, blah, Blah,” he screamed, spitting acid in my ears. In the rearview mirror I could see his steel rimmed eyes; how they spun like molten drill bits, coming closer and closer to penetrating my brain. I knew then, if only subconsciously that laughing in this demented way was but the only choice left to me for the other options were complete madness or the unthinkable five letter word that was spelled d-e-a-t-h.
I fought to pull the mighty whale back onto the road and as the great beast swerved once again toward the guardrail I noticed what looked like a discarded pasta maker on the side of the road. It of course was too late to avoid the wreckage and I plowed over it. One of my tires exploded.
“Ahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa,” I yelled.
I frantically stabbed at the breaks with my foot. Now sparks were coming from the left rear side where the tire had blown. Evidently I was riding on the rim. Stones and sparks flew from the tail end as the great blue beast finally ground to a most impressive stop in a patch of roadside weeds.
I flung the door open and grabbed the six pack of 16 oz. Budweiser on the passenger’s seat. Smoke billowed out as I made my way to the guardrail and sat on it.
My emotions had been stretched like the elastic waistband of a grade school nerd’s underwear under the duress of a wedgey by the class bully. I couldn’t do it anymore. Not only had I almost died in a crazed car ride but inside I was perilously close to shutting down too. How much could one human being take? Shortly this question would be answered.
I opened a can of Budweiser and drained almost the whole thing. I hadn’t slept for days and reality was something that at that point was an option not a constant. I didn’t even consider the fact that a police cruiser might come along, nor did I care.
The headlights of cars and trucks came at me in one continuous yellow stain that ate up the darkness and spit it back out in clouds of lung clogging exhaust. Behind me I could see the illuminated eyes of varying heights of woodland critter that were undoubtedly waiting for me to topple over backwards off the guardrail in exhaustion so they could consume me. The little bastards must have been starving for the landscape in this area looked as if a nuclear bomb had pulverized it, everything black and sooty, the plants growing back in twisted and unbelievable angles. I closed my eyes and thought…
Earlier that night when all the white trash were sitting on their leaning porches sucking in the viscous coal dirt skies, as the old Chevy trucks bounced over roads with teethed potholes--their springs creaking like the bones of old miners-- and as the trailer whores kicked up their dirty knickers for their nightly airing, I was south bound riding through a caffeine and nicotine gauntlet that sustained a four day sleeplessness. This of course was not a journey dictated by choice but a trek set in motion by circumstances pertaining to mortality and the edge. You see all this had been set in motion some two weeks earlier and all this time I’d been sleeping at roadside rest areas with a butchers knife on my lap; one couldn’t be too careful for the late night freaks rubbed up against one’s windows like rutting pigs, lewdness sewn into their tiny squinting eyes, their hoofs packed with the DNA of every toilet cruiser in the tri-state area.
Thank God this was my last trip home from visiting the West Virginia State Mental Hospital. The trip had been too long for me to make every day after school and work without sleep, something had to give and as it turned out what was almost given was my life, quid pro quo…nearly.
With a pack of matches from the Dungeon, a local watering hole, in Morgantown, I lit a Camel Light and inhaled. I looked up in the sky and it started to rain. The drops brought me back a little bit, reminded me of standing her limp body up in the shower, trying in vain to hold her up under her armpits. Me still in my work clothes, her in her pajamas. It felt like I’d been standing in that shower all my life.
* * *
Upon arriving at the mental hospital earlier that evening I’d sat in my Cavalier drinking the last of my coffee, shaking, and looking. The hospital was a new facility, placed on top of a small mountain, which was corkscrewed with a road the followed it from top to bottom. It was new but somehow didn’t feel it, like an old couch with a new slip cover. Or maybe that’s just how all these made you feel.
When I was done with my coffee I gathered my things and went inside. Every time I entered the lobby of the hospital, and this time was no exception, it immediately struck me as some sort of pagan tribute to the bloated pig god of Italian Marble; Shooter I believe his name to be. Hell, I think even the lamp shades were made of some strain of the veiny rock. It was impressive from an overdone standard, something a whore master from some third world shitball country would build while his people were forced to eat gravel and drank brackish puddle water.
“Cocksucker,” I said under my breath for no reason other than it made me feel good.
The opulence left me feeling weak like a pitbull that had been chained to a running treadmill for days without food or drink. I stumbled forward towards the semi-circular receptionist’s desk, which of course was made of marble. A black woman with huge cans in a light blue sweater sat behind the desk. She smiled and glistening teeth like pearls floating in can of tomato paste appeared in her mouth.
“Hi darlin’,” she said. “You here to visit?”
“Right,” I said. “I assume we can rule out cavity searches and background checks.”
“You know what they say about ass-uming don’t you?” she said with a chuckle.
“Right,” I said, lifting only one side of my mouth to smile. I would have given her full smile, she seemed nice enough but I was running on a precious little reserve of energy.
Next to the receptionist’s desk, in a metal folding chair, sat a security guard with what looked like a gallon can of mace hanging from his Batman like utility belt. He shifted his weight in the chair, which was considerable, and the thing groaned like the Tin Man might if he was constipated and trying to force one out. The nametag on his shirt said: Chief.
“Let me see what’s in that bag,” Chief said, grabbing at me with his pudgy ham gravy soaked fingers.
He was an odorous SOB, with a tang to him that watered the eyes and seemed to be a combination of the sweat squeezed from a dirty sweat sock, copious amounts of Brute aftershave, and some rather toxic industrial cleaner. If would market this scent I would have called it Ode De Dirty Feet.
“It’s just magazines,” I said, stepping back. I hadn’t had to go through this before.
“Give me the bag,” Chief said with a snort, which was not unlike that of a rooting swine.
I didn’t want to state the obvious but I was about to…with my fists.
“Here,” I said, tossing him the bag a little harder than necessary.
“Watch it,” he said, unhitching his thumbs from his utility belt and catching the bag.
I tried not to stare at his physique but it was like trying to pass a gory car wreck and taking at least a teensy weensy peak. I had to do it damn it! I know I’m pedestrian, common beyond belief but he was there and he was something to behold. He was stuffed into a pair of excruciatingly tight blue polyester slacks and the area above his crotch, presumably part of his stomach, hung over his belt like a sack of wet dinner rolls.
Chief rooted through the bag, flipping open the pages of each magazine to make sure there wasn’t any contraband contained there. A nail file?
“He’s clean,” Chief finally said, thrusting my bag at me.
“Thanks,” I said, rolling my eyes.
After making my way through several doors and another checkpoint I finally found her room. It took me several minutes of psyching outside her door, my daily ritual, to actually enter and when I did I found her propped up in a bed amongst several large white pillows. Her eyes were cloudy and still, as if the electrical current had been cut to them. She looked so small and so far away.
“Hey,” I said, which was about as poetic as I could be just then.
She smiled and focused on me somewhat.
This wasn’t the time to ask WHY, that I knew, although I wasn’t quite sure what exactly the correct protocol was. I’d stumbled through the last two weeks with the words, they hadn’t come easily but I’d managed and she seemed to be doing better.
“I brought you some magazines,” I said, handing the bag to her. She took it and laid it on the bed in front of her and then beckoned me toward her. We hugged. Emotions were swirling in my chest like the foamy water in a hotel hot tub. I could smell the nicotine from the two packs a day of cigarettes I’d been smoking seeping from my skin.
”Ahum.”
I turned. It was the fat security guard Chief. The cocksucker had followed me with his foldout metal chair and had positioned himself squarely in front of the door.
“What’s the deal with him?” I asked turning to her.
“I told them that if they didn’t release me I was going to have you break me out of here,” she said.
“Right, that would explain his interest in me. I was worried there for a bit. I thought he might like my choice in cologne.”
On her forehead I saw the tiny green veins pulsing; memories squishing in and out of her head? Her up there, us up there, all of it swirling down the shower drain, all of it almost erased.
“Turner, how’s it going,” Chief said to a thinner balding security guard that had joined him with a foldout chair.
“It’s going fine,” Turner said.
I could tell right away that Turner was a boot licker, a third string nothing on Chief’s short list of friends. Chief was a loser and he needed someone to make him feel big, someone to fill his coffee cup and kiss his fat ass whenever he made some mundane political statement like, “People kill people, guns don’t kill people.” Ho fucking hum. He was the kind that searches for power in the only kinds of places where he can get it, in a place like this where the adversary is drugged to the gills and incompetent.
“I sure could get into a fight tonight,” Chief said as he cracked his knuckles. It was a horrible haunted house sound like brittle wood on a rotted staircase giving way under your weight.
“I ought to rip that cocksucker’s head off,” I grumbled.
“No, babe don’t do it they’ll throw you in here too,” she said.
She was right. They’d strap me to a board and pump me full of elephant tranquilizers. They’d have to because there was no way I wouldn’t kick the living shit out of both of these backwoods goons.
“Yeah, I sure feel like a fight tonight,” Chief said again, his fat lips growing redder as his blood pressure increased.
“Babe, don’t let them take me away,” she said.
“Don’t worry I’m here for you,” I said.
“Hi there,” a doctor said, said as he entered the room.
He was wearing a white coat which was a bit dirty and looked somewhat disheveled but who was I to tell a nut cracker how to crack nuts? I was just a bystander.
“There are some weirdos in here aren’t there?” the doctor said, looking down at his clipboard.
“Yeah, there are,” I said, relieved that someone was finally admitting it. “Some of the staff seem as bad as the patients.”
“I want to get out of here,” she said.
“Well, you certainly seem sane enough to me. What was it they brought you in here for?” the doctor asked. He was bald on top but had greasy red bozo hair on the sides which he twirled.
“A drug overdose,” she said softly.
“So you’re not like the others, that’s good. Everyone else in here is crazy…do you see that Picasso on the wall?”
We both gazed at the picture which was a landscape and definitely not a fucking Picasso. I looked into the “doctor’s” eyes and I saw two lemons and a cherry. This guy wasn’t a fucking doctor he was a patient. I stepped between him and her.
“Edward, what are you doing with Doctor Casper’s jacket on?” a nurse said as she walked into the room with a tray.
“I’m trying to worn these people so you don’t try to take over their minds too,” he said backing up.
Chief stood but he wasn’t staring at the loon claiming to be Picasso’s son. He was looking at me. With every fiber in my body I wanted to strike that cocksucker but I wasn’t going to get thrown in a padded cell and loaded up on Thorazine for the pleasure.
The nurse looked out in the hallway and motioned to Chief and Turner. They rushed into the room and jumped on top of Edward and then threw handcuffs on him.
“Real tough,” I said. I couldn’t help it.
“What did you say?” Chief said, as he wrestled with Edward.
“You heard me you fat cocksucker,” I said.
She grabbed my arm and pulled me towards her on the bed. I brushed her long brown hair out of her eyes.
“Don’t say those thigns,” she said, pulling on my arm.
She couldn’t have me go down too. I was her island, without me she would be cut adrift at sea with no land in sight. I looked at her face and remembered the charcoal they’d made her drink, the stuff that had made her puke up all the death that had been floating in her belly.
“What?” Chief said, acting as if he hadn’t heard again.
“Nothing,” I said.
“You’re going to have to leave,” the nurse said turning towards me.
“Leave?”
“She’s being transferred to Pennsylvania in a few minutes,” the nurse said.
“Okay, one second,” I said.
I bent over and kissed her on the forehead.
“I’ll call you as soon as I get there,” she said.
I nodded.
“Come on you have to go,” the nurse said.
I left but as I walked through the maze of doors and desks I couldn’t shake the feeling that something bad was going to go down.
When I hit the lobby Chief and Turner were waiting. I brushed passed them. They followed me out into the parking lot, where I was parked around the side, out of site.
“You think you’re some kind of tough guy,” Chief said when I went to put my key in the door lock.
I turned and slid my key chain back into my pocket.
“By asking me if I think I’m a tough guy one would suppose that you already think yourself to be a tough guy or else you wouldn’t be asking me that question in such a fucking condescending way,” I said.
They didn’t need anymore prodding. Both security guards started towards me. Chief reached for his oversized can of mace. I knew the cocksucker wouldn’t fight fair.
