Hide the Scratches

He took off one of her shoes slowly. She didn't make a noise other than the steady flow of her breathing that had just a slight hint of a snore in it and to Charlie sounded more like a purr. He took off the other shoe and she curled her feet up into her jacket with her and rolled onto her side, facing the sofa back and clutching a throw pillow under her head. He spread the blanket over her and tucked it in gently. She let out a tiny sigh and he stood looking down at her for a time before going to his bed and fighting himself into a light sleep.

He awoke to find himself alone. Rosa had left either the night before or sometime early in the morning. Charlie stood in the center of the living room and appraised things. Everything was still there. He chided himself for actually holding out hope that she had stolen something. At least he could have been outraged, gone out to stalk the streets in search of her, had an excuse to go to Jonny's asking after her. But no, nothing of the sort.

Sitting in the recliner, he flipped on the tv. The morning talk shows were just giving way to the game shows. Turning the remote over and over in his hands, he vacillated between the twenty-four-hour news channel and a children's show. The news had a story running about how hundreds of area residents had been scammed by some guys posing as exterminators. Apparently they had sold people liquor bottles full of agricultural pesticides. The people, thinking that they were playing it smart by paying so little and spraying the stuff themselves, were now dropping like flies. The symptoms included nausea, dizziness and vomiting. He wondered if his landlord had sprayed his place before he moved in. He dismissed the thought, however, because his kitchen had a healthy supply of tiny cockroaches.

He flipped off of the news and settled down to an episode of Speed Racer, who, as the opening theme purported, was a demon on wheels. It went by predictably enough with Speed's little brother and the monkey hiding in the trunk and Speed having to race the evil-doers. Racer X swooped in to save everyone from some horrible fate or another and Pops chuckled.

Charlie poked at an ash filled pipe and got up to make coffee, turning the tv volume up enough to be heard from the kitchen. He leaned against the counter smoking and listening to the coffee maker sputter and gurgle as it went through its paces. He found a clean cup in the refrigerator and put two spoonfuls of sugar in it while he waited. Back in the living room, he locked the front door with its two chains and deadbolt and peered out through the peep hole. He could see up and down the street and nothing was going on, as usual. He sat and blew on his coffee as he stirred it noisily. The tv spewed nothing but commercials until he forgot what he had been watching and turned it off. Traffic blew by outside his door at an average rate of four cars per minute. He sipped at his coffee and looked at nothing. The four clocks in the room all agreed that the time was somewhere near eight-thirty in the morning. One of the neighbors, probably the man, stomped from the back of the house to the front door and paused. Charlie waited to hear the door open, but it never did. Finally, the dolt stomped off to some important matters in the back of the house. Charlie got up and turned the heater on to try to drown out the neighbor, and because the cold had begun to penetrate the joints of his toes. He stood fooling with the knobs of the heater for a while until he felt satisfied with the settings and returned to his chair.

He took a tentative breath to assess his health and found that he could take a more-or-less full breath, only hitching a few times. He looked up at his ceiling and worried about the danger of asbestos falling from it. After all, it was one of those styrofoam jobs with the squares hanging in a steel grid. Really a bad choice for such an old neighborhood, but then, the rest of the place wasn't exactly a candidate for Architectural Digest or Better Homes. . .

He suddenly couldn't let those squares sit up there any longer. He jumped up and stood balancing on the arm of the sofa. Stretching up, he pushed a square up and into the unknown void above. He simply had to see the beautiful wooden cathedral ceilings that the fool landlord had so stupidly hidden behind this modern atrocity of a ceiling. He peered into the dark gap and pushed a little further and got a shower of insulation material. The fuckers had put at least a foot of insulation on top of their pitiful ceiling!

He jumped down from the couch spitting and blinking away the horrible pink crap. Now he was convinced. This stuff had to be the problem. He immediately went to stand in the bathroom to see if his breathing improved. It seemed to be a little better, but he couldn't be quite sure, so he found his keys in his pants from the night before and opened the back door deadbolt. He then unlatched the other three locks and peeked out of the blinds before opening the door. He sat on the stairs and pulled the door closed behind him. Breathing still seemed a little better than in the living room. Gospel soul music was switched on in the house next to him, which was separated from his own by only a ten foot wide alley, if that much. The old woman next door began singing along with the music as she clanked pots and pans around in the sink.

Charlie retreated inside for a cigarette, carefully locking all the locks on the door. He saw that his answering machine had a message and he played it.

"Hello, Chuck. This is Wendy from Norill Temps with a job for you," the voice said. "The pay's four-fifty an hour and you need to be there at ten o'clock. The address is forty-five-oh-eight Tchoupitoulas and it's the Gershwitz-Franz furniture warehouse. Please call if you can't make it."

Charlie knew the place and didn't relish the thought of going back, but he pressed out his cigarette and began gathering up his steel-toes and his weight-lifter's belt. He made it out the door by twenty after nine and walked quickly to cover the three blocks to the ferry landing. The boat was running late, filled to capacity with cars. He ran the last thirty feet of the landing, breathlessly thanking the ferry worker who begrudgingly held the gate for an extra couple of seconds.

The ferry ride afforded a nice view of the city's skyline, but he sat stony-faced thinking that he was being watched by some of the other passengers. There was the old couple who stood motionless in front of him and kept staring at the city through the window, but Charlie could see their reflections in the window. They were watching him, not the city. They kept turning to each other and whispering, pointing, not at the city, christ no, at him. . . and every now and again, one of them would turn around as if to look over his head at something. Charlie knew that one, he knew that there was nothing behind him. He could see their eyes glancing over him on purpose and never coming to rest on anything, but seeming to just move over him one too many times for it to be a coincidence.

The city loomed large in the windows and the ferry lurched slightly as it docked. The horns blew and everyone in the little chair-filled room stood at once. They all tried to smooth it over, searching pockets, stooping to tie shoes, snuffing out cigarette butts, folding newspapers. . . but Charlie could see it happening. They all seemed to be mooing softly to themselves and occasionally looking up to check on him before returning to chewing their cud. The bovine image was almost too strong to bear, but somehow he managed to stand nonchalantly and flow with them off of the ferry.

Walking over countless steps in the landing, he measured his stride carefully so as to not draw undue attention to himself. He could still feel the hot stares on his back. He picked people out from far away and steeled himself to walk by them. Their disgust with him barely hidden on their faces. All of them somehow held their tongues and kept from murderously launching themselves at him.

He continued down and out of the ferry landing building to the foot of Canal St. Mentally checking his map, he walked a couple of blocks up and took a left toward his destination. He stopped and pretended to wait for a pay phone. He peered at the arm of the woman on the phone and thought he saw that it was now five minutes until ten o'clock. He slapped his forehead and moaned loudly for the benefit of anyone who might wonder why he suddenly left his place in line for the phone and took off in a run, his heels quickly burning in his heavy boots.

A crowd was gathered in front of the giant steel doors of Gerschwitz-Franz. Charlie almost kept walking for fear that there was some sort of trouble going on, but reminded himself where he was and lit a cigarette and waited. Before he took two drags, a gray-black man of about fifty was mumbling for a cigarette. Charlie recognized him as Joe, with whom he had moved furniture around an office building for two weeks once. He gave him a cigarette and sat down against a dirty brick pillar to wait for the bosses to show up. Joe Henry sat down next to him and they both managed to look almost as good as leftover macaroni.

Charlie only remembered one thing about Joe Henry from their two weeks together, moving furniture from one office to another, up and down stairs and freight elevators, all at the whims of the executives, who treated the movers like the slaves they were.

"How're them hemorrhoids, Joe?"

Joe Henry turned and looked at him for a long time before getting up and walking to another area of the crowd.

Charlie thought Joe'd perk right up on that one. After all, all he had heard about while they humped credenzas up and down all fifty floors of that office building had been Joe's asshole. That and how many women Joe had taken up to the twelfth floor storage area.

Joe sure did seem to still be walking like his ass was killing him. . .

Charlie lit another cigarette from the butt in his mouth just as the fat, white bosses drove up and opened the doors. They all slowly trickled into the warehouse and had their time cards signed and collected. Then, suddenly, everyone seemed to know exactly what to do and where to go. One of the bosses saw Charlie standing around and pointed to a hulking man who looked like a mountain of lead sculpted into a set of filthy overalls and told him, "You're with him."

Charlie tightened the velcro straps of his weight-lifter's belt and put on his gloves. Everyone was grabbing a dolly or a cart and Charlie squeezed in to get a strong dolly. He ended up with a good solid one with straps and a chipped yellow paint job. He rolled it along behind the giant man he had been told to follow and waited.

Everyone else was busily moving furniture from one place to the other. Now that the crew was in place, trucks started pulling up to the row of shipping doors. Men spit into their palms and hefted desks and dining room sets into dark semi tractor trailers under the watchful eyes of the bosses, who, sitting in their elevated office, with their tv blaring, smoking cigarettes, could see the entire floor of the warehouse through dirty windows.

Sweat darkened the men's' T-shirts and was dripping into their eyes within minutes. Fifty men, all negroes, humped the furniture around, grunting and wheezing. Charlie and his partner just sat at an empty gate.

"Shit, I'm glad we're not over there." Charlie said in a low tone to the big man who just grunted in reply.

No more than five minutes passed before a full sized eighteen-wheeler pulled up and began maneuvering into place at the loading dock behind them, beeping loudly. Charlie stood and gave the driver signals. He wasn't ready for what was in the truck. The big man opened it with a swoosh and there were huge boxes lined up to the very edge of the trailer. The driver walked briskly by them with some kind of chipper remark about how he had to get moving and how they'd better "git to it."

The big black man slammed his dolly underneath a twelve-foot tall box with a picture of a thick couch on it. He twirled it around expertly and rolled it out of the truck.

Charlie stepped up and worked his dolly underneath a box with a stencil of a recliner on the side. He had to jump up and over the top of the box to lean it back. The bag man just stood watching him, still holding up his sofa confidently. Once Charlie had the recliner tilted back the big man started walking rapidly off deep into the catacombs of the warehouse.

Rows upon rows of beds and couches and all manner of giant furniture were lined up to the distant walls. The big man strode easily with his couch as Charlie bumbled along trying to keep the recliner from toppling things as he passed by precariously stacked dining room tables and plates of glass. Finally, they arrived at the correct spot and the couch was off of the dolly in a second, quickly wedged into the ranks of other huge boxes. Charlie dumped his recliner, pushing it up against another box, and started back to the truck to await further instructions. He met the big man on the way back, who had two recliner boxes stacked on their sides strapped to his dolly.

