Slim & Henry

 

Slim and Henry were pals at Park East High School, neither went to class much, both had D averages, and the Park east official gave them diplomas to get rid of them.

They were a bad influence on the other students, dealing drugs, putting Xanax in the cafeteria soft drink dispensers, and so on. 

Henry was a long hair guy, with no ambition who loved to smoke dope and was Dead Head.

Slim was 6 feet tall and weighed 160 pounds, a black guy with a monumental afro, the size of a garden shrub, from Harlem.

They worked at Carol’s House of Burgers, Carol made them wear hair nets, which itched there heads.

Slim was the burger, fry, and hash brown man, and Henry made coleslaw, salad, floats, and milk shacks.

The kitchen manager was a 75-year-old black man named Harpo. He talked about pussy and drinkin Crown Royal with old gals at Grady’s Place in Harlem. 

When Slim and Henry weren’t busy they’d listen to Harpo’s stories. He saw Robert Johnson play in 1938. And, Harpo was in the 92 Infantry Division, the only all-black unit during World War II. Their corp patch was a silhouette of a black buffalo.

He told us he didn’t want to go to war and regretted the killing on both sides. Saying,

there’s not a day I don’t think about the German kid I stuck with a bayonet. Slim ads,

we weren’t nothin but low-life niggers to the Nazis, if they caught a nigger they’d send him to the gas chamber same as a jew.

The all-black 92 Infantry Division was one of the most decorated units in World War II.

Carol walks into the kitchen and says, 

cut the bullshit, the lunchtime crowd's comin.

Carol’s House of Burgers closed at 8 PM. After work Slim and Henry would go to the Green Door for a drink. 

Sitting at the bar they eyeball two gals sitting in a booth, one is heavy with a sweet face, and the other is well-built and seductive. Slim says, 

the fat chick is mine I like, big women.

Slim asks the big girl,

could we buy you a drink? Let's sit together at the booth.

Slim and Henry go to the booth, the girls sit on one side and the boys on the other.

The exchange names, the gals names our 

Suzy and Martha, Martha the bigger girl says, 

I have my own apartment, it’s not far, let’s go party. Slim says, 

I got a bag of weed, and Henry says, 

I’ll buy a fifth of rum and some coke and mix Cuba Libres. 

Martha lives in a one-bedroom apartment, tastefully decorated, art deco, with second-hand furniture and framed paintings, copies of masters from The Salvation Army outlet. 

Henry makes a pitcher of Cuba Libres and Slim rolls a hand full of joints, soon they're all loaded.

Slim starts making out with Martha, they go into her bedroom, shut the door, and get it on. Henry asks Suzy if she likes sex, and she says, 

only with the man, I’m going to marry. Henry thinks to himself, 

so much for that, I’m not going to marry Suzy just to get into her pants, I don’t even know her, he says,

oh, that’s cool, I guess that makes you a virgin, Suzy answers stoney-faced, 

yes, I guess it does.

Slim and Martha come out of the bedroom, looking drained, they had a good time. 

Henry wants to escape the scene, he thinks Suzy is a jerk. He stands up and says, 

Slim we gotta go, I need to pay my electric bill or they're shut my electric off.

Slim and Martha hug and Henry and Suzy shake hands. Outside, as they walk on the sidewalk Henry says,

Suzy’s a fucking prude, Martha didn’t do nothin for me. Slim says,

Martha was one hot bitch baby, she made me cum three times. You see we brothas got this here special shaggin mojo, white woman be after me all the time. Henry says, 

let’s go to the Bronx zoo, Slim says, 

sure broh, 

Henry pays for Slim, Slim's always broke.

Slim says, 

let’s go to the monkey house.

The monkey house smells repugnant, looking like a monkey prison. 