It was comical the way Chief walked, like he was holding an Easter ham between his thighs, it looked painful. I guess he didn’t see the pothole because he stepped in it and his knee buckled horribly.
“Awe God my knee,” he screamed falling to the ground, his can of mace rolling under a pickup truck.
His sidekick, Turner, fell to his side in such a melodramatic fucking manner that it seemed he was rehearsing for a Broadway musical.
“You okay, chief?” he asked grabbing his fat arm.
I took a step toward them.
“Hey, can’t you see the chief is hurt?” Turner said. He was shaking.
“You have got to be fucking kidding me,” I said. “You two were getting ready to unload that mace on me. And then I suppose you would have beaten the shit out of me with those billy clubs and you want me to back off?”
“Ah, Hell my Goddamn knee. It’s done for. I’ll never walk again,” Chief cried. “I had a knee injury like this in high school. It kept me from going pro.”
The only thing Chief had a chance of going pro at was being an asshole. This was perhaps the most pathetic scene I’d ever witnessed in my life.
“Do you want me to help you inside, chief?” Turner asked, wiping at Chief’s forehead with a handkerchief.
“I don’t think I can make it,” the fat security guard said.
“Can you help me get him inside?” Turner asked.
“Help him inside? I don’t believe this,” I said.
“Come on he’s a good guy,” Turner said. “He does Santa Claus every year for the Salvation Army. He coaches his niece’s softball team--”
It was without a doubt like being dropped in an episode of the Twilight Zone. What could I say? It was too weird to just walk away from.
“Okay, stop, I don’t need a fucking resume” I said.
I walked over and knelt beside Chief.
“On the count of three,” Turner said, “One—two—three.”
We hoisted that fat fuck up and I damn near ruined my back trying to hold him upright. Of course I got his bad knee side, his right, which meant the brunt of his weight was mine to carry back to the lobby. It wasn’t so much his weight that bothered me but his odor. He grunted and pissed and moaned and made us stop seven times before we got him to a couch.
“I’ll call the ambulance,” Turner said.
“Don’t call a fucking Am—bu—lance you horse’s ass. Do you know how much they cost?” Chief said.
“Well how do you get there? You can’t drive and I can’t drive you there. At least one of us has to be on duty.”
They both turned and simultaneously looked at me.
“Uh, you know I really have to get back—”
“The hospital’s on the way back to the interstate,” Turner said, as he rubbed Chief’s shoulder. Chief swatted his hand away.
Yes, I drove the fat bastard to the hospital and then I waited for him because his wife was out of town. Afterwards he insisted on taking me to Kentucky Fried Chicken, where I watched him devour a family sized bucket by himself. I was still too hopped up on nicotine and caffeine to eat much and picked at a biscuit and a wing.
The whole time, as Chief rammed gobs of chicken in his mouth, despite the surreal quality of the day, the only thing I could think of was her. What if I had stopped off for a beer after class? What if her heart had stopped in the shower? What if the ambulance had come two minutes later?
“Are you crying?” Chief asked.
“No,” I said, “when you ripped that piece of skin off that drumstick some grease squirted in my eye.”
Chief looked at me and then at his chicken leg. He looked back at me and sighed and sucked the last of the meat off the bone and burped.
Friday, April 29, 2005
Thursday, April 28, 2005
From Naomi Klein's article The Rise of Disaster Capitalism:
Last summer, in the lull of the August media doze, the Bush Administration’s doctrine of preventive war took a major leap forward. On August 5, 2004, the White House created the Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization headed by former Us Ambassador to Ukraine Carlos Pascual. Its mandate is to draw up elaborate "post conflict" plans for up to twenty-five countries that are not, as of yet, in conflict. According to Pascual, it will also be able to coordinate three full-scale reconstruction operations in different countries "at the same time," each lasting "five to seven years."
* * *
So, let me get this straight. Did those of you that voted for Bush really believe him when he said there wouldn't be a draft? He's lied more than any other president about very serious issues, i.e. WMD's in Iraq, why wouldn't he lie about a draft? Think about it. There is no way he can pull off these preventive wars without drafting. The military forces do not have the numbers to sustain several simultaneous war fronts and protect our homeland. Recruitment is way down. Do a search on the Internet and look for articles indicating such. You'll find them. Will your child be the one drafted?
Our soldiers as people are too important to lose in these conflicts that quite frankly don't have much of a benefit for our people or humanity in general. Bush seemed to look pretty damn spiffy in that flight jacket on the deck of that Aircraft carrier when he declared victory over Iraq. Why doesn't he go to Iraq on a mission and "smoke the bad guys out of their holes?" He can talk the talk when he or his kids aren't the ones putting their lives on the line.
I mean what did we go to Afghanistan for if not to get Bin Laden? And yet we moved most of our troops on to another war before the objective was met. So what was the objective? Was it to secure the land so a certain American company could run a natural gas line through Afghanistan? You have to ask yourselves these questions if you care about our troops.
These wars have nothing to do with making us, the American people, safe. We are much less safe after going into Iraq than we were before. Many scholars agree that Iraq is and will be a breeding ground for terrorists because of our actions. There are thousands of dead innocent Iraqis and they were killed under false pretenses. Yes, those WMD's again.
For over a year I've heard that Iran is on the list as the next country we plan to "preventively attack." What have they done? Oh, the reports from our intelligence about nuclear weapons being developed. I’m extremely weary of any “intelligence” that comes from this government. Most have forgotten or don’t care that there were no WMD’s in Iraq. In fact I read a day or two ago that the search for WMD’s in Iraq is officially over. Did anyone even notice that article?
They Think You're Stupid
In his article Bush's War on the Press Eric Alterman reports of what an unnamed Bush official told reporter Ron Suskind.
"We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality--judiciously, as you will--we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how thing will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
He also reported of what another Bush adviser as saying, "Let me clue you in. We don't care. You see, you're outnumbered two to one by folks in the big, wide middle of America, busy working people who don't read the New York Times or the Washington Post or the LA Times."
If these kinds of statements don't alarm you to a great degree, no matter if you are on the left or the right, then you better look a little closer to what is at stake. These bastards are and will "creating other new realities." It's called propoganda folks. It called lying to further the interests of corporate America.
And I hope all those from the Midwest understand in the second quote the gist of the second quote is. They think you don't read the news and therefore they can say things like "we are the new reality" because they think you're too damn ignorant to know any better! They're using you to further the agenda they have which only benefits the extremely wealthy and large corporations!
"We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality--judiciously, as you will--we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how thing will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
He also reported of what another Bush adviser as saying, "Let me clue you in. We don't care. You see, you're outnumbered two to one by folks in the big, wide middle of America, busy working people who don't read the New York Times or the Washington Post or the LA Times."
If these kinds of statements don't alarm you to a great degree, no matter if you are on the left or the right, then you better look a little closer to what is at stake. These bastards are and will "creating other new realities." It's called propoganda folks. It called lying to further the interests of corporate America.
And I hope all those from the Midwest understand in the second quote the gist of the second quote is. They think you don't read the news and therefore they can say things like "we are the new reality" because they think you're too damn ignorant to know any better! They're using you to further the agenda they have which only benefits the extremely wealthy and large corporations!
Sunday, April 24, 2005
Ty Bluesmith the III tells me to be the bear. Thanks man for the ear. You're right I should be the bear. I looked in the mirror this morning and yeah there was a black carpet of hair sprouting on my back. This afternoon I tried to pick up a dumbell and it slipped out of my hand because I'm growing claws. My teeth, oh yeah, you should see my fucking teeth...
Oh yeah and Hell yes I would buy her flowers, the wild ones, the ones that smell like laundry sheets and pale in comparison to the way she is who she is.
This is life on the run. This is the world where the spiked toothed weasels dwell. A day in the life...
Oh yeah and Hell yes I would buy her flowers, the wild ones, the ones that smell like laundry sheets and pale in comparison to the way she is who she is.
This is life on the run. This is the world where the spiked toothed weasels dwell. A day in the life...
Friday, April 22, 2005
Luch is in the decorating division of the Air Force. Here we see him in Baghdad scoping out a room which he plans to furnish in the latest American bachelor pad style. He said that, "I, uh, think a kegerator would like nice in this corner. Over by the window I would put..uh, another kegerator. For a TV stand I would use..urh, uh, a kegerator. For a coffee table I would use cases of beer." Okay, I think we get the point. 
Thursday, April 21, 2005
Hilljacks and Peanut Shell Bars
There are of course the bare breasted beasts with long twisting nipple hair that know only the old in out, the bum rush, the tearing toothed cannibalism of yore; those that guard the booby trapped portals that lead straight to Hell. I will not delude you by downplaying the importance of avoiding such creatures, as they are the ones that collect the tolls that are due as one passes through purgatory. To challenge these bastards by ones self is a suicidal endeavor that only terminal cancer patients and those that mainline adrenaline might, in drugged out hazes, attempt. If it were up to me I would stay away from these places but when one partners up with the damned all bets are fucking off and tip toeing on the edge of the saucer while wielding a spiked mace is the course of the day.
Why in the Hell would I even bring up such a journey? This is a just and answerable query. You see the reality of the matter is that I have no choice. Let me explain. There are those of us who are by nature destined to wander through life in search of that ever elusive something that we believe will be the ANSWER. Its exact form seems to ever elude us and so we continue on this journey suspecting that the ANSWER lies just around the next turn. When two such journeymen partner up in such a quest the result is oft nebulous with only rays of light breaking through the darkness and therefore true gratification never is achieved and the eternal search continues. What then is gained by patterning up with a fellow member of the damned? Simply put the answer is survival. Two fighting madmen plow through life with twice the velocity of an average duo and therefore are less likely to be bogged down by conventionality, to die a slow, rotting death at the head of the family dinner table. Their conduct is more apt to be noteworthy and remembered when the final curtain goes down. Why do I tell you this? Why do I mention a second such seeker? Read on.
There are several worthy amongst the damned I call AMIGOS that I would partner up with to search for the unsearchable but none more formidable than the former man child that swaggered through the burnt umber halls of my incredibly shrinking high school. He was and is four normal men welded together in Frankenstein like proportions. With arms like full sweeping oaks chopped from their roots and crashing, with massive ape like pectoral muscles between which fit two cans of Coke that exploded upon squeezing, and with shock green eyes carved from blocks of straight mayhem. You would be too much a fool to challenge his wicked wit and an outright imbecile to cross his physical path. He had been the perfect partner in crime and he was coming my way once again…
* * *
It was after a night of swilling hopped beverages that I found myself in the bowels of my downstairs shower with hot water pulsating on my throbbing forehead.
“Dear God, I’ll never drink again if you make this pain go away,” I said, my forearms resting on the wall underneath the shower head.
Sure it was a lie but God supposedly forgives us for all our sins so if I reneged on my promise I would be no worse off than I was at that very moment, which was none too good.
“Brrrrringggggggggg, Brrrrrrrringggggggggggg.”
It was my cell phone sitting on the sink next to the shower. Through bloodshot eyes it took on the appearance of a large metallic blue Cicada. It vibrated across the sink counter buzzing madly. Tentatively I reached for the bug phone.
“Yeah,” I said, flipping its shell open.
“Hey what’s up man?”
“Gang?” I said.
“That would be me.”
“Hey what’s up compadre? I haven’t heard from you for months.”
“It hasn’t been that long has it?
“I’m not sure…so what are you up to?”
“Driving.”
“Driving where?”
“To see you man, the wife and kids have flown the coop. They’re in Texas visiting the grandparents.”
“You know this could be trouble?”
“That’s what I’d planned on.”
“Right. When can I expect you?”
“If I average a hundred miles an hour I can be there in four hours. So expect me between four and five.”
“Sounds good,” I said but he’d already hung up.
I closed my bug…er, I mean phone and set it back on the sink countertop.
“Bllllllllllllllllleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeecccccccccccccckkkkkkkkkkkkk.”
Vomit spewed from my open throat and stuck to the tile wall looking like spoiled ambrosia. In its sticky depths I spied Lucky Charms shapes; hearts, moons, stars, clovers, horseshoes, pots of gold, rainbows and red balloons. Breakfast was served up a second time but of course I wouldn’t indulge.
Like a beaten prize fighter I slumped in the corner of the shower and the hot water rained down on my swollen and aching body.
