Category: Fiction

She said she liked patriotic marches, so he bought a sousaphone. They marched around the backyard, sometimes naked, she the drum major, he carrying on the bass line for a melody to be imagined. It could irritate the neighbors. He liked to drink while they played these games. She put up with it as long as the marches could continue.
It was then that she decided that bluegrass was the new sensation. He grew a beard, wore overalls, bought a mandolin that would keep the neighbors up all night.
Next it was jazz and the laborious move of a grand piano and the purchase of a used baritone saxophone. During this phase they entertained more. The neighbors, once their enemies, became newfound friends.
Soon they started going to galleries and museums and she read artist biographies: Van Gogh, Gaudin, Picasso, Raushenberg, Warhol. They filled what was supposed to be the nursery, or so they thought when they bought the place, with canvasses. She took to drinking. Posing nude for him to paint her. Hours-long sessions would end with sex on the drop cloth. They talked of buying land, starting a commune. They didn’t see much of the neighbors during this period. When they did choose the be around others, it was always with the new friends in the city.

(more…)

My landlord’s got a new girlfriend and I can tell she’s trouble. I saw them walking down the road tonight to get a slice of pizza. She was in these black skin-tight shorts and he was in that same old baseball hat that hugs the skull like balding dudes like me and him like to wear these days. She kept on having to pull the little black shorts out of her crack as they walked ahead of me. I just paid the rent yesterday, so now he acts like he doesn’t know me.
My experience with the landlord is that he has a bluebird made of plaster on the back wall of his front porch. He also has a kitchen sink, and easy chair, and a large roll of copper tubing on the same porch. Once a month I go to his house across the street, usually in the cover of darkness, and leave the largest check I write every month in his mailbox, in the process committing a federal crime.
His experience with me is that I leave that check and he let’s me live in this house that he got for a steal, and that he occasionally fixes a leaky faucet.
Under my landlord lives a British guy named George of whom I know little. He loves Princess Diana and hate Charles and Camilla. He takes my recycling out to the curb, usually three days before the city picks it up.
George works for the landlord and, according to the neighborhood homeless guy, handed in his two-week’s notice a few days ago and is moving on to greener pastures. What I know of George, he was likely semi-homeless once as well, and he is recovering from colon cancer.

(more…)

