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.
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