“No, you fool,” I shouted at myself. “You must get up.”
With all the strength I could muster I managed to pull myself up by the edge of the shower but I didn’t quite make it to my feet. I slipped and then slid over the side of the tub and landed on the furry bath mat where I flailed like a nudist on a hot car seat. I was too tired and queasy to move so I pulled one of my Burmese jungle boots up and rested my head on it.
“God, really, I promise no more drinking,” I said as I drifted off.
I awoke several hours later to the echo of my Sony surround sound blasting in my living room. The movie playing was National Lampoons Vacation and it occurred to me that perhaps I’d turned up the wattage last night after I’d arrived home and devoured the leftover capon I’d found in the back of my refrigerator. But if this was so how had I slept through such a ruckus? Something was out of place and not until I’d stepped into my living room did I realize what it was.
“Gang?”
“Is that the imprint of a boot on your face?” Gang asked.
He was sitting on the sofa with a giant serving tray in front of him. It was litter with gristle and T-bones. I had a sneaking suspicion that those bones came from the family pack of discounted T-bones I’d bought for the weekend.
“Perhaps,” I said rubbing my cheek. “How the Hell did you get here so fast?”
“I drove like only I know how to drive,” Gang said, jumping to his feet.
He was agile for a big guy. Could probably balance himself on the edge of a tea cup and not tip it. He hoisted me up in the air and my head hit the ceiling putting a dent in the drywall.
“Oh, sorry about that,” he said setting me down.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said, dusting the plaster off my head.
“Anyway, it’s good to see you. I raced the whole way down here--followed some bag in a Buick Regal as big as a humpback whale--she was careening all over the Goddamn road, talking on her cell phone and chain smoking cigarettes. When we came out of those tunnels on the turnpike she shot past me and went up on two wheels taking the turn. I slowed it down to 90 or so then. She drove like a nut.”
Hmm, right she drove like a nut. This was the same guy that used to parallel park his Volkswagen Rabbit by lifting the front of it up and walking it sideways so it fit in a spot. No one could park tighter than he but it was at the very least an odd maneuver and garnered us all types of odd stares which I cherished like a speed freak does an eight ball and musty mattress in a dark basement.
“Well, I’m glad you made it one piece but I suspect if she hit you the Buick Regal would have lost the fight.”
“I’d rip that crabby old bitch out of that car and throw her like a shot put.”
“I know you would,” I said and grinned. ”
“I’m starving what do you say we go downtown, grab a bit to eat and then go out on the town?” Gang said.
He was picking meat out of his teeth with his keys.
“Didn’t you just eat a couple steaks?” I asked.
“Those are appetizer size. I need something to fill me up. I can’t drink on an empty stomach. You know how I get when I don’t have enough to eat.”
“Right, that wouldn’t be good. I’ll see if Picus wants to go.”
“Good old Picus. How is he doing?”
“He’s doing all right. He’s almost finished working on that engine that burns cleanly on turkey dung.”
“Turkey Dung?”
“It’s a long story. Let’s grab a bite to eat downtown. We’ll talk about it down there.”
“Okay?”
* * *
At a café on Second Street we dined like starved water buffalo tossing back greens soaked in thick tart dressings. In between gaping bites I glanced at Gang who had a piece of dressing slicked romaine sticking to his forehead. I would have brushed it off but didn’t want to get my fingers anywhere near the gears of his motoring mouth.
“Large looming green stapled to your forehead,” I said.
Gang grabbed at his forehead, pulled the lettuce leaf down to his mouth and devoured it.
“Right,” I said.
This would be the first course of many and as the late day stepped aside for its predecessor, a lonesome cowboy called night, the streets darkened and in time so did my mood.
This shift in mood was caused by a multitude of indescribables but then too there were those things that I was keenly aware, things that scratched against my nerves like the claws of an alley cat against a diner’s kitchen door. There was the pitter patter of scantily clad waitresses in Amish black sweaters and snug halter tops that shuttled back and forth, oblivious to anything but the ching ching of their ever growing change purses. They didn’t know Gang, Picus, and I existed but were junked out on a money high that burned eternally just below their withered cerebellums. And it wasn’t just the waitresses it was almost everyone around us. I was being swallowed up in a sea of greed.
“Cocksuckers. All of them are cocksuckers,” I said.
“Who?” Picus asked, as he scratched at his shaved head.
“Everyone, all of them. It makes no fucking difference.”
It was all too much--the false embraces, fiberglass smiles, clacking of bleached teeth--and it all goes down under the red morning moon, when the eye ticklers wave their giant whore feathers trying to entice the money makers. I was never part of this, never cared to be. You could shoot me and leave me wallowing in my own blood on the side of a thoroughfare and this would be preferable. You pulled on my yang and I’d slap you with my ying. There was no fucking way I’d go down the plastic booby trapped lined trail that the trendy paved with other people’s feelings.
“I need fresh air,” I said.
“Uh, we’re already outside,” Gang said.
“All right then I need a change of scenery. This place is starting to feel like some futuristic sci-fi movie. I think I would call it Attack of the Fifty Foot Plastic Weasels or something as equally poetic.”
“It is getting awful hard to breathe with all this fucking cologne around here,” Gang said, scratching at his chin.
“Why don’t we go to that bar with the peanut shells on the floor,” Picus said.
“Presto, search for an answer and Picus is the man with the plan. Now, let’s hurry before the giant plastic weasels start closing in,” I said, standing.
We settled our bill and moved down the block to the country/western bar called Tooley’s. As we entered, weaving amongst the early evening trend mongers and the synthetic hipsters, I noticed the floor was indeed decorated with peanut shells, which can be very fucking dangerous on a freshly waxed floor. But fuck it, I wasn’t going to tiptoe like some lame ass cocksucker and instead bound carelessly about on this surface hoping to slip and slightly injure myself so I could file suit and cash in on a big pay day. I figured with a large cash settlement I’d light out for Europe and search for the dream woman that had thus far eluded me here in the states. As luck would have it though my Burmese jungle boots gave me more than adequate traction and even when I carelessly ran around a corner on the way to the bathroom I didn’t lose my footing. Alas, there would be no lawsuit filed that day but one day I would find the means to fund my campaign and my dream of bringing “the man” down would come to fruition.
“Goddamn bunch of hilljacks,” Gang said.
I didn’t query as to what a “hilljack” was exactly but could tell by the tone of Gang’s voice that I didn’t want to be one.
“I suppose I have left my guard down. What is exactly is the problem,” I said.
“Nothing,” he said tossing back a glass of beer.
“Ha, nothing,” Picus said, cracking open a peanut and discarding the shell on the floor.
Gang said “nothing” like it was SOMETHING and soon I spotted two college football types in gnarled baseball caps, and Old Navy T-shirts. Like bastard twins born from some evil frat house experiment these two born followers, with mopish haircuts highlighted with streaks of blond, were angrily circling a most beauteous female with a blond pageboy and electric blue eyes. They jabbed accusingly at her with their fingers; spit like ocean foam formed at the edges of their square mouths. The blond cringed, trying to sink away into herself; tears like greasy pearls rolled off her cheeks.
“Only pussies wear Old Navy T-shirts,” I yelled.
“I don’t think they heard you,” Picus said.
“Maybe they’ll hear this,” Gang said, picking our pitcher of Guinness up off the rough planked bar.
“No, not the Guinness. I’ll get an empty pitcher and go fill it with toilet bowl water. Come back,” I said, lunging at Gang.
Picus grabbed me around the waist and stopped my pursuit.
“Damn waste if you ask me,” I said.
“I’ll get another pitcher,” Picus said.
“Hey you fucking hilljacks,” Gang bellowed.
The two frat types in all their Old Navy glory turned and stepped towards Gang. The blond scurried off undetected.
“Like picking on women?” Gang asked and unloaded the pitcher of Guinness on both of them.
For a moment they were too stunned to react and I’m sure more than a little of that had to do with Gang’s immense size. I figured they would have been fools to tangle with him and as it turned out that’s exactly what they were.
“What the fuck was that?” the taller of the two asked.
“That was Guinness,” Gang said.
This taller of the frat boys had the eyes of a crazed maggot squirming freshly from a meatless corpse. He was all bull force; used to getting his own way in a world where el dinero is the linchpin in the happiness equation. These types know nothing but daddy’s overflowing pockets and the towel covered arm of the Mexican waiter at the country club where they suck down lobster tail like toothless lions. Of course I couldn’t let a scene with such cocksuckers involved go down without intervening in some way. For it is my nature to intervene, to throw myself into the eye of the tornado and try to wrestle the bastard into submission. In these moments I leave my morality behind and enter the realm of the gods, if only in my mind. And that’s where I was headed when I abandoned all reason…
“Back you cocksucker,” I cried, waving my brass knuckle covered fist madly in front the perpetrators’ faces.
My next move was an ill advised lunge in am attempt to mount a nearby table. Yes, I was feeling a little cocky but this time the confounded peanut shells that littered the floor did cause me to slip and I flew up and the air and landed hard smashing my head on the floor. Stunned, I flailed my arms and legs, making a snow angel in the peanut shells.
“Why don’t you two try something,” Gang said.
Picus distracted the shorter of the Old Navy T-shirt wearers with talk of compromise but things weren’t going so well with Gang and the bigger of the two.
“Make a move,” Gang said, staring him down.
The guy obliged and lunged at Gang and with a quickness that bellied his great size Gang grabbed the frat boy’s belt and collar and hoisted him above his head.
“You afraid of heights?” Gang asked.
“Let me down,” the guy squealed.
Like a fucking professional wrestler Gang began to spin the guy he held at arms length over his head. He’d been a shot putter in high school and college and could chuck the iron grapefruit further than anyone I’d ever seen.
“One, Two, Three,” he said counting every spin.
The frat guy that was spinning began to turn green and I knew that if Gang didn’t get rid of him soon the dude would barf all over him. Picus helped me up and I stood on shaky legs watching this most unusual scene go down.
“That cocksucker’s getting ripe,” I yelled. “You’d better toss him before he looses his cookies down the back of your shirt.”
Gang sank down to a squatting position with the guy still extended over his head and then, began to spin and with perfect shot put form he thrust the guy across the bar. It seemed like the frat boy was flying through the air for minutes rather than a second or two. He landed on the pool table by the front door with a great crash and the table wobbled momentarily and then all the legs gave out. There was a second more horrific crash when the table hit the floor and now everyone was staring at us, which I quite enjoyed.
“A job well done,” I said, handing Gang a beer.
This was a mistake for it caused Gang to turn his back and when he did smaller of the two frat boys smacked him over the back of the head with a full bottle of Coors Light.
“Ouch?” Gang said touching the back of his head.
When the beer bottle perpetrator saw that he hadn’t injured Gang he hastily made to collect his friend from the crashed pool table.
“Damn hilljacks, now I’m really going to have to rain on their parade,” Gang said.
The two frat boys scrambled outside and got in a blue Jetta parked in front of the bar. But before I could say “hilljack” Gang was out the door and standing in front of their car. Picus and I hurried outside.
“You want to pick on women you fucking hilljacks!” Gang screamed.
The Jetta started up. Gang bent over, hooked his hands under the cars bumper, and lifted the car up. The veins stood out on his neck like thick green jungle vines. The driver of the Jetta gunned it but the front wheels just spun madly in the air.
Evidently these guys weren’t too slick because they’d parked right beside a fire hydrant and Gang saw this. With great ponderous side steps he moved to his left and then dropped the front of the car on the fire hydrant. It was hung up just enough to keep the tires from touching the ground. Again and again the taller frat boy gunned the Jetta but it wouldn’t budge.
“Uh, hey big guy, I think it’s time to vamoose. I have a strange feeling the cops are on their way,” I said.
The crowd that had gathered outside the bar was cheering wildly.
“I’m going to get going,” Gang said, “I’ll meet you back at the house.”
“Nonsense, I’ll give you a ride,” I said but before I could make any real effort to stop him he was gone. I watched as Gang disappeared amongst the throng of late night revelers and his wide shoulder disappeared behind a hotdog cart.