Most of the monkeys are Rhesus, Slim notices right away saying to Henry, 

look at that mother fucken monkey over there he’s playing with himself, 

they break out in laughter, 

A large male Rhesus defecates laying one hand on the pile, picking it up, and throwing it through the bars so it splatters on Henry’s face. One of the handlers helps him wipe it off with a wet towel. Then Slim says, 

let’s get outta this mother fucken place, don’t take me to no mo fucken zoos, Henry.

To Tell You the Truth

 

I'm so bummed out that writing is my only hope. 

My readership has gone down so much that I might as well be writing to myself.

As well as writing to get my ass in gear, I take 200 MG of Bupropion a day. The byproduct is loss of appetite. 

Like Gandhi fasting for 135 days. Now wait a minute here, Gandhi fasted for 135 days? I think it's folklore. If you don't drink water for 24 hours you can die. I guess the Mahatma was drinking water at least.

I'm one of life's fuck- ups.

I' could never hold down a job and get just enough Social Security to survive in Thailand— if I was living in America I’d be living in a homeless tent city. 

I’m not a rational person, I’m impulsive, and it’s a constant battle between me vs. impulse. The byproduct is I do stupid shit that gets me in trouble, ignoring the advice of bright and sane people.  

When Robert Johnson sings about the blues, he’s singing about depression. The blues is depression, being broke, and without prospects.

If it wasn’t for writing and psycho dope I would slit my wrist with a razor blade on the pot in the bathroom until the last drop of blood left my body. 

I don’t have a gun to blow my brains out because foreigners in Thailand aren’t allowed to own them, but you can be sure the fucking Thais are well-armed.

On the fuck-up scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest, I’d be a 9.

Maybe it’s Karma, maybe I was Hitler in my last life. 

Every day is an effort for me, I’m retired, scraping by in Thailand, unlike US retirees— Ole Joe, doing woodwork in the garage, building wood crap, or classy Chad on the golf course drinking beer and having a burger after 18 holes. 

I wake in the morning, and look around, feeling depressed when I realize where I am.

The cognizance shatters the breathtaking dreams of glorious sex with women I love and the feeling of being in otherworldly utopian environments.

The getting out of bed process is comparable to waking in a jail cell.

I see people who have made it, in small ways, not your Elon Musk types, just regular folks who own a liquor or hardware store and envy them 

I couldn’t galvanize myself to give a shit growing up, content with minimum wage, working in warehouses, or pumping gas,

although I drew the line at working at Mc Donalds or KFC because of the terrifying smells.

After work, I'd go home, get high, and watch sports and porno. 

So here I am today, 45 years old, living in Thailand because I can afford to— Without extra money to get massages, go to bars, getting by with enough money to feed my 12 dogs, and myself.

God help me if I have a heart attack or something, I'll have to go to a Thai public hospital and the doctors aren’t so hot.

My girlfriend Pinky is never home because she works on her parent's farm, 40 kilos north of Chiang Rai. 

She cuts rubber, a white liquid that seeps off the trees as you lacerate them with a blade in a circular motion. 

Her family grows— corn, rice, cocoa, and Kratom, which was legalized when ganja was legalized in Thailand. Kratom doesn’t do nothin for me, but the Thais like it.

I have a friend who’s the kind of guy you go to for advice, Andy, he suffers from depression like I do, we are on the same meds, Bupropion, only I take twice as much. 

Andy has a wonderful hill tribe wife, Nat, but he just scrapes by like I do, living cheap in Thailand, teaching English online, and his wife works as a maid. Anyway, he told me the other day, 

I wish I was never born. 

My wish is a mirror image of his, 

I wish I was dead.

Big talk, easy to say but it’s bullshit, I’m scared shitless of dying. The funny thing about dying is nobody gets a Get Out of Jail for Free, everybody kicks it eventually. 

I don’t wanna die, I’m a vegetarian, don’t drink, smoke cigarettes or ganja, and walk every day, big fucking deal I'm going to kick it anyway. 

Fuck who wants to make it to 94 but 83 would be nice. And, I would rather live on the beach in a tent than go to a nursing home. I pity the poor old bastards stuck in those ennoble 

jails.