"We unloading that whole truck?" he asked breathlessly.

"Yeah, an you bes git movin ifs you'll be wantin lunch."

"It all goes back there?"

"Yeah." he said, and pushed his load off into the warehouse.

Charlie hurried to get to the truck so as not to fall behind his partner. He managed to get two disassembled dining room tables onto his dolly and strapped securely before the big man was in sight. He rushed furiously to get to the storage area and on the way back, he met the big man a little bit closer to the truck than the last time. He continued to rush his trips until he and the big man had established a rhythm, always meeting in approximately the same place.

Slowly Charlie got more confident with his dolly and started loading larger and larger boxes. Soon he was carting two recliners at a time. He tried three, but a boss stopped him and made him only take two. The big man nodded approvingly at him on their next pass. He pushed hutches and tables and boxes of beanbags and mattresses and box-springs and secretary's desks and things he couldn't identify, even with the pictures right there on the box.

He and the big man took turns smoking Charlie's cigarettes outside, sitting next to the truck's big wheels. The furniture in the truck seemed like it would never end, but by the time his stomach started murmuring about food, it looked as if they'd have the thing unloaded before lunch. They slowed their pace and stretched it out perfectly so that they were squeezing the last box into the packed area at the back of the place just as one of the bosses yelled lunch.

Everyone got out quickly and walked in different directions to acquire lunch. Charlie spotted Joe and followed him to a small diner in the foot of one of the big office buildings. He stood in a long line and ordered a burger and fries to go. He got back with ten minutes to spare and wolfed down his meal while smoking a cigarette. When the bell rang, everyone disposed of his trash quickly and quietly moved back to work.

Charlie's sphincter tightened when he saw another full truck waiting at the dock and his giant partner wrestling with some difficulty with a heavy looking box. Charlie put his belt and gloves back on and retrieved his dolly from where he had hidden it before lunch. He sure as hell didn't want to have to deal with a wobbly-tired dolly for the rest of the day. The contents of this truck seemed to be mostly hutches and display cases. The hutches looked expensive and after examining the boxes, Charlie found that the average one cost in the neighborhood of four grand.

The driver of the truck was in more of a hurry than the first one and helped out some. He stayed in the trailer, pushing the huge boxes into position for Charlie and his friend. They were half-way into the truck and things seemed to be slipping along, almost in a groove, when Charlie tilted a large hutch, apparently with leaded glass doors and a safe built into the bottom, on his dolly. It tilted, and tilted, and fell back and over. Charlie caught it with his belly and spread his arms above him to try to catch the corners as the thing continued to crush down on him. In a flash, he could see the lawyers from Gershwitz-Franz slapping him with a bill for five thousand big ones and him having to pay it off for years with a twenty percent interest rate. He had stopped it from smashing down and breaking itself, but now it was threatening to crush him. The trucker just stood by and watched, afraid to incur any part of the debt about to be created in the back of his rig. The hutch finally settled down over Charlie, pinning him between the handles of his dolly. He just lay there waiting for the pain to come, but it didn't. That really got him worried. He couldn't budge the hutch and he couldn't move from under the dolly. His partner had, by this time, returned from rolling three or four of the very same hutches, no doubt. He and the trucker carefully lifted the hutch off of Charlie and seemed almost disappointed when Charlie wiggled out, apparently unscathed. A boss had seen the commotion and was already cutting open the box to inspect the damage to the hutch. Nothing seemed broken on the precious piece of furniture. He looked from Charlie to the behemoth and said "Come with me."

For the rest of the day Charlie worked with an old man whose hair had gone almost entirely white. The old man gave Charlie a box of markers ranging from black to a reddish-brown. Dining room chairs with ornately engraved legs and backs were placed in their area and the old man instructed Charlie in the fine art of scratch hiding. Every chair that came through did so because someone had found a scratch on it. He had to search carefully over each chair and color in any gouges or scrapes that he could find. They were then whisked off to be delivered with the rest of the set.

Charlie guiltily stole a glance at the unloading dock where he saw his big friend starting on another full eighteen wheeler, this time alone.

Viewpoint

Sitting in Charlie's darkened living room, the light from the street filtering in through the blinds, they passed it between them quietly, each inhaling deeply and professionally until the bomber of a joint was nothing more than a sticky tab of brown paper that would not light no matter how hard Charlie tried.
"Stop flicking that thing, man. You're giving me a headache." Rosa said, leaning back on the couch and nearly disappearing into her coat.
The window unit pumped heat into the room.
"Sorry." he said, putting the lighter down and scraping the resinated roach off of his thumb and onto the edge of the ash tray. The heater shifted gears and settled into a different tone. "Rosa," he continued, "I may be crazy, but I think all of this has happened before."
"Huh?" she said, almost asleep, her feet slowly making their way up onto the couch with the rest of her.
"I mean everything, everything that happens. Like elections and wars and death and, well, shit. . . just everything. . . Ya know?"
". . .hmmm, yeh. . . right. . ." she said through a sleepy haze.
"I mean the way we think of previous generations as backwards and uneducated, innocent, the whole nine yards. . . why should they be so innocent? Did our parents simply appear and POOF! there we were? No of course not. . ." He lit a cigarette as he spoke, pursing his lips, continuing to speak around the cigarette. "What. . .we. . .per. . What we perceive as just beginning to happen is really not just beginning to happen, it's just that we are only now beginning to perceive it. For instance, how long have people been sucking toes? Hmm? How long? You might think it'd be a relatively recent perversion, but I'd be willing to bet that hunch-backed, club carrying mongoloids were sucking toes ten thousand years ago. My point? Well my point is that people aren't as original as they like to think. . . People make a huge stink when there is a murder or a gang-rape or whatever, but what they don't seem to understand is that those things have been going on for so long that their outrage is misplaced. Benobo monkeys. Ever hear of them? They basically do nothing but hang from the trees and fuck all day. You should see the positions these things can achieve what with their prehensile tails and all. . . They have group sex, incest, anal sex. . . all of it right out in the open, right in plain view of the rest of the population, who if they aren't too busy fucking, often sit and watch while masturbating. Meanwhile, we, WE have laws against nudity, laws about who you can and cannot marry, what sex they have to be, exactly how far removed they must be from your family, etc. . . Who came up with these things? Us? Our parents? Their parents? Nope, this stuff has been going on for tens of thousands of years, since before we stood upright when our little rodent ancestors scurried around collecting nuts. . . But today we have law enforcement telling us that in response to recently growing problems, laws are needed such as laws against oral sex and exposure. . . I say that it's just a pretense to allow them to pull the noose tighter around our necks. These things are supposed to take care of themselves naturally. If an exposer keeps it up, he is eventually trounced. If the oral sex goes on, well, I still can't figure out what would be wrong with that, but what I mean is, these things should be left to nature. If someone exposes themselves to someone else and the person who is exposed upon, so to speak, does nothing about it, or doesn't have someone else do something about it, well then I guess someone got away with something naughty. Children are raised to hate and raised to follow their parent's example. Boys born to hunters would die for the right to have their guns. Why? Because they need them? Not likely in this day and age. They would die for them because their fathers felt that way. Why then, did their fathers feel that way? because their fathers felt that way, ad infinatum. Guns have never been an absolute necessity of life. The American Indians made it for many generations without them and did quite well, thank you, that is, until the Europeans showed up with cannons and rifles and bombs. . . Most every healthy young Indian who died for the next five hundred years was killed by a bullet. Why? Control. It's not necessarily bad to pass things down until it becomes almost a matter of course that the youngsters learn it. Lions all learn to hunt or they die. It's not a bad thing for them to pass down to their children, but humans have filled their children's heads with such garbage that it makes me sick. Is it just me," he asked the now soundly sleeping Rosa, "or do the same families seem to be the ones in control, generation, after generation. . . Kings and monarchies, presidencies, tribal chieftains, the whole gamut, there always seems to be that alpha-male thing going on like in those Jack London wolf novels. . . I grant that it's an entirely natural process, but it seems to me that we have pretty much rid ourselves of every other semblance of hierarchical bestiality, why not that one? We don't mate with our relatives because we know it'd foster regenerative traits, we research ways to make babies born without vital organs live long, empty and confused, unseeing, bitter lives, but we still have the same alpha-males making our decisions, governmental and economic. . . Why? Because by the time we are old enough to give a damn, the alpha male is firmly in place, his seed gestating and waiting to be placed onto the throne of power just as his father grows nearly weary enough for us to topple him. I hate to sound bitter, Rosie, but it seems like breaking that cycle, in any of its modes, not just political, is impossible. That barrier is thrown up everywhere. I go to the grocery and find the old man behind the counter, his son working in the stock room waiting for him to die so he can do some remodeling and really get the place going, when all that's really gonna happen is he'll pass it on to his kid. Where's a guy supposed to break in? What's to be done? All I've been left are two strong legs and this accursed mind. . ." He lit another cigarette, lost in thought. He had been sitting on the floor in front of the couch. His head leaning on Rosa's back. At least he thought it was her back, he couldn't be sure it wasn't a handbag in the giant pockets of her coat. Whatever it was, it was good and he could feel her breathing and smell her smell. He finished the cigarette and got up to get a blanket for her.