“Well, it seems to be just be me and you,” I said and looked over to Picus but the beefy redhead wasn’t there. I would find out later his blood sugar had gotten low and he had happened upon an all night Chinese takeout joint where he loaded up on ribs and egg drop soup.
I hooked my brass knuckles belt buckle back on my belt and started walking down the street. I remember thinking about stopping off to have a few more beers when I heard screaming.
“There he is,” I heard someone yell.
I unscrewed my brass knuckles belt buckle.
“Come and fucking get it,” I said and turned.
Why in the Hell would I even bring up such a journey? This is a just and answerable query. You see the reality of the matter is that I have no choice. Let me explain. There are those of us who are by nature destined to wander through life in search of that ever elusive something that we believe will be the ANSWER. Its exact form seems to ever elude us and so we continue on this journey suspecting that the ANSWER lies just around the next turn. When two such journeymen partner up in such a quest the result is oft nebulous with only rays of light breaking through the darkness and therefore true gratification never is achieved and the eternal search continues. What then is gained by patterning up with a fellow member of the damned? Simply put the answer is survival. Two fighting madmen plow through life with twice the velocity of an average duo and therefore are less likely to be bogged down by conventionality, to die a slow, rotting death at the head of the family dinner table. Their conduct is more apt to be noteworthy and remembered when the final curtain goes down. Why do I tell you this? Why do I mention a second such seeker? Read on.
There are several worthy amongst the damned I call AMIGOS that I would partner up with to search for the unsearchable but none more formidable than the former man child that swaggered through the burnt umber halls of my incredibly shrinking high school. He was and is four normal men welded together in Frankenstein like proportions. With arms like full sweeping oaks chopped from their roots and crashing, with massive ape like pectoral muscles between which fit two cans of Coke that exploded upon squeezing, and with shock green eyes carved from blocks of straight mayhem. You would be too much a fool to challenge his wicked wit and an outright imbecile to cross his physical path. He had been the perfect partner in crime and he was coming my way once again…
* * *
It was after a night of swilling hopped beverages that I found myself in the bowels of my downstairs shower with hot water pulsating on my throbbing forehead.
“Dear God, I’ll never drink again if you make this pain go away,” I said, my forearms resting on the wall underneath the shower head.
Sure it was a lie but God supposedly forgives us for all our sins so if I reneged on my promise I would be no worse off than I was at that very moment, which was none too good.
“Brrrrringggggggggg, Brrrrrrrringggggggggggg.”
It was my cell phone sitting on the sink next to the shower. Through bloodshot eyes it took on the appearance of a large metallic blue Cicada. It vibrated across the sink counter buzzing madly. Tentatively I reached for the bug phone.
“Yeah,” I said, flipping its shell open.
“Hey what’s up man?”
“Gang?” I said.
“That would be me.”
“Hey what’s up compadre? I haven’t heard from you for months.”
“It hasn’t been that long has it?
“I’m not sure…so what are you up to?”
“Driving.”
“Driving where?”
“To see you man, the wife and kids have flown the coop. They’re in Texas visiting the grandparents.”
“You know this could be trouble?”
“That’s what I’d planned on.”
“Right. When can I expect you?”
“If I average a hundred miles an hour I can be there in four hours. So expect me between four and five.”
“Sounds good,” I said but he’d already hung up.
I closed my bug…er, I mean phone and set it back on the sink countertop.
“Bllllllllllllllllleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeecccccccccccccckkkkkkkkkkkkk.”
Vomit spewed from my open throat and stuck to the tile wall looking like spoiled ambrosia. In its sticky depths I spied Lucky Charms shapes; hearts, moons, stars, clovers, horseshoes, pots of gold, rainbows and red balloons. Breakfast was served up a second time but of course I wouldn’t indulge.
Like a beaten prize fighter I slumped in the corner of the shower and the hot water rained down on my swollen and aching body.
“No, you fool,” I shouted at myself. “You must get up.”
With all the strength I could muster I managed to pull myself up by the edge of the shower but I didn’t quite make it to my feet. I slipped and then slid over the side of the tub and landed on the furry bath mat where I flailed like a nudist on a hot car seat. I was too tired and queasy to move so I pulled one of my Burmese jungle boots up and rested my head on it.
“God, really, I promise no more drinking,” I said as I drifted off.
I awoke several hours later to the echo of my Sony surround sound blasting in my living room. The movie playing was National Lampoons Vacation and it occurred to me that perhaps I’d turned up the wattage last night after I’d arrived home and devoured the leftover capon I’d found in the back of my refrigerator. But if this was so how had I slept through such a ruckus? Something was out of place and not until I’d stepped into my living room did I realize what it was.
“Gang?”
“Is that the imprint of a boot on your face?” Gang asked.
He was sitting on the sofa with a giant serving tray in front of him. It was litter with gristle and T-bones. I had a sneaking suspicion that those bones came from the family pack of discounted T-bones I’d bought for the weekend.
“Perhaps,” I said rubbing my cheek. “How the Hell did you get here so fast?”
“I drove like only I know how to drive,” Gang said, jumping to his feet.
He was agile for a big guy. Could probably balance himself on the edge of a tea cup and not tip it. He hoisted me up in the air and my head hit the ceiling putting a dent in the drywall.
“Oh, sorry about that,” he said setting me down.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said, dusting the plaster off my head.
“Anyway, it’s good to see you. I raced the whole way down here--followed some bag in a Buick Regal as big as a humpback whale--she was careening all over the Goddamn road, talking on her cell phone and chain smoking cigarettes. When we came out of those tunnels on the turnpike she shot past me and went up on two wheels taking the turn. I slowed it down to 90 or so then. She drove like a nut.”
Hmm, right she drove like a nut. This was the same guy that used to parallel park his Volkswagen Rabbit by lifting the front of it up and walking it sideways so it fit in a spot. No one could park tighter than he but it was at the very least an odd maneuver and garnered us all types of odd stares which I cherished like a speed freak does an eight ball and musty mattress in a dark basement.
“Well, I’m glad you made it one piece but I suspect if she hit you the Buick Regal would have lost the fight.”
“I’d rip that crabby old bitch out of that car and throw her like a shot put.”
“I know you would,” I said and grinned. ”
“I’m starving what do you say we go downtown, grab a bit to eat and then go out on the town?” Gang said.
He was picking meat out of his teeth with his keys.
“Didn’t you just eat a couple steaks?” I asked.
“Those are appetizer size. I need something to fill me up. I can’t drink on an empty stomach. You know how I get when I don’t have enough to eat.”
“Right, that wouldn’t be good. I’ll see if Picus wants to go.”
“Good old Picus. How is he doing?”
“He’s doing all right. He’s almost finished working on that engine that burns cleanly on turkey dung.”
“Turkey Dung?”
“It’s a long story. Let’s grab a bite to eat downtown. We’ll talk about it down there.”
“Okay?”
* * *
At a café on Second Street we dined like starved water buffalo tossing back greens soaked in thick tart dressings. In between gaping bites I glanced at Gang who had a piece of dressing slicked romaine sticking to his forehead. I would have brushed it off but didn’t want to get my fingers anywhere near the gears of his motoring mouth.
“Large looming green stapled to your forehead,” I said.
Gang grabbed at his forehead, pulled the lettuce leaf down to his mouth and devoured it.
“Right,” I said.
This would be the first course of many and as the late day stepped aside for its predecessor, a lonesome cowboy called night, the streets darkened and in time so did my mood.
This shift in mood was caused by a multitude of indescribables but then too there were those things that I was keenly aware, things that scratched against my nerves like the claws of an alley cat against a diner’s kitchen door. There was the pitter patter of scantily clad waitresses in Amish black sweaters and snug halter tops that shuttled back and forth, oblivious to anything but the ching ching of their ever growing change purses. They didn’t know Gang, Picus, and I existed but were junked out on a money high that burned eternally just below their withered cerebellums. And it wasn’t just the waitresses it was almost everyone around us. I was being swallowed up in a sea of greed.
“Cocksuckers. All of them are cocksuckers,” I said.
“Who?” Picus asked, as he scratched at his shaved head.
“Everyone, all of them. It makes no fucking difference.”
It was all too much--the false embraces, fiberglass smiles, clacking of bleached teeth--and it all goes down under the red morning moon, when the eye ticklers wave their giant whore feathers trying to entice the money makers. I was never part of this, never cared to be. You could shoot me and leave me wallowing in my own blood on the side of a thoroughfare and this would be preferable. You pulled on my yang and I’d slap you with my ying. There was no fucking way I’d go down the plastic booby trapped lined trail that the trendy paved with other people’s feelings.
“I need fresh air,” I said.
“Uh, we’re already outside,” Gang said.
“All right then I need a change of scenery. This place is starting to feel like some futuristic sci-fi movie. I think I would call it Attack of the Fifty Foot Plastic Weasels or something as equally poetic.”
“It is getting awful hard to breathe with all this fucking cologne around here,” Gang said, scratching at his chin.
“Why don’t we go to that bar with the peanut shells on the floor,” Picus said.
“Presto, search for an answer and Picus is the man with the plan. Now, let’s hurry before the giant plastic weasels start closing in,” I said, standing.
We settled our bill and moved down the block to the country/western bar called Tooley’s. As we entered, weaving amongst the early evening trend mongers and the synthetic hipsters, I noticed the floor was indeed decorated with peanut shells, which can be very fucking dangerous on a freshly waxed floor. But fuck it, I wasn’t going to tiptoe like some lame ass cocksucker and instead bound carelessly about on this surface hoping to slip and slightly injure myself so I could file suit and cash in on a big pay day. I figured with a large cash settlement I’d light out for Europe and search for the dream woman that had thus far eluded me here in the states. As luck would have it though my Burmese jungle boots gave me more than adequate traction and even when I carelessly ran around a corner on the way to the bathroom I didn’t lose my footing. Alas, there would be no lawsuit filed that day but one day I would find the means to fund my campaign and my dream of bringing “the man” down would come to fruition.
“Goddamn bunch of hilljacks,” Gang said.
I didn’t query as to what a “hilljack” was exactly but could tell by the tone of Gang’s voice that I didn’t want to be one.
“I suppose I have left my guard down. What is exactly is the problem,” I said.
“Nothing,” he said tossing back a glass of beer.
“Ha, nothing,” Picus said, cracking open a peanut and discarding the shell on the floor.
Gang said “nothing” like it was SOMETHING and soon I spotted two college football types in gnarled baseball caps, and Old Navy T-shirts. Like bastard twins born from some evil frat house experiment these two born followers, with mopish haircuts highlighted with streaks of blond, were angrily circling a most beauteous female with a blond pageboy and electric blue eyes. They jabbed accusingly at her with their fingers; spit like ocean foam formed at the edges of their square mouths. The blond cringed, trying to sink away into herself; tears like greasy pearls rolled off her cheeks.
“Only pussies wear Old Navy T-shirts,” I yelled.
“I don’t think they heard you,” Picus said.
“Maybe they’ll hear this,” Gang said, picking our pitcher of Guinness up off the rough planked bar.
“No, not the Guinness. I’ll get an empty pitcher and go fill it with toilet bowl water. Come back,” I said, lunging at Gang.
Picus grabbed me around the waist and stopped my pursuit.
“Damn waste if you ask me,” I said.
“I’ll get another pitcher,” Picus said.
“Hey you fucking hilljacks,” Gang bellowed.
The two frat types in all their Old Navy glory turned and stepped towards Gang. The blond scurried off undetected.
“Like picking on women?” Gang asked and unloaded the pitcher of Guinness on both of them.
For a moment they were too stunned to react and I’m sure more than a little of that had to do with Gang’s immense size. I figured they would have been fools to tangle with him and as it turned out that’s exactly what they were.
“What the fuck was that?” the taller of the two asked.
“That was Guinness,” Gang said.
This taller of the frat boys had the eyes of a crazed maggot squirming freshly from a meatless corpse. He was all bull force; used to getting his own way in a world where el dinero is the linchpin in the happiness equation. These types know nothing but daddy’s overflowing pockets and the towel covered arm of the Mexican waiter at the country club where they suck down lobster tail like toothless lions. Of course I couldn’t let a scene with such cocksuckers involved go down without intervening in some way. For it is my nature to intervene, to throw myself into the eye of the tornado and try to wrestle the bastard into submission. In these moments I leave my morality behind and enter the realm of the gods, if only in my mind. And that’s where I was headed when I abandoned all reason…
“Back you cocksucker,” I cried, waving my brass knuckle covered fist madly in front the perpetrators’ faces.
