My stuntman days are numbered.

I think it’s important that we explore the state of mind that I was inside of. As I said earlier I wanted to believe it was the end of the world so very, very much, that I just did okay. See back then being hooked into my naiveté, barely seventeen and a half, all I knew was that I didn’t know shit, but I had to pretend. The other people present may remember everything but what was going on inside my pretty little dizzy head. The only reading material I was keeping by my little bed roll was a stack of about thirty back issues of Thrasher magazine. I had a few pictures of some of the more Aborigine members of the Zorlac & Alva skate teams duct  taped to the wall behind my pillow. I was pretty obsessed with the style of middle school street skating, & the Mad Max look of Hook and the Daggers. I came to the realization that the way that punk rockers looked is what would identify them as an opposition to the police.(Duh?) All we were listening to at that time were a couple of seven inches by bands that we had all been very close to, these records along with The Squeeze and The Jam to come down with, also each other’s impatient diatribes. I had already abandoned my first record collection. The world was a very small place for me back then.

So it’s the end of the world, in my head full of some of the most potent acid ever, a dog just bit your finger off and you want me to take you to the hospital with the hopes of getting a new finger?

giddy up

The first thing I wanted to do before getting behind the wheel of my car, was to try to do a couple of street plants just to fly the flag a little so the fuzz would know not to fool with us. So I did, and I fell down and hit my head and hurt my wrists, then I was ready.

I had learned how to drive under the influence the very first time I ever dropped. I drove to the convenience store to get orange juice with a couple of guys, and when they were inside the store I blacked out and drove off. I had forgotten why(how) I had ever arrived. This was gonna be the first of many rides like this. Behind the steering wheel of a car was like being the captain of some crazy cruise ship jet ski. The street just kept leaping up and lapping at the sides of the vehicle in waves like water. I had been to the hospital in Little Rock once ,about one week before, when one of us had a lymph node surgically removed, so I knew the way there. I don’t remember much of the drive, just that it had been a bad ride. I wouldn’t pull into the parking lot, because I was paranoid, instead I pulled the car in where I thought a boat belonged, the loading dock behind a dumpster.

heaviness

The scene at the hospital was dense, really thick. I mean to say that I remember it being busy. The rules wouldn’t allow more than one chaperone into the emergency room, so I was left alone to creepy crawl the most immensely crowded waiting room ever. I can’t say that I remember much about this time except that it took maximum restraint on my part to maintain some semblance of sanity. I had to act like I knew what I was doing and try not to freak anybody out. I tried not to speak to any of the orderlies that kept asking if I was okay. I pretended to watch one of the television sets which were  tuned to all sorts of local & national network news reporting what was really happening out there, which reconfirmed the feeling I first had when I had heard all the citizens being shot in the street. I couldn’t watch t.v. so much as I was actually projecting my thoughts that were then reflecting, being beamed back at me through transmissions by the mass of human conduits.(the whole thing is just a hypno-ray anyway, right?!!) I tried to buy some candy, investigating the contents of the vending machine which were suddenly the most attractive thing in the room, when a little black kid(he might have been a midget) tried to help me decide and bought me a twix, which I promptly dissected and smeared all over myself. I was most certainly malnourished, but not the least bit interested in, nor could I imagine eating anything as detestable as a chocolate caramel cookie candy bar. The kid kept staring at me so I started to stare back at him, but instead began a thorough introspective investigation of myself. I wanted at first to find out what he was looking at me so funny for…I remember removing some of my clothing. I pulled the sweater up over my head and left it hanging like a head-dress, and I am pretty sure I took my t-shirt off too. Examining my arms closely I started to notice that the patterns of vascularity were repetitive, and to my souprize, the arms attached to my tiny tattooed torso(I was a late bloomer in more ways than one, and only happened to weigh about 130 lbs. soaking wet in a river of sweat) appeared to have become quite muscular in a matter of minutes(premature body dysmorphic disorder? I sure did spend alot of time looking in the mirror back then.). In my mind I had mutated into the mythic warrior poet that had been my psychic predestination all along.. “This, I thought, must be the reason that alluva sudden, everybody seems to be staring back at me. “Shit, I thought  out loud, they know who I am. ” I knew right then I had to get outta there. I made a beeline for the door marked EXIT, took the stairs up to the tippy top of the parking garage. “From here, I thought, I am able to plan my escape route.” I looked out and saw the city burning, as I suspected, and as I started methodically  plotting my course, the sound of static interrupted my train of thought…You see, the rest of the world may have been unaware of it when, but the cultural phenomenon of gang violence was all the rage in the south back then. There had been a HBO documentary called “Bangin’ in Little Rock” a few years prior to this, and since then the security levels had been heightened at the hospital, much like my senses that night,so the place was teeming with cops. A roaming security guard warned me not to resist, and also asked me not to jump. A cruiser pulled up and his partner asked me to put my hands on the hood of it, patted me down, put me in handcuffs, and parked my ass in place of the back seat. The next thing I knew they led me into a tiny interrogation room where me and the three little pigs were joined by a couple more policemen. These two were county Mounties, and they were wondering what kinda drugs was I on, and where did I procure them? I remember thinking that I heard them saying things, but I couldn’t hear what they were telling me, so from what I could decipher they were about to shave off my beautiful blue-black head of hair and penetrate me. They asked me for my phone number so I gave them the only one I remembered at the moment, which was/is:(501)767-8361.” Suck on that, I thought, that was my phone number from the time that I was seven until I turned twelve or thirteen.”