I had a friend in high school in 1967, we went to New Trier, in Wilmette, Illinois, a well-to-do town. Where the actor Bill Murray grew up. 

His name was Tommy Sprague, a gifted basketball player. Somehow, in the white-bread suburb of Wilmette, he became a junky. 

My guess is he took the electric train from Wilmette's Linden Station, the last stop on the line, to the hood on the Southside— ghettos like, Back of the Yard, Hide Park, or Bridgeport, scoring there. 

Tommy would bring the junk home and shoot up in his bedroom. 

As you would think, the story has a sad ending. His father broke Tommy’s bedroom door down, finding him lying in bed dead from an overdose, He was only 17. Being precocious beyond his years is what killed him

So me, crying to you all, about my life seems kind of stupid doesn’t it? 

BBQ'd Rats & Sticky Rice

My last story, Jesus Krishna was a flop, I don’t think readers cared for the opening bit about the character who makes the Guinness World Records by filling an empty peanut butter jar with mucous, his own.

As for references to the King of Kings, it's apparent quasi and stoney-faced Jesus people don't care for writers fiddling around on the subject. Praising the Lord is the only road, but wrangling about the Lord's existence is blasphemy. 

Literati are overly sensitive in regard to vulgar images from second-rate writers, but fall all over Charles Bukowski when he writes—

I like shit, I liked to shit, I like turds but it was such terrible work creating them.

Stay with me, 

Bukowski’s loo scene may be more convivial if you read the entire paragraph.

Anyhow, after Marie left I sat in the kitchen and drank 3 cans of beer I found in the refrigerator. I never cared much for food. I’d heard of people’s love for food. But food only bored me. Liquid was o.k. but bulk was a drag down—I like turds but it was such terrible work creating them.

Very little unnerves me — blood, a Nazi soldier squished as he’s run over by a tank on TV, people who never stop talking— but rats and cockroaches petrify me. 

Particularly sewer rats that differ from country rats, which are clean and edible. 

While living in Asia a Thai pal, Dacha and I ate lunch in a bamboo hut. I order meatless green curry soup with rice and he has fried rats with sticky rice, showing off.

Suddenly it's pouring rand and the roof of the hut folds. None of the Thais say anything about getting soaked because Thais never complain. It’s a Buddhist thing, but I tease Dacha by saying,

the downpour is bad Buddha for eating rats.

Rats are pests Henry, 

You're heartless? They want the same things we want in life, to eat, sleep in a cozy nest, procreate, and live. They’re like Hamsters. Dacha says,

 rats taste like chicken. I tell him,

people say the same about wild meat— it tastes like chicken— alligator, snake, rabbit, or frog legs. The meat-eating talk sets me off, I’m a vegetarian—

I can’t eat living things, take pigs, I pity them with all my heart, they’re intelligent and sensitive, the swine herders don’t give a shit about the pig's feelings or beings, the red necks just see bacon. Eggs are basically embryos, and the Gods created milk for baby cows, not cocoa geriatrics to drink at bedtime. We should eat like monks.

You’re nuts Henry, Thai monks don’t follow strict diets, they eat what their disciples give em, pork, eggs, chicken, rice, tomatoes, and some eat pussy.

Thai monks eat pussy? Did you know Michael Douglas got throat cancer from that?

No, Google it, Henry reads from the webpage,

Michael Douglas said cunnilingus was the cause of his throat cancer. In particular, pointing his finger at the human papillomavirus, or HPV. And, 80 to 90% of people who engage in cunnilingus get it. Dacha laughs, 

That’s total bullshit, everyone you know would have it. Do you know anyone with HPV Henry? 

No, and the HPV shit ain’t gonna stop nobody from bush diving. 

A few years later, broke again, I go back to the US, because foreigners, as Thais refer to us no matter how long we've lived here, can't work in Thailand.

The American Embassy in Bangkok fronts me a plane ticket with a catch— pay back the money or go to jail. 

