living with madness(pt5)
Living With Madness(pt 5 )cont'd
Current mood: complacent


why do you put a kid's pet frog in a blender?...to watch the expression on its face! -from the book Truly Tasteless Jokes

ok, ok so i changed the joke a little, i'm not a monster. so anyways the summer was winding down, it was better than bobby had predicted. we were a two-man wrecking crew. we took an entourage of maniacs wherever we went. life was one big ha-ha. people at work couldn't wait to hear what insanity we had participated in the night before. business had actually gotten better with the new arrangement with hippy ben and my cousin deron taking over the nickel and dimers which gave us more time for our insane adventures.

some punks who lived up above pangaea, a restaurant on the north side of town, were throwing a party and due to the whole springer-esque bobby/amy/brain love triangle, we were asked not to come.well i wasn't even invited, bobby was suggested that it would be better if he didn't show. the person that had given the advice should never have done that. rising to bobby's defense, i suggested to him that we show up and totally ruin the party. his eyes grew wide, like a child on christmas eve being told of santa's impending arrival. "nnnnice!" he smiled all day. it made me happy to see the miserable bastard actually smile.

we started off the night the usual way, 5:15 happy hour at micawbers. then we hit mahogany grill, simeon's and finally coming to rest at the good ol' chanticleer, or the chanty for all you regulars out there. bretton met us around 9:30, beer o'clock for bretton, and we proceeded to get shit-faced, as they saying goes. which reminds me of another joke from the book; what did one condom say to the other while standing in front of the gay bar?... hey! what do ya say we go in here and get shit-faced?! yeah i know, i know it's a bad joke, oops ya got me.

the chanty was pretty dead for a friday night, everyone was at the fucking party. damn those fucks, they should have just let bobby come to the party. as the night went on, bobby grew more and more depressed. saying shit like, "man i should just kill myself." or " ...if i had any friends." and the classic, yeah i remember the last time i got laid,.... back in '89..". all the usual miserable bobby madness self-depreciating comments he likes to make. it's so sad the guy doesn't realize how money he actually is. if he were to get semi-successful he'd become unstoppable. but i guess that's they way it is for most people that use massive amounts of alcohol and drugs.

around midnight, a couple friends of mine, big jim k, not to be confused with the other jim k , and clint, walked into the chanty. the usual greetings and salutations went around. then i got a bright idea to invite big jim k and clint to the party with us. these two are long-haired, leather-clad, biker lookin' mofos and jim is huge.no one would dare fuck with these guys, at that party anyway. so after last call, two double shots of jager and a few pounded down pints later, we were an awesome party wrecking crew on a mission. i was pretty well lit as we headed for the party. it had rained a bit earlier and everything was coated with water. i managed to enrage bretton when, after body-checking him into the rain-soaked bushes, he couldn't catch me as he chased me down the street. i guess i didn't help matters much by laughing at him like a maniac and slowing down just enough to let him think he had a chance of catching me.

the party was in full swing when we got there. a couple of punks leaving told us they had just tapped a new keg. it was raging! people laughing, yelling, making out, the usual punk rock party scene, any party for that matter. mark z, an old schooler from back in the day, now wealthy computer guru, sees us walking in and screams, "bobby madness! tony suisidle! bretton! what's up?!" and this wave of silence , like those old e.f. hutton commercials, falls onto the party. everyone stopped what they were doing and looked at us as if we had three heads. having a good buzz on , the two mohawk chick, walked up to us and gave us some cups , "the kegs' in the kitchen" and she gave bobby and i a hug.

apparently , the party was for some chick's 23rd birthday, i didn't know who she was by name. eased by our plastic cups from one of the occupants of the house , the partiers went back to what they were doing. friends came up and greeted us, i introduced big jim and clint to anyone who approached. and the whole idea of wrecking the party seemed to just... melt away. damn, i thought, we should have just shown up, we would have probably saved ourselves at least fifty bucks in bar service. oh well , say la vee and all that. in one room, was a gravity bong. i hadn't done one of those in years. i sat patiently and awaited my turn in the circle, twice. feeling great and noticing my beer was empty i headed for the keg.

i bumped into brian on my way, when he noticed me, he added a little bounce to his walk as if he was a tough guy, or that he had gotten the best of bobby. i don't know, maybe i was just stoned. i remembered something amy had told me that brian had said about me. something like, 'oh he's a junkie', which i was for a while, i hadn't done it in a few years, 'don't hang out with him, he'll get you strung out on heroin on purpose, like he did laura.' something i had never done in my life, and actually , when people asked me for heroin that didn't do it, i wouldn't get ti for them, i'd tell them, go get drunk, you don't want to do this. or something else, but, i would NOT get anyone strung out on heroin, especially on purpose. the person that turned laura on, on the other hand , is just the kind of scumbag who would.

so, as brian was smiling his big, dumb, i'm joe cool smile, and walking his big, dumb , i'm joe cool walk, i let him have it. i said, " yeah brian, you think it's pretty funny, that you got the last laugh on bobby when you sucker punched him in the eye in micawbers for fucking amy , huh." smiling the whole time. my smile threw him off. he agreed with me, yeah he thought it was pretty funny. so i kept right on smiling with him. i leaned real close and asked, "do you want to know what's funnier than that?" he was still smiling but its glow was fading. i continued, " about a week after punching him in the eye for fucking amy, he fucked her again." he was still sort of smiling, but his eyes weren't, but i kept right on smiling at him. "do you want to know what's even funnier than that? i watched him fuck her, so did my friend , rich." now i had his attention, he was no longer smiling at all, in fact, he looked pretty shocked. i could see his brain working out the scenario in his head. i must be truthful, i was loving every tiny bit of this meltdown.

i continued my little speech, i was having fun, like a cat does with a bird or mouse. " do you want to know what's even funnier than that, it gets even better. she knew we were watching her, she looked me right in the eyes while she screamed out her pleasure. she said, 'oh bobby.. hit it.. right there...'" i imitated her as if someone was fucking me from behind." oh, by the way this is the best part." i had to grab ahold of his arm because he was in a hurry to get away from me. he knew it was true, he wanted to confront amy about this immediately.i landed my knockout punch, " when she was done, she was late to pick you up. she didn't even have time to take a shower! she drove off in YOUR car as fast as she could to pick you up. isn't that fuckin' hilarious? so , brian, tell me, again. do you think it's still funny that YOU got the last laugh on HIM?" he looked at me like he was going to cry and he asked, "tony, why do you have to be such an asshole?" to which i replied, " 'cause i think it's funny!" he growled and stormed away, i headed for the keg.

meanwhile, bobby was in the other room talking to some one when brian stormed in and grabbed amy by the arm. later on after we left, bobby told me that brian said, " you said you wouldn't do this to me anymore. you said it was over" when she asked brian what he was talking about, he told her he knew she was still fucking bobby. from the keg i heard amy screeching, "bobby madness, you're such an asshole!" to which he replied, "fuck you , ya whore!" i looked up from the keg at some girl pouring her beer as i waited for the tap, it turned out later to be the birthday girl. i smiled at her and said . "i guess the honeymoon's over." she fake smiled back, you know the all lip no eye smile, and handed me the tap. bretton, big jim, clint and i were huddled together talking in the kitchen , i informed them to get ready for the fireworks.

from the other room, brain yelled to bobby, "man, you need to control your boys bobby," bobby told him that we were not HIS boys. that we were separate identities. amy was still screeching at bobby, "you don't even belong here, you're old, no one even likes you you should ju-" bobby had shut her up with a faceful of beer. the next thing we heard was a loud crash. we headed for the main room of the party. bobby was practically crowd surfing on top of people as they were trying to grab him. brian was jockeying for position to get to bobby. suddenly bobby grabbed a shelf, a six foot long board and swing it around, brian had picked up a hammer and broke the cheap wood into pieces with one swing of the hammer. bobby picked up a half-full bottle of whiskey and hurled it at brian with the tenacity of a "rocket" clemens bean ball at mike piazza. the bottle struck brian square in the forehead and bounced off, after realizing it was plastic bobby screamed, "what the fuck? you cheap fucks!" there was now nothing between brian and bobby and it looked like brian was going to use the hammer on bobby's head, i decided it was now time to intervene.

"hey brian!!" i screamed as loud as i could, getting the attention of all the people in the room, including brain. " you think you're such a tough guy, why do you need the hammer?" i had picked up a glass bottle of beer that was almost full. i got brian to finally put the hammer down with the skill of a police hostage negotiator. i was actually a little proud of myself. i asked all the people that had been trying to grab bobby, if they still wanted to jump into his and brian's fight, telling anyone who did was going to get to fight me. i told them they were all a bunch of pussies and that i could clear the room by myself. most people in the room were there the night at the chanty, when i knocked out the six people in front of it. nobody wanted to fight anymore. amy began to screech at me , and i just looked at her. she shut right up. i went to get another beer,mine had been spilled and the beer in my hand was piss warm, and it wasn't mine in the first place.

when i got to the keg, the birthday girl was standing there. when i picked up the tap, she said that i should leave. that this was her birthday party and these were her friends.then, to cover her ass, she turned to big jim and clint and said "you guys can stay, but they," pointing at bobby bretton and i, "have to go." i was completely sure there was no one there who was going to kick me out, and i told her so. she then told me she would call the cops,and i then reminded her that this was her party, that there were under aged kids drinking from her keg. she became infuriated screeching profanities and slandering accusations at me. i quietly told her that maybe she should have been born a man. she exploded, screaming about two inches from my face. i stepped back and looked at her boyfriend, "excuse me, dude, but if you don't shut her the fuck up, i am gonna bust your fuckin' jaw." the poor fuck shrugged , and demanded,"what the fuck did I do?" i told him that i wasn't gonna hit a girl and that he just happened to be unfortunate enough to be her boyfriend. he then asked her to be quiet, and she turned her venomous rant onto him. poor guy, i know he probably didn't get laid for a few days from that. i later apologized, quite recently actually, to the both of them.

bored , tired and extremely drunk, i said to the crew, "man, let's get the fuck out of here." i opened the fridge and saw a twelve pack of icehouse and took it.we gathered in the parking lot and smoked a joint. big jim and clint were heading back downtown and we were going to the west side towards home so i smoked the guys up for their walk. as we smoked in the parking lot, the party sent out two delegates. one was a kid wearing a patch, he only has one eye having lost it to some youthful trauma i can't recall at this time. the other was a fifteen year-old scrawny little kid. they told us thew people at the party were worried we were going to fuck with the cars or beat people up as they left. we laughed. we told the kids that the people upstairs weren't their friends, sending them out here to get their asses kicked. we also told them we were just smoking a joint we weren't even thinking about fucking with anyone's car. then jokingly i said, "but, now that you mention it," and headed for a car pretending to go fuck with one and i laughed and turned around. it really isn't funny sober and in retrospect, well maybe a little, then the skinny kid asked, real sad-like, "uhhh , can i have my beer back." i smiled and pulled out two, telling him just cause he had the balls to come out and ask for it. i told him he could come to the house with us if he wanted to drink it but he refused. we finished the joint without further incident, said our goodbyes with hand slaps and back pats and went our separate ways. laughing as we rehashed the last hour or so.

living with madness (pt2)
Living With Madness(part two)cont'd
Current mood: calm


meanwhile... as a devastating meteor the size of texas zooms on a deadly path towards the earth, we join our two heroes in the den of their secret hideaway at ice station zebra.........

yeah it had the makings of a great summer, we'd already had thee brawls any hollywood film producer would be proud of and two brushes with the law. bobby and amy's 'secret ' love affair was blooming and our pot business was booming. we couldn't keep enough around the house. it seemed as soon as we got it , it would be gone. the money was piling, the drinks were flowing , and the women were many. one night bobby brought home a couple of chicks , one was super-model hot and the other was her friend. they were tripping on some sort of abbreviated hallucinogen that i hadn't heard of. bretton called and told us about some party up on the cornell side of town. this austrailian guy that bretton and bobby knew from work lived at a fraternity and they were throwing a regular friday night. complete with body shots, a dance floor of bumping, grinding, and writhing sweaty half-dressed bodies. we called him the roo hunter. i can't remember his real name, julian, i think, but he was a rapper. him, bobby and i would battle freestyle raps and get drunk together. he wasn't half bad , but it was just awesome to hear him rap in his austrailian accent. the fucker got all the hot chicks.bretton was being really aggressive with my drug-laden date which ended up helping mer out because she was terrified of him. bretton is an odd guy, he is the master at being offensive to women and men who get their feelings hurt easily. bobby ended up with her friend , the chick with two mohawks. after the beer had gone and bretton had managed to offend almost everyone we headed back to the zebra for night caps, ditching bretton at the state diner. the twin mohawk girl ended up going home and miss super-model and i hit the sack. the next morning, business started pretty early, some pothead with a job was calling to hook up before going to work at 7:30AM, i had only had about an hours sleep so i waited to see if bobby, who was up watching the news, answer the phone. after the fourth ring, i finally got out of bed to answer it , only to find bobby sitting practically right on top of the phone. he just sat there smoking a came; straight , drinking his coffee and staring at the television. after i told the customer to come on over, i asked bobby , "why the fuck didn't you answer the phone?!". he looks at me , rage plastered all over his face," do you want to know why i didn't answer the phone? do YOU want to know why I didn't answer the phone?!". " yes," i told him "i do." he stands up and flings his coffee out the front door, smashing his pink, hello kitty coffee cup. "because you got fucking laid and i didn't!" i looked at him realizing he was dead serious, i couldn't help but laugh. the only enraged him even more, " you think that's fuckin' funny , do ya? well i got news for ya , tony, the next time i bring home a couple of chicks, i want the better looking one, or the one most likely to put out!" the veins in his neck looked like they were about to burst. the neighbors' kids' yelled yo their mother," tony and bobby are fighting, momma!" which made bobby laugh, and luckily lightened the awkward moment. "i'm serious bro, i didn't bring home that sweet piece of ass for you to have, at least not until i had a chance to have it first." i was trying to tell him to keep it down , when my bedroom door opened and rachel, the super-model bobby had brought home, said" 'scuse me, gotta pee" and tip-toed her way to the bathroom, wrapped in a sheet from my bed. bobby gave me an exasperated look and whispered, " fuck, she's still here? hey rachel, i was just kidding about all that, ya know." his face was bright red , he picked up his pack of straights and left, hanging his head in embarrassment. secretly i think he knew she was still there and wanted to make her feel bad as well. i never saw her again.

august rolled around and the first month in our "stylin' bachelor pad" , as bobby called it, went pretty much the same; smoking, drinking, partying, selling and getting laid.so far , bobby's prediction of a great summer was holding true. we had become regulars at he '80s dance blast at castaways, on thursday nights. with the ic and cu students out of town for the summer, it was relatively easy to get a drink and the scene was a bit less hectic. one drunken night to break the monotony, bobby began dancing with a chair, eventually grinding and dry humping it, watching it was quite hysterical. you should have seen it, bobby is a maniac. he kind of looks like tom waits, with half of his body covered in great tattoo work. a little later , on the deck i announced to the thirty or so people out there, that tonight was a busy night for the perseid meteor shower. that if anyone looked up they just might catch a glimpse of a shooting star. when everyone looked up a shooting star streaked across the sky as if on cue . it was great and for that one tiny moment i felt like a god.

