Hobble

This afternoon I walked two miles in stifling, tropical heat to keep a therapy appointment where I discussed my desire to develop a new persona. On my way back I ran into my old friend, Hobble (he has a wooden leg) outside a 7-11. Hobble’s sweaty face was decorated with silver spraypaint; he had obviously been huffing. He was enthusiastic and friendly when he recognized me. “Hey hey hey!” he said, smiling with his silver lips. He was fidgety and stuporous and started babbling at me. He was mostly incoherent but talked a lot about time-travel, Rita Moreno and radio repair in Germany. I listened to his manic rap for around twenty minutes and then told him I had to get going. That it was good seeing him again. He insisted on shaking hands and then he hobbled around to the back of the 7-11. I looked at the silver spraypaint on my hand and then headed home. I started thinking about a new persona again.

A cyst is a sac-like structure filled with liquid, semisolid, or gaseous material.

Outside my building, down there in the parking lot, I noticed a man with a bristling red beard and he was wearing one of those big yellow sleeveless ponchos, even though it wasn't raining (yet—it would rain later that day—the man was prescient!) and there was a large hump on his back and I figured he had a backpack, like he was on a long journey or something but then the hump started to thrash and scream (it sounded like a chimpanzee scream) and he swatted it with a sawed-off hockey stick and the hump relaxed (if that’s the right word—it fell still anyway) and the man looked around (real furtive like) and kept on walking (quickening his step like the guilty do) and I wondered, what on earth did he have strapped to his back? What was under the yellow poncho? I considered calling the police but it was too late, he was gone. It was none of my damn business anyway. 

"This tastes like radishes."

"It's sole."

"I know what it is, or what it's supposed to be but it tastes like radishes."

"Time tastes like radishes, not sole."

"Wait, are you saying thyme or time?"

"Are you saying sole or soul?"

"I don't know anymore."

"Me either. Pass me the sodium chloride."

Post Title

Flavored Band Aids

Picked up a box of those new EXTREME "flavored" band-aids. I’m not sure how they work, but if you place one over an open wound, you can “taste” the "flavor" of that particular band-aid. So far I’ve “tasted” coffee, coleslaw, horseradish, Swiss cheese, grape, escargot, Cola, hot mustard, bread(?), spinach, pizza, banana and thyme. It’s all very interesting but I’m running out of discreet places to cut myself.

Donald and Sherri at the Membranous Lounge, St. Patrick's Day

TELEVISION CUT-UP (random words from random channels):

I have freedom to live now. But if you work at it you can find it again. Plastic preschool and naturally fertile soil. And then off line. I’m gonna feed him like family. Information as it comes in. One officer opened fire. So damaged it had to be torn down. Killed while doing his job. You love your job, right? We guarantee the best prices. Focuses on machine learning. Epic fun is just a kid-click away. Girls from ten dollars. I can’t accept that. Trying to get ready for Easter? Under an early weather alert. That was a mighty nice thing you done, Grandpa. How many of you are there? For your information I’ve been putting on makeup since I was twelve. Do not miss out ladies and gentlemen. My compliments to the management.

Kooky snowbirds Ronda and Lizzy

Carol was poking around in the muddy field behind my house and found my old ColecoVision game console. Inside the rusted remnants, she discovered a tooth (incisor). It belonged to my friend Adam - god rest his poor, tortured soul. He gave me the tooth (pulled it out himself with needle-nose pliers) to seal an agreement we'd made. The deal became null and void after Adam was shot to death in Chelsea on February 4th, 2002. 😊

Trixie the swimming chimp!

I Found a Tumor On the Bathroom Floor

She is simply there, wearing a large black hat with an awning. I knew her once, a long time ago. Or rather, I knew a younger version of her. She’s in her early 60’s now, ravaged and depleted by a life of raising kids. Her name is Estelle.

     We used to work together at Bobber’s Fish Emporium. I can still smell the clams.

     “Estelle?” I ask her, already formulating what I’m going to say.

     She smiles and shakes her head. “No, sorry. My name is Kimberly,” she informs me.

     “Oh, I’m sorry. You looked like someone...”

     “Don’t we all?”

     An ostrich walked past us with its muddy dinosaur feet.

     And there you have it.