The ticket deal calls to mind a scene from the film The Godfather when Michael Corleone tells the Godfather, 

I'll make him an offer he can't refuse.

In the US, I find a cheap room in East Harlem, work in the service industry selling weed, paying off the plane ticket in a week.

I get out of bed one night, wearing shorts, a sweatshirt, rubber slippers, and stuffing my waist-length hair into a stocking cap.

It’s an animated Saturday night, I smoke a joint as I walk, the neon lights look prismatic— like being in a house of mirrors.

I pass a couple who’re arguing, the drunk woman yells at her husband—

get the fuck away from me, he squeezes his hand into a fist like he means to hit her. She yells at him again,

you fucker, 

he opens his arms towards her as an offering, pleading until she falls into his arms. A hundred strangers pass not noticing any of it. 

New Yorkers are famous for walking the city streets wearing blinders, wary of mishaps. 

There’s a story about a married couple fighting in their apartment, making a racket— a concerned neighbor knocks on the door, the wife opens the door, and the neighbor asks,

are you guys OK?

the wife punches him, bloodying his nose, rudely saying,

mind your own fucking business asshole, if we wanna have a row it’s our affair. 

The guy calls the cops on the outta-control wife. The cops show going with the bloodied guy to the pair's apartment, knock on the door saying, 

NYPD.

The pugilist wife opens the door, and one cop says,

Ma’am this gentleman says you assaulted him, bloodying his nose, and you smell like alcohol, she says, 

Oh him, he’s a drunk, everybody knows it, he runs into things. And by the way, I just finished gargling with Listerene. I’m going to bed

What can the cops do? It’s her word against his, no witnesses, and no surveillance cameras. 

The story instantiates the wisdom of New Yorkers for minding their own business.

Still walking I hit Chico’s bar for a drink. The drunks are loud, they hold the bullshit inside until they're loaded, then let it fly.

I notice a sad-eyed gal with long dark dreadlocks, wearing a bulky sweater sitting alone at a table in the back of the bar, asking her, 

could I buy you a drink? She says,

I’m the kind of girl people avoid, I’m a humpback.

Do you like beer? I’ll get a pitcher of German beer. 

I bring the pitcher and ask,

What’s your name? 

Twinkle, 

I’m Henry,

Twinkle, twinkle, little star, 

How I wonder what you are! 

Up above the world so high, 

Like a diamond in the sky. 

Twinkle, twinkle, little star, 

How I wonder what you are?

Twinkle says,

The little star feels like shit— people stare at me as I walk the street, I can’t cover this hump with makeup, I just wear bulky clothes.  

Twinkle the world is full of blemished people of all kinds. I’m bipolar and can’t hold down a job or stay in a relationship.

Where do you live Henry?

Not far, East Harlem, in a wee room.

We pick up a bottle of Wild Turkey at Tito’s Liquor. Inside, we sit on the bed, I tune the radio to a jazz station.

We pour a couple of drinks and talk, Twinkle grew up poor in an abusive family, her old man was a drunk janitor and her mother turned tricks to make ends meet. Twinkle says, 

I’m on disability insurance, it’s enough to get buy, I live at home.

They have another drink, Henry asks Twinkle,

do you like sex? She answers, 

nobody wants sex with a humpback. He assures her, 

I do, and Twinkle says, 

How about 69?

Stinky & Baghead

 

Having landed a job as a copy boy for The Advocate, a magazine for the LBGTQ community, I rented a one-room apartment in Queens.  

A copy boy is a gofer, running errands and carrying copies from desk to desk. It was mindless work at the bottom of the pecking order. I got through the day smoking dope in empty toilet stalls.

My new apartment was bare— a mattress on the floor, a few wooden chairs, a table from Goodwill for eating and doing paperwork, and a Sony Boom Box, that wolfed down cassettes. 

I saved a few paychecks, quit The Advocate, and bought a kilo of weed, bagging it into ounces.