bored with castaways, we headed for the valley house. there was this cute chick, johnny who tended bar there. bobby and i both had a crush on her and we fought for her attention, it was really quite juvenile and must have looked pathetic.johnny and her girlfriend, bethany were regulars at the haunt's '80s dance blast on saturdays. they would dress in really slutty clothes and act like dykes, cock-teasing all the guys there and being total bitches to any guy that approached them. normal 'we know we're hot and you can't have any' bitchiness. anyway, when we got there, there was this guy chris that was totally hammered and being an asshole to his ex-girlfriend , kate. they were arguing about something, when chris threw the water johnny had given him instead of the beer he had ordered , in kate's face. bobby and i got off our stools and got between him and kate and chris popped bobby in the eye. big mistake, we pummeled him. after we kicked his ass and kicked him out of the bar, bobby totally played up the eye, well it WAS pretty bloody and johnny was babying him. he ate it up. after last call, johnny, kate, bobby and i took a couple sixers from the bar and went to our pad. after the beer was gone, kate went home and i got experience firsthand how bobby felt, listening to him and johnny have sex, and i understood his anger and jealousy. after bobby fell asleep , johnny sneaked out, having a boyfriend, johnny had to bo home at a semi-reasonable hour. the next morning i woke up to bobby banging shit around in the kitchen, hurt and angry that johnny had split in the middle of the night without leaving so much as a note. i never understood why he seemed to only chase chicks with boyfriends. so i got up and listened to him gripe and bitch and go through his manic temper tantrum

bobby started drinking at around 9AM, he was depressed. by noon he was hammered, i started drinking with him just to keep him from drinking all of the booze himself. at four in the afternoon we headed to micawbers to catch the fifteen minute happy hour at 5:15. 25 cent drafts and $1 top shelf shots were a great way to start the days buzz, and an even better way to keep drinking cheaply. unfortunately , brian was there and the vibe was thick. once brian had gotten his liquid courage up, he made his move against bobby, as they walked by each other , brian shouldered bobby causing his beer to smash on the floor. as bobby was looking down at it, brian sucker punched bobby right in the eye that was split open. blood poured from bobby's eye and brian ran to madeline's , his work, to hide from bobby's wrath. bobby was fuming furiously.he called amy on her cell phone and told her what had happened and that he never wanted to see her again, "the honeymoon's over sweetie!", he screamed into the phone. he got proceeded to get completely obliterated and passed out around 8 o'clock at night.

now, this is the way ithaca, or any small town for that matter, is. by the next day, the rumor was that brian had kicked bobby's ass all over the place and that he called amy up and he'd cried to her on the phone asking why brain had beaten him up. another one had bobby, not brian, running down the street in fear . my favorite was, that brian had hit bobby over the hear with a pipe and that bobby had tried to break a beer bottle to use to stab brian.insanity. needless to say, amy didn't stay away for long. a couple of weeks later, amy and bobby showed up at the house, hammered, cranking rap on bobby's boom box. a friend , rich and i , were watching some movie and they had totally disrupted the vibe to the point that we had to turn it off. amy, being the attention seeking pig that she was , had cranked up a snoop dogg song and was singing and attempting a pathetic go-go type stripper dance in the small, cluttered living room. being a little angry at her for getting us pulled over by acting like a complete lunatic, and then getting away with it because she was a cops' daughter. and then, having her boyfriend act like a pussy and cause a scene in one of my favorite bars, i couldn't take her shit anymore. i told bobby, "why don't you stick your dick in her and shut her the fuck up,". so they go to bobby's bedroom. about ten minutes later, they're fucking, and she's being louder than ever. screaming, " yeah, that's it bobby!...hit it...right...there oh... yeah ...bobby...". it was so loud i finally looked and i noticed bobby had left the door open. bobby was fucking her doggy style, appropriately , to snoop dogg, and she was looking right at rich and i while she voiced her pleasure in bobby's prowess to hit the right spot. it was actually a little hot, and if we had wanted to, i think amy was willing to let us all have a little taste. but, just watching bobby have sex with the girlfriend of a guy that sucker punched him, the eye was still blackened, was satisfying enough for me. after a half-hour or so later , they were finally done, amy looked at the clock, " aww shit , i gotta go, i gotta pick brian up . i'm ten minutes late already." she got up got dressed and split. we sat around laughing at the whole insanity of it all. that bobby and brian had gotten in a fight over this pig, that she was driving his car to go pick him up , and that, most importantly, that she most likely didn't go home to take a shower before going to pick him up. " yeah," bobby added, " i stole one of your tricks, tony." he added, " i made sure she sucked my cock before she left." being summertime and the windows open, the neighbors in the back all started laughing. michelle, one of the neighbors said," that is ruthless, bobby madness, but listening to that was better than a porno, you are a sex god." we all laughed again. summer was almost over but it had not been short on excitement.

living with madness (pt3)
Living With Madness(part 3 ) cont'd


you join this program already in progress..............................

so bobby was playing juggling the girls with boyfriends thing and i foolishly had allowed some people i didn't really know, friends of friends, to start coming over to buy weed. we weren't big time or anything, not a shit ton of movement. i was going down to texas and bringing about twenty pounds of pot, once a month. the money was good as i had bought my kids' mom an suv and helped pay for college at syracuse university. she was going to school to be a mortician/ funeral director. i had finally found a drummer and we formed a band called gutterfly. bobby airbrushed this drunken fly with torn up wings, sitting in a gutter drinking a beer , it was the coolest! things were going well , so , naturally, something bad was bound to happen. actually a series of somethings.

one night i was up a little late doing some crap online , i can't remember what right now , but it really doesn't matter. anyway there came a knock at my door at around one in the morning. it was this chick from syracuse that a customer of mine had introduced me to. i had told her that she had to stop bringing different people with her, every time she came, she had someone different with her. this i didn't like. everyone in the game knows that this is not cool. i told her so on several occasions. when she came in , she had yet again, a new face with her, " this is my cousin, shaniqua," she said. i told her that i had asked her to stop doing this and that if she felt nervous to come in by herself, to pick one person that made her feel more comfortable and to stick with that one person. she said the one girl was her sister in law, the other was her moms and the man she brought with her was her fiance. i told her that i really didn't want to meet her entire family and that this wasn't a family business and that i wanted her to choose one, just one, that's it, standing firm with what i had been telling her. reminding her that some people would freak the fuck out if you brought ANYBODY with you. she apologized and then told me what she wanted to buy. i had run out about thirty minutes before she had gotten there, and i told her so. "sorry," i said and shrugged, " i'll have more in the morning, but tonight it's all gone" she clearly didn't believe me and left angrily calling me a "white, mother fucker. a liar and a mother fuckin' asshole." so i told her that maybe it was time we went our separate ways because i really didn't need her business or the hassles that came with it. she warned me that i would regret this and left. i remember thinking good riddance as she walked down the driveway. she made me nervous , as if her and her friends were casing my house to rob it.

about an hour or so later, just enough time for someone to drive down from syracuse, another knock came on my door. i went to the screen door, which was locked, and this nervous looking white girl stood there. she kept looking over to the side of the house. as if someone was standing there coaching her. "can i help you?", i sort of gruffed. she couldn't keep eye contact with me as she asked if there was a chad here. i informed her that she had the wrong house, maybe he was out back at michelle's place. michelle had a sixteen year-old daughter who had a bunch of friends and one of them definitely looked like his name could be chad. you know how some people fit there names real well. she asked if she could use my phone, she thought maybe she was lost. i told her to wait there, that i had to get off the computer for her to use the phone. as i was logging off the computer, the screen door opened, " ummm," she stuttered, " uuhhh i think you have some.... uhhh somebody's here."

i looked over and these two guys stood there in the doorway, the girl behind them. one was about as tall as me, maybe a little taller or shorter but only by an inch or two, and real skinny. he was missing the front tooth that most crackheads end up losing for some reason or another. the other was shorter, but he was real fat, he probably weighed close to three hundred pounds. the girl had long, black hair, and she looked at the two of them nervously, but she was definitely not afraid of them, not in the least. the skinny one was in charge, and he was the one the girl was with, she wouldn't tale her eyes off of him. he pulled out a blade and looked at me," mother fucker, you know what this is." i almost laughed , i cracked a big smile, "dude, there's nothing here." as if he was gonna say, 'oh, ok my bad. sorry 'bout that, we'll see ya later , sorry.' it's odd how the mind will work in times like this. some people panic, or cry and beg, some cooperate completely. i just repeated what i said again, "there's nothing here, man." a little louder , hoping bobby was awake, or would hear me. "shut the fuck up!" he yelled at me pointing the blade to emphasize his point. up above my head, on top of the refrigerator, was my kitchen knives. i had a few chef's knives up there as well. i knew i could have pulled out two before he got to me and fought them both off. there wasn't enough room for both of the to fit between the counter and the fridge. i could have held them off, but i decided to see where this was going to go, so i waited. "get down on the floor, mother fucker!" , my nemesis screamed at me , again using his blade as a pointer. i got down , sort of.

the chair i had been using to sit at my computer, a nice old , hard wooden chair, was right behind me. i knelt down and sort of curled my arms around it , hugging it, sliding my left arm through the space between the back and the seat and gripped it like a life preserver. that fat guy headed right for my room and went to my dresser , pulling out the first drawer, the top one, where i kept my baggies, my scale and usually, when i had it here, my pot. i told him again, that we ran out about an hour ago, that i get everything on the front and that my 'guy' came by to get the money, that they were wasting their time." shut the fuck up" he ordered. he had moved on into the kitchen, in the corner between the sink and the stove. the girl was standing by the door, still pretending that she had no idea what was going on. when he told me to shut up he had pulled his hand from his pocket, empty. i decided it was time to play my hand, soon they were going to demand i empty my pockets, i had about $3500 and there was no way in hell they were going to be taking it from me. so i yelled to my partner in crime, "bobby! bobby!" , the skinny one screamed for me to shut up again. " bobby! bobby! we're getting fuckin' robbed!" he pulled his hand from his pocket and pointed at me with his finger, "i told you to sh-..."

from the darkness of bobby's bedroom came the recognizable, unmistakable sound of a shotgun getting pumped. chu-chuk, the skinny guy froze and looked in the direction of the sound, and i was on him like lightning. i hit him so hard with the chair that he went up over the stove and counter , landing in the living room. the fat guy came running from my room as bobby came running from his, blanket still flying off of his shoulders wearing nothing but a pair of leopard print bikini underwear. i spun and caught the guy with the chair so hard in the back of the head he collapsed, out cold. the girl began screaming, "OH MY GAWD, OH MY GAWD!" over and over as she spun in circles, terror had possessed her.

the skinny one headed for the door, his knife in his hand , now, and i caught him in the chest with the chair , sending him backward. i confronted him , now holding the chair like a lion tamer. stabbing him in the chest over and over to keep his knife away from me. he knocked the chair out of my hands and raised the knife as he rushed me. bobby and i grabbed his arm. "shoot him, shoot him, bobby, shoot this mother fucker!" i screamed as we struggled. the skinny guy was a lot stronger than he looked. he raised the knife again and he grazed bobby's arm on its way down into the muscle just above my knee. "you're a dead man now, mother fucker!" i assured him, just then, his partner came out of his daze and ran out the door. i grabbed the skinny one by the back of his head and his shoulder and proceeded to slam his head into the old plaster of paris walls, they were solid. with every slam more blood appeared on the wall. i looked down and saw the knife, as i reached for it, bobby pulled it out of my leg. " gimme that fuckin' knife!" i demanded, but bobby refused, i would have gutted him with it. i kept slamming his face into the wall and said, " IF.... I... EVER..... SEE.... YOU.... AGAIN.....I'LL...... FUCKING..... KILL.... YOU!!!!" i slammed his head into the wall two more times and threw him out the door where he collapsed as he fell down the stairs. this whole time, the girl was spinning in circles screaming, "OH MY GAWD!", i got behind her and waited until she was facing the door and i kicked her , right above the ass, as hard as i could. she sailed out the door, and cleared the stairs. her momentum took her forward and she landed right on her face in the gravel driveway, where she bounced and skidded to a halt. finally, she had stopped screaming.

bobby and i stood in the doorway and looked at them both, bobby turned to me and smiled, "nice kick, bro!" and high-fived me. he looked back at them and then back at me, "do you think they're dead?" i told him i didn't care. i picked up the shotgun and told them they had about ten seconds to get off my property before i blew they're fucking brains out. she got up and started dragging her boyfriend out of the driveway. she looked up and bobby moaned, " ooohhh, that's gonna ruin the rest of her summer!" he high-fived me again and pulled my bottle of jager out of the freezer, "damn, man my nerves are shot, i need a fuckin' drink." he poured two coffee cups full of the delicious mix of herbs from the deutsch speaking area of europe, we clinked glasses and emptied our cups as we watched the attempted robbers legs and feet disappear from sight. about thirty seconds later we heard a car start up i went out to look, it was a white honda, i wrote down the license plate number and stuck it on the fridge. i called up my friend tracy, a nurse and told her i needed her help, just then i caught the neighbors' daughters' eye as she looked into our apartment from her bedroom upstairs, i waved and pulled down the shades and pored myself another jager as we waited for tracy. i never saw the girl from syacuse again. what a coincidence, huh?

living with madness(pt6)
Living With Madness 6(cont'd)
Current mood: awake


"Well, he's not a hard man to track..... he leaves dead people wherever he goes." Captain 'Red Legs' Terrell-Outlaw Josey Wales

summer was gone, and as bobby had predicted it had been great.harvest season came and went and we continued to do our thing.winter began to rear it's ugly head.i like the winter. when i was a kid it was because it meant the beginning of hockey season. as i got older it was because of the snow. before the first snow fall, it rains and everything gets all muddy and the vibrant greens turn to shit brown. the ground harden up and everything just looks dead. then the snow falls and covers it all up making it pristine and beautiful. i just love looking at a fresh coat of snow. also between halloween and new years there are some raging parties.

the first real heavy snowfall was deep. it hit hard and within a few hours there was at least a half of a foot on the ground. between bobby being in portland for ten years and me in austin for five, we really hadn't seen any snow in fifteen years collectively. it snowed once in austin, but it was more like icy rain.

the city was shut down for the most part, except for the busier bars. as usual , before we went out , we'd started our festivities at home. bretton came over and we went to castaways. on the way bobby and i hit everything in our sight with snowballs. cars driving by, street signs and lights, people. it didn't matter. and it was a blast. we had been at castaways for a bit , when someone offered to smoke a joint of blueberry bud with us. if you've never had the distinct pleasure of smoking blueberry , find some, it's fucking great, i got ripped. potheads are kind of flaky sometimes , especially when it comes to their weed. they are like wine connoisseurs. they know all these different kinds of strains and the different environments it was grown in. outdoor , indoor, hydroponic, clones, white widow, sour diesel... whatever. it smells good , i smoke it , i get high. yeah some weed gives me more of a body buzz than a head buzz, this cat i know, loma , grew some weed that made me feel like i did a couple of bags of heroin, but for the most part, i just smoke it and couldn't care what its' name was or anything else. as long as i get high.