WTF?

They asked me if I thought that I might be capable of driving my friends home…what friends? I had forgotten all about them. I had gotten all caught up in the eye of this apocalyptic hell storm in my head and forgot all about my fingerless cohorts. “Sure, I can drive. Of course I can. I know how to get out of here. What do you think I was doing up on the roof?” At that point, I could have driven all the way home in reverse. I was over it. I had ridden on the crest of a monster wave for some time. There was no fucking peak. If there was, I had surpassed it. Remember, these were the days before portable gps tracking devices, when you had to rely solely on your internal locus. They let me go. How? Why? The answer to these questions I will never know. My car was right where I remembered leaving it, we got in, I backed up, and we slid all the way back to Capitol street.

When we walked into the haus the party was just getting cranked, and I had enough. Everyone seemed concerned about my mental and emotional well-being. Someone brought me a beer from the keg, the tap  from which was the jumping off place of the whole amputated phalange dog bite trip. I remember asking everybody to leave me be, I went back to the bedroom, begged for sleep, and blacked out.

deja-voo-doo

A few days afterward I found myself with some super-friends, facing the day, being back to normal, getting some grub at the corner store. I was standing there stoned, in a never-ending ultra-long line waiting to buy my nutty bars, when something about the image of me happened to get caught in the eye of the man standing directly ahead of me. He did a double take, that’s when I reckon I placed his face, a perfect match…he turned to face me, we were just about the same size, me and the rent a cop from the apocalypse. “You don’t remember me do you?” he asked with a kind, stunned expression on his thin face…”How could I forget you, dude?” I responded. None of my pals seemed to notice, except for one, and he asked me how I knew him.” I don’t know, bro. I just do.”

The Point

The ones that don’t get it can’t. They don’t need to. For those of you that do, here it is(this oughta be rich)…

Post Acute Street Knowledge, get some.

Like I said before, it’s the sum of the myriad trials I have faced that have gotten me good and laced up for general day-to-day of the here and now. You don’t have to endure these kinds of traps just to have kicks but, the ability  to survive shit like this can leave you both at a slight advantage and quite severely handicapped.

end part II

I had taken one hell of a hit. The shit was only beginning to take hold when I got my first taste of the white-hot wake of post-pubescent delinquency. It  scared me, bad. I had to admit that I had wronged a comrade, that I had hurt a whole commune full of fast friends, and got called out on being a con man. These words would not sit well with me until future days when I found myself within a den of them. The suit sure did fit, even though I didn’t like how it felt when I tried it on. I had lost myself, spent way too much of me, spread myself too thin without having much of a grip on the handle of who I was or what I wanted to be.Before you knew it, I was gone daddy, gone. I left Little Rock behind, but the reflection in the rearview of  my new mind went along for the ride. I walked outta there with my first two tattoos, a severely severed head, and an escape route all-star mapped out…I had crapped out.