At first, I peddled it on the street and eventually, clients came to my apartment. I was home all the time, ordering Mexican, Chinese, and Thai food for meals.

One night a guy shows with a brand new Smith Corona electric typewriter under his arm, ripped off for sure, I gave him two OZs for it. 

I began writing to pass the time.

I didn’t give a fuck what I wrote, nobody would read it. 

My first story was Baghead, about a guy who wouldn’t go out without a paper bag on his head. He claimed to be allergic to sun and moon rays. 

Baghead lived in a boarding house owned by a fat girl, Lil. He had fat girl fetish, he liked to lay his head on Lil’s lap as she spoon-fed him Gerber’s baby food. 

Lil saw Baghead's face once, he was a handsome kid in his twenties who made a living collecting unique pieces of metal he found in the junkyard and soldering them into jewelry. Selling his work online.

Baghead was the genesis of a host of dim-witted wise-cracks by townfolks like—

Joe, you’re so fuckin ugly you'd look better with a bag on your head,

or,

I put a bag on my wife’s head last night and taped a picture of Raquel Welsh on it. 

And, 

I told my husband if he don't cover that ugly face of his with a bag I'm gonna divorce him.

One day, Baghead packed his belongings in a cheap suitcase, vacating his room which was littered with bags, walking past Lil at the front desk, bagless, saying, 

don’t wait on me Lil, I gotta job up north in a paper mill. 

The Baghead story was two and a half pages of total shit. I lit it with a Zippo, as the pages burned the sleeve of my flannel shirt caught fire, so I ran to the sink.

I take a slab of Land O’Lakes butter from the refrigerator and rub it on the burnt arm. The butter doesn’t help so I grab a bottle of Alocane from the medicine cabinet, spraying it, my arm still hurts like a bitch.

The doorbell rings, I open it, it’s Ricco Shoe,

yeah, Ricco, 

I got 20 Dilaudid I’ll give you for an OZ. 

Where’d you get 'em, Ricco? 

Why the fuck do you care? 

Never mind, I’m hurtin.

I crush some Percs with a meat hammer on a cutting board, mixing the powder with weed and rolling a joint. 

After a few tokes, my zombie body is hovering on the ceiling. I can see myself on the sofa, I couldn't feel a thing in the zombie body, it was miraculous pain relief. 

A body is a burdensome thing to carry through life, feeding it, cleaning it, dressing it, relieving yourself, and dealing with the mental ups and downs. Why didn’t the gods have the sense to create humankind as spirit bodies? The gods aren't as smart as they think.

Stinky Smith was born with an awful stench, a cross between rotten food and clammy feet. The obstetrician assured Stinky’s mother the smell would go away in a few days, as the hospital staff, most of whom were gagging through their surgical masks, completed little Stinky’s discharge papers in record time. 

The Smith family lived in a one-story house in Fentonville, reeking so bad that little Stinky’s father vanished one night and never returned.

When Stinky was six months old, Anita took him to an Odor specialist, Dr. Flatulence.

Poor little Stinky was tested and diagnosed with Bromhidrosis, a condition that causes extreme body odor. It occurs when the skin’s bacteria break down sweat and produces a smell that mimics sulfur and onions. 

By the age of five Stinky weighed a hundred pounds, twice the weight of the average five-year-old. Junk food was his steadfast friend.

Stinky was fat and pungent.

During kindergarten, Stinky had to learn in a private classroom. His teacher, John Slopehead was a sensitive sort who understood Stinky’s blight, teaching Stinky with a surgical mask on. 

The two became close, Sloophead pitied Stinky, who didn't have a friend in the world. 

Doctor Sloophead calls Anita, Stinky’s ma, suggesting, 

Ma’am, I believe we can placate Stinky’s condition by dealing with it as though he’s been sprayed by a skunk. Bath him for an hour every day in a tub mixed with hydrogen peroxide, baking soda, tomato juice, and dish detergent.

Stinky lost his stank thanks to his daily bathing regimen, late becoming a masseuse.