so we were behind this big ass yacht that had been dry docked for the winter and as we were passing the joint around, people were heading for the club on the other side of the boat. bobby says"watch this, ..." and sizes it up, times it and lobs a snowball ala abdul-jabbar, over the yacht. the guy comes around the front of the boat and size "nice shot!" the snowball still sticking to the top of his head. he was a total stranger, and he took it really well, didn't even get mad . we all laughed and high-fived bobby and continued smoking this blueberry.snowball forgotten, i lean towards bobby as i hand him the joint. this hissing sound whizzes right by my face and explodes as it hits bobby directly in the forehead."oh!", he yells and sort of stutter steps, as if the snowball thrown was with the ferocity and velocity of roger clemens' mike piazza bean ball. "he domed me!" bobby says, and takes his hands from his head and there is still snow in the part of his hat where you can adjust the size, it's in the front when you wear them back wards. i lose it, everyone just starts cracking up. i look over and the guy bobby got with the skyhook is standing there pointing and laughing. "nice fucking shot!" i yell at him. bobby, being the sore head he is, gets mad we're all laughing and heads inside. a few moments later i go in and buy the sniper a beer.

while standing at the bar waiting for the drinks, someone punches me right in the back of the head.now , i don't fancy myself as a tough guy, but i'm not a wuss either, nor am i small. i turn around pissed as a mother fucker and there is only one person behind me, and he is easily six inches shorter and fifty pounds lighter.i couldn't believe this little mother fucker just hit me. i lean real close and i ask, "did you REALLY just hit me in the back of the head?", ready to kill the poor kid. "no." he says vigorously shaking his head,"a snowball hit you." at which point i look at the floor , evidence melting at my feet. i scan the bar real quick and there's bobby over by the dj eying the ceiling , a devilish shit eating grin on his face. shit eating grin, now where do sayings like that come from? i can guarantee you, no one would grin with a mouth full of shit.

any ways bobby does this little jerk/spasm ala cosmo kramer, this"oops , busted" knee jerk thing and smiles at me , i add two shots to my oder and head on over. "you fucker," i say as i hand him his shot, jager what else?," i almost killed that kid, i thought he hit me. we laugh it off and down the shots.now, anyone who's worked in a kitchen knows that chefs are sick fucks with twisted senses of humor. i'd been doing this thing at the station where, if anyone bends over in the kitchen near me, i get behind them and start doing "the air hump", usually without their knowledge, while they bend over. the only person i never did it to was the boss' wife barbara, hey i ain't stupid, oh and the pro boxer, jesse... so the dj bends over his table, and bobby goes to town, looking at me smiling. he starts pretending he's spanking the guy, really getting into it. the dj feels the air from bobby's spankings and turns around, meanwhile bobby is still looking at me. now he's laughing because i am. the dj gets a little pissed and yells at him. "hey! what the fuck , dude, do you mind?" bobby , still looking at me tells him to shut the fuck up. "dude," the dj continues, using one of bobby's own lines on him, "do i come into burger king and fuck with you while your flipping burgers?" the smile from bobby's face fades, and we walk away laughing.

a little while later, the dj plays some sappy ass love song. bobby grabs a chair and starts dirty dancing to it on the stage. taking moves from strippers and old school burlesque shows. he's got half the bar totally cracking up. the whole time he's dry humping the chair, he's lip syncing the words and staring at the dj like he's singing to him. when the singers says , 'i love you, baby' bobby, with one hand on the chair, thrusts home the point and points at him. pissed off the dj goes and cries to the bouncers, who are all friends of ours. to which they laugh and say, "he did what?" this only further enrages the dj. we decide that , with someone pissed off , our mission here is done and head out.

at this point, there is probably more like a foot of snow on the ground. while outside waiting for bretton, we begin making snowballs to ambush bretton with. we get about twenty made before he comes out the door. we start bombarding him with snowballs the second the door cracks open. but, it's not bretton, it's the dj and his girl. we start laughing when we saw who it was, but don't stop throwing snowballs. the dj screams bloody murder, and begins to throw snowballs back at us. we both start cracking up hysterically , the guy totally throws like a girl. this only pisses the poor kid off more, and now the bouncers are throwing them too, all at the dj. the girl starts to fight back and she throws better than he did. we start teasing him about it and the guy just gives up and goes back inside, totally humiliated. then to top it all off, the girl gives bobby her number and says, "he works every thursday , friday and saturday night, call me." score! high five.

on the way home, it's more of the same,car goes by, snowball. cop car drives by, snowball. whatever was moving , or standing still, we threw at it.we get home and begin amassing a cache of snowballs on the hood of your upstairs neighbor, charlie's , truck. and just like we did when we were kids, we began plugging cars from behind the gmc jimmy in our driveway. soon the neighbors' dogs start barking at us, so we start plugging them too. the neighbors come out and yell at us to stop throwing snowballs at their dogs, so we start throwing them at the neighbors. they fight back and soon we have this great snowball fight going.

meanwhile, the guy driving the last car we had hit, had circled around the block to see where we were. all of a sudden from behind us we hear some guy yelling," so, you wanna throw snowballs huh?" now, we had NO idea who this guy was, but we thought it was either bretton, jeff, don, charlie or angel coming up from behind us to ambush us. we hid behind the drivers' side of the truck as our aggressor came up from the passenger side. when he came to the hood, he approached very slowly. i jumped up and blasted his right in the face with a snowball! " that did it, !"he screams, adding" now i'm going to fucking kill you." oh shit, we said in unison and ran into the house.

once inside , however , i realize that we have a glass front door, nothing will stop him from smashing the baseball bat he's holding as he heads back towards the house. i decide to try to reason with the guy.DUMB!!! he starts up the driveway and i tried to say something to get him to cool out and he swings the fucking bat right at my head! luckily i was sober enough to get out of the way. i try to talk to him again and again i dodge the bat. he's still going for my head! damn, i think , this mother fucker really does want to kill me. third swing and i duck, and he takes out my rain gutter. while i ducked i grabbed the lead pipe that was leaning against the stairs and came up swinging like babe ruth. all his wind comes out as i connect with his gut. now he doesn't want to kill me anymore, now he wants to breathe, and run. but, now i am the one who wants to kill. he turns and starts to run and i chase him, raising the pipe over my head with both hands. i bring it down upon him with enough force the crack his skull. and, thank god, he raises his arm in self defense at the last second and dodges a bit to the right. the pipe comes into contact and cracks his fore arm, bouncing right off and through the rear passenger side window of charlie's truck bringing me to my senses. otherwise i may have killed the guy, over a fucking snowball.the whole time, bobby is in his room, hiding under the mattress.

the guy falls down and starts crawling away, i kick him a couple times and then his wife starts screaming to leave him alone. which i do.three doors down is an ambulance so that's where he goes.i go inside and lock the door. ten seconds later, there's a knock at the door. no it's not the cops, it's charlie , and charlie is righteously pissed off.he just keeps saying over and over dude that's fucked up and i laugh,"sorry charlie, we want tuna with good taste. this just pisses him off more and he walks away, while bobby and i laugh like loons.

a few minutes later, i look outside and the place is crawling with cops.i call mariposa and tell her that we're surrounded by cops and to meet mew in washington park. i grab all the weed and money and bounce out the window over the fence and head for the park. but, there are cops everywhere, so i run to her house, where she finds me, passed out in her back stairwell an hour later.

the next morning at 7 am, bobby shows up tat her house. he tells me that 'the snowball incident', as it came to be known, was on the radio and that some huge"training day-looking cop" had come to the house looking for me.i must admit i was a bit unnerved by the whole thing,and hungover like a mother fucker.'damn' as george clooney's character in o brother,where art thou would say, 'we're in a spot'. after a day of hiding out at mariposa's, she got tired of us and we went home... after it was dark out.

the next day, "training day" called. it was a local city cop, who was now a detective. i'd played football with him in high school, so i was quite frank with him. it seemed the story the guy had given was this. being drunk , he couldn't tell them he'd been driving, so he said he was walking down the street , when two guys jumped out of the bushes and tried to rob him. that he'd fought us off and crawled down to the ambulance station. marlon, knowing me, didn't believe this, especially since the bat he had claimed to have been hit with had his fingerprints, not mine or bobby's all over it. apparently he had dropped it when he fell onto the sidewalk, or when i kicked him, whichever. marlon thought that the fight had been over drugs. this i assured him wasn't the case. so, i waived my miranda rights, which is something i do not EVER suggest doing, and i tell him the whole story, starting where i started with you. luckily, he believes me. so instead of catching a felony assault charge, i catch a violation(think traffic ticket) 2nd degree harassment. thank you MB! and i agree to pay half of the ambulance bill, $500.00! i pay it right then and there and head home. when i get home bobby has a joint already rolled and waiting for me, he fires it up , hands it to me and says, "dude, this is gonna be the best winter ever!" he turns on the tv and finds jerry springer.

Tripping in the Graveyard
my friends and i used to hang out in a graveyard on university avenue in between ithaca and the cornell campus. it was a great place to hang out. the cemetery is full and the graves are relatively old so it assures no bereft relatives of the deceased will show up and complain.
the place is full of really cool stones and mausoleums. there is this amazing celtic knotwork with all these masonic temple icons. it stands about fifteen feet tall and overlooks the north side of town and cayuga lake. i believe it was carved by a man with the initials ihs because these initials appear on a few similar, but smaller, crosses.
there is also a crypt with the word/name wait on it. years ago a friend of mine added ".....there's more" to it causing laughter to many for years.
in the middle of the tomb garden is a bough of fir trees with a small bench, it is well covered and serves just fine as a place to have sex in the middle of the day. and a grave on which the name blood is etched in is always a cool thing to show newcomers. being on an ivy league school campus, it has a large amount of masonic phallus that bear resemblance to the washington monument in dc.
to the Northwest exit of the graveyard is an overlook that offers up the most beautiful view of the lake and the town, this is about fifty feet from the cross and on the other side of the fence from the wait is the turret, from the street below, it almost looks like steps leading to some medieval gothic castle. i have spent many a summer afternoon lying on one of its walls tripping on acid watching the clouds roll by,seeing all sorts of different things in the patterns in the clouds, almost like a beautiful rorschach inkblot test.
one night in particular, sometime around or on halloween, my friends and i took some extremely strong liquid acid and went to the graveyard.it was a creepy night, very dark with no moon and the sky was full of dark, ominous clouds. some guy drove by cranking the hanging garden, by the cure and it gave everyone the heebee geebees.
one of our friends, clit-eye, showed up with some kids who wanted to buy some liquid. being extremely high i gave them more than they paid for, by dripping it straight into their mouths, oops sorry fellas. clit-eye's friends left feeling very spooked coming to a cemetery to buy acid.
as the acid trip peaked, the temperature dropped, and we were walking through 'our' cemetery, we came across a group of college kids cutting through the graveyard. looking like a bunch of ghouls from night of the living dead, a bunch of leather-clad in the light, the group got a little scared.
"uh, hello?" greeted one of 'them' uneasily. no one answered them, we just kept walking towards them. being high on acid we could feel their fear and we played on it continuing our approach. "hello??" he asked again, even more nervously. as we got about ten feet from the party, the tension in the air thickened and one of the girls screamed, " say something, please!!!!!!" i walked up and asked, "what would you like me to say?" a big cheshire grin on my face. she begged "please don't hurt us". and we all laughed. " hurt you? now why would we do that? you've not tipped any stones, have you?" in unison, they all answered in the negative. and, in perfect sync, we parted, and i added "you may pass, this time." and they high-tailed it out of there, one of the fellas mumbled "fuckin' assholes". i agreed, i am an asshole, i still smiled about it though.and so did the great cosmic joker in the sky.
we headed for the wait, and the turret, we called it- the top of the stars that looked like a turret of a castle. as we approached this arctic breeze blew up from the very depths of hell, in its acrid breath. i felt ice forming on my soul. just then, we noticed a group of people had built a small, perfectly round fire in the middle of the turret. there were six people, three men and three women around the fire. they had formed an odd sort of chain, each with their head in the one on the rights' lap, alternating man-woman-man-woman-man-woman. another woman sat on the wall to the east and another man at the base of the wall to the west. the man sat cross-legged reading aloud from a book.
the group laughed again and another frigid blast from the bowels of hell blew through our fragile souls. it scared the shit out of me , and everyone i was with.we decided they were the source of our fear and the icy winds blowing through us.we approached them and my friend judah and i kicked out their fire. these people did not fear us, yet they allowed us to kick out their fire. it was as if they knew why we were doing what we did. one of the men from the circle looked up at us from the ground and said, quite calmly, "your souls are on fire." this caused me only a mild concern, i hadn't really processed what he had said, however judah looked at me with absolute terror in his eyes, "tones... our souls are burnin!..." he was terrified. the guy looks up and says, "uh, on your shoes...?"
that was enough, we got the hell out of there, practically knocking each other down the stairs. the stairs go it intervals; ten or fifteen and then a turn to left, ten more then right, then down twenty or so, then left, eight or so and then to the left again down to the street. at the second turn i noticed a woman in the shadows of the corner of the stairwell, i just about jumped out of my skin. "hello" she said smiling, confidently. i looked closer and noticed there were women and men, alternately in each darkened corner, hiding in the shadows. like the people we scared earlier in the graveyard we left with our tails between our legs, when we got to the street i mumbled.... "fuckin' assholes".