Big Night

Charlie knew fun and had tried to remain familiar with it over the years, but somehow it always seemed to elude him now, seeming to just slip around the corners of his awareness, growing more intangible as the days and months passed him by. Often, he went to places where others seemed to enjoy themselves in one way or another, but he usually came away with little more than an empty feeling and a smile that sat like a prosthesis, disgustingly plastic, on his face.
Winter was coming.
He let the thought hover in his mind as he lay listening to the muffled news broadcast that was seeping through the wall and had awakened him. Eyes still closed, he tried to understand the flow of the reporter's words, but he could only catch a few here and there. He got out of bed and, sniffling and snorting, he fished a set of clothes from the hamper and set out for the neighborhood bar.
The neighborhood was an old one and as such, had seen both good times and bad. Lately it seemed that the pendulum was on an upswing. People were opening coffee houses and news stands, corner groceries were chasing the bad elements from their storefronts, the old cathedral was playing Amazing Grace on its bells. Still, people crossed the streets from each other and only the very old gave greetings if they happened to pass close enough to do so. But still in all, it was a pretty nice neighborhood. It was almost three hundred years old and had been built when New Orleans was nothing more than a little place where European sailors could get whores, whiskey and slaves.
Jonny's bar was a dark little place. The door, like many in the area, had steel grating over the window and required a buzz from the bartender to open. Charlie pressed the buzzer and waited. A camera scrutinized him from above and he looked up at it blandly. The door clicked and buzzed and he pushed it.
"Hey, what's up, Chuck?"
"Chuuuuuuck. . ."
A nod from someone playing pool alone that implied an invitation.
A tilt of the head, a slight spreading of the hands and a crooked tsk-tsk smile, two slow shakes of the head and Charlie graciously refused the invitation.
Pool balls resumed their clicking, the pool table resumed it's clunking and Charlie sat on a stool at the long, antique cypress bar.
"Michelob.."
He paid quietly and looked up at the tv mounted in the corner, sipping the foam that slowly rose from the neck of the bottle. Music videos filled with unnaturally perfect, bikini-clad women and shirtless, muscular men with chiseled features paraded across the screen between important messages from the sponsors--mostly beer, trendy garment manufacturers and automobiles. Charlie looked around with a sigh and noticed that everyone else seemed to constantly be in the process of either turning toward or away from the television or trying in some way to consciously to ignore it.
Charlie pulled out a dollar and studiously folded it back and forth on the bar in front of him, stealing glances at the bartender. Soon enough, he had four quarters and was standing before the jukebox. He played two blues songs by a long-dead black man. The tv volume was turned down and the music loped along, smoothing everyone's mood. He ambled back to his stool.
The pool player caught Charlie's eye and nodded approvingly as he shot and missed a maroon seven ball in the corner pocket.
Charlie raised an eyebrow, squinted, nodded, took a sip of his beer and returned to his spot near the taps.
At the bar again, making a concerted effort to avoid the television, his gaze moved from liquor bottle to liquor bottle, examining, appraising, remembering. . . listening to the man on the jukebox holler his woes over driving rhythms and a railroad train harmonica player that made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up.
The reverie was broken by the buzz at the door.
The bartender looked at a screen under the bar that Charlie could see in the mirror through all the bottles. He could also see what looked like a sawed-off shotgun lying on the shelf, next to the little screen. When it came to security, they didn't play around at Jonny's. Not since the murder of a nineteen yr. old kid right outside the front door the year before.
The door buzzed and opened.
Charlie and the others at the bar all looked mutely at the mirror behind the bar and watched her come in.
She wore a long coat with jeans and tennis shoes showing out of the bottom. Her black hair framed a face with a slight south-of-the-border cast to it. Bustling her coat off, she sat down on the last stool at the bar, next to Charlie.
Charlie, careful not to look at her, lit a cigarette and pushed the ashtray to his right, her being on his left. Before he had taken the first drag, she was lighting one too, so he moved the ashtray back to his left into the neutral space on the bar between the invisible lines of their staked out spots on the bar.
"Thank you" she said, looking not at his face, but at his shoulder, or hand, or somewhere. Charlie couldn't tell, watching her in the bar mirror, her appraising him unabashedly. She followed his gaze and turned to stare right at his reflection and their eyes met for a second, Charlie turning away first, then furtively looking back, her looking away, then back, both of them looking down, blushing.
"Charlie. . ." he said, sticking his cigarette into the slotted ashtray and extending a warm hand.
"Rosa," she said, "but my full name is Rosalita" she continued, letting a slight, probably second or third generation, accent peek through.
"It's a beautiful name" he said, feeling her soft, tan hand in his. She had given it to him palm down, like a princess, as if she were expecting him to genuflect and kiss her knuckles. He just squeezed it ever-so-lightly and nodded sheepishly at her.
He could feel the stares coming from the other men in the bar and he couldn't blame them. He had become the only entertainment in the bar, other than the music videos, which remained soundless even though the juke-box had long since quieted.
"Like a beer?" he asked.
"Okay."
"Michelob?"
"Lite please."
"Fine, fine. . ." he trailed off as he tried to imagine her midriff through the multiple shirts that girded her against the cold. The bartender was standing in front of him before he had his wallet out. "Michelob and a McLite" Charlie said, dropping a five on the bar.
The beers came and they sat and sipped them in silence. The tv volume returned and they smoked slowly as the beers disappeared.
He was down to one last frothy sip when she produced a pocket book from within the folds of her voluminous coat and ordered up two shots of whiskey and more beer.
They sat drinking like that for the space of an hour or more. Neither of them saying more than two or three words at a time, occasionally nodding at each other in response to something on the tv. The pool player turned in the balls and chalk, the tv switched to baseball, no one in the bar spoke, blue cigarette smoke hung in the air and rose lethargically to be gently sliced by the two slow moving ceiling fans that were suspended from the high ceilings.
"You smoke?" Charlie mumbled the question in the quiet bar.
Rosa looked at him, time seemed to slow and Charlie fidgeted in his chair, puffing at his cigarette. "Yes, but first let me go to the bathroom." She got up a little wobbly and put a hand on his shoulder, squeezing gently. He put out a hand to steady her and he let it rest on the small of her back. He could feel the taut, parallel muscles and the pert curve that led downward. She regained her balance and turned, her hair flying past his face. The smell of strawberries and something else and his hand was left holding only empty air.
Charlie looked around at the other patrons. They looked like wax statues and he found himself imagining them with dust and spider webs like he imagined an old abandoned wax museum might look. He slouched back to staring straight ahead at his beer, sitting on the bar. He tracked the statues in his peripheral vision for a while and could feel his eyes glazing after a minute. The bathroom door squealed and slammed loudly and Rosa was soon behind him.
"Hey Chuck, you all right?" she ran a cool hand over his back.
"Yeah," he said blinking away the trance. "Let's go burn."
"Let's go" she said shrugging on her coat and buttoning it up.
The door buzzed as they approached and Charlie pushed it open for Rosa with one hand and waved to the bartender behind him with the other.
Outside it was cold. As they walked, they both stuck their hands into their pockets, foregoing cigarettes until they reached warmth.
"So you got it with you?" she asked, looking up at Charlie.
"No, it's at my house." he said, noticing for the first time that she couldn't be over 5'1.
"Where's that?"
"Three-and-a-half more blocks."
"Oh."
They walked along in silence, her heels sometimes giving her problems on the irregular brick sidewalks. After the third stumble, Charlie offered a piggy-back ride. She politely declined, watching the changing sidewalk pass more and more quickly beneath her feet like a treadmill gone wild.

A Shitty Day Continues

I opened the door in a pair of old swim trunks and a stained, white T-shirt. In retrospect, sopping wet and stinking, I mustn't have made a very good impression.
The young couple at the door were very nice. They explained that they were looking for a friend of theirs who hadn't been seen in a while. Apparently, he had lived in my apartment and they thought he still lived there. I could imagine their surprise when the door opened on the scene in the living room, not to mention my condition.
They politely apologized for intruding and disappeared around the corner.
Two hours later, waiting for Earl and charging my telephone battery, I found a cop at my front door.
He handcuffed me, made me kneel, and pushed my face down to the floor.
His safety assured, he proceeded to question me.
"What do you know about Carmen LaTrobe?", he demanded.
"Nothing", I replied.
"So, how long have you lived here?", he asked almost conversationally.
"Two months."
"Who did you rent this apartment from?"
"The apartment people downstairs."
"W H O!!!!?" He yelled so loudly that he spit and his face turned red. From my vantage point I could see that he might even have had an erection.
"I don't know the old lady's name. She should be down there right now", I said as calmly as I could.
"We'll see", he said ominously and stalked out of the apartment.
So there I lay. Hog-tied on my sopping living room floor.
I tried at the cuffs. It hurt to change the rotation of my wrists in the least. I resigned myself to lay there in the toilet water.
The day had started out so pleasantly and now here I was. I couldn't figure out what I had done wrong. Just to be safe, I made a mental note to never wear glasses while shitting.
I managed to crawl like a caterpillar myself over to the couch. I was just about up onto it's heavenly, dry surface when the cop came splashing back in with the old lady.
"Get back on the fucking floor!!", he screamed in his way.
I assumed the butt-fuck position and waited.
He pranced around me like a drill sergeant inspecting the stance of a new recruit at attention.
I remained perfectly still.
The old lady just gaped at the apartment.
"She says she doesn't know who the hell you are and has stated to me that you are not currently a tenant here", he said, pointing at the stooped figure of my landlady in the doorway.
"What do you have to say to that?"
They exchanged a knowing glance and then both stared down at me.
"So, um, am I under arrest?", I stammered.
At this point, the officer kicked me in the side, hard, then he went on a delirious rant about justice and the weak willed being amongst us, or something along those lines. Sweaty and winded after his speech, he picked me up by the cuffs and yanked me along all the way to his squad car.


In the cell I sat talking to a self-professed career mugger. He told me how he made an easy living mugging people. He'd travel all around the country; city to city, state to state. He'd go all around the city mugging people at night. Taking buses and sometimes cabs after particularly good takes. By day he lived the good life playing the tourist wherever he went. He never had to injure anyone, he said, and he always tried to drop the stuff other than money (like lipstick, wallets, etc) near by and therefore, possibly locatable.
He was full of reasons why he wasn't a bad guy. I just sat and smoked and listened to him.

WELFARE OFFICE Pt. 7

ALBERT GYPSUM SAT upon a piece of driftwood down on the batture of the Mississippi river among the tall weeds and weeping willows that grew there. The solitude of that narrow strectch of wilderness between the man-made levee and the river appealed to him. He could hear the occasional vehicle as it rumbled past on the old highway but he was hidden from view and nobody bothered him. He had three old cane poles set out in a shady spot where the water ran deep near the shore between a stand of bald cypress and a couple of Chinese tallow trees. The hooks were baited with small pieces of chicken gizzards that he carried with him in a yellow and blue plastic bread bag. In truth he could have baited the hooks with anything, even spittle, because he was after catfish and those scavenging bottom-feeders weren't picky. Nowadays people told him that he shouldn't eat fish pulled from the river because of the pollution but he still ate what he caught, mostly hard-head cats. And those suckers were big and meaty, healthy looking. Albert had eaten them all his life; they tasted fine enough when seasoned and cooked properly. His wife Cherry was one hell of a cook. Lord have mercy, the woman could bitch and moan enough to fray any man's nerves. He shook his head and looked heavenward in mock atonement. Still, he admitted to himself that she had good qualities and baked creole catfish with tomatoes, shrimps and okra was one of them. Cherry and Pearlie both knew their way around a deep-fryer. Man, they fried those catfish fillets to a golden perfection. On Fridays the smell permeated all through the trailer court and beyond. They weren't at all greasy, you could plunk those suckers into your mouth with a little tartar sauce and they melted away like butter. But damn it all, he couldn't taste much of anything since he lost his taste buds. But he still had his memory of the flavor. And that, at least, was something.