My next move was an ill advised lunge in am attempt to mount a nearby table. Yes, I was feeling a little cocky but this time the confounded peanut shells that littered the floor did cause me to slip and I flew up and the air and landed hard smashing my head on the floor. Stunned, I flailed my arms and legs, making a snow angel in the peanut shells.
“Why don’t you two try something,” Gang said.
Picus distracted the shorter of the Old Navy T-shirt wearers with talk of compromise but things weren’t going so well with Gang and the bigger of the two.
“Make a move,” Gang said, staring him down.
The guy obliged and lunged at Gang and with a quickness that bellied his great size Gang grabbed the frat boy’s belt and collar and hoisted him above his head.
“You afraid of heights?” Gang asked.
“Let me down,” the guy squealed.
Like a fucking professional wrestler Gang began to spin the guy he held at arms length over his head. He’d been a shot putter in high school and college and could chuck the iron grapefruit further than anyone I’d ever seen.
“One, Two, Three,” he said counting every spin.
The frat guy that was spinning began to turn green and I knew that if Gang didn’t get rid of him soon the dude would barf all over him. Picus helped me up and I stood on shaky legs watching this most unusual scene go down.
“That cocksucker’s getting ripe,” I yelled. “You’d better toss him before he looses his cookies down the back of your shirt.”
Gang sank down to a squatting position with the guy still extended over his head and then, began to spin and with perfect shot put form he thrust the guy across the bar. It seemed like the frat boy was flying through the air for minutes rather than a second or two. He landed on the pool table by the front door with a great crash and the table wobbled momentarily and then all the legs gave out. There was a second more horrific crash when the table hit the floor and now everyone was staring at us, which I quite enjoyed.
“A job well done,” I said, handing Gang a beer.
This was a mistake for it caused Gang to turn his back and when he did smaller of the two frat boys smacked him over the back of the head with a full bottle of Coors Light.
“Ouch?” Gang said touching the back of his head.
When the beer bottle perpetrator saw that he hadn’t injured Gang he hastily made to collect his friend from the crashed pool table.
“Damn hilljacks, now I’m really going to have to rain on their parade,” Gang said.
The two frat boys scrambled outside and got in a blue Jetta parked in front of the bar. But before I could say “hilljack” Gang was out the door and standing in front of their car. Picus and I hurried outside.
“You want to pick on women you fucking hilljacks!” Gang screamed.
The Jetta started up. Gang bent over, hooked his hands under the cars bumper, and lifted the car up. The veins stood out on his neck like thick green jungle vines. The driver of the Jetta gunned it but the front wheels just spun madly in the air.
Evidently these guys weren’t too slick because they’d parked right beside a fire hydrant and Gang saw this. With great ponderous side steps he moved to his left and then dropped the front of the car on the fire hydrant. It was hung up just enough to keep the tires from touching the ground. Again and again the taller frat boy gunned the Jetta but it wouldn’t budge.
“Uh, hey big guy, I think it’s time to vamoose. I have a strange feeling the cops are on their way,” I said.
The crowd that had gathered outside the bar was cheering wildly.
“I’m going to get going,” Gang said, “I’ll meet you back at the house.”
“Nonsense, I’ll give you a ride,” I said but before I could make any real effort to stop him he was gone. I watched as Gang disappeared amongst the throng of late night revelers and his wide shoulder disappeared behind a hotdog cart.
“Well, it seems to be just be me and you,” I said and looked over to Picus but the beefy redhead wasn’t there. I would find out later his blood sugar had gotten low and he had happened upon an all night Chinese takeout joint where he loaded up on ribs and egg drop soup.
I hooked my brass knuckles belt buckle back on my belt and started walking down the street. I remember thinking about stopping off to have a few more beers when I heard screaming.
“There he is,” I heard someone yell.
I unscrewed my brass knuckles belt buckle.
“Come and fucking get it,” I said and turned.
Monday, April 18, 2005
Thursday, April 14, 2005
Tuesday, April 12, 2005
The Gas Station Diaries
Through the finger smudged plate glass window of the Mobile station on Walnut Bottom Road I observed three Harley Davidson Choppers pulling up to the gas pumps. Their motors spat out hair balls of gray exhaust that clung to the black carpet of the moist night sky. The clamor of these infernal metallic beasties, as they bucked and gurgled, interfused with the bevy of chirping insects in the swamp surrounding the station, and the end song that resulted was a cacophonous ballad that caused my eardrums to feel as if they were being scratched with straightened paper clips.
I drew on a Marlboro Red as three scruffy looking bikers dismounted, sliding lazily off their hogs. The scene reminded me of the group of fat kids I’d seen getting off the broken back nags at the Gettysburg Miniature Horse Farm as a kid. I pitied those puny, run down horses with their swollen knees and protruding ribs and even as a kid knew that the owners should have put some sort of weight restriction on riding privileges. There had been cutout cartoon chipmunk holding a ruler vertically with a caption above its head that read: You have to be this tall to ride. There should have been a cutout cartoon of two chipmunks holding a four foot yard stick between them with a caption above their heads that read: If you are wider than this you can’t ride. Of course this would never happen in our all too PC world. The Stevenson’s National Association for Chunky Kids or SNACK or some such shit would file a law suit and then all fat kids would eat free McDonalds and ride miniature horses until the hapless hair bags wore worn away to their shoulder joints.
If motorcycles had feelings I would have gone out and hugged each of those choppers for having to haul those sloppy bastards around. Sorry Karl Marx religion is not “the opiate of the masses” genetically altered beef, high fructose corn syrup, and heavily processed starches are. Keep them fat, keep them content, and then when it all goes down they’ll be napping and they’ll never know what hit them.
The bikers were snazzed out in shit cheap leather that had the look of sun baked road kill. They laughed in short mean snorts and as they did so their shoulders lurched up and down in unison. There was a tall one in the center, flanked by two nondescript movie type extras, the kind of guys that you’d never in a million years pick out of a police lineup up because there was nothing particularly unique to remember them by. The guy in the middle though, he was all personality, all bravado, all kill or be killed. His surface character was tough with a sneer and just below the skin laid the beast with a knife in its teeth and blood on its claws. He wore a red bandana wrapped around his head, and it was obvious, if only to me, that this cocksucker wore the head wrap to cover up his baldness. He strutted and guffawed and his arms swung to and fro like an orangutan. He spit, and if my eyes didn’t deceive me, it wasn’t saliva that left his lips but a tiny blue flame.
In the late shift gas station business there are nights like this one when you know the next person or persons coming through the door could be more trouble than a hamper full of rabid alley cats but it is your solemn sworn duty to man the cash register in the face of this late night scum. To stand boldly, chest thrust forward, with no health or life insurance plan for the loved ones to collect and grow fat off of when the cocksucker freaked on animal tranquilizers and airplane glue comes raging bare chest through the door and blows a peephole in your forehead. You have only your wile and wit to guide you and if you let the drugs get the best of you then you don’t even have those. If your faculties desert you then you are SOL but fuck it I was told Heaven’s got strip clubs and besides what does a 21 year old know about mortality?
I turned quickly and accidentally knocked over my coffee mug.
“FUCK!”
The bikers turned and I hunkered below the counter. It was nearly three AM and I was on my second pot of coffee and second pack of Marlboro Reds. There was also the matter of the little yellow pill with red speckles I’d taken a few hours earlier which was given to me by a guy I knew who had just been released from jail that day for selling pot to an undercover cop. “This is my friend Speedy Gonzalez. ¡Arriba, arriba, andale!” he cried, as he placed the pill in my palm.
“I don’t do speed,” I said, “people brew that shit up in their toilet bowls and store it in their crevices. They’ll whore themselves or their kids out for a thimble full of that rot. It eats your brain from the inside out like a duck baked into a loaf of bread.”
“What?”
“Never you mind. The how’s and why’s aren’t important. What is important is my commitment to inebriation be dictated by some sort of self prescribed doctrine. If you don’t have an anchor as such one is apt to drift out into the deep waters and who the Hell knows what dwells in the deep waters of the mind, monsters of all sort I imagine. One might never come back and I’m too egotistical to sleep in a shopping cart or under an underpass.”
“This is pharmaceutical grade junk,” my friend said.
“Why didn’t you say so,” I said, tossing the pill back and washing it down with my coffee. “The government only has my best interests in mind. They wouldn’t allow drug manufacturers to make a drug if it weren’t safe for my consumption.”
“That will keep you going for the duration my friend,” he said.
Some three hours later I was trying to drink from my cup of coffee but my teeth kept rattling off the edge of the mug. When I stood I would involuntarily tap dance, my limbs shooting out unexpectedly and in directions I’d never thought possible. My heart was beating so fast the individual beats were indistinguishable; there was only the constant lawn mower hum of my overtaxed love muscle rattling off my rib cage.
I glanced up over the counter and outside. The bikers were making their way into the station. Out of the corner of my eye I thought I saw something slither behind the Otis Spunkmeyer cookie oven. It was very long and very green.
“Was that a giant lizard?” I wondered. “I think it was a fucking giant lizard.”
It occurred to me that it was some sort of hallucination but not wanting to risk the possibility that I had really seen this horrible lime green creature and that it might sneak up on me and spit in my eye…or is that camels that spit? At any rate I wasn’t taking any chances and grabbed a Playboy magazine lying on the counter and rolled it up. Still crouched below the counter I made my way around the potato chip aisle.
“Ahhhaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa,” I cried jumping out, ready to pound on the lizard with the rolled up magazine.
“What the Hell are you doing?”
It was the bikers. They were standing in the doorway.
“I thought I saw something,” I said, standing.
The Playboy magazine slipped from my hand and fell to the floor face up.
“He thought he saw something,” the leader said, elbowing his friends.
His eyes melted through my steely exterior like radioactive cue balls. I could tell this cat was used to the bum rush, to the take all and win all. He was a throwback to a Viking time when might made right. He would have led the raping and pillaging and feasting and when it was all over he’d stand at the head of the table, crack open a giant ham bone and suck the marrow out just as he had sucked the life out of all those that had crossed his sordid path.
“We want to fill up our bikes,” he said.
“Pumps one, two, and three,” I said, walking behind the cash register.
The big guy said something and they all laughed.
“Ha ha,” I said as they walked back out to their choppers.
As I bent down to pick up the magazine something went terribly wrong. It was as if a boa constrictor had wrapped its fleshy body around my neck and was squeezing. My eyes bulged. My vision doubled and then tripled. I tried to pull in a breath of air but my lungs felt as if they were filled with cement. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the giant lizard, which I had now identified as an iguana. It had to be nearly six feet long and it despite its immense size it easily hopped up on the hotdog machine, flipped the plastic lid back and with its claw snatched a sausage out. With long methodic bites he chewed the processed meat treat.
“You bastard,” I cried throwing the Playboy magazine at it.
The magazine missed and fell behind the counter. There was a terrible pain in my chest. I dropped to my knees. This was it. I’d finally gone too far. I was going to die.
The skies had broken down and there was chaos in my head. I had been locked out of the world, cast into some surreal anxiety induced Hell. The only sound I could hear was a muffled and far away hissing. It was as if someone had duct taped two conch shells over my ears. I staggered back to the cash register. I was supposed to go to the Lollapalooza concert in the morning. Damn it. Only death would keep me from seeing Henry Rollins.
“Grab hold of yourself you spineless bastard,” I said, tearing at the collar of my T-shirt.
I stood and fighting back the waves of anxiety tried to light a cigarette but I couldn’t keep my hand still long enough to bring the flame to the tip. The iguana hopped from the hotdog machine to a display of Pepsi twelve packs. Its long tail swung and knocked several cans of Pringles on the ground.
I tried to force thoughts of death from my mind but every time I did they would come rushing back with twice the intensity. Another pain shot up my arm. What the Hell was that pill my friend had given me? My heart fluttered. By God! I didn’t even have a will…not that I had anything to give but still I wasn’t prepared to go at such a young age and leaving everybody nothing was at the very least tasteless. I needed to call someone to pick me up. I needed to go to the hospital. I reached for the phone but was shaking too badly and couldn’t hold the receiver in my hand. .