Black Bears on Crack
lost in a fog of cigarette smoke and wired on mountain dew, I'd sit here pecking away at these keys, randomly, without a plan like a chicken on crack with its head cut off. blood shoots from the top of me shoulders like a crimson volcano.yes, chicken little, the sky has fallen.
fresh from the mountains, where I'd stayed with franciscan monks, I'd am a renewed man full of piss and vinegar. where do these crazy sayings come from, piss and vinegar indeed. prayer and meditation above saran ac lake.
I'd had this vision, meditating, that I'd was looking out my window at the sky. it was a darker, summer blue as opposed to the winter's lighter tone. this box of bright light filled my vision, and from it , a bloody hand emerged. it reached towards me and I'd shook it. what does it all mean? I'd have no idea. the one is it was the most famously broken handed man in the known universe personally reaching to say hell.
man, I'd don't know really your guess is as good as mine. so what's your interpretation? anyway, I'd heard some great rehab stories that I'd'd love to share.
first, the insanity of addiction,continued. I'd don't know how true this is , but the bizarre-ness(is that a word?bizarre-ness?) of it was good enough for me to listen.
my friend, bill, a crack head, told me about a female he knew that had come across a bunch of money in a settlement of some kind or other, could have been an inheritance for all I'd know. but, anyway, she was a BIG-TIME smoker, all day all nights she stuffed that glass cock and sucked on it for all she was worth. funny thing about crack. you can smoke it for a good seven days without any real side effects, that are noticeable anyway. but, on the eighth day, every time you take a hit, the stem takes a hit. smoking you up. your cheeks get sunken and then the weight just melts off like butter in the kitchen on the table in the summer time. eventually you end up smoking your soul,piece by ever-loving piece, until you are a walking stem, all you need is a big blackened piece of chore-boy in the end of your mouth and a lighter.
this woman would smoke from the moment she took her head off the pillow , until she passed out from sheer exhaustion however many days later.but before she would pass out, she'd piss an a bowl. when she awoke from her vampiric slumber, she would scrape the sides of the bowl to get her morning blast off!she was smoking her piss! that was so saturated with the little white devil in a bottle that she got high! now if that is not the most horrific story of a crack smoker, then, man, I'd don't know shit from shinola!the horror of that insanity. how does one even stumble across figuring something like that out. that human animal will never cease to amaze me.somewhere in a different time-space continuum some alien life-force is watching this woman in absolute terror and awe.
speaking of which, terror and awe, that is. I'd was on the way back to the monastery coming from an NA meeting. I'd was talking to a buddy of mine named steve. steve was running from the city-the city NYC- picking up crack. he would sell some so he could smoke the rest for free.
his father had a cabin in the woods up in odgensburg, which is near watertown and canada and all that. springtime in the top of new york state. he took his car down the muddy trail that led to his fathers' cabin where he planned to smoke a few hits of crack by himself. he had four ounces stashed in the door of his car and an eight-ball(that's 3 1/2 grams to you non-addicts) in his pocket. well, it was a little less than that by now, for he had taken a few hits on the way home to stay awake. not enough to get high , just enough to keep from crashing the car.
he kept the car to the right along the edge of the remaining snow so that he wouldn't get stuck in the mud. the sun was beginning to peak its massive fiery head up over the horizon so steve parked so that he could watch it come up. even though steve had partied til the sun come up on countless occasions, he hadn't;'t watched the sun actually come up in a long,long time.
he pulled out his charlie daniels cd popped it in the player and busted off a chunk the size of the tip of his thumb. easily a gram. his carefully fished his rusty razor blade from the glove compartment, this thing had seen more coke the last two years than most people seen in a .he cut the chunk into four even pieces-bell ringers, they're called.when you get a good blast some people hear bells ringing others, whistles.
he pulled out his pipe and stuffed one of the phone calls from saturn into the blackened business end of the stem. he lit his trusty, brand new black Djeep lighter tickling the white sheetrock looking piece with the butane feather until it looked like melted candle wax. he exhaled all of the air in his lungs and put the stem into his mouth and began sucking the poisonous white fog into his ever ready and waiting lungs, "as the band of demons joined in and it sounded something like this" sang charlie daniels.
steve took the toxic narcotic down deep into his lungs and waited to feel the rush before he blew out the smoke.his face light up from the suns' first rays upon the new day and he smiled. " good morning to you too." as a smile crept over his face. as the intoxicating rush took its devastating effect on steve's mind and body, he began to hear noises outside his car. the tree people already? he thought. coke abusers get this hallucination that there are people in the trees waiting for them, usually the cops, just lying in wait ready to ambush the insane fucks.
steve looked over to his right, to the source of leaves rustli8ng and snorting, " holy fucking shit" was about all he could intelligently muster. the shoulders and head of an enormous black bear had filled his passenger window, paralyzing steve with fear, as steve's heart tried to break out of his chest.the bears' snout was almost as big as steve's whole face. it took three good curious whiffs of the air, and steve started screaming, just like the director from the godfather when he discovers the head of the prized horse in his bed with him. "aaauuuugggghh, aaaauuuggghh,aaaauuuggghh!" he screamed over and over. this scared the salmon eating shit out of the poor black bear just waking up from hibernation, along with the rush from the cloud of crack smoke steve had blown out. the bear was off and running, so steve kept screaming.all he could hear after that was thump thump. oh shit he's on the roof of the car, steve thought , but the thump thump, thump, he heard was the pounding of his heart almost ready to explode.
he looked at the knuckles of his hands, they were bone white and wrapped around the steering wheel and he dug his long overdue for a clipping nail; into his palms deep enough to draw blood. he began honking the horn and laughing hysterically. when he looked into the rear view mirror to see if he could spot thew bear he realized that tears were pouring down his face.he rolled up the windows and locked the doors. just then his cell phone rang, it was his girlfriend, he said"honey, you're never gonna believe this!"

vaseline
when you are in recovery and involved in AA/NA you are exposed to a plethora of catch phrases, mantras and mottoes, all designed to help you keep your demons in the closet where they belong, not floating in a spoon awaiting the needle or stuffed in the end of a crack pipe. there must be a million of those little phrases-"it works if you work it, so work it you're worth it", "keep comin' back", "easy does it", and my personal favorites, "one is too many and a thousand is never enough" and " the insanity of the addiction"
the former is a true symptom of the addict. basically saying it is the first drink, or hit, or shot, or line, or pill - whatever method you used to feed the demons, that gets your addiction going again. the latter is just a label that goes with the crazy things people do to get high. as i am rubbing KY jelly onto my ass so that i can smuggle heroin and a needle into the jail, it is that phrase-"the insanity of the addiction" that echoes in my mind while i gently slide the package into my rectum. rectum? damned near killed 'em!
the use of the anus for the smuggling of drugs in prison is one of the most degrading things imaginable. while some guards will surmise that you have earned the right to get high, going through all that to get a fix. others will exploit the fact and continually make jokes and such to continue the degradation that you have already gone through.
once, in elmira prison, a guard thought that he had caught me smuggling a package in the visiting room. he spoke into his radio, "i've got one boofing a package on the dance floor". 'boofing' is the slang for sticking the package up your ass, the 'dance floor' is the visitation room. i was immediately taken from the room. my visitor, the niece of another inmate who had see me in a picture from the yard with her uncle, and had decided that i was cute and wanted to meet me, was taken from the visitation room to a cell with a toilet that did not flush. coincidentally there was a piece of toilet paper on the floor under the chair next to mine, that had vaseline residue on it-from another boofer. they insisted the paper was mine as further proof that i had something inside of me. they took me to a room and strip searched me. after i refused to admit that my visitor, nicole , had given me anything, they decided to let her go. but, they told her, that if it turned out that i had anything inside of me when they made me defecate into a bucket , they would let the chemung county district attorney's's office know and felony charges would be pressed. they took me to a room where the toilet couldn't flush and told me the sooner we got this over with the sooner i could return to my cell and get back to the normal routine of the facility.yeah right, i thought,after you beat my ass on the way to the box. i admit, i got a little shook, i did not know how i was gonna get out of this. nicole's uncle had hired me to smuggle weed into the facility a few months' ago and i was worried that this could get me killed. they brought me my lunch and with it i received a note from troy, nicole's uncle. it read," good job T, way to keep your cool. don't worry about niki she's at home safe and sound. give the package to the trustee when he comes back for the tray and just relax-Big Troy" so i shat it out and gave it up. the staff Sargent came to see me after a few hours. he questioned me and told me that he had to believe his officer and that after dinner we would be going to the infirmary to settle the matter once and for all. after i defecated in a bucket, one of the officers had to go through my shit. i loved watching the pig squeezing my shit as he searched it for contraband. they fed me a laxative and told me i would have to go two to three more times. they took me to a room that had a chair in it and made me sit on it. the guard from the visitation room was becoming increasingly agitated. he would bet his right nut, he kept saying, that we would find the stuff. the chair revealed nothing, 0 for 2. the laxative they gave me was very strong and i was on the toilet fifteen minutes after i had ingested it. this time the guard who 'caught me' was told to search the poop, again i smiled as he squeezed the evidence, and laughed as he retched. he deserved every bit of what he got. after the third trip to the flushless toilet the Sargent told me i would be sleeping in this cell until i passed another sample tomorrow that way there would be no arguments surrounding whether or not i had been caught or it was just a misunderstanding. after i was through in the morning the Sargent apologized as the guard who had really caught me fumed behind his back, while he stared at me with murder in his eyes. on the way back to my cell, Sully, the guard, said "i don't know how you got away with that but i am gonna catch you, i'm on to you now mister" i laughed more out of nervousness than anything else, then he said " i know what you did you nasty little fuck, you shitted it out , then you ate it." to which i silently smiled until we got back to my tier, and then in the safety of having witnesses i whispered ," naw, sully, i shit it out and then your girl swallowed it". and i laughed and laughed as he stomped away. when i turned around , Big troy had a nice sized joint in his hand, and he said "welcome home, soldier, niki says hi and wants you to call her". i was the celebrity on the tier that day as i relayed the story of my capture and eventual release by the enemy. i never told anyone how i was able to get rid of the package, i just kept saying that i never had anything to begin with . that they just wanted to scare people who were really doing it, just for the ears of the jail house snitches. those bastards, the snitches, really make me fucking sick to my stomach, siding with the very people who are paid to keep you down. and for what? an extra slice of fake bacon on sundays? to me these people are as low as the pedophiles that are locked up in PC-punk city or in pigs' terms protective custody.
so niki and i laid off on the smuggling for a bit and she brought a friend, jessika, that i hooked my friend, larry, up with. so the show never really stopped , there was just a new guy in the starring role. larry was more than happy to bring the stuff in, he was a real lonely guy. his family had pretty much written him off when he got arrested for selling drugs. his folks were rich and didn't understand why larry would stoop to such a low thing. " why did you do this to us?" his mother asked from a letter, the only letter he had received since he was locked up. " i can't even show my face, i am so embarrassed i have to do my shopping in a whole different city now....." it went on and on like that. larry acted like he thought it was funny but i could see that it hurt worse than a shank to the gut. to get the letter off of his mind i told him about another time i was smuggling dope from new york city to ithaca, ny, my home town.
i had gotten a ride from a friend, mikey, who owed me forty bucks. i told him he could work it off by giving me a ride to the city. he was bored and had nothing better to do so he agreed.. mikey's car wasn't inspected and his license to drive was suspended so i was real nervous the whole way down that we'd get pulled over and i would have to explain to some hick cop why i had over $3000 in my pocket. after we got to the city and i had bought the dope i had decided to boof it in case we got pulled over on the way back. i had also made sure to save enough money for bus fare back home on top of the expenses we'd need to get back, just to cover my heroin filled ass. i put a gram of dope in each balloon, which, after i cut it when i got back would be 2 1/2 grams per gram. enough for fifty bags. since i was doing over thirty bags a day myself, i figured if a package broke open i wouldn't die , i'd just get real fuckin' high. so, i had 20 one- gram packages of heroin in balloons and i put four balloons in a rubber, greased up the rubber with KY, not vaseline because vaseline will eat away at the latex of a condom, and boofed it.we got home without a problem and mikey laughed at me for doing such a disgusting thing. i said "laugh all you want, but , you would have been in just as much trouble as me if i had gotten caught with that shit because of your illegal-ass car, mother fucker". "well,... since you put it that way...", he smiled.
i drank a huge cup of coffee and waited. i hit the toilet. plop- one, plop- two, plop three, uuggh, i pushed uuuunnngggh, i pushed harder.UUUUNNNGGGH! i saw stars, but still no more packages came out. i was a little worried, i didn't want the dope to get ruined, and i really didn't feel like od-ing on eight grams of heroin. my girl told me to relax and wait , "have another cup of coffee, it'll come," she said.
so, i drank another cup of coffee and i waited, ...... nothing. i sent her to the store for some laxatives. i ate a piece and waited........ still nothing. being strung out on heroin dries you out. it becomes really hard to move your bowels. sometimes you won't shit for a day or two and when you get backed up like that it can be painful, so you have to drink more water than you usually would to keep regular. something you sometimes forget, being all fucked up on drugs and all. mikey suggested getting some cocaine. he said " coke always makes me go, man. it'll work, trust the old mikester". i pull twenty bucks from my pocket and tell him to go get some, and he says " twenty bucks?! c'mon cheapskate kick down at least a fifty , i ain't going down into brown town for no twenty stinking dollars!" i gave him a look like your father does , when you do something stupid and he feels like smacking you, i snatched the twenty from him and gave him a fifty and said "do not stop to talk to anyone but the dopeman, and hurry the fuck up." mikey's an alright guy and all, buthe is easily side tracked. i was notfeeling like waiting an hour for this to work-little did i know the end of it all.
while mikey was gone i ate another piece of the poo-poo candy and tried my luck on the john to no avail. my girl told me to stop or i would get a hemorrhoid or a hernia or something. so i just waited for mikey. now normally when you're waiting for someone to come back with the drugs it seems to take a long time. the whole time you're silently cursing the person that left. come on asshole, you say to yourself, hurry the fuck up,mother fucker. when you are waiting for someone to come back with something to help you crap out eight-grams of heroin, time CRAWLS. it feels like they are never going to get back, ever. believe me, i know!
finally mikey gets back with the coke. now, long ago i had made a deal with the Big Man Upstairs that i would NEVER shoot cocaine again. i won't go into the details because that is a different story all together, but, basically it went like this: "if you let me live, i'll never do it again". a bargain to which, at that point, i had lived up to. so i told mikey to rock it up, which he was happy to do, the little fucking crack head. then the fucker tries to take the first hit! "gimme that!" i yelled at him, giving him the 'what the fuck are you thinking?' look. mikey had a tolerance to coke, he's a garbage head- if it'll get you high, he does it. it's what earned him the nickname mikey, his real name is al. so i take the hit he has packed for himself and i feel like my head is going to explode. i run to the john and sit, but i am scared to push because i am paranoid that if i do, i'll do some kind of internal damage to myself, like blow out a major vein to my heart. i sit and wait , nothing. when i come down a little i try to push, nothing. so i go through the whole process over again. it still doesn't work. now i am totally wired on crack, a feeling that i completely despise, and i still can't poop out the drugs, so i do more heroin to come down and give the rest of the coke to mikey. which makes him a very happy boy. i myself, am miserable and worried. i send mikey on his way and wonder what is going to happen. maybe the rest will all break open and i'll be out of my misery, after i die the remnants will come out and the coroner will say, "see this here? this here is your cause of death". while holding a half-chewed ham on rye in his hand.
my girl suggests that i let her put on a glove and retrieve it manually. she too, is scared of the consequences of a prolonged exposure to the inside of my anus will have on the heroin, or me. i deny her this awful duty, for now, before i let her do that, i'll do that myself, i tell her. i call a friend who is familiar with the workings of this procedure in the smuggling scheme. he suggests using a suppository. i try it, the whole time fearing for the dope- not my health, and this too, fails. at this point, the dope has been up inside of me for over eight hours. i am sure it has been ruined. another friend of mine, opey, shows up. i tell him the trouble i am having. his reaction is something i did not want. he explains in a panicked way, how i have to get that shit out before i die. "no shit?! tell me something i don't already know,you fucking asshole!". now i am more worried, and after he buys his shit ,i send him on his way.
well, i say to myself, i guess it's time to go treasure hunting. i grease up my fingers and start my painful,degrading search. i feel almost like a rape victim, but at least it's my fingers up there, and i am being damn sure gentle about the whole thing. i search and search to no avail, and i realize what will happen next. feeling lower than low, i give my girl permission to do what she's been suggesting for the last hour and a half. but her fingers are shorter, and thank god smaller, than mine and has no luck herself. i sit down on to my couch and stare at the television but all i can see are the two packages nestled away inside the darkness of my anal cavity. if i had a shotgun at this particular moment in life i may have damn well used it. after an hour or so, i passed out. i woke up to someone knocking at my door, it was 8 am, opey was at the door, on his way to work. he needed his morning fix,when i answered the door the first thing out of his mouth was, "did ya get that out yet, bro?" with genuine concern on his face. my girl was gone, as she went to work at seven in the morning. i went to the john while opey fixed his morning shot in the living room. i tried to reach the packages again. i felt something and i got a finger behind it, it was the ring of a rubber. slowly, gently i coaxed it closer to the exit, slower, slower... i got it!!! i was so relieved, i broke it open right then and there to inspect the dope. to my surprise it had not been ruined one tiny bit. i was so happy and opey was too, so we celebrated by doing a real nice shot of raw.
i handed opey a cup of coffee, and he dropped it. he bent over to pick it up and smashed his head on my glass table three times. i was yelling at him, "yo! what the fuck are you doing you asshole?!" one look into his eyes told me the whole story. he was fucking od'd. "aww great this is all i fucking need.", i said out loud to no one, because the only person in the room besides me, was the fucking asshole who was dying.i slapped him a couple of times to bring him around,he was alittle too high,not over dosing. i went to pick him up to put him in the shower to try to wake him up, and he starts biting me on the shoulder. "yo!" i yell again " what the fuck are you doing?" he says, "what are you doing to me?" i explain what happened and tell him he needs to help me, help him, by standing up. which, thank god, he does. one of his buddies comes to the door and knocks, they are late to work, he gripes. "take him.", i tell his buddy who knows what is wrong by taking one look at him. "well this is just fucking great!" he says sarcastically as he helps opey walk out to the truck, bitching at him about being all fucked up. the cold winter air does him good and he comes right around. "hope you get the other problem taken care of T",he yells, sounding like a drunk as the truck drives away.
i head back to the bathroom, hoping that the next one comes out as easily as the first one did. i feel another ring, but it keeps slipping out of my grasp. i go through this, one, two three, four, five, six times. finally, i get a nice good grip on it with my pointer and middle fingers, i squeeze and i feel a pop. i look at my fingers and they are covered in blood. i collapsed into a ball and burst into tears. oh my god, i am going to get some kind of nasty infection and die now. i call up my girl and tell her what has happened. she is sympathetic and then reminds me that gay guys are way rougher than i have been, and that i should be okay. this calms me down and i stopped crying, but i was still scared to death deep down inside. i give up searching for the rubber and decide to just let it pass naturally. fuck it, the first one came out unscathed, the second one will too, i tell myself.
finally at around four in the afternoon, while at work, twenty-two hours after first going up inside of me in a hookers' bathroom in brooklyn, the final four grams of dope came out. it was such a relief to finally get them out of me that i almost cried again.
i would like to tell you that i said i would never do that again, but it would be a lie. even after all of the tears and fears and desperation, degradation and humiliation. i wish i could say that after that i got clean, but that too, would be a lie. but at least everything came out alright in the end.after my story, larry stood there silently, shock all over his face.for the first tiime sincei had met him, he had nothing to say. a guard interrupted the silence," Ward, Sidle, Kastenhuber, Frank, Jones...visitation"we went to our cells greased up and headed to the dance floor.