WELFARE OFFICE Pt. 6

CHESTER AND ELVIRA squeezed past the impatient crowd and exited through the glass doors of the welfare office. They turned south down the old State highway and began walking along the worn rut in the grass between the levee and the road where a sidewalk should have been. The baleful sun beat down forcefully and a lone katydid chirped in the weeds. Dump trucks and industrial vehicles rumbled past kicking up dust and belching exhaust fumes. The humidity overwhelmed the pair and soon they were sticky and drenched. Chester's threadbare shirt clung to his bones like a second skin and the perspiration picked up the brown dust. They knew enough to let the work trucks pass unmolested but whenever an old car creaked past they stuck out their thumbs in hopes of a ride. Nobody stopped but Cherry Gypsum, whom they knew from the trailer court on Dead Man Lane. She told them that she needed a few bucks for gas and had to make a stop halfway down the Parish at the old clapboard house of worship. She wanted to speak to Minster Thurgood. It was he who told her about the universal food stamp reimbursement in the first place. That's what he called it, 'a universal food stamp reimbursement.' The minister had an excellent vernacular grasp and enunciated his words clearly when he spoke. As pastor of the First New Risers Baptist Missionary Church, he was held in high esteem by almost everyone in the lower Parish. And as a result of his benevolent candor, Cherry didn't have to wait in line all day and might even catch the tail end of her stories. She wanted to thank him, keep in his good graces. Chester and Elvira passed on the ride. They wouldn't have jutted their thumbs out in the first place had they recognized her beat sedan. Chester held a grudge against her because Cherry often made a stink about the late night ruckus they kicked up at the court, mainly when her husband Albert joined them. Hell, they'd find a ride eventually. Why waste money on gasoline? What they needed was a good stiff drink anyhow; a nip of something to slake the thirst. Cherry drove off muttering under her breath, engine sputtering, struts and shocks ready to cough up the ghost, exhaust fumes blackening the air. Chester and Elvira walked a bit further to the dilapidated Ajax Bar, which stood like a sentinel and the gateway to the lower Parish proper.

Chester's pockets were empty except for the packet of food stamps that Mister LeFluer had given them but he padded himself reflexively to be sure. Elvira had some dough, he knew. She always saved a bit for just this purpose. It was a big trip up and down the only highway in the Parish when you didn't own a vehicle. There was no bus service, or public transit of any kind.

“Let's get a nip and rest our dogs,” Chester postured with bravado.

They limped past the faded, handwritten Ajax Bar Sign and down the oyster shell drive toward the sagging and rotted porch. It was almost as hot inside as out but the lights were dimmed and that made a difference. An old ceiling fan slowly sliced through the thick air and squeaked with each rotation. There wasn't a soul in the place save for Jim, the old barkeep who was a permanent fixture. The warped wooden floorboards creaked under their feet as they sidled up the the bar. Chester ordered two shots of bar brand whiskey and a couple of Dixie drafts. The barman nodded and poured the drinks without saying a word. He was a part of the place like the jukebox and barstools.

WELFARE OFFICE Pt. 5

THE PAIR STANK a bit and dressed in tattered rags. One got the impression that they could have cleaned themselves up easily enough and probably had decent enough clothes in the chifforobe at home. They defiantly chose to wear the rags. Plus they had sense enough to dress down for welfare appointments. Despite too many routine encounters over the years, Cyprian had never seen them sober. They were blunt and crass toward each other but in a good-natured and jovial sort of way. Cyprian represented State Authority with a capital A, which meant plenty of Yes Sirs, No Sirs and the like. Elvira was especially obsequious in his presence. She whined and squawked in the hopes of furthering her cause. Despite her ingratiating mannerisms and her rail thin frame, there was something pleasant and attractive about her. Chester, garrulous and unshaven, dramatically inhaled puffs of his cheap cigarette and blew plumes of blue smoke into the air. But he toadied to the man as well...this day he walked with a pronounced limp and wore no shoes upon his malodorous feet. He carefully unwrapped a bandage from the big toe of his left foot. The appendage was swollen to triple the normal size, purple and crowned with a cracked yellow toenail.

Elvira said, “Look at it will you? I tell you it looks bad. Don't it Mister LeFluer? He needs to see a doctor but he don't listen. They'll have no choice but to cut it off before long.” She winced. “Gangrene will set in, I keep on telling him. And then where will he be?”

“Shut your pie-hole, will ya?” Chester barked at her. It was a grand bluff, an act. He grinned and laughed aloud as he said it. The three of them did.

Chester began to pick at his gangrenous toe and Cyprian watched fascinated. While in a drunken stupor during the storm, he fell into a drainage ditch and busted the toe on a pipe. He lay there for some time, oblivious to the howling winds and the rain which pelted him. Elvira thought he was lucky not to have drowned. The pain was negligible thanks to the liquor and, once he came to, he brazenly walked on it until he sobered up. Initially bloodied, it had since hardened into a solid mass of scab. He was scabrous; little flesh wounds pockmarked his face and arms. It had been on hell of a tumultuous hurricane party. Chester's breath stank of cheap cigarettes and malt liquor.

Elvira wrung her boney hands nervously.“O Mister LeFluer, do you think we can get more stamps on account of Chester's toe? We ain't got nothin' to eat in the trailer since the lights went out. We go hungry our borrow from neighbors. That's the truth. All our meat went bad. Sausages and everything. And now with this toe can't neither of us work. I got to look after Chester before he cripples himself.”

“Elvira, I'm warnin' you...shut your trap!” Chester snarled. He feigned a readiness to backhand her. Cyprian dreamed of aiding him in that endeavor . They shot each other humorous and conspiratorial glances. Elvira began to chew at the quick of her thumbnail.

“But Chester baby, you know it ain't fair. The blacks get everything handed to 'em on a silver platter and poor white trash like us get nothing. Here we are starvin' to death in the breadbasket of America. I mean, it's a shame Mister Lefluer. What we got to do? I'm tellin' ya from where I sit it looks bad. And now this toe...Jesus, Mary and Joseph!”

“Fill out this paperwork in duplicate, for starters, Miss Logan, and I'll see what I can do. And for the love of God, take care of that toe, Mister Monsoon. It looks bad.”

Chester breathed a sigh of relief and an intoxicating whiff hit Cyprian in the face. Elvira made the Sign of the Cross. “God bless you!” The six-month old light bill passed unnoticed.

WELFARE OFFICE PT.4

CYPRIAN LOATHED HIS position with the State. He'd been there too long. That's the way life goes if you haven't much drive...youth slips away in a fashion. As the months stretched into years, his vocation became monotonous and unbearable. Thus with time he fell into a dull torpor and developed an irrational hatred of poverty and the poor. Not once did he encounter the Joads and their Grapes of Wrath. Nor the struggling hard workers of Sinclair's Jungle. The poor he knew were a downright shiftless, cantankerous breed. His was an odious task: pacify, preen and mollycoddle a population of ne'er-do-wells. To become hardened to the actualities of poverty and all of it's ramifications was the vilest of tortures. He longed for the days of compassion. As a boy, on his trips through the old French Quarter, he never failed to place a coin in an up stretched palm if he had one to spare. Once he even volunteered at a soup kitchen, and in the shadow of his memory he remembered handing a steaming bowl of thin turkey gumbo to one of the unfortunates. “Thanks,” the man muttered, his breath redolent of wine. “You're welcome,” Cyprian quickly responded out of habit, more than anything. “I know damn good and well I'm welcome,” the man snarled back at him with vehement hatred. “I'm in a soup kitchen!” Flecks of white spittle gathered in the cracks of the man's meaty lips. Cyprian stared at him blankly for a minute, turned away and never forgot.

One thing for sure, the clients kept him on his toes. Cyprian jammed Cherry Gypsum's paperwork into a tattered brown cardboard accordion file, tossed it onto the floor near his feet and glanced toward the door. Next up were a couple of maudlin drunks. They squeezed into the room before he could air it out. Chester Monsoon and his shack-job, Elvira Logan. They cohabited in a fairly new trailer down the road, just off the highway in a trailer court on Dead Man Lane. Chester purchased the trailer with the proceeds of a lawsuit settlement. A rare but sage financial move. He liked to boast that there was a four-burner stove in there, a flushing toilet and even a small shower stall. The poor bastard had been injured in a barge collision on the river. Half-drunk on the job but never proven in court. Lawsuits were like the lottery to them- why not take a chance on winning? The same concept held true with Life Insurance policies. Once in a moon one of them croaked and the survivors hit the jackpot. They usually blew it in a fortnight...who's to say they were wrong?

WELFARE OFFICE Pt. 3

IN THE BOWELS of the welfare office, behind a locked door marked Employees Only a narrow hallway with cracked linoleum flooring led to a row of diminutive offices filled with gunmetal gray file cabinets and old wooden desks. In the last of these cubicles, Cyprian LeFluer ran a napkin across his lips. The day had him harried, nerves in tatters, so he ate his lunch while standing up. An oyster po-boy. Punch in, punch out. Five days a week. And never a moments rest when the vultures are circling. The welfare office, what a place to work. He gobbled down the last bite and took a swig of water as his speaker phone buzzed: a plethora of clients still waiting to be seen in the lobby. The jobless kept themselves busy in this Asshole of the Earth. No wonder they seldom found time to work. Between visits to the doctor and the police station, making groceries, courtroom appearances and the welfare office they scarcely had time to think. If they did find a little time on their hands, they hopped under the sheets for a little recreational venery. And to hell with prophylaxis. Cherry Gypsum wanted to speak to him for a moment. Urgent, she says. Cyprian dreaded encounters with this bitter woman. Life dealt her a shitty hand...what had he to do with it? Ah, the words which spewed from her mouth: endless, coarse, guttural. Death would be a favorable turn were you to take her words at face value. But as you get older and death nears, life becomes more precious and you hold onto it no matter how miserable it's been to you thus far. Cyprian belched and walked toward the door. There's no reasoning with those whose minds don't function in a rational manner.