“Pump three.”
I looked up. It was the biggest of the bikers. The leader. He was smoking a cigarillo that looked like a wet twig. The smoke smelled like a burning tire. He was ten times uglier than I had remembered.
I tried to focus on the readout on the cash register. The numbers blurred and the iguana peaked up from behind the cash register. Somehow he’d sneaked there while I was distracted by the biker. I looked at the biker to see if he saw what I saw but he made no indication of having seen my lime green friend. He must not have noticed it? I was freaking the fuck out but I couldn’t let this guy know. His type prayed on weakness.
“Well?” the biker said.
“I’m getting to it,” I said.
I would have to touch the cash register and risk that iguana might bite me or whatever it was that iguanas did when they were pissed off but I wanted to get this biker out of the station. Ever so slowly I reached out and thankfully the iguana stayed put. I relaxed momentarily and began punching the keys and then the little cocksucker lunged at me.
“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh,” I said jumping back.
“Pretty complicated isn’t it?” the biker said and guffawed.
I looked at him, through him. His leather clothing hardened and spread and became a shiny black exoskeleton. I thought of him as a giant cockroach. His antenna whipped through the air like lassos. I threw his change on the counter. Something that looked like tobacco juice dripped out of his mouth and onto the counter. Everything sounded muffled again. The bikers were cockroaches…no they were men…no they were cockroaches. I was pretty sure I was going mad.
I still couldn’t shake the feeling I was going to die. I would start to feel better and then the panic would come on again and again. I thought about the end of man. So this was the new world? Bugs would take over. I pictured putting a shotgun to my head before the bugs took the reigns of my life. It would be a repeating theme in my life; pictures of guns under my chin, pictures of guns against my temple, bugs attacking. They would never take me alive. I would never connect with the bugs. What these creatures would never understand was that it wasn’t a fight against them (the bugs) it was a fight against me, always. They would have to get at me before I did.
When I looked back at the cockroach biker there were two more cockroaches beside him. I told myself to hold it together, that I would live through this heart attack or whatever it was that had hijacked my senses.
I scooped their money up form the counter. They were saying something but it sounded like clicking and clacking. I didn’t understand cockroach, which is what this strange language must have been. I kept imagining them as such; pictures of hardened shells covering them over kept slicing through my mind and covering up reality.
I reached for the register and the iguana’s tongue flicked at me hand. It was all I could do not to scream again. I punched at the keys of the cash register.
“Clack clack clack,” the cockroaches said.
“All right, hold on. This damn thing doesn’t work right all the time,” I said.
The iguana slid off the register and crawled up on the cigarette rack. Everything had a Tim Burton feel to it.
“You are one of the bug people,” the biker roaches said in unison. At least that’s what I thought they said.
“I am not a bug person,” I yelled.
But if they were bug people wouldn’t the iguana eat them up?
I threw the other roaches change on the counter and as I did I saw the iguana’s tail disappear out the door.
“Quick get out of here,” I said to the roach bikers.
“I-G-U-A-N-A,” the leader said.
“I don’t get it,” I said.
They clacked and clicked and clacked and clicked. If felt like I’d been standing there for a week when they finally turned and scurried off. As they mounted their hogs I went into the back room and found a piece of pipe with which I planned to bash the iguana. When I went outside the bikers were gone, the only thing left from their stop was quickly dissipating clouds of exhaust.
“Here little iguana. Here little iguana,” I said, trying to coax the little bastard out of his hiding spot.
I searched in the bushes for the scaled beast but it was dark and I saw nothing but used condoms and empty Coke cans. After ten minutes or so I gave up my hunt.
The feeling of impending death had subsided and the idea of seeing an iguana now seemed absurd. I laughed and tried to open the door…it was locked. I looked inside and could see the iguana in my chair. The same chair I’d used as a sexual prop one night when a certain petite brunette stopped in to buy cigarettes…
“You little mother fucker,” I screamed.
My keys were inside beside the cash register. I was fucked. The owner would never understand me locking myself out of the station because I was hunting an iguana. Calling him was not an option. I needed a plan. I tried the back door; tried to pick the lock with a paper clip but to no avail. This activity took my mind off the strange drug induced anxiety attack I was experiencing and the symptoms retreated but I still couldn’t get into the damn station.
Exhausted, I sat on the curb outside the station. The iguana lunged at the window repeatedly banging its head on the glass. He was antagonizing me. I turned my back on him. Cars whizzed by and their headlights left buttery snail trails hanging in the air long after they were gong. These trails came together and formed a long golden tunnel that led across the highway to the Happy Pines Trailer Court. I hated that fucking trailer court.
When I’d first started working at the Mobile station it didn’t take long for word to reach the trailer court. I was fresh meat and the door of exploitation was left ajar. Soon there began a gradual exodus from the rows of tin houses to the gas station. They came in tall Ford pick up trucks and rusted Camaros that were dotted with back yard bodywork that made them look like mechanical bugs. They would pull up to the full service pumps in pairs of two and their scam worked like this. When I went outside to pump their gas the passenger would go in the gas station. While inside the passenger would stuff his or her clothing with packs of cigarettes and when I went in to make change from their $5.00 bill for $2.00 in gas they would come running out. After two or three times of this routine I realized what was going down and it pissed me off. I vowed never to allow these bastards to rob me again. The next pair that tried this little scam would be in for quite a surprise...
They were driving a pitted yellow El Camino and I let passenger believe she was going to get away with the cigarettes and then abruptly I stopped pumping gas and charged into the station. The passenger freaked out and ran out the side door, her windbreaker fat with cigarette packs. She had the angle on me and made it to the car and they took off. I picked up a brick and threw it at the back window. BAM! The back window exploded. Funny they didn’t report that to the police. And then it occurred to me…
“That’s it I need to think like a criminal” I said to myself, rising from the curb.
I thought of breaking a window and blaming it on some young kids to regain entry but then I noticed that the hinges on the side door were on the outside. Evidently someone had fucked up when they hung the door. This was a major security foul up and I would exploit it.
Not having any tools I went to my truck and got out a tire iron. With ease I pried the hinge bolts out with the tire iron and removed the door. The iguana was back up on the Otis Spunkmeyer cookie oven when I walked back inside.
“I’m going to kill you,” I cried, but just then the phone rang. I answered. “Yeah?”
“Hey man this is Garret. I wanted to tell you that Chico might be wandering around the gas station.”
“Is he a biker?” I asked. “Drives a chopper—”
“No, Chico is my iguana. I took him to work with me and then I got stoned in the bathroom and I forgot about him.”
“You mean he’s not a hallucination?”
“A what? No he’s an iguana. A lizard. ”
“Right,” I said. “He’s here sitting on the Otis Spunkmeyer cookie oven.”
“Cool, I’ll be in to pick him up in about ten minutes.”
My neck tightened again. I couldn’t breathe. The anxiety attack was coming back with more force than ever.
“Call an ambulance,” I said, weakly into the phone.
“Why is Chico hurt?”
“No, Chico’s not hurt you fucking idiot. There’s something wrong with me.”
The muscles in my left arm tightened and I dropped the phone. I staggered and then fell to the ground hitting my head on the edge of the cash register.
“Are you there? Hello?” I heard from the receiver.
The last thing I remember as the world shut down around me was that fucking iguana. He was sitting on the counter. Evidently he’d been rooting around in the ash tray because there was a cigarette butt clinging to his lip.
“You cocksucker,” I said, and the world turned to black.
I drew on a Marlboro Red as three scruffy looking bikers dismounted, sliding lazily off their hogs. The scene reminded me of the group of fat kids I’d seen getting off the broken back nags at the Gettysburg Miniature Horse Farm as a kid. I pitied those puny, run down horses with their swollen knees and protruding ribs and even as a kid knew that the owners should have put some sort of weight restriction on riding privileges. There had been cutout cartoon chipmunk holding a ruler vertically with a caption above its head that read: You have to be this tall to ride. There should have been a cutout cartoon of two chipmunks holding a four foot yard stick between them with a caption above their heads that read: If you are wider than this you can’t ride. Of course this would never happen in our all too PC world. The Stevenson’s National Association for Chunky Kids or SNACK or some such shit would file a law suit and then all fat kids would eat free McDonalds and ride miniature horses until the hapless hair bags wore worn away to their shoulder joints.
If motorcycles had feelings I would have gone out and hugged each of those choppers for having to haul those sloppy bastards around. Sorry Karl Marx religion is not “the opiate of the masses” genetically altered beef, high fructose corn syrup, and heavily processed starches are. Keep them fat, keep them content, and then when it all goes down they’ll be napping and they’ll never know what hit them.
The bikers were snazzed out in shit cheap leather that had the look of sun baked road kill. They laughed in short mean snorts and as they did so their shoulders lurched up and down in unison. There was a tall one in the center, flanked by two nondescript movie type extras, the kind of guys that you’d never in a million years pick out of a police lineup up because there was nothing particularly unique to remember them by. The guy in the middle though, he was all personality, all bravado, all kill or be killed. His surface character was tough with a sneer and just below the skin laid the beast with a knife in its teeth and blood on its claws. He wore a red bandana wrapped around his head, and it was obvious, if only to me, that this cocksucker wore the head wrap to cover up his baldness. He strutted and guffawed and his arms swung to and fro like an orangutan. He spit, and if my eyes didn’t deceive me, it wasn’t saliva that left his lips but a tiny blue flame.
In the late shift gas station business there are nights like this one when you know the next person or persons coming through the door could be more trouble than a hamper full of rabid alley cats but it is your solemn sworn duty to man the cash register in the face of this late night scum. To stand boldly, chest thrust forward, with no health or life insurance plan for the loved ones to collect and grow fat off of when the cocksucker freaked on animal tranquilizers and airplane glue comes raging bare chest through the door and blows a peephole in your forehead. You have only your wile and wit to guide you and if you let the drugs get the best of you then you don’t even have those. If your faculties desert you then you are SOL but fuck it I was told Heaven’s got strip clubs and besides what does a 21 year old know about mortality?
I turned quickly and accidentally knocked over my coffee mug.
“FUCK!”
The bikers turned and I hunkered below the counter. It was nearly three AM and I was on my second pot of coffee and second pack of Marlboro Reds. There was also the matter of the little yellow pill with red speckles I’d taken a few hours earlier which was given to me by a guy I knew who had just been released from jail that day for selling pot to an undercover cop. “This is my friend Speedy Gonzalez. ¡Arriba, arriba, andale!” he cried, as he placed the pill in my palm.
“I don’t do speed,” I said, “people brew that shit up in their toilet bowls and store it in their crevices. They’ll whore themselves or their kids out for a thimble full of that rot. It eats your brain from the inside out like a duck baked into a loaf of bread.”
“What?”
“Never you mind. The how’s and why’s aren’t important. What is important is my commitment to inebriation be dictated by some sort of self prescribed doctrine. If you don’t have an anchor as such one is apt to drift out into the deep waters and who the Hell knows what dwells in the deep waters of the mind, monsters of all sort I imagine. One might never come back and I’m too egotistical to sleep in a shopping cart or under an underpass.”
“This is pharmaceutical grade junk,” my friend said.
“Why didn’t you say so,” I said, tossing the pill back and washing it down with my coffee. “The government only has my best interests in mind. They wouldn’t allow drug manufacturers to make a drug if it weren’t safe for my consumption.”
“That will keep you going for the duration my friend,” he said.
Some three hours later I was trying to drink from my cup of coffee but my teeth kept rattling off the edge of the mug. When I stood I would involuntarily tap dance, my limbs shooting out unexpectedly and in directions I’d never thought possible. My heart was beating so fast the individual beats were indistinguishable; there was only the constant lawn mower hum of my overtaxed love muscle rattling off my rib cage.
I glanced up over the counter and outside. The bikers were making their way into the station. Out of the corner of my eye I thought I saw something slither behind the Otis Spunkmeyer cookie oven. It was very long and very green.
“Was that a giant lizard?” I wondered. “I think it was a fucking giant lizard.”
