Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? –William Shakespeare She got a TV eye on me. –Iggy Pop A few weeks ago, I bought a Zenith black-and-white portable TV from a hawk shop for $39. The set came with a fucked-up channel-changing knob, a coat hanger doubling as an…
This year the kids just banged on Bill’s door regardless of the fact that the trailer was dark as a cemetery. And the only exterior light on the tin home came from the silver and yellow strains of the half moon and the barren Dairy Queen sitting well-lit across the…
All afternoon Bill Blake catalogued his depression. The money was gone. The beer almost. Rent long past due. Worse, beating-off had lost all charm in time with the porn. And the porn was just some semi-glamorous soul-killing connection to a world that was offered up through a peep-hole known as…
DWI/I can make it if I try –Handsome Dick Manitoba The heady mix of sleep deprivation, speed and booze has given me an eagle-eye vision, and tonight the city reveals itself in painful clarity: The cheerless repetition of manicured lawns is even more bleak, the awkward, oversize grasshoppers have become…
One way I’ve discovered to subsidize my real writing and alcohol habit is porn writing. Smut for Dollars: cheap hack porn-vid toss-offs for quick-buck fixes. Scribing a “review” takes about as long as a good whack session, which is actually longer than it takes to do an album review. Album…
If there is a hill behind the sun, it ain’t Heaven Hill. It ain’t the brown-colored liquid that is sold at two bucks per half-pint in neighborhood liquor marts where food stamps are the legal tender of choice. No, it can’t be the same Heaven Hill that ruins lives faster…
There’s a lovely little girl a few trailers down from me who has that guard up. That barrier of self-denial that is inevitably raised in kids when unnatural things occur. A self-defense mechanism used before all the misfires accumulate and things like alcohol and meth grab them by the throat…
Shirley MacLaine in Irma la Douce. Now there’s a woman, the kind of gal I want: hips, lips, wit and sexual tension. And a whore. Shirley MacLaine. Oh, man. I can spend a whole day thinking about Shirley’s Irma and never bore myself. I wonder if any of those so-called…
The garish rock ‘n’ roll bar, painted an eyesore “rock dude” purple, is fittingly situated in the company of half-empty strip malls, failing video-rental franchises and vacated car lots on a horrible, comfort-free city thoroughfare designed strictly for utilitarian purposes. It’s the kind of street that had its fiscal heyday…
The phone rings and I let it go. (That the thing still operates is shocking enough, considering I haven’t opened a bill in months.) I sit some more and do nothing. The ringing stops. Then it starts in again, and instead of picking it up, I count off the rings…
On the day before holy International Western Commerce Day (Xmas), I awoke with undigested La Tolteca burrito bits glued to my face and hair whilst my head was aswim in Canadian whiskey murk courtesy of Marty, my jolly/drunken new neighbor from Canada. The previous day (December 23) was to have…
I was taking out the trash when I watched them swing around in that horrible pickup truck and park in front of the single-wide next to mine. I could recognize that prison tat anywhere. One can’t forget a neck-adorning swastika, especially when stuck on an abomination like him. Nor could…
I confronted the want ads this morning. Help wanted. Yeah. The agony. If I ever commit suicide, there’ll be a newspaper open to the want ads somewhere near my dead body. One ad read: Yo-Yo technician, assembly and stringing–no experience necessary. Drug test required. Another: Circle K offers career opportunities…
Love fades, but with me it is always wrenched away like a rotten tooth. My expertise at self-sabotage and being continually defeated, drained and drunk guarantee this. Sometimes it’s like being tied to a post opposite a firing squad, the squad members pulling their triggers while I stand there watching…
The trip from my trailer park to the strip bar usually lasts as long as a quart of beer. I had finished a 40 of King Cobra by the time I pulled the ’76 Ford LTD into the midst of late-model German and Japanese cars. I found a parking space,…
Sunday afternoon in the middle of August. I come to, ready for the undertaker. I look up at a picture of Jesus, hanging on the faux paneled wall opposite me. The sweat in my eyes makes Him appear all blurry. I am parched, hung over and stinging of cooked flesh…
This morning my neighbor across the court accidentally killed her dog. Backed over its head with her Pontiac. My girlfriend used to feed the little brown thing dinner scraps from my kitchen door. I would tell her to quit it. But that was before. I am on the couch, drinking…
Something snapped. The wind blew, the dust rose, and inside my trailer, an empty malt-liquor bottle came sailing for my head from the kitchen, which was a good 20 feet away. My excellent reflexes afforded me a timely duck that spared my skull but killed my prized possession–my 12-inch black-and-white…
I cracked a 40 of King Kobra, opened the curtains a bit, and took a seat. My trailer park’s domestic-theater show had just begun, and my neighbor, Meth-Head Red, was in rare form. His lime-green La-Z-Boy, which usually sits in front of Red’s TV, now lay on its side in…
I came to and the contents of my stomach made a bid for freedom. I stumbled to the toilet just in time to fill it with last night’s Old Milwaukee. Joy. I wiped the pungent fluid from my nose and mouth and braved the mirror. Not bad. Some shattered blood…
Mountain-Vu Trailer Court. Apache Junction, Arizona. 2:30 a.m. I had the Clash going. Loud. The trailer was pumping. Pabst Blue Ribbon flowed freely through my veins, and the moon and stars shone with a vengeance. Everything made sense for a change. Until I heard Meth-Head Red, my illiterate, white-power neighbor,…