He brought her into one of the little rooms just off the lobby and motioned her to sit down. A buzzing fluorescent tube light cast an eerie glow onto the peeling lime-green cinder block walls. As always, he took the chair nearest the door perchance he had to bolt. Oftentimes they looked about ready to stab him with the pencils stubs he gave them. Mrs. Cherry Gypsum refused to take a seat, said her bad hip bothered her. She stood there and began with it:

“He all big down there, Mister LeFluer.” She wore flip-flop sandals which exposed crusty heels and yellowed toenails. Her hair was up in curlers beneath a clear plastic cap and she wore a shocking pink housecoat. A few renegade hairs sprouted from her upper lip; her mouth she scrunched into a continual scowl.

“All big? What do you mean by that?”

“He swoll up like a baseball. His testicles. Them doctors, they don't know what's wrong but I tell you one thing: Albert cain't do no kinda work. He too swoll up.”

“How big?” Cyprian inquired.

“Big. Swoll up. He cain't do nothin' but lay in the bed. Moanin' and groanin' is all he do.”

Cyprian knew Albert as a lazy son-of-a-gun, albeit justified. At his age, no one would find much comfort in menial labor. He had already been wrung through the system: one shitty low wage job after another. Yet we've all got to eat, it's a biological fact. One simply plays the cards dealt until the bitter end. Old Albert suffered one malady on top of the next. In truth he had a weakness and a propensity for port wine. And a gambling habit which kept him up late nights. As a youth he worked on the boats where the wind carved his flesh and the sun baked his brain. As a result he resembled a dried-up septuagenarian by the age of fifty. Nevertheless, he was a likable fellow, full of piss and vinegar. He still had spunk and enjoyed getting his kicks in. Always a smile and a good tale to spin. And what a raucous laugh! From the very core of his soul, from the gut. Laughter as only the poor know it. Cyprian pitied him his termagant wife.

“All my meat done gone bad with this storm, Mister LeFluer. I just stocked the freezer full of steaks and gizzards and now they rancid as can be. And they 'bout the cut the lights out for good, Albert ain't paid the bill. I don't know what we gonna do.”

“Fill out these papers for starters.”

Her eyes got big in mock surprise. “All these? I hope it ain't gonna take too long. I got to git home to watch my stories...” And she began checking off the boxes: no, no, none, n/a, nothing, no...”Albert cain't do no kinda work,” she added defensively.

“Did Albert get a statement from his doctor?”

“Huh?” She pretended not to hear but then went on, “No, we ain't got no statement...But I'll tell you he swoll up big. And now he say somethin' wrong with his taste buds. He cain't taste no food. No matter what I feed him, he say he cain't taste it. Them doctors don't know what's up. Bringin' Albert to 'em just waste his medical card.”

Cyprian sighed. The entire family was stricken with acute lazybones. Two corpulent ill-mannered daughters and their common-law husbands plus a plethora of grandchildren all living under one small roof. None of them ever lifted a finger more than need be. On the books, understand. Except old Albert, ironically. Once in a moon he would put on his shrimp boots and pick up scrap metal from around the Pogie fish plant. He cashed this in for a fresh supply of port wine and a few bucks to the wife to shut her trap. One son-in-law did receive disability payments from the State on account of a gimp left leg, the result of a barroom brawl over careless love. It ended tragically with a single bullet. All the family's hope were pinned on Boo Williams, Pearlie's husband, who sat around strumming an acoustic guitar all day in fantastic idleness. Years prior he worked off-shore on the rigs and got himself stranded on a sandy barrier island for a couple days in the midst of a tropical rainstorm. Lawsuit pending. Work in the Gulf and on the river was fraught with peril. A rusty trawl boat sat on cinder blocks in the front yard. To use it would negate the prospective settlement. The shady lawyer eked them along on a stipend which lowered the potential return on the lawsuit. And to top it all off, Pearlie found herself with another bun in the oven. The family couldn't afford another mouth to feed but the strictures of their belief system prohibited abortion. The duality did not phase them: religion played a role of convenience.

An idea germinated in Cyprian's crop. “Mrs. Gypsum, I saw Albert just last Thursday before the storm picking up scrap metal on the side of the road near the Pogie plant. I blew the horn and he waved...”

“Huh? Oh, he felt a little better and wanted to git out to stretch his legs. He don't like being cooped up all the time, you know. Them grandkids drive him batty...the way they scream and holler. They work on his last nerve.” Her lips moved mechanically, as if she were chewing the cud.

“That income must be reported.”

“O help me Jesus!” And she looked skyward.

WELFARE OFFICE Pt. 2

A RUMOR SPREAD in line that you had to have a copy of your light bill in order to prove the loss. Plus you had to sign an affidavit estimating the value of the food you lost during the outage. Almost everyone in line had hopes of claiming their entire monthly allotment had gone bad and spoiled in the heat which followed the storm. Some folks ran or sent children home to retrieve crumpled utility bills from the trash. Chester and Elvira had only a stained copy of an old bill which Chester found balled up in a corner of their trailer near the garbage pail. He took it with them not on a whim but because he knew the routine. The lights to their property had been cut off for lack of payment six months prior. They both hoped that the welfare worker wouldn't notice the old date on the bill. Chester scraped at the printed date in the corner with a fingernail which smudged it and made it almost illegible. He figured that would cast enough uncertainty on it such that they would get the stamps. Besides, they weren't greedy and were only going to claim that half of their monthly benefit was spent on perishables lost. One thing was sure, he was sick of eating canned goods from the food bank and the first thing they were going to do on the road home was stop at Me-Maw's Superette for a nice plump roaster chicken or two. Some dirty rice, mustard, and maybe a few links of good andouille sausage. And with the cash that Elvira stuffed surreptitiously into her tank top, they would buy beer, wine and cigarettes. Chester smiled a half-smile but winced a little when he put too much weight on his sore toe. The day wasn't starting out too badly, but they seldom did if one didn't expect too much. Roll with the punches, that's the mantra he chanted to himself and indeed lived by.

WELFARE OFFICE Pt. 1

ONCE THE STRONG winds abated and the clouds parted, a piss-yellow sun crept out and hung low in the chalky blue sky. A long line of people snaked through the lobby of the welfare office and out the glass doors to the parking lot beyond. Chester Monsoon and Elvira Logan stood out under the rising sun with bare feet already burning on the asphalt. They shuffled their body weight from one foot to the other, as the situation required to abate the sting. Chester had a dirty white cloth bandage wrapped around a wound on his left big toe which made him wince every time he shifted to that foot. Elvira glanced at it nervously and chewed her bottom lip. With heads throbbing and still partly stewed from the night before, they stood in vigilant silence and with the patience of Buddha. A tropical storm grew in the Gulf over the weekend and whipped across the Parish, but just the tip, a near miss if ever there was one. A handful of residents were without electrical power until Monday, a minor inconvenience. The State boys in charge of the matter convened in their dull brown Capital offices but were unable to determine who lost power or the duration of the outage. An executive decision was made to authorize a full month's Food Stamps to everyone on the dole to cover the loss of victuals which might have spoiled in refrigerators and freezers during the aforementioned storm and subsequent power outage. Might congenial indeed. Word spread like lightening and by mid-morning everyone in receipt of Public Assistance in the Parish was aware of the windfall, which accounted for the line of quiet desperation which continued to grow and writhe like a plump earthworm on the sizzling pavement.