A man walks into a bar; this not a joke. He first asks the bartender for a glass of water, at which point, the bartender explains that if you ain’t paying, you ain’t drinking. The man bursts into tears. The bartender asks why the long face. Really, this is not a joke.
It seems that the old guy’s wife had run off with another guy, leaving early this very same morning while he was still in bed. If that wasn’t enough, the Camaro-driving sonofabitch ran over his what-would-be-best hunting dog, if only he ever hunted. The dog could climb a tree and throw the raccoon to its death, or say he said.
So his old lady is gone, and his favorite dog is dead, and all he can think to order is a glass of water, because she took the money in the Maxwell House can in the kitchen that they had been saving for a trip this summer to Panama City Beach, and she took the bank card from his wallet on the dresser, and the checkbook which was also on the dresser, and the credit card was long overdrawn, and to top it off, it’s Veteran’s Day, a fucking bank holiday, and the old guy fought in the first Gulf War, and through much VA therapy had just learned to manage his PTSD, but he couldn’t get any cash out to buy a drink after his woman ran off with another man, who ran over his favorite dog, as they made their getaway.
Lord knows how he’s going to afford the colonoscopy and all, especially after being laid off down at the factory.
This wasn’t the shittiest day ever, or even week. This is the shittiest life on record.
The bartender acquiesces and gives him the glass of water, and a shot of Kentucky Gentleman chaser on the house. That was about the time the Asian geisha-style siamese twins walked in with the midget, but we will save that one for later.
Then this leather fag walks into the bar just like it’s 1980 and it’s San Francisco, which it isn’t. He’s got brass knuckles on one hand, and a cricket bat in the other just to increase his odds. He stomps over to the guy, who’s now in the middle of his first house gin and tonic, and smacks him square in the jaw with the knuckles and then square on the knee with the bat as he descends from the stool to the floor.
The dude asks what the fuck did you do that for, and the queer says that’s because your daughter ran off with my old man.
The midget with the four gold rings in each ear plays a song on the juke box.
He says that wasn’t my daughter, that was my wife. Mr. Castro feels so bad he buys the guy a Grey Goose martini and they spend the next half hour licking wounds and talking about what they lost. Then they talk about church and childhood. Then about the rough start the Astros are off to. They talk about the midget and the siamese twins, and Mr. Tightpants says he almost switched sides for some Arabic siamese twins that he ran across while trying to figure out something to do during the first Gulf War. The two realize they have something in common – the Gulf War – not the siamese twins or wishy-washy sexuality.
The homo says he has to leave to throw his ex’s shit out into the street so the whole neighborhood will know what an asshole he is, and thus will know that a period of mourning will ensue behind the doors of his house. Don’t come asking for a cup of sugar.
That’s when the ducks come in, and man were these some rich ducks. They start ordering rounds of drinks for the whole house, but being ducks they were lightweights, and most of them started passing out under tables, on the bar, in the toilet. One was even found asleep floating around in the bathroom sink. He was a small duck.
The bartender brings three of the leftover duck drinks to the old guy and he drinks them all: peach schnapps, amaretto sour, shot of Jaeger from the duck with the frayed Astros hat.
About this time the bartender says something along the lines of last call, only to be followed by you don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here, or if you don’t work at the bar, or you are not fucking someone who works at the bar, get the fuck out, or something like that. The guy thinks briefly of propositioning the bartender – a feeble attempt at eeking out a few more moments here and a few less moments at the house that was once their home.
The siamese twins leave, each trying to weave in an independent direction. The midget follows trying to push his face into the unified ass of the twins. The ducks all start to awake and stir and depart the bar in a V formation. Quack, quack.
Then there’s the veteran, the man, now alone. He thinks of the street girls out on the boulevard. He thinks of the all-night liquor store. He thinks of his 10-years-his-junior wife on the way to Panama City Beach with his Panama City Beach money and a guy in a fucking Camaro, with t-tops. He thinks of how easy it is to be a drunk when your life has gone to the crapper, and how being drunk at such times, can make the whole world seem new again.
He thinks he shouldn’t have mixed all those drinks, but beggars can’t be choosers.

And she keeps hitting me in the fucking kidneys. And I like it. No I don’t. He’s kicking me in the teeth. I am sorry. No teeth. No luck. All sorrow. Good weekend. I just want to read that book that yo wrote back then.

There are soldiers out tonight, even in this city. I have seen them in their clandestine suits. I have wondered about them through dreams.
Tomorrow will be another dream day for this fallen one. I am not broken or foresaken. Just fallen at this point.
From the top of the hill over there the scout can see everything and with that everything he cannot move. He want to tell his comrades what there is to come, but he just stand still and the whole world passes, at once, through his eye.
That is the nature of the scout. He has to understand it all. The soldier should understand very little if anything. There is this and there’s the hospital. There’s a nurse with a tender touch, or there’s another day.
When they saw the whites of the eyes the muskets came ablastin’. The scout dreamed, closed his eyes and composed letters to his wife.
There was 30 shot initially, and one when they came face to face. Was it brothers? Of course it was. In some place or not with a name or not. No names on placards or plce cards. There would be no wedding or funeral. Just some dirt sifting through fingers.
One last look at the moon.
My point being that the man who took the bullet and the one who sent the bullet are one and the same.

Daddy liked to laugh. He would laugh when mama got in the car and stormed out the top of the hill. He would laugh when he told us the dirty jokes we were too young to hear. He would laugh when he should be crying.
I wish that I could be laughing. Laughing all of this off, but it bites me down to the core and I find the humor hard to find. I cannot laugh. No jokes are funny. Not even donkey dick. I don’t like to tell the old standards.
How can there be a joke when we can treat each other as horribly as we will treat one another. Of course we can attack another country, of another religion, and kill thousands of innocents when we can treat people we love like absolute dog shit.
We are such selfish beings and despite the fact I have argued differently, I do believe we are utterly broken little pricks – boys, girls, women and men.
Ha ha ha ha ha!