Mushrooms 

I chopped up the Sermon on the Mount with a razorblade and snorted all the words through a hollowed-out felt pen. Jesus’s words dripped numb in the back of my throat all day. Tomorrow I’m gonna freebase some Kierkegaard because snorting Kierkegaard is a waste. In the meantime, stay hep! because...

Razor Wire Kiss

My new scary novel is available!

Amazon 

 

My Last Halloween

My urine looks like root beer. That’s a good bad sign, I think. It ain’t from eating rhubarb. My doctor once told me, “Your organs are not happy...” and I rushed straight home and put away a quart of whiskey. I already have hepatitis. The whites of my eyes are yellow. I was putting a brave strain on my liver and kidneys and (probably) pancreas. My pee was now brown. The end was near, thank Manson. I’m feeding the champion within with beer and bourbon. My abdomen is swollen. My face is decorated with ruptured blood vessels, little Braille scabs that describe my disordered life. I look like a Wolverton cartoon.

    I don’t sit at my kitchen table anymore. Sitting there makes me feel like a sack of puppies about to be drowned. I don’t need that. I patiently await my hemorrhage on the loveseat. The cushions are pocked with little burn holes. I can’t afford to smoke anymore. Cigarettes have become too expensive.  Lung cancer was taking too long anyway. I used to cough like a helicopter. There was this girl named Colleen. An anorexic albino, she looked like a vaporous, woeful ghost. Pale and spooky and willowy. We only had sex once. She said intercourse with me was like fucking a fishing rod.

     I used to know a coke-dealer named Ivan, a big Russian with a mustache and a laugh like galloping horses. I once bought a gram from him and gave him too much money. Those were the days. Ivan noticed the error and gave me the extra twenty back. He said, “Honesty is the best policy,” in his deep dark forest of an accent. I thanked him and returned home to find that the coke had been cut to within an inch of its life. Colleen laughed about it for hours. That was the start of her nervous breakdown.

     I haven’t had company since Colleen left. They were all her friends. I didn’t like any of them but at least they drank. We used to stand around the kitchen table, filling our livers. I felt a reluctant kinship. I felt like a character in the AA book. One night three people had to race to the bathroom to puke. We were drinking bubblegum vodka. The smell got to be obnoxious.

    Why are all these sour memories crowding in on me? I pour another shot of bourbon. I don’t know why I don’t just drink straight from the bottle, hobo style. Etiquette? I’m only an obscene animal with a thirst like a plummet. I urge my liver to fail. The next time I piss I want it to be inkjet black. I want to drown in my own blood like Kerouac and W.C. Fields.

     They’re dead and much happier than I am.  

Leaves from the Smorgasbord 2nd Edition!

This is the link to Amazon

A Mess (from Bleak Holiday)

Photo by H.K.

A MESS

“You are a mess, my dear,” she said in her Russian accent.    

“I know.”    

“Your organs are not happy.”    

I had nothing to say to that. The tests had come back.    

“You’ve been drinking today,” she said.    

I nodded, embarrassed.    

“Do you know how I know that?”    

I shrugged my shoulders.

   “Because I can smell the alcohol.”    

She sighed and said, “If you keep this up, you will be dead in one to three years.”    

I nodded. “Okay.”    

She shook her head. For the first time since I’d been going to her, she looked sad. Usually, she was all business; firm, implacable. My doctor.            

“It’s too bad,” she said.    

When I left her office, I thanked her.    

On my way out, I grabbed a lollipop from the front desk. Grape.    

I walked straight to the liquor store. I bought a twelve-pack and then raced back to my building.    

In the hall, I passed the woman who lived across from me.     

“Hi.”    

“Hi.”

Boy, I wanted to fuck her. What was her name again? Erin? Sara? I was pretty sure it was one of the two.     

Hi was the only thing we’d ever said to each other.    

I went into my apartment – beer cans on the floor, rotting food on the stove.    

I threw off my jacket, carried the twelve-pack to the couch and turned on the TV. It was one o’clock and Gunsmoke was on. I cracked a beer and the show started. It was a good one. An outlaw comes back to Dodge and visits the wife who’d thought he was dead. She’d been a grieving widow for years and now he was back.     

By the second commercial-break, I’d opened another beer.    