Spectacles

I awoke slowly. The beers had flowed the night before like a dam burst open. I sat on the edge of the bed staring blankly down for a long time. I sat thinking of absolutely nothing. I looked from the carpet to my pot belly to my erect penis. My muddled mind figured out that I needed to get up and take a good long piss. Must be some of that beer still fermenting in there, I thought.
As I sat thinking about standing, I realized that this would be a shit, not just a piss. I got up and stumbled to the bathroom, still fighting the residual drunkenness of the night before. I sat heavily on the cracked seat. I reached back and got the copy of Love is a Dog From Hell by Bukowski that currently lived on the back of the toilet for people to read while using my facilities.
I sat reading. One poem told me that to become a good, no a GREAT writer, you must drink a lot of beer and fuck a great many whores. Well, I had the first part covered. I read a couple more and stood to wipe. I turned, crouched and wiped. As I did, the spectacles fell from my face and into the bowl. "Shit." I thought and shit I saw. I looked at my glasses sitting on a bed of shit and at my hand holding shit-covered shit-paper and there was still some shit on my ass too.
I froze for a bit while I decided what to do.
I certainly couldn't go waddling around the house and if I just reached in and got the glasses, my weak stomach would lose its' contents. I needed to finish wiping, but what of the glasses? I couldn't cover them with shit covered wet toilet paper.
I crouched there, thinking.
Finally I threw the paper into the waste basket and finished wiping doing the same with the rest of the paper. The whole time I stared at those glasses resting on their bed of shit.
Done with wiping, I stood to face the problem. My Idea was this: If I flushed, the shit would get sucked down into the abyss, leaving the glasses stuck across the opening. I had to time it right though. Just as the water sloshed at the bottom of the bowl, I'd have to reach in (lightning-fast) and snatch the glasses. I figured I'd have to disinfect them in some way, but that was another problem.
I positioned myself. Right hand perched above the bowl and left on the flusher.
I flushed.
The shit and glasses both spun around and around and around. I watched helplessly as it all flushed down the toilet.
The bowl refilled, the back refilled for a bit longer and the thing finally stopped running as I crouched there dejected. My glasses were gone for good.
I sighed and plucked the used paper out of the waste basket and deposited it in the toilet. I flushed again and they spun around and went down. As it cycled, the toilet made a tortured THUNK and something underneath burst with great sprays of water all over the floor, up the walls, and right in my face.
I panicked. I tried to turn off the water, but it was no good. The pipes were done for and there was no turning it off. I jumped up, got a headrush and fell to the wet tile floor. On the way down, I smacked up against the edge of the tub and must have broken a couple of ribs. I lay there for a while before trying again. I got up more slowly and tip-toed out of the bathroom closing the door behind me. Water was pouring out from under the door in waves. I reached into the closet and grabbed an armload of towels. These I threw on the floor and kicked into the crack under the door. This abated the flow for about 30 seconds.
I yelled at the door and slammed a fist into it. It went through like paper and hurt like hell. I extracted my bloody fist from the jagged hole and shook it in the air. I screamed obscenities at the ceiling and stalked out, blind, stinking, and naked into the living room. I stumbled around the room looking for the cordless telephone.
I finally found it stuck between the cushions on the couch. I flopped down and pressed the TALK button. It beeped three times and flashed a little red light labeled BATT at me. Exasperated, I threw the phone across the room and thrashed helplessly on the couch for a while. Once my faculties were recovered, I located a moderately dirty towel on the floor and wrapped it around my waist. Thus clad, I left my apartment in search of a phone. I walked to the next door in the complex and knocked.
No answer.
I walked to the next one.
No answer there either.
I tried the knob. Finding it unlocked, I walked inside and looked around. It looked worse than my place. It was littered with bottles of all kinds. Beer, whiskey, and wine bottles were strewn all around. Mixed in with these were cigarette butts, garbage from fast food restaurants, slips of paper with scrawled phone numbers, junk mail, Ed McMahon proclaiming that Edna Croush had won a bundle, and various other waste products of modern american life.
I tried to figure out which of the people I nodded at on the way to and from the laundry room and out in the parking lot was Edna Croush. I couldn't pick her out to save my life.
Soon enough I remembered that I had a mission here and abandoned my reverie. Locating a phone and phone book, I looked up Plumbers. All the pages from H though L were missing, but the P's were still there. I sat in an old bean-bag chair sending plumes of little styrofoam balls flying and dialed 'AAA Plumbing'.
"Hello, Earl here, what ya' need?", a gruff voice asked.
"Uh, yes, is this Triple A plumbing?", I asked the voice.
"Yeah it is, you got a job for us?"
"Well, yes I do, and it's kind of an emergency. You see, my toilet's busted and water's going everywhere. It's seeping into the rugs as we speak. Can you get a guy out here to do something about it?"
"Have you turned off the water?", he asked, like a baboon.
"What the hell do YOU think!? The pipes are busted! I can't turn off the fucking water!"
Dead silence on the other end of the phone.
"Hey look buddy, I'm sorry", I pleaded, "I'm having a bad morning, the toilet's busted and I need someone out here. Please Earl."
The guy finally agreed to get someone out to take a look at it for me. As we were straightening out the particulars, this woman of about maybe forty-five years came out of the bedroom.
She was naked and had what looked like dried puke on her big fleshy belly. She blearily stumbled into the kitchen and began to fiddle around with a bottle and a glass from what I could hear. I sat in silence, hoping that she'd not notice me and go back to her bedroom with the drink.
No such luck.
I hadn't hung up the phone. It started making a terrific noise. Apparently, Earl had hung up. I heard a glass drop in the kitchen and she came running out.
When she saw me there, she froze. She just stared all wide eyes and shivering flesh.
I took her in.
She was a big woman. Maybe two hundred fifty pounds. She tried to cover herself with her hands. She didn't have big enough hands to cover anything.
I gave myself a mental shake and tried to think of what I could do or say to not get arrested or shot as a result of all of this. I smiled up at her from the beanbag and opened my towel to expose my cock.
She looked at it as if she'd never seen one before and I guess it gave her a start because she flew into action. In one swift move she unfroze, ran into and then out of the kitchen, and threw an apple at me.
It hit me with surprising force right in the belly. I rolled out of the chair and across the garbage littered floor. I found the door under a hail of rotten fruit and smashing bottles.
Gripping my towel like a relay baton, I ran clumsily back to my apartment where I beheld the carnage. There was water in the living room submerging the carpet under about an inch of water. The kitchen was in a similar state. The bedroom, however, seemed to be holding up well until I noticed that all of my clothes had soaked up water and worse yet, the bed, which sits directly on the floor, had become entirely waterlogged.
Something had to be done.
I waded to the bathroom and opened the door on much deeper water. I sat in it and waited for it to pour out enough to see the pipes.
It did and I spotted the broken pipe. Just a big hole really. I stuck my thumb into the hole and the flow stopped, but the pressure was tremendous. I had to push constantly to keep it back. It kept spraying out on the sides of my thumb, catching me in the face, across the shoulders, everywhere.
I sat there filthy and naked hoping that Earl hadn't forgotten me.

Open up and Drive

Charlie sat trying to ride out a sudden inexplicable and frightening urge to rip holes into his own chest. Flashbulb images flew through his mind. His fingers, slipping between ribs, tearing flesh, pulling open a wet, yawning vacuity, dripping with gore. Face damaged too, jawbone showing through a mass of tendons and muscles. His arms snaking around his head, severing it with a swift twisting motion. . . his heart threatening to pound right out of his chest and onto the living room floor, throat constricting around his breath, screeching, horrible noises deafening him from somewhere inside of his tortured head, eyes darting around rapidly. . . his cloistered room pressed inward on him. Dust motes and lint swirled thickly around his face in the light of the reading lamp causing further breathing difficulties. Standing up, he paused to take stock of the effect of his change in position on his physiology. His heart began to pump faster, but the rest remained disgustingly usual.

He stepped softly to the bathroom, taking care so as not to wake the neighbors who were audibly sleeping on the other side of the thin wall. To his mind, even his soft steps seemed elephantine, reverberating through the floors like a pile-driver.

Icy water, tinged with rust, poured from the faucet and slowly turned clearer. Charlie splashed great handfuls of it up into his face and bent to let the water run into his hair. He whipped his head out of the sink with a splattering of his hair on the low ceiling. Out of breath and blinking away water, he checked his pupilary reflex. No dilation irregularities. When he put a hand over his eye and leaned closer to the mirror, he could see his pupils grow and when he removed the hand, they shrunk to a normal size. What is a normal size? Charlie didn't know, but they seemed to be close enough to what he had grown accustomed to seeing in the mirror over the years.

Six billion of us, he thought as he dried his face and patted at his shirt front. Six fucking billion human beings eating and shitting and puking, farting, picking their noses, fucking and sucking and killing, raping and robbing, dying and being born, wet and screaming, falling from the ripped and jagged hole right down to the hot asphalt to rub elbows and assholes just like so many bacteria jiggling around on a big petri dish. . .

He tip-toed through the kitchen, silently getting a bottle of beer from the refrigerator on the way. Sitting on his bed, he got dressed, intermittently taking pulls at the beer. He got his wallet, keys and two cold ones from the fridge before leaving.

Locking the front door and giving it a shove to make sure, he got into his car and, seat belt securely fastened, pulled away with a beer between his legs and the other one jammed into the garbage piled behind the passenger seat.

He lit a cigarette and drove aimlessly for a while. His eyes scanning the rear view, the side mirror and the parking lots and driveways along side the streets. . . He carefully examined every set of headlights, coming or going, to determine if they might be those of a police cruiser, especially looking out for the telltale parking-lights-only Ford LTDs that could occasionally be spotted sitting in lonely lots at that late hour. These were usually found in twos, facing opposite directions, with their driver-side windows adjacent in case they felt like leaning out and swapping spit with their partners or something.

Charlie inhaled cigarette after cigarette. He sucked the smoke down harshly, feeling his throat burn and redden with every drag, but he didn't care. He couldn't stop envisioning himself as a twisted, bloody pulp and the more he drove, the more automotive the themes of these horrible images became.

At a red light, no other cars in sight, he hopped out with a dirty shirt found on the passenger side floorboard and wiped at the grimy windshield just to make himself feel marginally safer. He got back into the car and waited for the light. It turned and he took a left up onto the elevated expressway.

He noticed that his heart had slowed down markedly and seemed almost to be beating normally. He counted three beers and eight cigarettes. The alcohol? Probably not, it wasn't hardly enough to produce that much of a change. He'd drunk considerably more than that in his time and still felt fairly sober. Maybe the nicotine had played a part. . .No, he figured it was more likely the heavy drags he'd been taking that had primarily affected the change. Deep breathing's how the athletes and kung-fu masters do it, isn't it? He thought it must have been. Sticking his head out the window and into the wind, he inhaled deeply through his nose and exhaled for an eight count before repeating the process a few times.

Back behind the glass, he almost felt better, but the mild light headedness and the ringing ears reminded him that it was to only be a short reprieve. His eyelids drooped, his scalp tingled and he put both hands on the steering wheel while his head buzzed gently back to normal.

Sirens screamed!

His breath caught, his heart fluttered wildly in his chest and his eyes flashed up to the rearview. There were flashing red and blue lights and some very bright white ones all directly behind his car. He nearly slammed on the brakes reflexively and his eyes darted to the speedometer. He was going about five over the posted limit.

His arms tensed, chills ran down his spine. His feet shook uncontrollably, rattling the pedals as he fumbled with the blinker rod and pulled the car over to the side of the road, trying to make every nuance of the maneuver look as normal and as sober as possible.

The cruiser pulled up close behind him and the lights kept flashing.

Charlie's heart pounded and his temples throbbed. He couldn't stop shaking and feared that it might be noticeable from the other car. He tried to take a deep breath, but his lungs were shaking too. He was able to haltingly fill them with air, but became hotly aware of just how much he was shaking upon exhaling it. He threw the beer in the back seat with all the other garbage and it, no-doubt, spilled its last contents over everything. . . it didn't matter. Charlie's mind raced to think of anything in the car that the officer "might not want to see. . ." but he couldn't order his thoughts. A floodlight came on to further brighten the scene and it was trained on the back of Charlie's head.

"Take the keys out of the ignition and drop them out of the window," a stern voice enunciated slowly over a scratchy pee-ay system.

Charlie performed the action in spite of his hands' frustrating refusals to cooperate.

"Open the door from the outside and step out of the vehicle," the stern voice said deliberately.

Charlie fumbled with the door handle and tried to complete the movement in a relaxed manner. He thought he'd pulled it off rather suavely when the voice yelled,

"HURRY UP! GET THE FUCK OUT OF THE CAR!" and he got out, squinting back at the dazzling myriad of lights flashing and whirling around the cruiser. He could hear a police radio squawking fuzzily somewhere within the lights.

"TURN AROUND! NOWWW!" the voice commanded viciously. "Face the other direction! ON YOUR KNEES!" it boomed as Charlie complied shakily. "Get your hands on your head and lay on your belly, NOW!"

Charlie did it.

Minutes passed as the radio squawked, the lights flashed and Charlie laid, shaking and blinking on the shoulder of the expressway. Not a single car went by the entire time.

It was late.

He heard the door of the police car open and heard a boot hit the pavement with a cold THUD that he could feel through the ground below him. He judged the distance to the cop car to be at least twenty feet, so with a normal stride, the officer would arrive in eight more steps. He waited for the second thud, but only the wind over the mechanical sounds of the rotating lights on the roof of the cop car and the squawks of the radio could be heard.

The next step never came as a door suddenly slammed and the cruiser revved alive and sped off, tires squealing, nearly running over Charlie's prone body.