It occurred to me that it was some sort of hallucination but not wanting to risk the possibility that I had really seen this horrible lime green creature and that it might sneak up on me and spit in my eye…or is that camels that spit? At any rate I wasn’t taking any chances and grabbed a Playboy magazine lying on the counter and rolled it up. Still crouched below the counter I made my way around the potato chip aisle.
“Ahhhaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa,” I cried jumping out, ready to pound on the lizard with the rolled up magazine.
“What the Hell are you doing?”
It was the bikers. They were standing in the doorway.
“I thought I saw something,” I said, standing.
The Playboy magazine slipped from my hand and fell to the floor face up.
“He thought he saw something,” the leader said, elbowing his friends.
His eyes melted through my steely exterior like radioactive cue balls. I could tell this cat was used to the bum rush, to the take all and win all. He was a throwback to a Viking time when might made right. He would have led the raping and pillaging and feasting and when it was all over he’d stand at the head of the table, crack open a giant ham bone and suck the marrow out just as he had sucked the life out of all those that had crossed his sordid path.
“We want to fill up our bikes,” he said.
“Pumps one, two, and three,” I said, walking behind the cash register.
The big guy said something and they all laughed.
“Ha ha,” I said as they walked back out to their choppers.
As I bent down to pick up the magazine something went terribly wrong. It was as if a boa constrictor had wrapped its fleshy body around my neck and was squeezing. My eyes bulged. My vision doubled and then tripled. I tried to pull in a breath of air but my lungs felt as if they were filled with cement. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the giant lizard, which I had now identified as an iguana. It had to be nearly six feet long and it despite its immense size it easily hopped up on the hotdog machine, flipped the plastic lid back and with its claw snatched a sausage out. With long methodic bites he chewed the processed meat treat.
“You bastard,” I cried throwing the Playboy magazine at it.
The magazine missed and fell behind the counter. There was a terrible pain in my chest. I dropped to my knees. This was it. I’d finally gone too far. I was going to die.
The skies had broken down and there was chaos in my head. I had been locked out of the world, cast into some surreal anxiety induced Hell. The only sound I could hear was a muffled and far away hissing. It was as if someone had duct taped two conch shells over my ears. I staggered back to the cash register. I was supposed to go to the Lollapalooza concert in the morning. Damn it. Only death would keep me from seeing Henry Rollins.
“Grab hold of yourself you spineless bastard,” I said, tearing at the collar of my T-shirt.
I stood and fighting back the waves of anxiety tried to light a cigarette but I couldn’t keep my hand still long enough to bring the flame to the tip. The iguana hopped from the hotdog machine to a display of Pepsi twelve packs. Its long tail swung and knocked several cans of Pringles on the ground.
I tried to force thoughts of death from my mind but every time I did they would come rushing back with twice the intensity. Another pain shot up my arm. What the Hell was that pill my friend had given me? My heart fluttered. By God! I didn’t even have a will…not that I had anything to give but still I wasn’t prepared to go at such a young age and leaving everybody nothing was at the very least tasteless. I needed to call someone to pick me up. I needed to go to the hospital. I reached for the phone but was shaking too badly and couldn’t hold the receiver in my hand. .
“Pump three.”
I looked up. It was the biggest of the bikers. The leader. He was smoking a cigarillo that looked like a wet twig. The smoke smelled like a burning tire. He was ten times uglier than I had remembered.
I tried to focus on the readout on the cash register. The numbers blurred and the iguana peaked up from behind the cash register. Somehow he’d sneaked there while I was distracted by the biker. I looked at the biker to see if he saw what I saw but he made no indication of having seen my lime green friend. He must not have noticed it? I was freaking the fuck out but I couldn’t let this guy know. His type prayed on weakness.
“Well?” the biker said.
“I’m getting to it,” I said.
I would have to touch the cash register and risk that iguana might bite me or whatever it was that iguanas did when they were pissed off but I wanted to get this biker out of the station. Ever so slowly I reached out and thankfully the iguana stayed put. I relaxed momentarily and began punching the keys and then the little cocksucker lunged at me.
“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh,” I said jumping back.
“Pretty complicated isn’t it?” the biker said and guffawed.
I looked at him, through him. His leather clothing hardened and spread and became a shiny black exoskeleton. I thought of him as a giant cockroach. His antenna whipped through the air like lassos. I threw his change on the counter. Something that looked like tobacco juice dripped out of his mouth and onto the counter. Everything sounded muffled again. The bikers were cockroaches…no they were men…no they were cockroaches. I was pretty sure I was going mad.
I still couldn’t shake the feeling I was going to die. I would start to feel better and then the panic would come on again and again. I thought about the end of man. So this was the new world? Bugs would take over. I pictured putting a shotgun to my head before the bugs took the reigns of my life. It would be a repeating theme in my life; pictures of guns under my chin, pictures of guns against my temple, bugs attacking. They would never take me alive. I would never connect with the bugs. What these creatures would never understand was that it wasn’t a fight against them (the bugs) it was a fight against me, always. They would have to get at me before I did.
When I looked back at the cockroach biker there were two more cockroaches beside him. I told myself to hold it together, that I would live through this heart attack or whatever it was that had hijacked my senses.
I scooped their money up form the counter. They were saying something but it sounded like clicking and clacking. I didn’t understand cockroach, which is what this strange language must have been. I kept imagining them as such; pictures of hardened shells covering them over kept slicing through my mind and covering up reality.
I reached for the register and the iguana’s tongue flicked at me hand. It was all I could do not to scream again. I punched at the keys of the cash register.
“Clack clack clack,” the cockroaches said.
“All right, hold on. This damn thing doesn’t work right all the time,” I said.
The iguana slid off the register and crawled up on the cigarette rack. Everything had a Tim Burton feel to it.
“You are one of the bug people,” the biker roaches said in unison. At least that’s what I thought they said.
“I am not a bug person,” I yelled.
But if they were bug people wouldn’t the iguana eat them up?
I threw the other roaches change on the counter and as I did I saw the iguana’s tail disappear out the door.
“Quick get out of here,” I said to the roach bikers.
“I-G-U-A-N-A,” the leader said.
“I don’t get it,” I said.
They clacked and clicked and clacked and clicked. If felt like I’d been standing there for a week when they finally turned and scurried off. As they mounted their hogs I went into the back room and found a piece of pipe with which I planned to bash the iguana. When I went outside the bikers were gone, the only thing left from their stop was quickly dissipating clouds of exhaust.
“Here little iguana. Here little iguana,” I said, trying to coax the little bastard out of his hiding spot.
I searched in the bushes for the scaled beast but it was dark and I saw nothing but used condoms and empty Coke cans. After ten minutes or so I gave up my hunt.
The feeling of impending death had subsided and the idea of seeing an iguana now seemed absurd. I laughed and tried to open the door…it was locked. I looked inside and could see the iguana in my chair. The same chair I’d used as a sexual prop one night when a certain petite brunette stopped in to buy cigarettes…
“You little mother fucker,” I screamed.
My keys were inside beside the cash register. I was fucked. The owner would never understand me locking myself out of the station because I was hunting an iguana. Calling him was not an option. I needed a plan. I tried the back door; tried to pick the lock with a paper clip but to no avail. This activity took my mind off the strange drug induced anxiety attack I was experiencing and the symptoms retreated but I still couldn’t get into the damn station.
Exhausted, I sat on the curb outside the station. The iguana lunged at the window repeatedly banging its head on the glass. He was antagonizing me. I turned my back on him. Cars whizzed by and their headlights left buttery snail trails hanging in the air long after they were gong. These trails came together and formed a long golden tunnel that led across the highway to the Happy Pines Trailer Court. I hated that fucking trailer court.
When I’d first started working at the Mobile station it didn’t take long for word to reach the trailer court. I was fresh meat and the door of exploitation was left ajar. Soon there began a gradual exodus from the rows of tin houses to the gas station. They came in tall Ford pick up trucks and rusted Camaros that were dotted with back yard bodywork that made them look like mechanical bugs. They would pull up to the full service pumps in pairs of two and their scam worked like this. When I went outside to pump their gas the passenger would go in the gas station. While inside the passenger would stuff his or her clothing with packs of cigarettes and when I went in to make change from their $5.00 bill for $2.00 in gas they would come running out. After two or three times of this routine I realized what was going down and it pissed me off. I vowed never to allow these bastards to rob me again. The next pair that tried this little scam would be in for quite a surprise...
They were driving a pitted yellow El Camino and I let passenger believe she was going to get away with the cigarettes and then abruptly I stopped pumping gas and charged into the station. The passenger freaked out and ran out the side door, her windbreaker fat with cigarette packs. She had the angle on me and made it to the car and they took off. I picked up a brick and threw it at the back window. BAM! The back window exploded. Funny they didn’t report that to the police. And then it occurred to me…
“That’s it I need to think like a criminal” I said to myself, rising from the curb.
I thought of breaking a window and blaming it on some young kids to regain entry but then I noticed that the hinges on the side door were on the outside. Evidently someone had fucked up when they hung the door. This was a major security foul up and I would exploit it.
Not having any tools I went to my truck and got out a tire iron. With ease I pried the hinge bolts out with the tire iron and removed the door. The iguana was back up on the Otis Spunkmeyer cookie oven when I walked back inside.
“I’m going to kill you,” I cried, but just then the phone rang. I answered. “Yeah?”
“Hey man this is Garret. I wanted to tell you that Chico might be wandering around the gas station.”
“Is he a biker?” I asked. “Drives a chopper—”
“No, Chico is my iguana. I took him to work with me and then I got stoned in the bathroom and I forgot about him.”
“You mean he’s not a hallucination?”
“A what? No he’s an iguana. A lizard. ”
“Right,” I said. “He’s here sitting on the Otis Spunkmeyer cookie oven.”
“Cool, I’ll be in to pick him up in about ten minutes.”
My neck tightened again. I couldn’t breathe. The anxiety attack was coming back with more force than ever.
“Call an ambulance,” I said, weakly into the phone.
“Why is Chico hurt?”
“No, Chico’s not hurt you fucking idiot. There’s something wrong with me.”
The muscles in my left arm tightened and I dropped the phone. I staggered and then fell to the ground hitting my head on the edge of the cash register.
“Are you there? Hello?” I heard from the receiver.
The last thing I remember as the world shut down around me was that fucking iguana. He was sitting on the counter. Evidently he’d been rooting around in the ash tray because there was a cigarette butt clinging to his lip.
“You cocksucker,” I said, and the world turned to black.
Wednesday, April 06, 2005
Richard Peabody
Nationals return poet to his youth
By Erik Brady, USA TODAY
Check it out here:
http://www.usatoday.com/sports/baseball/nl/nationals/2005-04-03-poet-timeout_x.htm
This is the guy that taught me at JHU and has been working on editing my first book.
By Erik Brady, USA TODAY
Check it out here:
http://www.usatoday.com/sports/baseball/nl/nationals/2005-04-03-poet-timeout_x.htm
This is the guy that taught me at JHU and has been working on editing my first book.
Monday, April 04, 2005
Billy Bob on the Border. Yeeeeeeeeeeehaaaaaaaaaawwww!
'Minuteman' Volunteers Help With 18 Arrests on Border By BETH DeFALCO, AP
Read it here: http://aolsvc.news.aol.com/news/article.adp?id=20050403003809990001
This kind of bothers me. This is about a group of citizens who have volunteered to patrol the Mexican border. They may have good intentions but it seems to me this is the kind of thing that could get out of control very quickly. Supposedly, they won't apprehend any illegal aliens but will merely report their goings on to authorities. Why the Hell then do some of think they need guns? I picture a pickup truck full of beer bellied hicks doing donuts in the sand and throwing empty Budweiser cans over the border fence. Cooter is in the bed of the truck waving the rebel flag. Pedro peaks his head over the border fence and Carl lowers his deer rifle. BAM! "Damn,' Carl says, "I thought that was a hoot owl." Guffaws.
Those that "volunteer" for these types of endeavors seem to be people that don't have enough authority over others in their lives (rental cops) so they get involved in policing type activities to gain the power they so desperately desire. It makes them feel important. They can exert this "power" over the helpless Mexicans who cross the border and they are no longer at the bottom of the food chain.
