All I Could do Was Barf

Writing is like  Rubic Cubes,  you twist your fingers up in knots as your work gets worse and worse.

Relieving myself in the basement bathroom, I came up a cope of

Reader's Digest I found in the crapper amongst a pile of mags on the tiles; the bit was inspirational as are all of the rag's stories. 

So, a mixed breed dog, Shepard, and poodle, is pilfered by a hobo, tied up in a potato sack, and carried to the tracks where the bum hops a freight. 

Well, it’s Reader's fucking Digest so you know the pooch is going to make it home; while the tramp is eating a can of beans in the freight car, fido jumps out an open plug door; journeying 200 miles home, overcoming tribulations; bears, speeding cars, hunger, and such.

I was going to use the magazine as butt wipe, but the story moved me so that I used the reflections section of The Catholic Review instead. 

It’s summer in New York City, circa 78, I’m broke; staying in a men’s hotel, the ones with closet-size rooms and chicken wire ceilings for 8 bucks a day, feeling Bukowski-like, thinking, 

today’s the day I’m gonna get me a job. 

I was on the skids because of weed, nothing dramatic, I got lazy that’s all, smoking weed and laying in the fields of Central Park spending my days parodying bird songs.

I roam the canyons of the Rotten Apple ending up in the Meat Packing District; going directly to a slaughterhouse and asking the guard where the office is. The place smells like cowshit, which isn’t a bad smell on the range, but here it’s an awful, rancid smell.

On the way to the head, I see a fat guy that looks like a boss and I ask,

how bout a job mista? But, please not on the killing floor,

son from the looks of ya, yous ain’t got the skill to kill or butcher a cow, but I’ll give yas a try as a loader, come back tomorrow at 5 AM.

Fortified by a donut and cup of joe, I show at Amour Slaughter House on time, and a boss points the way to the loading ramp with his fat pudgy forefinger. 

I see semis side by side ready to be loaded;

the gig's self-explanatory, carry heavy slabs of frozen beef into the refrigerated rigs and hang them on hooks. 

From a platform at the rear of the ramp, a ripped Black dude balances a frozen slab of beef on my back; I make it as far as the semi and my feet give out and I fall down in pain.

The fat boss picks me up, placing me in an odd position in the back of the company station wagon and I puke.

When we reach Cider Seed Hospital I feel like I'm going to die, they wheel me into the emergency room, and the doctor says, 

get the kid x-rayed and send him to the ward with the other geeks.

The medical folks roar laughing, but I didn’t find it funny.

The x-ray shows Spondylolisthesis, a displacement of the lower vertebrae. 

Now here's the beauty part; I was mega-doped up having slept for 2 days and I wake up to the scent of a sweetly scented hand tapping my forehead, it's the social worker who says,

Mr. Lucowski you qualify for SSDI, 

how much is it? 

It will be in the range of a couple thousand a month, 

I could have dropped a turd in my hospital bed, that's how I felt.

Knowing I’m set for life, I languor in the hospital for a few more days, doped up on morphine, enjoying the attention. 

When I’m discharged, I make a B-line to the Greyhound bus station and buy a ticket to Miami and never look back. 

Martian Mud

Earth's first cellular life arises from vats of warm, slimy mud fed by volcanically heated steam.

Crawling on my belly through mud, lost, feeling weird there's shit's happenin all-over;  yous chasted by clay Martians, masses of em, colored cells run through you at will.  

Adrift in the mud sea of  Jerusalem B.C, sinking and drowning. eyeballing hectors of houses built of hewn blocks, wooden beams surrounded by a golden brick wall; 1000s of em are there today; hash-daubers-hassidic Jews, all of them MOse.

In Thailand, working a roti stand, selling mud cakes until the bulls show. 

Thai cops look over my passport and lock me up.

I Fortuitously meet a  Thai friend, Buckwheat out in the yard who's in for doin his 14 yr old niece. , 

Henry, I swear she looked 20, she raped me.

Hiding from the bulls behind an Indian tree Wheat produces a pochette of cocaine, which we roll in green leaves and eat.

Walkin the line in D.C, you could say it was a cakewalk, feeling as good as a man can feel, wading through hip knee-deep clag; hitchhiking the streets the architecture is still and dying Greeco Roman, I'm not knocking it, the stuff's stiff.

I meet a cabbage-faced gal at in line waiting for a Big Mac.

She grabs my ass as we walk through the golden arches; we get into her old Plymouth, I sit in the bitch seat and her girlfriend's in the back. 

We drink wine coolers and smoke pot, she has speedballs.

The witch points her claw at the  Washington Monument calling it Big Georgie's cock, offering me a blow job, no shit.

At Mr. Tombs, sitting at the bar I order a Tijuana Mud, a fancy mixed drink.

The crowd in the Tombs is nonexclusive, a motley collection of priests, students, barflies, bohemians, and such. The guy sitting next to me says, 

A man needs a shitload of chaos in himself to create a dancing star, 

I tell the guy, 

I like it, do you write, or do you sit in the bar all day pontificating? 

I take a snort of my drink, cough, and then blow specks of dust in the air; when I wake I'm flying with Angels, it's a glorious feeling, and I never want it to end, then a brute of an Angel broadsides me like a linebacker knocking me to Mars where it's minus 80 degrees Fahrenheit and I fall asleep.

Later, I wake on a sofa of emeralds in the middle of a ring of Martians smiling, and one asks,  

Henry show us your penis, 

I pull it out, it's smaller than average, and the Martians fall down laughing, you tell me why? 

Then one says, 

We don't need cocks to fuck, we sheathe one another in purple rays and have orgasms that last for days, and I say, 

Wow, that's marvelous, anthropoid orgasms only last a few seconds, your culture is snazzy, would you be kind enough to take me home, 

yes, earthling where? 

 323 Conch Ave.

I get into a 2 man craft, and in the time it takes to fry an egg, I'm dropped off at my front door standing there and watching the UFO disappear into the stratosphere. 

Feeling shaky I go to Frank's in Old Town, sit at the bar, and order a boilermaker and when it's served I take a deep pull, over the moon it's not a mug of gumbo, and saying to Frank,

Frank, you would believe where I've traveled over the last 24 hours and I couldn't put it in words anyway.

Yeah sure Henry, sure.