I thought about eating. It had been a while.     

But I didn’t feel like moving. The pain in my side bothered me too much.    

When Gunsmoke was over (the ending was satisfactory), I went into the kitchen. The kitchen floor was gross: crumbs, stains, muddy boot prints, cigarette butts, what looked like blood...    

I opened the refrigerator but everything inside had gone bad, either crawling with mold or way past the expiration date. The milk looked like cottage cheese. I checked the freezer but everything looked awful to me. When did I buy frozen tacos? Jesus.    

I returned to the couch, my beer. Bonanza was on. The remote control felt like a theoretical object in my hand but I changed the channel anyway.

On one of my many PBS stations, I landed on a documentary on dromedaries that was soothing enough and boring enough to allow me to think and drink.

I dozed off after half an hour. When I woke up I changed the channel again. The Big Valley was on and I thought about writing. I’d started several stories but didn’t have the energy or enthusiasm for any of them: a story about a woman who seduces strange men with her headless, parasitic twin. A story about a snuff filmmaker who feeds children to starving pit-bulls and films the results. A man and the woman he loves drink ice tea together one summer afternoon, and when she leaves his apartment she is hit by a car and dies. When he returns from the hospital, distraught and in shock, he finds that the ice in her glass hasn’t melted yet and he saves the ice in his freezer and becomes obsessed with preserving it.       

But I didn’t feel like writing. I drank another beer. And another.     

Excerpt from My Novel, COCKTAILS AND CANCER (formerly Anosognosia)

 

These kids sneaked into The Membranous Lounge with fake IDs...

Cocktails & Cancer Part II

-1-

It started with the worms, but not really. I’d been drinking relentlessly (religiously) leading up to my Big Psychiatric Appointment and my reflection looked like a scream in a movie theater. I’d switched from Steel Reserve to a cheap boxed wine called White Burble. It was as atrocious as its name. I hadn’t eaten anything more than a few pistachio nuts in five days. I surrendered to morbid fantasies of lynching myself (even going so far as to hang a necktie-noose from my closet clothes rack), or suffocating myself with Glad Wrap or buying a cheap box of helium from iParty and poisoning my lungs with funny Mickey Mouse gas.

     I prayed for the cancer to return. No surgery, no chemotherapy this time. I would nurse the little black cells like a protective mother with a gulping child.

     My first meeting with the psychiatrist and I was already an emergency.

     It was warm when I set out toward Evergreen Mental Health Services. The sky was bright, cloudless and intense. A sky so blue I wanted to shoot holes in it. Assault the environment. My head was filled with a loud, thirsty crowd, screaming, screaming like angry villagers in a Frankenstein movie...

     I began my weary, Don Birnam[1] trudge feeling every agonized stride like a new wound. Every footstep carried the threat of imminent death. My liver hurt. Two miles stretched ahead of me like Death Valley. After five minutes of walking I knew I was doomed. I considered turning back and cancelling the appointment but then what? Drink more wine and get sicker? I’d reached the end of another rope. I needed help, stat. My desperation both clung to me and tumbled from me like a parasitic twin with crumpled bones.

     Outside the puzzling young woman’s apartment, by the steps there, I noticed a dried out half a mouse (the hindquarters) a spent condom and a bent spoon. More pieces to a savage, enigmatic puzzle.

     A sudden sandstorm whirled, blinding and granular, into my mind and I had to stop and close my eyes a few seconds for fear of fainting. My mouth had gone dry. My tongue tasted (probably) like the dead half-mouse at my feet.

     I can’t do this.

     (All you have to do is get there).

     I kept walking, forcing my weakened, burdensome legs forward. Sweat started. I wished for a handkerchief so I could mop my brow like Louis Armstrong after a taxing solo. Instead, I brushed the sweat from my forehead into my (already oily) hair, pasting it back. I wished for a pair of sunglasses. I wished for a hat. The sun was so assaultive I could feel cataracts developing over my eyes like lenses of milk. All of my internal personae are weak and desperate. There’s nothing to hang onto. Clark Kent turns into another Clark Kent. Nothing under the business suit but flabby flesh weakened by kidneystones of green Kryptonite.

     And then I had a seizure and fell into the street, right in the path of a huge, lumbering truck...