the struggle
adolf hitler's autobiography's title, mein kampf, is the most aptly named book ever written. mein kampf means 'my struggle' as you may well know. i have never read it, never even seen a copy of it. i appreciate its' title though, i can relate. life is a constant struggle. with its twists and turns and surprises and letdowns, it is a constant struggle. even those at the very top of the world's economic food chain, it does not discriminate. the grossly wealthy struggle to keep what they have, and to get as much more as is inhumanly possible. the poor struggle to keep their bellies full. even in nature the ant struggles to build its home and the lion struggles to survive as man continually trespasses upon its territory, expanding urban growth. as an addict, i constantly struggle with the demons that haunt me, chasing me into narcotic oblivion.
i can't say that i've seen it all, but i've seen enough. fifteen-year-old junkies, thinking they are so cool sticking heroin into their arms,not realizing that they've crossed a line that is damn near impossible to come back from. crack heads turning tricks, selling their children's clothes and food stamps, they'd sell their soul if they could find a buyer.i once watched a girl cut apart a needle that had blood coagulated inside of it. the blood belonged to someone else. she added water to it and got it to turn back into a liquid and injected it into her arm to get the drugs that were trapped inside the blood. amazingly, she did not catch the A.I.D.S. virus that was inside the blood of the person who had the needle before. another girl i knew, had only one vein left- her neck. she had had a needle break off inside of it a few days earlier and 't done anything about it yet, she eventually died from the infection that it had caused, another wasted life,another soul haunted by the demons of drug addiction. i used to think i wasn't hurting anyone but myself, that my crime was victimless- that I was the victim. a victim of a corrupt society that allowed the drugs into the country. it took me going to jail, this time after a friend of mine who i had been partying with, died. at first, it looked as if the district attorney was going to charge me with criminal negligent homicide, citing my "depraved indifference" as evidence of a crime. the stress that my mother went through following the arrest caused a near fatal stroke that still affects her to this day.my children's mother was forced to keep me form them due to my degenerative appearance, resulting in behavior problems in them that have yet to be corrected. and my boss constantly has to worry that one day,i just won't show up, because i am in jail.
while in rehab, recently, a friend told me about a woman that he knew that would force herself to hold her urine throughout the whole day, afraid to go to the bathroom because someone will steal her crack. she took to urinating in a bowl. one morning she noticed a film around the bowl, she scraped it off and smoked it , and got high! she now does this daily to get her morning hit.
another woman told me how she was trickin' in newark new jersey. living in an abandoned building with the raccoons, using bucket for a toilet.not using condoms to protect her from hiv/aids or hep. she lived there for two years before she finally succumbed to the misery and went for help, last month she celebrated two and a half years clean.she said she used to feel sorry for us men because we had to rob and steal and hustle to get ours.that she was special because of "what she had between her legs." she suffered a miscarriage a couple months ago, and she was riding the bus through the dope spot. she said she thought about getting off the bus to cop a bag, but she didn't have any money, so her addiction reminded her of how she used to get her dope,"i had already bought me another pair of knee pads." she said with disgust,she 'teven got high yet,so she ran to a meeting instead of going right into work.
the other night a girl i know,went to see a band from the 80's that she liked. the drummer broke out some crack and before she knew what she was doing she had let the whole band fuck her,while her boyfriend was there,just to get some more. i was disgusted while she told me she was trying to hurry to wash all of the cum off of her before her boyfriend came back in to the room.
i could go on for ever with stories like that.staying clean is a constant struggle,an even harder struggle than trying to stay high.

Looking Into the Eyes of My Friend High On Crack
Yeah, yeah, i know. you can say every cliche 'til you're blue in the face, i've heard them all 1000 times. yet, after all the denials, accusations, name calling, finger pointing, set-ups, betrayals, double-crosses, okie-dokes, switcheroos and whatever else have you, when the dust has settled and it's all done and over with, you are the one left standing there. scheming, mouth running, finger stretched outward, ace up your sleeve, a false bottom in your words and empty eyes exposing your lack of a soul. limpid jet black pools of emptiness reflect my face as you return my gaze, reminding me of a sharks' eyes. machine like, in their infinite search for food. MORE is the only word a shark knows. watching you comb the floor picking up different shades of all things white. i don't remember dropping any and i didn't see you do it either. i feel like stomping your head in to take your out of your misery. just stomping and stomping until your head is completely mashed into the rug. i once let him live with me because his fat, ugly, mannish-looking, bitchy, lesbian whore of a girlfriend kicked him out of their house.you know the drill, they got high, started drinking, she started bitching, he started not taking it like he usually does because he's whacked out of his brain on crack. a poke, a prod, a push, a shove and two back hands later, she's on the phone with the cops. they show up , a fuck you get out of my house and a can of mace later and we're at the city lock-up for the night. waking up in the morning to go to court with stank breath, mace face and sleepy head. 250 dollars and an order of protection later, he's at my house asking for a couch to crash on for a week until he moves into an apartment up above some bar. sure, i let him, what are friends for, right? after a couple of days, he asks/tells me he is going to have his son over for visitation. i tell it to him like this: this is what i tell all my friends with kids, the bottom line is that they are your kids. i myself do not bring my children into this house due to the simpled fact that there is a LOT of drinking and drugging going on in here, however if you can keep an eye on your kid and are responsible for it (which everyone ends up being anyway),it is your choice. he did not take the hint and brought his kid down anyway ,nobody ever does. he began to have his kid over every night for a few hours while she did whatever the fuck big, fat, ugly, mannish-looking, bitchy, lesbian whores do. one day i came home, and there she was cleaning my house. cool, i thought she was making sure it was clean for the boy. the next day he told me, he was going to spend some time with his family. to be considerate i said i would spend the night at my girls' house to give them some privacy. the next day ,when i went to get my morning shot , all my dope was gone. no one knew what happened to it ,no one took it, no one ever does. but i know what happened, el fucking cudo del cracka, got all smoked up and wanted to do some dope to come down, mother fucker, after all i had done for him , this is how he is going to do me? yes! yes it was! and i deserved every bit of it when i let a few days on the couch become 150 bucks a week til he found a place. fucking door mat loser that i am. now she was living in the tiny apartment that seems to shrink every time her hulk of a frame enters a room. one night i came home to the distinct smell of burning crack cocaine, i told them that i didn't really want that in my house, do you have any more? i smoked a couple of hits throughout the night and went to bed. the next day,home boy was still there at 10;30 in the morning.he claimed that his boss didn't need him today, tuesday on a sunny day in the middle of may? he works in the masonry field, i begin to get suspicious and i can already hear my girlfriend telling me "i told you so,". a few days later, they get their deposit from the house they were living in back from the landlord. they pay me the two weeks rent they owe and i leave for work. when i get home, once again they have a pile of crack. this time i do not ask for any, i tell them to remember that my girl does not approve of the use of crack no matter how much heroin she does, and will not tolerate its' presence in the house. so they moved their little c party for two to their bedroom, where their baby was sleeping. i woke up at four in the morning to some noise or something and had to use the bathroom. as i returned to my room i could hear the voices of four or five people. the stench of crack smoke filled the kitchen. i pushed open the door to their bedroom and looked inside. my friend was holding a pillow over his baby's head to keep the smoke away from it. a few months earlier i had nailed all the windows in that room shut to keep intruders out of the house. there were three other people in the room besides them i knew two but i'd never seen the other one and with all of the musical equipment in the house i was not comfortable with him being in my house. i told them the party was over and it was time for everyone to leave, at which the unknown guest said he was a guest of my friends and didn't have to leave. i ignored his ignorance and suggested they put their son in my room in the baby bed so that he could have non-toxic air. that's ok, his mom says, we're almost done. i corrected her, no you are done and told the other crack heads that they didn't have to go home, they most likely weren't welcome there either, but they were no longer welcome in my home. the two that knew me politely picked up their shit and left, the other did not so i grabbed him by the neck and dragged him to the door and threw him out as he kicked and screamed and threatened and begged. after i locked the door he banged on it saying that his shit was still inside. i looked at my friend, who remains nameless because i don't speak to him and don't want to conjure his presence by typing it either, he looked in the direction of a pile of crack on the desk, probably a gram or so. i said it was rent for having a place to smoke and that if he continued to stand outside my door and scream i was gonna open the door and beat the shit out of him. when he didn't stop screaming i grabbed a bat and opened the door , it only took two swings to get my point acrossed and he ran away. i was so angry now, and wide awake. my friend and i smoked the crack. after it was gone he stared at the floor and mumbled one word answers to my conversation, his transformation into this thing disgusted me so i did a shot of dope and went to sleep. i woke to their baby crying at about 7:30 in the morning, i heard his mom shush him back to sleep, i myself knowing that people would start coming over for their morning fix, got up and did my morning routine. the baby continued to wake up every hour or so, she would shush it back to sleep. at 10:30, i told them i would cook the baby breakfast. what i saw afterwords sickened me. their baby, after being in that room, with no fresh air, while they smoked crack from before i got home from work at 9:30PM til 4AM, was retarded and lethargic. normally it was playing with the toys and getting in everyone's way trying to learn how to walk. today it just sat on the couch and stared into space like a zombie. it made me sick to my stomach that they had done this to their child. at 1:30 i cooked us some lunch, which the baby hardly ate any of. after, i told them they needed to get up to take care of their son. while i was at work the baby began vomiting, they said they thought the boy was sick from eating a cotton from my floor. when i came home i asked for the next week's rent, when they said they didn't have it, that they had smoked $1400 worth of crack in a little over a day, i began throwing their shit out of the house. which wasn't much anyway, i called the boy's grandmother and told he the situation and to come get they boy so that it would have a place to live. now we are no longer friends. it's been that way for over a year and probably won't ever change, seeing him drive by in his beat up car inspired this rant, which i dedicate to him.