The sirens faded into the distance. . .

He listened for any noises behind him.

Nothing.

Just the rush of blood in his ears and his breath wheezing against the grainy cement.

A car approached and flew by going over seventy. It honked at him as it went by, him still lying there next to an open car, light pouring out of its door, keys in the road.

He sat up and looked around.

The cops were gone. His heart thumped twice, slowly and deeply before returning to a relatively normal rhythm. No one was approaching and he was utterly alone on the expressway, sitting there on the shoulder, at least thirty feet off of the ground. Dusting himself off and finding his keys with a flashlight from the glove-box, he made it home, hungrily smoking the rest of his pack of cigarettes, before the sun rose.

A Year to Live

Bill and Frank sat watching people go by. The place was a large outdoor pedestrian mall with an ornate fountain as its centerpiece. An indoor mall sat at one end and the Mississippi River ran along its side. All manner of people went by and Bill quickly washed his feet under the weight of a icy stare from an old woman with cat-eye sunglasses on, who sat frozen, admiring the fountain.
Bill turned to let his feet dry in the breeze. Now he was facing the woman. Frank didn't seem to notice her as he smoked and had apparently picked up a pair of sunglasses. Bill wondered at Frank's ability to procure items like cigarettes, lighters, sunglasses, hats, shoes... He figured that he'd either walked into one of the shops back on Canal St. and taken it or swiped it off of someone whilst walking. In either case, it was a pretty neat trick to be able to pull off consistently without getting caught a lot, at least it seemed so to Bill. He bummed a cigarette off of Frank, who apparently had a whole pack.
Frank moaned just loud enough for Bill to hear and when Bill looked over, Frank was staring. Bill followed his line of vision and ended up looking at a gorgeous young woman in a flower print sun dress. She had wispy blond hair and open shoes that were nothing more than a wedge of rubber with tiny leather straps binding them to her feet. Her body was that of a swimsuit model. She walked at a brisk pace, but her face was relaxed and peaceful as if she had nowhere to go, just extra energy. She positively glowed in the sunlight.
Bill looked away before she noticed his stare.
Frank, his head not moving, followed her with his eyes from behind his sunglasses.
While waiting for her to get out of earshot so they would be able to discuss the nuances of her passing, Bill fidgeted around, examining the stone of the fountain, checking his shoes, waving his feet... He still could feel the old woman's stare and he looked at her quickly. Sure enough, she still seemed to be staring right at the spot she had been when they'd first arrived. Bill wished he had a pair of sunglasses. He puffed at his cigarette.
"Damn, that bitch was fine!" Frank said.
"What?"
"That girl in the flowered dress! Didn't you see her?"
"Oh, yeah...yeah! She was a goddess."
"And she knew it too!"
"DID she!" Bill shook his head.
"Did you catch the painted toenails?"
"No! What color?"
"Looked like red..." he pointed to his sunglasses and sighed.
"I liked the shoes."
"Yeah," Frank nodded as he produced a candy bar.
"But how about that beautiful little dress?"
"Shit, that bitch could have been wearing a potato sack..."
"Yeah... Maybe you're right," Bill said as he slipped the shoes onto his bare feet. "But the dress didn't hurt either. How about the way it blew around in the wind, letting a little extra thigh show now and then?"
"You're right, but all I'm saying is that she'd have been fine either way." Frank said as he scanned the crowd, studiously taking in every woman that went by. He dismissed the men as soon as he determined that they were either cops or too smart to be conned. The ones he decided were cops he imagined into painful situations. He was picturing one particular pinhead with a sharpened coat hanger piercing his navel when Bill said something. "What's that?" Frank asked.
"I said, what would you do if you knew you only had a year to live?"
"Well I guess I'd do what I'm doing now until I died in the Charity ward." He paused. "That's a hell of a fucking question to ask, man."
"You took it the wrong way. Of course, that's what I'd do too, given our present situation." They both glanced down at their clothes. "I mean if we were straight and had jobs and houses and wives and families and everything. What then?"
"Those are a lot of ifs..."
"Yeah, but humor me, I think I'm on to something."
"On to something?"
"Yeah. Just answer the question. What WOULD to do?"
Frank thought for a minute. "Is it something painful?"
"What?"
"The thing I'm diagnosed with."
"Doesn't matter."
"Well of course it matters! If it's some horrible wasting illness like AIDS or something, I'd probably kill myself before the year was up."
"Okokok! It's a painless tumor that the doctors say will explode and kill you in exactly one year."
"They can't operate?"
"No."
"Ok. well that changes things a lot."
"You're right...So what would you do?"
"Well, let's see..." Frank meditatively watched a little latin girl go by.
"Caramel." Bill mumbled.
"Caramel?"
"Yeah, that mexican cutie with the caramel colored skin that just went by..."
"Oh, yeah. I saw her. . . So?"
"So what?"
"What would you do?"
"I don't know," Frank said, getting annoyed. "I guess I'd divorce my wife, kiss my kids good-bye and buy a Harley. Maybe smoke a lot of opium and tool around on my bike until the damned tumor blew up and killed me in my sleeping bag."
Bill didn't say anything and just sat nodding reflectively.
"What?"
"Hmmm," Bill said, seeming to wake up from his thoughts.
"Then what would YOU do?" Frank asked with a tinge of sarcasm.
"I'd just stay in my place with my family... Don't get me wrong, I'd quit my job and all, but it'd be better than dying alone."
"Eh, maybe you're right." Frank watched a young couple pushing a baby in a stroller. The man was sweating profusely and carrying two large baby bags that threatened to burst. "What kind of question is that to ask anyway?"
"I dunno," Bill shrugged, "I just think it says a lot about a person's ambitions, that's all."
"What do you mean by that?"
"I think the answer to that question says a lot about you, where you picture yourself going and what you want from life. Like you, for instance. You want to be left alone to enjoy what you can get your hands on, while I want love, and to be with my family and all..."
They both sat and thought, watching the beautiful women walk by in groups and alone, with husbands, boyfriends, babies, parents, siblings and pets. Each one more sensual than the last. Huge vessels went by on the river. Tanker ships, cruise ships, tugboats and barges. All of them with men scurrying around on their decks.
Frank suddenly stood up, slapping both of his knees.
"I think it's time we went looking for some grub, pardner."
"I think you're right." Bill said as he got up to follow Frank.
The old woman quietly sighed to herself and rearranged her hands in her lap.

Wake Up, Heart Yanked Out

Cyprian woke up floundering in his own dystopia at the age of twenty-five. He stood at a quarter-century and on the cusp of life but his hopes and dreams had been dashed. Still he was young, unbelievably young and his feet trod a fecund path. He held a low grade menial position as a governmental flunky in the ranks of civil service, lusted after women incessantly and viewed himself with utter contempt. I say he 'woke up' floundering although he'd been awake all along...with his eyes shut tightly against the affliction. The job, a veritable torture rack, blackened his outlook. He considered himself a martyr he was so oft crucified. And who could blame him under the circumstances? He suffered a great deal of anguish at the hands of his fate. Things happened, fell into place piecemeal, with little or no forethought. Try as he might he was unable to alter his affairs. In that regard he was like a marionette...but who manipulated the strings? It was as if he wasn't alive at all but living vicariously within his own skull. A sort of back room, cerebral existence in which he harbored no ambition. By hook or crook, sheer indifference and laziness he ended up a civil servant. Naturally he loathed the job; it became the ubiquitous thorn in his side. It was anathema to him and he suffered from uncontrollable shakes, bouts of nervousness and wild fits of depression. Emotions oscillated within him like a pendulum and it became difficult to hold onto the reins. His senses became dull and his mind filled with drivel; his attention span deteriorated and he lost the ability to concentrate. He was drawn and quartered...trapped like a beast in the zoo.

He longed to quit the 'nine to five' but had bills and the rent. Civil servants make peanuts, chicken feed. The more he scrimped, the more debt mounted. And his landlord didn't pussyfoot around for someone so light on his feet. A day late with the rent and he was out on his ass...Sure, he looked for other work. As a desperate measure he perused help-wanted ads in the Picayune over beer at Johnny's. No luck. Every possibility disgusted him equally; he couldn't fathom doing anything with relish...He grew disenchanted and existed in a lull. An utter failure in the realm of employment. At night, in bed before sleeping, grandiose visions danced in his cranium...Lofty pipe-dreams; the musings of a peon. Still he was young, unbelievably young. I do not speak candidly to illicit compassion on his behalf. Rather, I am illuminating the quandary in which he found himself awash as a triumph of sorts.

But fuck the groundwork; the groundwork can wait. It's the meat and potatoes I'm after now. It was a Sunday when the doldrums hit him. Sundays are useless entities- the only sensible thing to do is fritter them away as quickly as possible. Cyprian woke from his slumber at the crack of dawn and felt the noose begin to tighten. How many hours remained before he had to return to work? Ah, work! That's the idea that stuck in his craw. The death of tomorrow always lingers on the breath of yesterday. There's no hope for men who lack ambition. And in this world the multitudes will always be bound and fettered...

Where You Got Them Shoes?

Frank and Bill sat sharing a cigarette in an alcove under their interstate overpass. Frank took the last drag and held up the butt for inspection by Bill.

Bill nodded dejectedly and watched the burnt butt fly up and away from them and out into the windy swath cut by the traffic that flew by day and night. It bounced and bobbed along the pavement, somehow never completely coming to rest. He wondered just how far it could make it on the interstate. It was theoretically possible that it would go all the way to California via I-10, but it was just as probable that it would follow an alternate wind current and be carried up I-55. It all depended on the rate of biodegradation and the drenching rains that could carry it to the shoulders and wash it down the storm drains...although, rain might also cause it to stick to the surface of a passing vehicle... He thought on...

Bill turned to ask Frank's opinion on the butt's longevity and destination, but found him putting on the shoes. They owned one pair between them. Living in the back-country for eight or nine months, they had either destroyed or eaten their old shoes. Upon returning to the city, they'd acquired a new pair from a tourist's bag while the dupe got a sketch done of himself by a street artist. Both of them felt bad about having to steal, consequently they owned just the one pair of size eleven hiking boots.

Bill asked Frank where he was going, all the time watching carefully the ritual attentiveness that Frank put into donning the shoes. They were both dirty bums, but they had agreed to try to prevent fungal infections of the feet. Each watched intently whenever the other put on the shoes.

"You're coming with me. We're gonna get some shoes for you."

