9/15/17

The Rat's Wheel





Henry sitting uncomfortably bent on his futon, the frame staked up sofa-like, writing on a lap-top. 

It was a spring afternoon, mild, warm and lazy. A sweet scented air-tide flowing all the way from Central Park through the window of his Queen’s apartment— sent by the gods of spring, special delivery.   

Adjusting the futon frame in a more comfortable position, rolling a joint— wanting to stay in this moment forever. It was a beaming, rapturous moment, a light-bulb moment, Henry smiling inside, peeking. 

His cell phone ringing the sound of Honky Tonk Women, it was Mai from Siam Massage wanting to know if he was coming tonight? 

At the end of the month Henry’s crazy pay was below empty. He would have to be creative, only cheap thrills tonight.

Luckily Chaim let Henry run a tab at the deli.  Ruby his regular waitress happy to see him says, ”Jesus Christ Henry you’re radiating health, you were on deaths door just a few days ago.” He says, “ I spent four hours a day in the sauna at the YMCA for a week, black tar-like poison oozing out of my body and I did some inner work, tantric yoga stuff.”

He ordered a double pastrami and chicken liver sandwich on pumpernickel, as well as a glass of Fritz’s Cream soda, mixing it with Mescal. 

Henry dancing out of Chaim’s Deli, broke and on fire, walking to and into the Bowery. The Bums who fucked with him night after night couldn’t touch him tonight, they could see he was protected by armor blocking the Bum’s wino X-ray beams.

Stopping in Cheap Shots Tavern, a dive outside of the Bowery, a shit-hole for barflies. Barflies a cut above Bums, on their way to the Bowery, it was just a matter of time. For Henry Cheap Shots Tavern, just a place he went to drink at the end of the month, cheap thrills. 

He orders a shot of Mescal and a beer chaser. Sitting on a bar stool eyeing his image in a mirror line from age, behind the bar. He was thin, with a Mediterranean nose (broken more than once) a wrinkled half moon face protruding from a roundish hallo of unkept curly white hair. 

In a bar trance, feeling invisible, not wanting to be visible in the shit hole, Cheap Shots Tavern. 

Around midnight a hooker sits next to Henry, he had seen her before on 42 Street. She was black women, slender, wearing a jump suit with a large orange and blue afro wig on her head, something you would wear to a Denver Broncos game. 

She says to Henry, “ I haven't always been a hooker, I have a degree in Dental Hygienics, but when the sub-prime mortgage crisis hit,” and so on and so forth, he had heard the same story so many times.  He says, “Save it, I have heard it before, how about we slip out back to the alley and smoke a joint.” Henry lights a joint and passes it to Miss no name, knowing she had a alias, street name, like Cherry, Ripple, or Sweety. She puts her arms around him pulling him closer, dry humping him, pressing into him. He says, “Spare me baby, you might do some serious damage, let’s go back inside and have a drink.” After a few more drinks Miss no name says, “ I gotta go to work, thanks doll.”

2 AM Henry leaving Cheap Shot Lounge, waking up the following mourning on his futon fully dressed, wondering how he got home? His life a rollercoaster ride, stuck on a rat’s wheel.


A writer needs to look eyes wide open at the freak show, running a hundred miles a hour into it. He needs all of it— the good, the bad, the sublime, the vile, the just and the unjust. The wheel keeps on spinning, it doesn't stop for anybody. 

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