Confessions of a Football Junkie
i love football. i love everything about it.after the super bowl , i am usually a little depressed and bored, but luckily i have quite the affinity for college basketball as well. after march madness the NFL draft comes around and i usually watch the first couple hours then check in every hour or two. after the draft i have enough new football information to last me a couple of weeks, then the slow period begins.
in the end of june beginning of july ,the fantasy football magazines start coming out.fantasy football geeks are among the hardest of the hardcore NFL fans. i am not an ff geek but i am definitely getting closer to it each and every year. i usually buy four or five magazines and pore over every word that is printed from cover to cover. i make notes in the margins and compare the numbers and rankings of each magazine,devising systems that and formulae that calculate the best of the best at each position , or each team . who has the hardest schedule , streaks , slumps, jinxes , curses , etc,etc...giving me plenty to do until late july comes around.
then... free agent signings , training camps and exhibition games begin. players hold out and get injured , traded or cut. my fantasy football drafts and the beginning of the college season, which i watch to see who will be coming to the NFL,ushers in the regular season of the NFL.
the first weekend happens so fast that it's just like christmas-you wait so long for it to get here that when it finally does , it is over so fast that you wonder if it really happened.
i used to gamble on football and was pretty good at it , it was like having an extra bank account only sometimes i put money in, and couldn't take it out.
my week would start on tuesday, i'd spend the day with the spread sheets, combing over them looking for the cracks that would lead to the money .thursday , i'd pick a college game, one on friday ,three on saturday ,and then three on NFL sunday for each the one o'clock and four o'clock games , the sunday night NFL game , then monday night NFL. on tuesdays i'd add up my winners and losers ,then either paid or collected on friday.i collected more often than not ,but i gambling kind of ruined watching football for me.i no longer rooted for my teams, i rooted for the spread.one day my boss told me that he thought i had a gambling problem and i said "how much you want to bet that i don't?" and then it happened,i told myself that i wasn't going to bet on the super bowl. fifteen minutes before kickoff i walked over to the phone and placed my bets . i stood outside of myself watching the machine i had become and was helpless.although i won, it was the last game i ever bet on.
i remember this one weekend , i lost 1800 dollars! on tuesday, after i had added up my bets, i looked at the number and was in shock.i reached into my pocket and pulled out my money... i had three hundred and fifty dollars-one thousand, four hundred and fifty short of what i needed! i was physically sick.i didn't get off of the couch for two days,and now it was thursday-24 hours away from collection.i went and picked up my pay check for 500 , now i was at least a little closer to half way there.the phone was ringing when i walked in the door, it was THE BIG MAN ,"HEY CREEP, " he yelled into the phone "YOU'RE DOWN 18 LARGE",like i didn't know that already,"I'M JUST CALLING TO MAKE SURE YOU'RE COMING DOWN TO THE GRILL TOMORROW." i assured him i would be there and then hung up.
the grill was just one of the three places he won from degenerate gamblers,people that can't cover their bets.i was definitely not going to be one of those-once you are there ain't a bookie around that will take your action .
i went to the Hill to get some pot, i called in an old favor and got two on the cuff,that's credit ,for four grand . i offered it to a friend for a one-time-only 2750,which would get me completely out of this mess, but he was broke.he could only take a quarter pound off of me , so i sold him one for 800,i was now over a thousand-1150 to be exact , just 650 away from getting out of this hole.
i went back home exasperated,i threw my hat down on the table and wondered, what the fuck am i gonna do? i called in my thursday nighter , texas tech giving 14 points for a hundred and fifty bucks, and opened a sam adams. i woke up to knocking on my front door the west ender-a gambling' buddy of mine-knocked on my door. he handed me a coffee and said he was on his way to turning stone, an indian casino a couple hours north , to play some black jack. i saw that the sun had come up, it was friday -payday-doomsday.i grabbed the paper from him and looked up the Tech game, it wasn't in the paper-damn late games.i grabbed my jacket without even thinking about the ramifications of losing and left with him.i looked at the clock it was 830 in the morning-i had nine and a half hours to come up with the 650.
west ender and i got the casino at 11 .we hit the black jack tables and in fifteen minutes i was down to four hundred, i was getting sick. told me to take a break and get some fresh air. i walked around for a bit ,the thing about casinos outside of vegas and atlantic city is that there isn't anything else to do but gamble. it was around 1 in the afternoon when i finally took my pathetic ass back into the casino.
when i found westy he was laughing and carrying on having a good old time . he was up about 1200. i sat down and lost another two and a half .now i was really fucked i ran to the toilet and vomited.on my way back to the table a die from the crapshooters hit my foot , i picked it up and handed it to the croupier.i had 150 in chips left. i said fuck it, and put the whole 150 on the pass line.i didn't know shit about craps.i prayed to the gambling gods and watched the woman roll the dice.
they bounced off the wall and a guy watching yells "SEVEN!" and my 150 doubled.smiling i picked up two fifty and put another fifty on the pass line, she rolled again ,this time getting an eight. chips began flying all over the place . guys were yelling ten on the hard eight ,thirty on six ,fifty on the come. i looked at the old man next to me and said what do i do, i never played this before, he looked at meas if i had asked for money. a dealer told me a quick explanation of the game . i looked around the table for the most chips and started copying his every move at a ten percent cut.he was betting with the green 100 dollar chips , i used the red tens. my money began to grow.
i was really starting to have fun when i got the dice.i had a basic idea of what i was doing, and i started rolling .i made about eight passes before i lost.next thing i know west ender is at my side " i've been looking all over for ya , we gotta go,its 430.i had already placed my bets, i told myself last roll, win or lose i take my chips and go.the woman who hit me with the die had the dice,she rolled a nine. i had chips on five , six and eight,the pass and below the pass all in all about 114 dollars.she started rolling. she hit my five,i collected and pulled my money off of five. she hit the eight,i collected and took the eight pile. she rolled a few more times the hit my six, i pulled the six. now all i had was the pass , and below it. she rolled and rolled and rolled -eleven i collected the rest and picked up my chips.i threw twenty to the dealer that helped me learn and split.
how much you win , creep? asked old wester as we were cashing out.i counted....1650!i was only 150 dollars off!there was light at the end of the tunnel!
on the way home ,west ender kept telling me how lucky i was.that never -neeeeeverrrrrrr happens my friend.you never win when you're down like that.i told him i was a quarter cherokee and that it was my reparations , we laughed like loons .west ender had got the indians for 2500. he kept saying "we scalped 'em!" we listened to espn radio on the way home, when i learned that texas tech had covered, i screamed so loud westy almost crashed ."i covered , i covered, i'm in the clear!" i felt as if i had just gotten out of jail ,like a huge weight had been lifted.
i walked into the grill a little after six, THE BIG MAN says-"YER LATE CREEP" i smiled as i handed him a fat wad, 1650,texas tech covered last night. his fat face never changed as he pocketed my money . for a second he looked like jabba the hut"GIVE THE CREEP WHAT EVER HE WANTS" i got a double shot of jaegermeister and a pint of sam adams , i slammed them both and doubled up , repeated and got one more."HOW YA FEELIN CREEP?" jabba asked, "i feel no pain" i said .i climbed off the stool and stumbled home into the cold darkness wondering who i was gonna pick tomorrow.

Circles Psychos and Silliness in Xanadu
my point of view is crooked and jagged ,to the left and to the right .if it was on a chart it would look like a stock market report. i consider myself a conservative liberal, not too laid back and not too hard line. i straddle the line ,i am not a flip-flopper although ,like everyone else, sometimes things are able to change my opinion. by experience , new information , maturation, whatever.i feel like i am an average american, well not average , but close enough-ok i talk to average people, ok? close enough. i get around well enough , socially. i've partied with politicians(my friend travis had DUBYA on his speed dial), the fellows that live in the "jungle" , homeless crack smoking hookers, rock stars , porn stars , millionaires, ceo's, beer brewers , tattooers , glass blowers....you name it .i've had the privilege of enjoying just about all walks of life.ya know , it's funny how social circles weave together on the pattern of life.
i am a student of knowledge , seeking the truth. an avid pupil of the human condition and the secrets of the universe. the path i've taken directly correlates with my crooked and jagged point of view. it helps to keep me in tune with the vibrations of the universe , its beating of the drums. my heart longs to be one with the universe. i can feel its magnetic pull on my body. the closer i get the more i feel my soul grow , feeding from its stream of cosmic energy. the actual expansion of my entire being that is held within this body. i feel as if i could move mountains in this state. for one millisecond, i am aware of what it is like to be god. the feeling hits you with an overwhelming force. sometimes faith healers are able to summon this energy and it drops the people to the floor and they writhe in holy ecstacy as hands of eternal light lie upon them. in that perfect instant of bliss you are pure emotion and wisdom, one with the sun. infinite. after ,you are never the same . your aura shines for days ,drawing the attention of anyone who comes near. they are drawn to you and don't know why, some people subconsciously get uncomfortable with this cosmic attraction and instantly hate you.your energy is infectious ,as if you emit a spiritual musk. its as if you just got laid for the first time in months and everyone can tell the difference, now matter how subtle it is , in your prescience. many people search to attain this feeling forever, to drown in its infinite wisdom. soldiers of the light , overdosing on evolution, blinded by the brightness, forgetting the lesson of icarus. they become unable to interact with others socially. they shine like the sun , giving off a creepy vibration that makes others uneasy with the feeling of being of a lower human.1000cc'sof 100%pure emotion ooze from every pore of their existence. if a fly were to land on them and soak up their sweat,everything they landed on later, would instantly begin to return to the great creator.like a bee pollinating flowers. giving death life and feeding life death as it buzzes through its existence . completely unable to comprehend its great importance , even as one of life's vermin , as an essential member of the planet. a card carrying insect since we were but still just an amoeba floating in the pond scum.
that is until that day that a great ray of light shone down into that puddle of filth and out we crawled. slowly evolving , sucking oxygen inside of our wretched existence as we grew into our present beastly forms .chronologically speaking we are still babies , still learning through failure after cursed failure. we have been condemning ourselves to the fiery pits of hell ever since that fateful day when one cell became two. with our greedy , hungry eyes, our sticky , lustful fingers , our jealous , angry hearts ,our stubborn , vain minds and our filthy , lying mouths.we are worse than crabs in a barrel. completely willing to stomp out 1000 people's dreams for a chance at slaking the thirst for our deepest , darkest desires. adamantly pulling anyone back down into the drop of filthy grey water we came from for a minute of instant gratification. wanting what we don't know't need, needing what we don't know't have, and having what we don't know't want. a perfect circle in such a perfectly imperfect world. as we float endlessly through space in a circle, inside yet another circle, as we ourselves are circled as it itself circles and circles and circles .inside an even bigger circle.
it's no wonder every now and then someone says "the hell with this lunacy stop this existence i want off" .tired of the mundane trappings of everyday life , dizzy from all the damn circling.sick of been tired of it all . laughing to themselves as they say "i'll show them" and 'they' don't know't even take even an iota of interest.just another cruel joke life hands out on an eternal basis,like when you say well it couldn't possibly get any worse....heh heh heh.the grates joke of all? it smiles back at you from the face in the mirror and the seven years of bad luck that is soaked within its' prison of glitter and glass waiting to be released. collecting its' dust and recording all that it sees. until it lay in pieces and releases the fate as it fulfills its destiny.like a djinni trapped in a bottle, except it only hears your wishes it doesn't grant them.all the time the phrase , be careful for what you wish for emanates from its sheen.just imagine all the stories a mirror could tell, the sights it had seen.all the beauty of humanity and its true beastly nature.tears of joy and pain. the first breath of life and the last breath of death and every other kind of breath taken in between.
and as i wheeze out my fragile little death rattle, body no longer to withstand the abuses i have endured it with, i shall fear no evil. for i will have already walked through the valley in deaths shadow and have been through hell and back. and finally , rest in peace i shall.

