I like to look at people, young people, poor people. I imagine what they do in their one-room place after work. Surely they get high on dope, ganja maybe or speed; cheap dope. They watch local TV with their old ladies fucking around during commercials.
At night, they go out and eat noodles with bits of spongy beef, shredded onions, and holy basil, 2 dollars a bowl.
The workers stroll to the Gypsy camp on the river; the Romani boil large pots over a fire, cooking rabbit, wild bird, carrots, and potatoes seasoned with fresh ginger, chili pepper, garlic, and salt.
Bowls of food for all, big bellies dancing into the wee hours, falling in place, waking up, going to mundane jobs: Car washes, kitchen work, street cleaning.
They have no insurance, when sick they go to county hospitals queuing for hours.
They are slammed from above by their employers, rapped, under pressure for money, sweating blood.
Tyson Chicken and a slaughterhouse open in town. Jessie and his wife, Linda, get a job at the slaughterhouse; she’s a cutter and he unloads frozen sides of beef from the freezer trucks.
The couple takes a bus to the slaughterhouse, they fill out paperwork and Linda asks,
where is the slaughterhouse?
the boss says follow the trails of blood honey.
Linda works as a cleaner hosing down and sweeping up bits up scrap meat saving the choicer bits and saving them.
Jessie is wearing rubber slippers he carefully walks in the freezer truck and slings a quarter of beef over his shoulder, his back coils but he knows he must keep going.
They are paid after work, and they go to their one-room place, Linda makes stew with bits of meat and potatoes, seasoning it with Romani seasoning. After eating they pass out on straw mats.
Weeks at work turn into months they rent a three room apartment. Linda’s pregnant.
Jessie works partime at a car wash; they buy a crib, washable diapers, and plastic baby bottles.
Let me interject here as the author; this story is hard going, I’m struggling, bare with me. I’d rather be writing a poem.
In August, Linda gives birth to a tiny baby, a girl, they name her May, she has curly blond hair, she’s a Leo.
Jessie buys a bag of shrooms at da pack home.
The lovers clean up good, put the baby to bed and slip outside to their 5 x 5 patio wrapped with a mossy tarp. They light candles and burn incense, turn on the radio, as they come on they listen to hard stuff, Blues, Rock, Soul, radio ZZKX.
The patio spirals upward, room and occupants flying past the clouds in the Heavens, flying with Angels, august, exalted, high and happy, in a spacecraft jetting into the future.
In the morning, they wake in the Gypsy camp the river is high, dancing, eating stew with the Romani, by 9 am they are at the slaughterhouse.
Linda works with mops, red with blood, Jessie slings frozen quarters of beef over his back, slips on a wet spot, hearing something crack on his upper back. He wakes up in Saint Matthew’s Hospital ward, there are fifteen men ; burn victims, sick junkies, and psychos.
Jessie is given a wheelchair and sent home paralysed from the waist down. Linda gives a Gypsy handyman a blow job to build a ramp at the front and back doors.
In the long hall, Jessie is fucked.
A paraplegic friend, Jimmy Glynn, was stationed in the Army Signal Corps in Bremen. While on leave he went on holiday, getting wasted on the Autobahn, drunk driving too fast in his Porsche, going off-road down a hill falling out of the car, feeling a crack in his upper back, later in an Army hospital, paralysed from the waist down; he told me this story about the VA hospital state side:
Some guys would drink all day, shoot dope, none of them made it home. I took care of myself, ate good, no booze, just ganja; it helped with leg tremors. I was one of the few guys to make it out of the place.
Jessie and Linda would make out, he would eat her pussy like a pro, but no hard ons that was tough for him.
He says home, Linda works at the slaughterhouse; he learns to maneuver in the house and take care of the baby, cook, clean house even. He lives ten more years, dying of bladder cancer cause by the tubes of his catheter rubbing on his bladder.
Lind finds another guy who can fuck her, she’s happy with that.