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.

A Good Night's Musing

" we all die, that's no big trick, but the miracle never quits; therefore we must not until it finally closes in."

- Charles B., from a correspondence


- PiGbOyFaCe

Bean Wars

"I love pintos, black beans look like poo on toilet paper, when spread on a flour tortilla!"

- from a heated debate on a foodie message board regarding the relevance of pinto vs. black beans

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.