The Cornell Graduate
k-rock was a cornell graduate .i first met her after moving back from texas. she was married and strung out and her husband didn't know. he knew she dibbed and dabbed but he didn't know to the extent to which she was stuck. at least he made it look that way . deep down i think he knew and liked it because it kept her needing him . he had a good job and made good money and didn't pay attention to his bank account. what a dumb fuck.
k and i clicked right off the bat something my ex-wife hated when we first met . she was jealous and it showed . k and i got a kick out of it and even poured a little fuel on the fire . her being from the southwest , scottsdale, arizona, and me having lived in the southwest, in austin, gave us a bit of common ground to build a friendship upon . pretty soon we were hanging out on a regular basis
i developed a little crush on k-rock and she knew it . she would wear these petite little outfits that showed off her gorgeous body and flirted with me unabashedly . it got to the point that my ex was convinced that we had had sex. but at the time it wasn't true . she'd come down and hangout and we'd talk and laugh, and on our trips to syracuse to score dope ,she and i paid little attention to anyone else . i would tell her that if she wasn't married she would be in big trouble , because i would be all over her . but i respected her wedding ring and the man who gave it to her although didn't know him.
i started to become the boyfriend without the benefits . i kept her ego going and she kept me interested . then one day she came over and was pretty sick . she looked awful . she sat down and i was playing my guitar and watching tv . she whispered ,tony, i'll do anything for a bag of dope . it sort of broke my heart to hear her say that . i didn't want it to be like that if i did in fact get to have her . i wanted it to be because she couldn't help herself . i even gave her a chance to take it back by pretending that i didn't hear what she said . but i was immediately turned on. just the thought of finally being inside this gorgeous piece of southwestern beauty had my head spinning . then she asked me if i heard her and repeated herself . i asked her if she was sure that she wanted to do that and she nodded her head . so it was an excuse for her to get to sleep with me. she was telling herself that she had no choice and that i wouldn't front any to her . i walked into the bedroom and she followed me . i let her get straight and then we were all over each other . the dope loosened her up a little and she told me how much she thought about this every time we were together , i admitted that i did too . it was amazing . we agreed that if she weren't married and i weren't with someone that we would be perfect together .
we continued to have sex in the daytime ,sometimes i gave her dope ,sometimes i didn't. one time she came over and dropped to her knees giving me one of the best blow jobs i've ever had . she was so dirty about it , letting me explode all over her face and breasts . after about six months or so , her husband "found out" she was using . i think he found out we'd been fucking because he told her that she either went away to rehab or he would leave her. she submitted ,but told him she wasn't going to go sick . and he brought her to my house to get straight.
she came in and fell into my arms bawling . she was hysterical , i couldn't understand a word she was saying . finally i got her to calm down and she told me what had happened . she gave me the money for two bags and told me how much she was going to miss me . now i was really excited . in my sick head i was so turned on by the fact that here she was crying in my arms , while her husband was outside my house no more than fifteen feet away . i grabbed her hair and kissed her hard . she tried to resist at first , but i'd given her too much good sex for her to resist . i shoved her on to my kitchen table face down and ripped her pants down to her knees . usually we needed to fool around a while for her to get me going but not this time , my dick was hard enough to cut diamonds . i stuck a finger in to her pussy to get her ready but it was already drenched . i shoved my cock inside her as hard as i could , causing her to scream out in pleasure . i began fucking her as hard as i could , as if there was a bee inside of her and i was trying to smash it into mush . with every pounding she screamed and screamed . she started to shake uncontrollably and she let out a high pitched scream i had never heard come out of her . all of the neighbors' dogs began to howl . " oh my fucking god" she screamed and i ran with it . " who's your fucking god , bitch , who's your fucking god?" she tried to hold back she bit her lip. i was about to explode " say it you fucking filthy whore , tell me who owns this pussy!" "you do !" she screamed "oh tony it is all yours! " i made sure she knew it too " anytime i want it i"m taking it , right ?" "yes!" " tell me your my whore! " ." i'm your whore ! baby fuck me hard! this pussy is all yours!" . i grabbed her by the throat and squeezed it soft but rough "then turn around and suck this cock you filthy whore !" and she sucked it harder then she ever had, going at it like a porn star. i exploded inside of her mouth and almost fell to the floor. she looked at me and smiled . she knew she had me strung out on the pussy just as much as she was on my dick. she kissed me on the cheek and went out to meet her husband and then i did the stupidest thing i could have ever done.
since i'd had a feeling that her husband had found out about her infidelities ,and that, not the fact that she was strung out, was the reason that he was sending her to rehab.i'd always thought that he let her stay strung out because he was insecure and that if she was strung out then she would always need him and his money.k had been western unioning herself two hundred dollars every two or three days and spent all the money on heroin. when her husband ,eddie , had gone to the bank for money and found the cupboard bare, he was pissed .on top of the fact that his wifey was fucking someone else , she was giving them(me) their savings.he went home infuriated, threatening the end to her free ride on the heroin wagon ,he gave her the ultimatum: rehab or divorce.now like i told you k-rock was a cornell graduate ,she had a bachelor's degree in environmental engineering and eddie's family was filthy rich with one child so when they die all that money is going to go to them , she made the same choice that everybody else would have made;rehab.
i asked k for a ride to tops to pay my electric bill,she told me that eddie was in the car so that probably wasn't a good idea . she pecked me on the cheek and turned to leave. i followed and she said eddie's out there. i told her i knew and that i was just getting a pack if cigarettes . she gave me a funny look but didn't stop me . i turned to lock the door and wished her luck, she said thanks and turned to leave. i looked over her shoulder and in the car staring directly at me with a look of pure hatred on his face. i smiled and pretended to pat her ass , then mouthed the words" i fucked your wife"and added in a fuck mime to clarify what i was saying. he exploded ,"you mother fucker "he screamed as he struggled to unlock the door and get the car door open so he could get out. i leapt from the porch and did a perfect flying kick landing it right underneath the door handle,knocking him back into the car .i grabbed the door and bashed his leg with it repeatedly ,now all he wanted to do was get back in the car.as i attempted to break his leg, k-rock screamed both of our names, which got our attention. i leaned forward and i told him ," if i get any trouble from the cops,or if i ever see you down here near my house again i am going to consider it self-defense."i asked him if i was clear and he nodded his head and then he started up the car and drove away.i stood there in the driveway chuckling to myself watching them drive away.a few weeks later, before she even went to see her husband she showed up at my work.dressed in a mini skirt with no panties on.
i started to catch serious feelings for the girl i was with and told k we had to cool it for a while . at first she was as jealous as my ex-wife was after she introduced us . but , after i explained that with her being committed to an active marriage she had no real right to be so ,she relaxed and we continued our friendship as if it never happened . it was the first time i was actually able to stay friends with a girl after we had been involved sexually so quickly it usually took at least a year to even be able to be civil, much less in the same room. k was smoothe and quite level headed so the transition went along quite easily .
k-rock and i went on many successful dope scoring missions together either to nyc or Rochester , depending on what time she had to be home, or as i called it, what time she turned into a pumpkin. one of the things i liked best about her was that could talkier and that we related easily.when we went on long trips together , time went quickly because of the long conversations we could have.i often wondered if her and eddie were able to talk like this. i hoped they were,for their marriage's sake . if they don't the house they live in going to get smaller and smaller.One time in new york city k-rock and i and sid , a guy we brought along, were in tompkins square park. we had split up to try to find some dope because our regular connection, mildred, a hooker from williamsburg in brooklyn, was in rykers for thirty days for something or other. although i didn't like the idea , k thought it would be easier if we split up,i guess she thought it would be easier for her to cop because she was pretty. i was having no luck when i spotted her talking to some street kid , so i began walking her way. when i was about twenty feet away , he grabbed her wrist and pulled her close sticking a small blade to her throat-in broad fucking daylight! i kept walking up to them, neither of them had seen me. i got close enough and snuffed him, i caught him in the ear . he dropped his knife and fell to his knees. just then someone yelled and all of the sudden about twelve kids from all around us began to close in . she had walked into the middle of a bee's hive and was about to get stung when i came along. sid had witnessed the whole event from about fifty feet away but wisely stayed put, and when i had acted he calmly started walking for the car. k and i ran with a modern-day oliver twist and his gang hot on our heels. k kept a spare set of keys to her car in the compartment under the arm rest between the front seats , she pointed her keys and unlocked the doors for sid and he got in and started the car. we got in the car with about fifteen feet to spare.one of the kids had dented the door by kicking it as we drove away . we laughed like loons as sid made his way through traffic .each of us recalling our roles in the encounter. realizing how close she'd come to getting seriously hurt k began to cry. now we were sicker than before, and it looked like we weren't going to find any dope.
we pulled over on avenue d between first and second, there used to be this cool club there, it looked like a scrap heap with all these amazing metal sculptures everywhere. it used to be where i would buy new needles, now it was a garden, the lower east side sure had changed since guiliani took over. we sat in the car for a minute trying to figure out what we were going to do. i got out of the car and walked over to a bodega to get a drink. when i came out there was this older black guy walking a ratty bicycle with a flat tire and a chain on it that looked like it was worth more than the bike. i took one look at him and it was obvious that he was on dope, maybe methadone, because his tracks were old and thick as if he were shooting up with a bike pump. i approached him and asked him if he knew where to get any dope.he got mad ,i had offended him because he thought i was a cop . "a guy looks jus'like ya's th' one sent me us'state" i walked away apologizing for bothering him.we sat there for a few minutes more trying to figure out what to do when he came back to the car." come on you an' me right now." he refused to let sid come and out of being sick i agreed. i gave sid a look that said "follow me." and walked away with him. he walked fast constantly looking over his shoulder to make sure sid hadn't followed. he took me to this apartment project .i was the only white person on the whole lot. we went into one of the buildings and got into the elevator.graffiti and what looked like blood covered the walls,the stench of piss and rotten garbage filled the car , " how much you want?" he asked/demanded. i was scared , my gut was in knots .this is it , i thought , this is where i die.i asked how much for a bundle ,he told me 80 bucks, i peeled out 80 in my pocket and handed it to him. the elevator stopped and we got out and had to go up another flight of stairs , in the stairwell it was dark ,the light was out . i was petrified and he knew it " see " he sang " now you knows how i feel. " grinning like the chesire cat, teeth and eyes shining in the darkness. he left me in a hallway , knocked on a door and went inside . i wanted to run , right then and there , but i couldn't for some reason , i wouldn't abandon the 80 dollars i'd given this random man from the street. he came back out five minutes or less later and handed me the bundle . i shot a bag right then and there, he asked me for ten dollars for his trouble . i asked him to wait and told him if it was good i was going to buy more. "oh,iss real good shit ,man, you love it.you see."he smiled . the dope hit me pretty hard and for a second i thought i was going to fall out . i pulled out 680 dollars and gave him forty, "this is for you,but i want eight more bundles", he went back in and came out even quicker than he had the last time. the whole way down the elevator i was waiting for the shoe to drop , the trap to spring . i kept expecting a gun to my face and someone demanding all my shit.the dope in my veins had relieved the fear a bit ,but not much. by the time the fresh air had made its way into my lungs i was practically falling over from the adrenaline that had built up inside of me.i have NEVER been so scared in my life ,before or since. my hands and legs shook as i walked the eight to ten blocks back to the car .
sid was non-chalantly reading a village voice leaning up against k-rocks car and she was doing her nails. i gave sid a rash of shit for not following me,and he came up with some lame excuse and k just asked "so, how much dope did you get?" i stopped in mid-sentence and almost slapped her for being such a damned dope fiend, but how could i ? we drove to a more discreet section of the lower east side where we poked up and they commended me on the quality of the dope. for the stress of the journey through hell i'd just taken, i told them the guy charged me 120, they bitched abit but what could they do? i was the one who'd just done what neither of them would EVER do. we split up the dope and headed for home.
over the next few months k started to gain weight .one day while i was looking at her i noticed that her breasts had grown, and it dawned on me ,she was pregnant.meanwhile,the company her husband eddie worked for was about to go under and he was interviewing for jobs in other cities.one day while he was in phoenix, i told her that maybe it would be good for her to get away from ithaca , to have a chance to start a new life with her husband. i told her that he was going to get hired in phoenix ,that i could feel it.and it would be good because she'd be close to her family and that her mom could help with the baby. she looked at me in disbelief wondering how i knew. i told her it was obvious. i asked if it was eddie's and she said even if it wasn't that it was still eddie's. a month later she left for phoenix,she told me she would send us pictures of the baby. i told her that she was going to go to phoenix and forget all about us.that she'd wonder from time to time how we were , but that it was okay for her to forget us ,that she and eddie deserved to have a good life , that her baby girl deserved to have a good life. i still think about her now and then and smile when i do , she was a good friend.take care k-rock,take care.

Drowwning in Enlightenment
Located in upstate ny,at the southern end of cayuga lake,the second largest of the finger lakes, in the seat of tompkins county , lies ithaca ny.home of cornell university, ithaca gun(obviously), ithaca college and the highest waterfalls east of the mississippi river-taughannock falls. former home of carl sagan, summer home to new jersey devils star joe nuendyck. to leave ithaca you have to go uphill, the city lies in a pit . it was once the center of the film industry before they fled to sunny southern california. and in the center of it all is where you'll find the average ithacan .
welcome to the ithaca commons- lunatic central. where ,for some, it's still the summer of love and the stench of patchouli hanging in the air like a bad omen is proof. the hippies have a stronghold here and have watered down the effect of protests and marches by having one almost weekly. this is the new world order hippy who preach tolerance and acceptance of others while looking down their unwashed noses at those who don't think like they do. screaming bloody murder about the iraqi war and saving the environment ,then they climb into their beaten down vw bus that gasps and wheezes as it labors on down the road, leaving a trail of jet black oil and other automotive fluids, and sending smoke signals to the other twelve monkeys cult members griping maniacally about the current Washington administration with the demeanor of a conspiracy theorist.meanwhile they sit on the commons all day preaching about how much better they are than those who feed into the great beast that is the capitalist system ,as they sell their pot, ho-made jewelry and other hippy shit. damn hippie-crites.
out patients from the mental health services do the thorazine shuffle, the prozac rock and the haldol drool from their roosts ,as if the dodo never died.the mad buffalo hill jogger sweating off his run, "three times up, three times down" he proclaims to anyone who will listen. vinny ,the mad cackler ,howls with laughter through a blue fog of smoke , hearing the voices inside his head do their stand up routines .the angry russian and his poor , abused , shell-shocked wife make their way to the liquor store to get,yep you guessed it ,another bottle of rot gut vodka. so that he can make her fuck all the other local loonies who have twenty bucks, then beat the living shit out of her for being a whore.ahh young love. gothic matt ,the acid casualty,waits for eleven o'clock to roll around so that he can get his daily allotment of his ssi check. the mhs has to dole out his money to him ,otherwise the junkies will get him to spend all of his money on dope, then give him water shots all day.poor bastard is just so lonely ,that he'll do anything just to feel like he has a friend . a skinny little black guy dressed like a mixture of beatnik, guardian angel and black panther, hands out his poetry/rant/confession of how the government and police are harassing him. accusing him of sex crimes that i suspect he is guilty of . in the text of his testimonial ,lying among his claims of their intrusion of his life is the doozy, that the fbi planted a micro-camera "inside my penis".bernie the rock guitar god mosies along carrying a pawn shop window special , and a pignose amplifier strapped to his hip. torturing the guitar as it screams for mercy through the tiny speaker that is amazingly loud. he talks just like peter the puma from bugs bunny , the one that wants "oh three or four "lumps of sugar in his tea.from the opposite side of the commons standing in front of the first bank of ithaca is richard the schizophrenic street preacher of armageddon . not only is he entertaining but some of his one-liners are eerily sensible."nixon sold us to china for his wine collection" he bellows at whoever is unfortunate to have to do business in the bank.and my personal favorite " you can control my mind ,but you can't control my bladder" while he urinates on himself the statement that much more validity.in one of his more lucid moments, he told me he was in vietnam and that he worked for the cia,and that they planted a micro-chip inside his head so that they could tell him who he was supposed to assassinate , and they could know where at all times ." but i fooled them " he says smiling his two toothed smile as if they were dull fangs. he pulls off his hood to his sweatshirt and reveals an amazing scar, that runs from his ear to ear behind his head.he was really quite believable,and then as if a switch had been hit and he was gone,back to crazy old richard again.
at the west end sit the , sipping their swill from paper bags and arguing over who said what to who , in some three day old fight. the stench on their booze soaked bodies overtakes the patchouli."say man,"says smoothe old hovie,"ya got thirty nine cents for a quart?" his trick is to ask for a small amount and to be honest about what he is going to spend it on and he is able to stay drunk. i used to wonder what he did about sundays before they let the liquor stores stay open on sunday. they terrorize the students' families with their vulgarity and appearance as they shop for their dorm room's accessories. champ, an old boxer, hollers out to any woman who passes by,"scuze me ma'am,but your slip is showin'!". it always gets a giggle from the other drunks.he once told me a story about going out to a bar in new orleans after a fight he had down there. after a while he realized that he was in a gay bar and he voiced his downright disgust with the lifestyle they had chosen. one of the lads had taken particular offense and walked up to champ and told him " there's two things i love to do ; suck cock and fight!" and he finished his anecdote with,"well, i don't know how he sucked a cock ,but he sure went right up one side of me and down the other." after that he figured a guy that could fight like that couldn't be all that bad, so he sat there and got drunk with him for the rest of the afternoon.
the chess players slap their timers,as those waiting to play peer over shoulders scrutinizing every move. a bunch of young potheads gather together in a circle kicking hacky sack ,taking turns selling the next ten dollar bag of weed to the newest pot head on the scene. a bunch of high school punks sit and watch smoking their cigarettes too cool for everything. taking turns telling lies to each other about asses they've kicked, crimes they've pulled off and girls that they fucked . a junkie slipping in and out of while he defies gravity , holding a lit cigarette in his hand. it burns away as if it were a fuse to a bomb. his anemic,pasty-white girlfriends' eyes roll into the back of her head like a human slot machine. she turns and vomits in the bushes every time she lands on jackpot.
college student oblivious to the cruel world of fate that awaits them after they graduate and are cast off the educational assembly line into the "real world" where the answers come not from books and professors.they stoll by self absorbed noses in the air ,knowing and thinking they are better than the townie scum that they pass.
it is a collage of the human condition ,here, in this three of universe. a banker, accountant and a lawyer , sit together scoffing down lou's hot dogs,talking about business deals done and trials lost or won.overpriced merchandise, all geared towards the pockets of the parents of the students, hang in the window of in this valley of glass and cement.the latest catch phrase or rock icon ,name brand or "ithaca is gorges" printed on it. in fact, everything in town is overpriced due to the spoiled rich fucks that invade the town for four years trash it, fuck our women and leave.
fresh nubile young bodies, the old and decrepit,and everything in between all come together in this hub of activity -the eye of tompkins county.police eyeballing the young and disorderly,keeping up their paranoia and making the shopkeepers feel "safe".the stench of stale vomit, beer and bleach waft out of the bars awaiting another night of drunken college debauchery. piss stains and vomit in the doorways of the unfortunate businesses that happen to bookend the bars.kids scream from the playground as the pedophiles peep from their crevices nearby.ugly parents with even uglier children , who will have almost no chance in life,doomed at birth to continue the vicious that their bloodline has been cursed to. rolls by semi-wheelchair .first he was thunder, then silent thunder,now rolling thunder. cannister of oxygen strapped to the back of his chair, tube under his nose,feeding his emphysemiatic lungs housed inside his agent orange racked body-thanks for serving our country son!i call him by his birth name -marvin. beautiful women walk this way and that heads follow like a compass to true north. the bretton666 yells "mom" to the better endowed ones.cell phone conversations and random notes of music are carried in the wind, the players tunes ,with open cases at their feet,spare change and random dollar bills beg for companions from the felt.
self important community "leaders" pat themselves on the backs as they cut the ribbon unveiling another piece of "art" they paid a sum of money for, planning the next"city beautification" project ,undermining the city with their best ideas ,as they say in na "your best thinking got you here." litter dances on the wind as you head for a urine filled elevator to one of the parking ramps,leading you to the street-a maze of one way roads , filled with potholes to rival new york city's.they stake their claim on your cars' alignment and underside,making your escape from this "most enlightened" mecca almost impossible .