Maybe next there will be volunteer groups to do the policing in your cities. Why pay cops when Earl and Jessie will do your policing for a six pack of Old Milwaukee? A militia forms. They are only there for your protection, to watch over you and makes sure everyone obeys their law. Oops, did I say their law? Silly me
Read it here: http://aolsvc.news.aol.com/news/article.adp?id=20050403003809990001
This kind of bothers me. This is about a group of citizens who have volunteered to patrol the Mexican border. They may have good intentions but it seems to me this is the kind of thing that could get out of control very quickly. Supposedly, they won't apprehend any illegal aliens but will merely report their goings on to authorities. Why the Hell then do some of think they need guns? I picture a pickup truck full of beer bellied hicks doing donuts in the sand and throwing empty Budweiser cans over the border fence. Cooter is in the bed of the truck waving the rebel flag. Pedro peaks his head over the border fence and Carl lowers his deer rifle. BAM! "Damn,' Carl says, "I thought that was a hoot owl." Guffaws.
Those that "volunteer" for these types of endeavors seem to be people that don't have enough authority over others in their lives (rental cops) so they get involved in policing type activities to gain the power they so desperately desire. It makes them feel important. They can exert this "power" over the helpless Mexicans who cross the border and they are no longer at the bottom of the food chain.
Maybe next there will be volunteer groups to do the policing in your cities. Why pay cops when Earl and Jessie will do your policing for a six pack of Old Milwaukee? A militia forms. They are only there for your protection, to watch over you and makes sure everyone obeys their law. Oops, did I say their law? Silly me
Friday, April 01, 2005
Screwed
I'm so mad I could chew through the steel gate outside the Circuit City store. Those bastards got me again...
I purchased an HP laptop there on 2/16/05 after my Dell exploded in a mushroom cloud earlier that morning. The advertised rebate for the computer I purchased was $200. With the rebate calculated into the price I thought it was reasonable so I decided to buy it.
At the checkout I received four long receipt like printouts. Glancing at the top “Redemption Form” I noticed that it indicated the rebate had to be postmarked by 4/2/05 in order for it to be valid. I had over a month to get it in, no sweat. So I stowed this paper work away in my desk for a few weeks. Everything was cool...
Fast forward to today. This morning I began filling out the “Redemption Form” (I like to call them Rip-Off Forms), which by the way denoted that you must also provide the bar code from the packaging box. How many people throw away the box and realize that now they can’t get their rebate? I’d imagine quite a few. This wasn’t my problem but it very well could have been.
As I filled out the form I noticed that there were actually two rebate forms, not one long one as I had originally assumed. Upon further examination of the second form, I noticed a post mark due date of 3/19/05. If I hadn’t already thrown my box out and lost my UPC code there was this little snafu to keep me from collecting my rebate. After ripping a phone book in half with my teeth and taking several tranquilizers I was able to calm down.
Let me recap here.
I was given the two “Redemption Forms” and as most consumers with little spare time do I glanced at the top sheet and saw a post mark due date of 4/2/05. I think it was reasonable to assume that this was the due date for the entire rebate and I believe a lot of people would assume the same thing. Conveniently the top rebate form was for $50 dollars and the postmark due date was 4/2/05. The second rebate form with the postmark due date of 3/19/05 was for $150 and was on the bottom.
It is my contention that the order in which you are given these two rebate forms is not a coincidence but a strategy to keep the consumer form cashing in on said rebates. Given the nature of the forms I don’t think this is an unreasonable assumption. Is it just coincidence that the top form was for $50 dollars and had a later postmark due date and the second form was for $150 and had an earlier postmark date? Knowing the nature of big business I cannot believe that this is simply a coincidence but I will let you draw your own conclusions on the matter.
It behooves these companies to make it as hard as possible for consumers to cash in on their rebates. Every rebate you don’t turn in is profit for Circuit City or whatever company you may have purchased from. So why then wouldn’t they make it as hard as possible for you to turn in a rebate?
So, what is the lesson here? Never trust the man…well, yeah that’s a given. First of all, as soon as you get your rebate information read over it and find the postmark due date. Second of all, don’t throw any packaging from the product away until you are sure you do not need it in order to cash in on your rebate. Thirdly, if you do feel you were mislead with rebate information write a letter to the store or company and tell them you will no longer shop at their store if they do not honor your rebate. Fourthly...is that a word? Anyway, if you really want to get them send yourself in your computer box and address it to store headquarters and when they go to open it up jump out wearing nothing but a keyboard and give them a scare they will never forget.
I formally challenge the CEO of Circuit City to a no holds barred steel cage wrestling match and no I will not be wearing a Speedo with the American flag depicted on it. I will however kick that fucker's ass for stealing my rebate so he can buy another ski house in Aspen. Better yet why don't we wrestle for that house you bastard? I await your reply.
I purchased an HP laptop there on 2/16/05 after my Dell exploded in a mushroom cloud earlier that morning. The advertised rebate for the computer I purchased was $200. With the rebate calculated into the price I thought it was reasonable so I decided to buy it.
At the checkout I received four long receipt like printouts. Glancing at the top “Redemption Form” I noticed that it indicated the rebate had to be postmarked by 4/2/05 in order for it to be valid. I had over a month to get it in, no sweat. So I stowed this paper work away in my desk for a few weeks. Everything was cool...
Fast forward to today. This morning I began filling out the “Redemption Form” (I like to call them Rip-Off Forms), which by the way denoted that you must also provide the bar code from the packaging box. How many people throw away the box and realize that now they can’t get their rebate? I’d imagine quite a few. This wasn’t my problem but it very well could have been.
As I filled out the form I noticed that there were actually two rebate forms, not one long one as I had originally assumed. Upon further examination of the second form, I noticed a post mark due date of 3/19/05. If I hadn’t already thrown my box out and lost my UPC code there was this little snafu to keep me from collecting my rebate. After ripping a phone book in half with my teeth and taking several tranquilizers I was able to calm down.
Let me recap here.
I was given the two “Redemption Forms” and as most consumers with little spare time do I glanced at the top sheet and saw a post mark due date of 4/2/05. I think it was reasonable to assume that this was the due date for the entire rebate and I believe a lot of people would assume the same thing. Conveniently the top rebate form was for $50 dollars and the postmark due date was 4/2/05. The second rebate form with the postmark due date of 3/19/05 was for $150 and was on the bottom.
It is my contention that the order in which you are given these two rebate forms is not a coincidence but a strategy to keep the consumer form cashing in on said rebates. Given the nature of the forms I don’t think this is an unreasonable assumption. Is it just coincidence that the top form was for $50 dollars and had a later postmark due date and the second form was for $150 and had an earlier postmark date? Knowing the nature of big business I cannot believe that this is simply a coincidence but I will let you draw your own conclusions on the matter.
It behooves these companies to make it as hard as possible for consumers to cash in on their rebates. Every rebate you don’t turn in is profit for Circuit City or whatever company you may have purchased from. So why then wouldn’t they make it as hard as possible for you to turn in a rebate?
So, what is the lesson here? Never trust the man…well, yeah that’s a given. First of all, as soon as you get your rebate information read over it and find the postmark due date. Second of all, don’t throw any packaging from the product away until you are sure you do not need it in order to cash in on your rebate. Thirdly, if you do feel you were mislead with rebate information write a letter to the store or company and tell them you will no longer shop at their store if they do not honor your rebate. Fourthly...is that a word? Anyway, if you really want to get them send yourself in your computer box and address it to store headquarters and when they go to open it up jump out wearing nothing but a keyboard and give them a scare they will never forget.
I formally challenge the CEO of Circuit City to a no holds barred steel cage wrestling match and no I will not be wearing a Speedo with the American flag depicted on it. I will however kick that fucker's ass for stealing my rebate so he can buy another ski house in Aspen. Better yet why don't we wrestle for that house you bastard? I await your reply.
Sick of the Lies
An excellent read is George Lakoff’s Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate--The Essential Guide for Progressives. Among the things he discusses are class action law suits and the framing used by the right wing to make Americans believe that the current government is going after “frivolous” lawsuits to protect our interests, ie, keeping prices down for us. In reality “frivolous” lawsuits make up well under 5 percent of all class action lawsuits. The objective of the right wing in stopping many of the filings of class action lawsuits is a “strategic initiative.” According to George Lakoff strategic initiatives are "a plan in which a change in one carefully chosen issue area has automatic effects over many, many, many other issues areas."
In Jack Dalton’s article Bush, The Republican Party, and Eliminating Competition Through "Strategic Initiatives" he states that “at the core of Bush and the Republican Party wanting to "cap" or, if possible, eliminate liability lawsuits by individuals and especially class action lawsuits, is a much broader strategy to "de-fund" the Democratic Party. A substantial portion of the Democratic Party's funding is donations from trial lawyers and their associations. These are the lawyers that generally speaking are the ones that hold the practitioners of bad medicine and companies that violate the law accountable by representing those that have been harmed. In short, eliminate the lawsuits, you eliminate a chief source of funds for lawyers and therefore their ability to donate to the Democratic Party. Lose enough funding sources and you might as well hang a sign on the door saying, "Gone fishin' don't know when, or if I'll be back.”
Dalton further says that, “Then there is the issue of liability lawsuits. Stifle the lawsuits; make it more difficult to get into court by switching from state courts to federal courts; end these lawsuits (which the Bush cabal refers to as Tort reform) and with one stroke of the pen they will have eliminated all the potential lawsuits that will be the basis of future environmental legislation and regulation.”
In a nutshell the right wing wants corporate America to be able to do as they please to us without repercussion to poison our water with chemicals, ignore labor laws, stop lawsuits where a faulty product injures or kills a consumer, etc and to "de-fund" the Democratic party among other things. What does the right wing and corporate America get out of this equation? PROFIT at the cost of your well being.
So before you start supporting the end of “frivolous” lawsuits know exactly what is at stake. There is more to this issue than what meets the eye. If you don’t care about workers rights, laws that protect consumers and our environment then by all means support these selfish, self serving bastards. When will the majority of conservatives learn that George W. Bush and his cronies don’t care about you? Their God spells his name M-O-N-E-Y.
And for the religious out there that believe the right wing conservatives are on your side I might ask you which side of this debate Jesus would be on? Huh? Do you think he’d be on the side of the big corporations? Think about it.
In Jack Dalton’s article Bush, The Republican Party, and Eliminating Competition Through "Strategic Initiatives" he states that “at the core of Bush and the Republican Party wanting to "cap" or, if possible, eliminate liability lawsuits by individuals and especially class action lawsuits, is a much broader strategy to "de-fund" the Democratic Party. A substantial portion of the Democratic Party's funding is donations from trial lawyers and their associations. These are the lawyers that generally speaking are the ones that hold the practitioners of bad medicine and companies that violate the law accountable by representing those that have been harmed. In short, eliminate the lawsuits, you eliminate a chief source of funds for lawyers and therefore their ability to donate to the Democratic Party. Lose enough funding sources and you might as well hang a sign on the door saying, "Gone fishin' don't know when, or if I'll be back.”
Dalton further says that, “Then there is the issue of liability lawsuits. Stifle the lawsuits; make it more difficult to get into court by switching from state courts to federal courts; end these lawsuits (which the Bush cabal refers to as Tort reform) and with one stroke of the pen they will have eliminated all the potential lawsuits that will be the basis of future environmental legislation and regulation.”
In a nutshell the right wing wants corporate America to be able to do as they please to us without repercussion to poison our water with chemicals, ignore labor laws, stop lawsuits where a faulty product injures or kills a consumer, etc and to "de-fund" the Democratic party among other things. What does the right wing and corporate America get out of this equation? PROFIT at the cost of your well being.
So before you start supporting the end of “frivolous” lawsuits know exactly what is at stake. There is more to this issue than what meets the eye. If you don’t care about workers rights, laws that protect consumers and our environment then by all means support these selfish, self serving bastards. When will the majority of conservatives learn that George W. Bush and his cronies don’t care about you? Their God spells his name M-O-N-E-Y.
And for the religious out there that believe the right wing conservatives are on your side I might ask you which side of this debate Jesus would be on? Huh? Do you think he’d be on the side of the big corporations? Think about it.
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