"But I like those."

"We'll get some like them. C'mon," Frank said, hopping up and crunching across the broken bottles and nail-driven slats of rotten wood that were strewn about under their cement cavern.

Bill followed, picking his steps carefully, looking like some sort of tic-tac-toe playing chicken in his nervous, jerky progression.

Hoofing it down Canal Street in silence, Frank went over his plan. First they would set up on two corners -- Frank on Decatur, Bill on St. Anne. Frank would run the shoes scam on a tourist while walking up the street. He figured it'd take about one long block to get to the kicker and start demanding the shoes, where, if the sucker gave him any shit, Bill would hop out and start agreeing with Frank as if he were a total stranger. They could both stand there and righteously demand the shoes off a mans feet if he played it right.

Frank explained the plan to Bill whose main concern was Frank's competence in picking out a man with a size eleven foot. Frank pointed out that his own feet were also size eleven and they tossed the idea back and forth, doubts and assurances flying like feathers around a cock-fight.

At length they arrived at St. Anne and Canal. Bill sat down at the granite foot of a forty story edifice and waited. Frank walked comfortably to Decatur St. while Bill picked at the dirty bottoms of his feet, unruffled by the looks of passing strangers.

After a spell, Bill spotted Frank walking toward him with a barrel chested man who was dressed like a cowboy. Blue boots with pointed toes and a big heel. Some kind of snake pattern on them.

They were engrossed in a spirited conversation as Bill watched them walk by. Frank kept shooting him looks and waving wildly behind the big man's back. Bill didn't move, instead chewing on his yellowed thumbnail and looking around dumbly.

Frank and the tourist walked together for another block before big Mickey Gilley finally pushed Frank roughly away and took a stance like a bull, giving Frank the eye. Frank cowered away and stalked back to Bill.

"What the fuck, man!? I had him! Why didn't you back me up?"

"I don't like cowboy boots", replied Bill, deeply interested in the sidewalk.

"Well, shit, you never said you were so particular about shoes before, your highness."

"No cowboy boots or sandals."

"Fine."

Frank took up his position on Decatur again.

People of all shapes and sizes went by. He stared down at their feet and waited for the right combination. The dupe had to be a tourist, wearing size eleven, and now, apparently, not wearing sandals or cowboy boots.

Twenty minutes went by during which time four perfect ones went by wearing sandals or cowboy boots. He thought about just going for one and letting Bill have the hiking boots. He dismissed the thought, however, as he had no intention of parting with the fine hiking boots. They were arguably the most comfortable footwear that he had ever owned.

He kept watching the crowd.

Inevitably, a sucker arrived. This time it was a nervous looking kid of about sixteen walking fast and smoking a cigarette. Frank sidled up, walking in step with the kid.

"How ya doin' fella? Can I get a cigarette?" Frank asked in one breath.

The kid looked at him like a hunted animal and quickly produced a pack from his breast pocket.

Frank took the pack from him and took two cigarettes, placed one behind his ear, one in his mouth and handed the pack back. "Light," he commanded.

The kid produced a pack of matches and stopped to wait while Frank lit his cigarette.

Before discarding the match and while still looking down his cigarette, Frank said, "I bet you I know where you got those shoes."

The kid raised an eyebrow and reached for his matches.

Frank snatched the matches back and looked the kid in the eye expectantly.

"Ok, what would ya like to bet?" the kid asked.

"I'll bet your shoes for my shoes."

The kid looked down appraisingly at Frank's fine boots and nodded. "Ok, it's a bet." he said. "Where?"

Frank tilted his head back and inhaled deeply from the cigarette with his eyes closed, savoring the moment. He mumbled, "where you got those shoes, let's see..."

"Well where? Ya not getting out of this bet now," the kid threatened.

Frank smiled to himself. "Size eleven, right?"

"Uh, yeah...", the kid said, taken aback a bit.

"You got them on your feet, that's where you got them."

The kid stared at him, mouth agape, for a full ten seconds. Frowning, he turned and started up the street.

Frank tossed the cigarette after one last hit and jogged after the kid, marveling to himself at how well things were working out.

Bill watched the kid moving quickly up the block in his expensive tennis-shoes. "Now that's more like it, Frank" he thought. He rose and stepped right into the kid's path.

"Stop that kid!", yelled Frank.

The kid looked back nervously and ran into Bill with a full head of steam.

Bill fell to the cement crying "Ohhh, hell. Oh damn, that hurts." He made a show of it, rolling around on his back and grabbing at his tailbone. The kid just stood and stared stupidly down at him, stealing a couple of furtive glances at the more curious of the working-class folks who mostly hurried by clenching their teeth and fixing their gaze straight ahead, ignoring the debacle.
Frank's arm appeared around the kid's shoulders.

"Hey, hey Kid! Slow down buddy. You're gonna kill someone!"

Bill, lying flat and still, let out a low, agonized moan.

"Aw, hell. I know this guy. He hurt his back in Vietnam. Remember Vietnam, kid? No, I guess you wouldn't."

The kid mumbled something about school, but Frank didn't hear him because Bill had really started pouring it on, screaming as if he were being eaten alive by wolves. It was all either of them could do to keep from laughing. They had to avoid eye-contact with each other.

The kid was horrified. Frank could feel words pouring from his mouth while Bill wailed on the sidewalk. He could see the kid getting closer and closer to his boiling point. It reminded him of sex in a strange way. Finally, the kid looked like he might just bolt and Frank heard his mouth close the deal...

"...and if you give up the shoes I'll see to it that the authorities don't have to be called in and that the old general here gets the medical attention he needs."

The kid was shaking and looked at Frank.

Bill kept sobbing and groaning, but looked up at the kid expectantly.

Frank looked from the kid to Bill and back at the kid.

The shoes came off in a flash, not even untied, and the kid disappeared across the street and into the crowd wearing only white tube socks.

"Well, that was easy." Bill said, hopping up and dusting off his backside.

"Yep." said Frank, bending to light his last cigarette from a businessman's zippo. He nodded his thanks and followed Bill who was babbling excitedly about washing his feet in the fountain up the street and trying on his new shoes.

Thank God for Little Girls

I drove around the neighborhood looking for a cheaper place to rent. I hadn't brought in any money in weeks and was starting to get worried.

The neighborhood was an old one and had recently been invaded by yuppies who fixed up their old houses with a vengeance. It actually looked pretty nice but still had some fairly affordable rents if you took the time to look.

After copying down a few numbers within a block of my place, I turned up Opelousas and scanned around for signs. It was about 3:30 and school kids from the near-by parochial school filled the street.

The old fire station stood there, stoically watching the proceedings. Next door to the station was an antique shop with a few Victorian chairs in the cracked front window. At this window there were three little girls dressed in their catholic school clothes apparently admiring the old things in the window.

As I drove by I thought how picturesque that little scene had been. Before I had gone ten more feet, I heard one of the little girls yell, "FUCK YOU, WHITEY!" As soon as the first one did it, the other two joined in a chorus of profanities.

Going as slow as I was, it wasn't a problem to take the next U-turn. That scared them. I slowly drove up on the antique shop and they started screaming at the top of their lungs and falling over themselves to get through the doorway. I looked around and saw an old black man sitting on a lawn chair across the street. He observed the whole thing silently and without moving a muscle. With his watchful gaze upon us, I felt confident and stopped the car.

I got out and walked up to the shop. The screaming little girls had made it into the shop where they were screaming and pointing at me and imploring a confused looking older lady to do something about me.

"Hi, I'm Duane Carter and I was just driving by..." I extended a hand and began to explain.

"What have you done to these girls!?", she asked, stepping forward and shushing the girls behind her counter.

"Nothing, ma'am! I was just about to explain to you that they had been yelling obscenities in the street and..."

She sent the girls to the back of the shop and they went, sticking their tongues at me and one even lifted her skirt at me in an obscene gesture.

"Look, ma'am. I just thought I'd let someone in charge of these girls know about their behavior. Nevermind." I said as I turned to leave.

"Stop right there you mother fucker", the old lady growled from behind me. She was pointing an old pistol at me and dialing the telephone. I didn't think she'd use it, so I turned back toward the door and took a step.

She shot me right in the back, somewhere near the kidney area. The pain was excruciating. I fell to a knee with the floor spinning under me. My head wobbling on it's perch, I spotted two of the little girls poking out from behind the counter and grinning as if someone had just wheeled in a cake before I passed out.

I came to strapped face-down to a paramedic's board being lifted into an ambulance. Once they got me in and got the van moving, a nurse of some sort stuck me with a needleful of burning liquid and I passed out again.

"So you're up?" a police officer asked from a foot in front of my face.

"Yeah", I croaked.

"You've caused quite a bit of trouble, sir."

I just looked around the hospital room. It was a nice one. I wondered who was going to pay for it.

"You want to tell me why you were chasing those little girls?"

"Chasing them?"

"Yes Mr. Carter. They have all stated that you chased them up the street and into the antique shop with your penis in your hand."

"My what?! What the hell are you talking about?" I nearly fell out of the bed.

"Calm down, the restraints are for your own good." he said, indicating the straps on my ankles and wrists. "The girls say that you got out of your car and came running at them with your penis in your hand. Do you disagree with this story?"

"You're damned right I do! I was just stopping to tell their mother that they were yelling obscenities at passing cars! They yelled 'FUCK YOU WHITEY' at me fergodsake!"

"You do understand, Mr. Carter, that these girls are all Caucasians themselves."

"I didn't say it made sense! I just thought their parents should know and then that old lady shot me!"

"The lady said that you were going for a weapon."

"I don't carry any weapons. I was leaving because she looked like she was going to believe her little darlings before me."

"Uh huh." he just nodded.

"What the fuck do you mean UH HUH!? I've been SHOT! Aren't you going to do something!?"

"I'll be right outside the door if you need me. In the meantime, I think you'd better calm down." he said as he walked out.

"Don't I get a lawyer?" I yelled at the closing door.

"Not until they arrest you, you don't." said a voice from the other side of a curtain that I hadn't noticed before.

"Huh?" I squinted at the curtain.

"You don't get a lawyer until they arrest you. Right now, you're not going anywhere, so they haven't arrested you. This way you don't get a lawyer until it's too late and you've said all manner of incriminating things."

"Oh. And who are you?" I tried to peer through the thin curtain to no avail.

"Just another prisoner."

"Where are we?"

"This is the police ward of Charity Hospital. They'll hold us here until we're well enough to be arrested. You might be here a while...