G.O.D
GOD, the great cosmic bully and joker.a blood thirsty Deity with a thousand names and a million faces. ever vengeful and watching , with the deepest pockets in the known universe. from the cavemen shivering in fear from every flash of lightning to children in sunday school learning of the sins of theirs that killed their god. oceans of blood have been spilled in his/her/its name. torture , incarceration and death all with the stroke of his mighty hand through his vicars on earth. every major event in history is shrouded in the church's shadow like an ever-present black cloud of doom. if the almighty loves us so much why does he require so much suffering and sorrow?
men sat down and wrote out the rules that were supposedly sent via burning bush, hallucination , or just downright lie, on how the one who is all wishes us to show our devotion. on our knees cowering we beg and plead for this that and the other while the divine coin flip is cast to decide the fate of our wishes. great buildings erected in honor of our creator are built daily. we flock , one day a week to give thanks for our graces and beg for mercy in our plights. follow the book these aforementioned men have written, and edited and rewritten over the centuries, mis-translations , spelling errors and outright fiction adding to the confusion. for every passage there lies a contradicting one. yet we carry the books as if they are a set of rules to a game. admit our sins and all is forgiven or "donate" 10% of our earnings weekly as if putting a down payment on our place in the afterlife.don't worry what you do somewhere in the books you can find salvation for it. the church has over-looked everything from the crusades, to the burning of intelligent women at the stake , to slavery , to the holocaust , to the anti-communist movement, to the more recent muslim wars. it seems we've come full circle fighting on the original holy battlefields where the soil is barren and the place has become a desert wasteland with pockets of greed sprouting from the earth through derricks . killing our home in the name of the almighty dollar. ignoring the signs. we had so many hurricanes this year they used the whole alphabet. floods , mudslides , melting polar caps. those appointed to lead us searching for a way to leave us once the going gets towards time to go. blood-sacrifice is at an all time high and it seems we may never quench gods thirst.

Dysfunction Junction
frustration, i see ,is going to be a familiar feeling when it comes to building this thing. i spent about two hours typing up this entry the other day and for some reason it didn't post ,i have some of it written down and i could tell myself that it is just a draft, that i wasn't finished but oh hell, i guess i better get used to that huh .i am little pissed that it happened ,but oh well.the space bar thing is way more frustrating than that. last year on the eighth of september the ny state police decided to pay me a visit but i wasn't at home, so they came to my work. you see, i was partying with a friend of mine and some asshole he was with and the guy died. they were trying to score some crack and they ended up buying 60 dollars worth of chalk . they were bummed out, so when my heroin dealer showed up they bought two bags of it. they had been drinking and doing god knows what else all day and i told him that it was a bad idea to be doing heroin . i said that the valley kid(a kid from the valley in hollywood , california) had done six beers and two shots and damn near died, off a half of a bag.i said,you are way too sensitive to dope to be doing any right now.he says the kid from the fuckin' valley ,i took half of their dope before they even got it.twenty minutes later oney was struggling for breath, i go you fucking asshole,i told you so ,i get him breathing and tell his friend go get his car and come back. he does and while he was gone i went into his pockets and took the rest of the dope. and then i got oney on his feet and walking around . when the kid came back we walked oney to the car. i told the kid, if he starts breathing like that again....and i saw the look in this kids eye and then i said i think you're gonna need to take oney to the hospital, the kid says is that gonna happen to me? and i told him if that was gonna happen it already would have , but you aren't gonna be able to keep an eye on him and he needs it so go to the hospital. they leave. the next day here comes the staties .i guess that the kid took him home and god knows why gives the guy valium,and he dies,and then tells the cops that i gave the guy heroin and that i was some big time dealer and that i shot him up and all this crazy shit and the cops believed it. oney died at 830 AM kid found him at 1130 and based on what he told them ,they got a warrant at 345 abnd were in my house by 4PM. at six they came to my job and arrested me, in front of customers and they were talking about criminal negligent homicide and that they found a bunch of heroin (200 dollars worth , less than two grams) in my house and then they took me to jail. they put me on the radio and tv news, put me in the paper and included a map to my house. while i was locked up someone tried to break in and steal my shit. and then they told my girlfriend that if she wouldn't testify against me that they would violate her probation ,so now we were both locked up. then my landlord told my folks that they were going to throw all my shit into a dumpster, so a good friend of mine rented a u-haul and stored our stuff in his barn in a town named spencer(a really small, dry town where people are fucking crazy,and incest runs rampant.i think it is the official town pastime) meanwhile they offer me a two-to-four for the whole situation and i said no fucking way ,because i was not guilty of the crimes they were charging me with, the next day they released me. i went to the barn to get some clothes , and went out with a couple friends and got drunk . while i was passed out in the truck they robbed a pot dealer and the dealer called the police and when the cops found out i was with them,even though i was sleeping and had no idea that this had even happened they assumed i was the "ringleader". they assumed that this was a heroin debt and one of the guys in the truck let them believe it . so they arrested me again and then while i was in jail, a volunteer fire-man in spencer started causing fires and the barn all of my worldly possessions were in was his first fire! he eventually got caught because he was the first man at the scene of the fires, fucking dumb ass! so when i got out the second time, i had no job and no place to live and for a week ,no girlfriend . life was miserable, but i guess it couldn't get much worse right? then my mom had a major stroke and needed brain surgery , and after the surgery i had to move in to help her out with stuff and to take care of her ,i haven't lived at home since i was 15 and now here i am at 36 living with my girlfriend at my mommy's house(how pathetic,i am surprised she didn't leave me right on the spot). then an old charge from '97 popped up and they gave me three years probation. then they gave me another three for the heroin charge . and just recently kane christianson, the dumb ass valium dealer got, 1 and 1/3rd to 4 for criminal negligent homicide for not taking oney to the hospital and then giving him valium after i told him he needed medical attention .and so here i am sitting in this chair griping to you about it whoever you may be.

A Day in the Life of a Valet
I started off as a lowly valet and eventually became half-owner of a valet business. we had the contracts of several nightclubs, fine dining restaurants, private parties , a couple .com places and best of all-strip clubs. one in particular was owned by a porn producer so i got to meet many , many , porn stars . anyway one of the clubs i worked at was fully nude and because it was fully nude you had to bring your own alcohol. so when i decided to go out and party that was the place i would usually go to .i got along especially well with the head manager mark , the head doorman ernie , and a bouncer named james. we'd get a bunch of beer and liquor and give it to the girls to ensure that we would get special attention from the ladies.
mandy was a gorgeous girl, she was all-state swimmer,in texas no less , in high school . she was beautifully toned and was extremely pretty. one night a cruel twist of fate came mandy's way, in an instant her life was changed forever. while driving home, a drunk hit her head on while driving an enormous buick. mandy was in her little mazda rx-7. the tiny japanese sports car was no match for the hulk of metal the careened over the double yellow line at 60. he didn't even hit the brakes he was so obliterated. in a matter of ten seconds mandy's leg just below the knee and the rest of her body went their separate ways,never to see each other again. mandy refused to let the accident slow her down, she went to physical therapy everyday for a year and a half and got a prosthetic leg and she returned to dancing. although she didn't have to work , and never would due to the settlement from the accident, yet i think she felt she needed to feel attractive and if a guy was willing to pay her for her company well in her eyes she was still pretty.
prosthetic limb or no, i thought she was fucking gorgeous. if you didn't know that she had a prop-as she calls it- you couldn't tell it was fake. she would do silly stuff , like let it fall off if a guy was disrespecting her and if someone pissed her off she'd throw the foot part at them . she had two different feet for the prop ; one was flat for sneakers and other flat-footed articles of foot wear and another was arched for high heels and the like. it really is pretty amazing what they can do these days if you lose a limb. they took her skin color and matched it perfectly to her prosthetic ,and gave her tanning ointment to even out the sun coloring.
mark, ernie , james , and i were sitting at a table drinking and carrying on the way drunken friends in a strip club do. i was watching mandy dance for an asian man at the table next to us. i was trying not to be obvious that i was watching , but when you are as drunk as i was you lose all of your stealth, assuming you had some to begin with. if not you're just more clumsy and oafish then you already were. but mandy knew i was watching her and she didn't mind at all, she began to look at me as she danced for her Asian man.
the boys and i continued our blast of a time we were in the VIP room , where we were supposed to be having that much better of a time,hey it's VIP. a few girls were sitting at the table with us partying. normally , one of the managers or floor bosses would pull the girls aside and say "if you ain't dancin' you're leavin'." or something less kind but since mark was THE boss exceptions were made-naturally. mandy had finished her dance with mr.chaing and excused herself from his own little party he and his friends had going. the other girls at his table were staying. there was money here and the girls could smell it like a shark can smell blood in the water, and they weren't leaving until they had every dime in their pockets/purses whatever.
mandy sat down on my lap and asked for a drink . i poured her a stiff crown and coke. i had a good buzz going and before mandy had even sat down . james and i had been trying to top the other with saying the most offensive outrageous thing one could think of, poor mandy never even had a chance. i told her i thought that mandy didn't really fit her personality and that she should change it,i paused as if i was thinking of a name and then i said "how 'bout eileen?" james laughed so hard his captain morgan's and ginger ale spurted from his nose like a faucet. mandy stared at me, eyes wide mouth wider , but smiling. i noticed the pierced and got turned on , which she noticed right away. "oh shit!"ernie yelled and mark laughed hysterically , but none of the girls did i went from the table comedian to complete asshole in a millisecond as it registered on the slower ones "yeah", i continued "mr.chaig's " table could call you irene" more guffaws from the boys and now some of the girls added a couple nervous titters here and there. mandy took it in good spirit . she had a great sense of humor ,which added to her sexiness ,and had come to terms with her accident and had moved on . she once told me that it had happened to her because she was able to accept it and that most of the other girls wouldn't have been able to saying "god doesn't give you more than you can handle " which i personally disagree with but i never bothered to tell her that. she laughed and called me a dork . which i liked because any time a girl has called me a dork or any name like that, i usually end up sleeping with her . "how about peggy ,or pipi one-stocking?" by this time we all laughed and the slight faux-pas had been forgotten.
mandy finished her drink and ordered another i made this one a bit stronger to increase my odds. everclear's song "you make me feel like a whore" came over the PA, "oooh " mandy purred/slurred "i love this song" before i could agree she had stood up and began dancing for me. she was so sexy and she added a lot of effort to be extra sexy, being a little bit dirtier than the club usually allows . she straddled me ,her back to my chest took two of my fingers, placing them in her nether region and mark interrupted us with a "that's a little too far , time for bed kids."in a fatherly tone. even at play mark was on top of his club . as she leaned into me i whispered i want to lick your stump,peggy" what was that? she asked i detected a little anger in her tone i changed it to , "i want to lick your wet ..." she smiled at me as she stood up to put on her thong , with her glorious ass in my face ,i couldn't resist..."y'all take credit cards right?" before she could say yes i ran my card down the crack of her butt as if it were a credit card machine, my boys erupted with laughter. mandy turned and slapped me across the face, hard , with a smile on hers, there's your receipt asshole. this was followed by the whole table laughing, especially the girls she pulled on her thong and walked away smiling at me in the mirror, and made her way back to mr. chaing's table. round one went to pipi one-stocking.
about an hour later mandy appeared next to me in her street clothes,she picked up my car keys and asked me if i needed someone to drive me home .absolutely, i said my good bye's quickly and followed her out the door. she drove me to her place, she shared an apartment with her boyfriend jason , who was tending bar at treasure island, a place on sixth street in down town austin ,and he "wouldn't be home til seven or eight." jason drove this super hot mustang , it was one of the fastest cars in the city . i had driven it once and had got it up to 70 in second gear. when we got in the door, i had barely shut it before she was on me like a boa constrictor. she was quite strong for a girl and was solid as a rock clothes went this way and that and we collapsed together on the bed completely naked . after having sex a couple of times she fell asleep, the ultimate compliment. i pulled the sheets off of her and examined her gorgeous body in all of its glorious nakedness . i practically broke my arm slapping myself on the back and wore the silly grin of a teenager who had just got laid for the second or third time. i examined the trail of clothes strewn about,it looked as if a drunken monkey had gotten into the hamper. then in the doorway to the bedroom i caught sight of the prosthetic leg , still in its cowgirl boot standing up in the bedroom doorway . it looked so funny sitting there , so abandoned . i started laughing to myself ,which made me laugh more because i knew that i sounded like a lunatic laughing to myself all alone with this hot one-legged stripper chic lying next to me. a distant rumble made me stop laughing quickly ,mandy shot straight up from a dead sleep."ohmyjason god'shome!quick get your shit " i ran around the house looking for my clothes which were thrown all over leading a drunken path to the door. jason's car pulled up out front, there was no way i could go out the front door without being seen .i ran to the balcony, i was three floors up! fuck what do i do? i threw my clothes to the ground and climbed over the rail and shimmied down to the bottom of the barrier and i swung back and forth to get momentum and dropped with a loud thud to the second balcony. i looked in and a frightened older mexican woman looked at me and screamed." no por favor i yelled pointing at her front door . then i pointed upstairs "espouso es aqui, en la casa! en la casa. "ahhh " she smiled and laughed. she opened the door and tsked tsked me "ay sancho" she said. sancho is the mexican slang word for the man who is sleeping with the wife. she handed me a towel and i peaked outside just as jason slammed his front door closed. as i ran to get my clothes a bunch of people clapped and whistled and commented on my daring escape. i picked up my things bowed and ran for my car and sped out of there as if the devil himself were behind me. as i got some space between me and the house , i flashed back on the boot and giggled like a maniac fresh off of his first kill.
i didn't see mandy for a couple of weeks. when i finally saw her , as she pulled in to the lot i approached the car, "hey where ya been?" a pair of boxers flew out of the car window and hit me in the face. "you left your fucking underwear in my bedroom asshole! jason took my foot and hid it! i had to order another one and they aren't cheap!" the idea of her walking around on her prosthetic limb without a foot made me laugh. "its not funny,you fucker", she whined/teased, smiling. i parked her car and carried her bags into the clubs dressing room. as i set them down and said "have a good night" and walked back outside to continue doing the best job i ever had.

First day on the blog
Hey all,
This is my first attempt at this blog thing,and i am quite computer illiterate.I wanted to find a way to get people reading my writing,and to get feedback on it as well,whatever it may be.I have around fifty poems published on poets.com under the pen name suisidle,but i am growing tired of the snobbery on the site.The space bar on my keyboard sucks and sometimes i really have to pound on it,so i apologize in advance for any run on words.
I live in ithaca ,ny.A small town upstate an hour south of syracuse.ithaca has been named the "most enlightened city in the US" whatever the hell that means.the town is run by a bunch of stupid hippies and gays and lesbians aren't harrassed here,so i guess that is how we got our "title" . Cornell University and Ithaca College are based here and it brings a new influx of bad drivers and drunken jocks every year and our high school seniors flee the area hoping never to return,and i don't blame them.
It is said that ithaca runs a top one of those magnetic vortex fields where phenominal stuff is said to happen,but i think it is just a freak magnet,because they(the freaks) flock here in droves.i have no idea what i want to do with this thing but i figured it will be something to cure the boredom and to get me writing.
I don't capitalize out of laziness and i figured if e.e.cummings can get away with it than so can i.my punctuation is dreadful,but who really needs it anyway?i have been a heroin addict on and off,for the last ten years or so,and i have some pretty interesting stories to tell.
last year,on sept.8,the nys police kicked in my door,as a result of partying with a friend that ended up dying.now i am a member of ithaca city's treatment court and must toe the line for the next three years.they test my urine three times a week,so it is pretty much impossible to get high,and i don't drink so i guess i will be using this as an escape for the time being.
So any way i will be doing this as often as i can and i will tell an epic tale or two,and i must admit some my poetry is pretty good.i write music so some of them are songs but they still read pretty well.also i will not always write straight forward like this,some of it will be more of a rant,orjust an excercise at being a whacko.feel free to tell me how much you think i suck,because there isn't enough honesty in the world anymore.thanks for reading,and have a great day!