Night Ride to Nowheresville

I was going somewhere, anywhere but backwards. First I went to Hot Springs to hit my Dad up for money. He never had much of it, but he’d give me what he could, even if he shouldn’t. My old man had been a weird role model, divorced twice before he met my Mother. I had five half brothers that I’d hardly even met. Being the last son of a gun to show up before he got fixed(snippety snap) I think he gave being daddy a go more than he ever had before. He used to tell me all kinds of wild war stories all his own. He also let  me know that you can’t con a con man, and that he was in fact a con man. We used to go on these wicked long walks in the woods, down the street, and through his own foggy version of the truth. Everything he ever gave me(save a pair of exotic boots, elephant hide is indestructible)I destroyed, literally. Like once, when he gave me this TCB medallion that he’d scored when we took a family trip to Graceland, he gave it to me to wear and it broke. He gave me this relic of a tomahawk once and I broke that thing too. I was able to steal one of them old dang takin’ care o’ bidness necklaces when I was visiting Memphis, and made a pilgrimage to his house to give him the thing. He didn’t ask me how I got it, he was just happy that I did. So happy in fact that he had a gold one made from a mold of the one I gave him. Any who, I hid out for a couple of days and spent some quality time with pops which entailed taking target practice at the firing range, shooting the shit, and beginning to have a break down. He could see that I had been hurt and needed to get the hell away from LR, AR, ASAP. While I was in town I tried too hard at rekindling some friendship that I had burnt down way back before I had first gotten high,  and I had the bright idea to go to the mall where I ran into yet another of my old play pals that I had wronged back in jr. high school. He wasn’t over it and wanted to fight. He punched my car so hard that it wouldn’t start, ever again. My dad bought me a bus ticket to Tejas pronto, and I took the first of many long rides on the old grey dog.

fried, dyed, & to the side

It had nearly been a year since my mama last laid eyes on me. And believe you, me, I was something to see. I looked weird. I’d become one of those kids that would take some speed and start sewing my pants non-stop til’ they were so skin-tight the seams wanted to pop. I had also bleached my hair, dyed it black, and bleached it back out again. The hair follicles had stretched and kind of melted together. I’d be lying if I said I remembered much of anything about the head first homecoming pit stop that I made when I got to mama’s place back down 3009. I do know that she took me to see a physician, and that a fellow patient mumbled something about Sid Vicious. Whoever you are, reading this, if you were wondering why now, some fourteen years down the road, I might be revisiting, insistent on skipping double dutch down the middle of  memory lane… I’ll tell you why in long form alright? A couple of months ago, back in the here and now, I had a peculiar peek inside some of the more lurid details of a police man’s lifestyle. He had suddenly become smitten with me and decided to have a sit down with me in my work space. He wanted me to see, with his supervision, a disk of some photos that he had taken on vacation in the desert oasis of Las Vegas. As I was sitting there skimming through the visuals on the screen of my monitor, I suddenly felt trapped. My chest got tight, my breath was short, and I began to lose my place in the present. I managed to keep a straight game face and not lose my job. Since then I have shared even more of these precious moments with various cops. You won’t believe it but one police officer brought his very cherry vintage O.G. 1984 V. Courtland Johnson version of the Powell Peralta Ripper complete with plastic bubble nose/tail guards, copers, lappers, and rib bone rails for me to salivate over. Oh, speaking of cherries, the very next week, that same cop gave me the talk about the time he lost his V-card. Yeah so? Why is it so weird for you to be a security guard in a conservative corporate monster working side by side with cops???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

As I was saying…

I was only gonna be underage for about five more months so I decided to go to Floriduh to see about living out the rest of the drug dream I was having. My dad agreed to fulfill his obligation to the judge and send the remaining child support payments directly to me via postal money order. It was a pretty sweet deal, seeing how I’d never technically been emancipated. (Maybe dropping outta high school counted for something?)  They’d cash the thing for me right there in line, made me feel particularly favored, having the mail men pay me. I hung around the college ghetto of Gainesville for the final countdown and hessian summer party session.  I learned the ropes of scumming it, scamming free food, no rent, and  getting by on two things: being cute and possessing pot. I had weed and I did travel. It would turn out to be a one trip pass, though I did meet the likes of a few future stars, and various notable southern punk rockers to have gone down(and come up!) in the annals of post rock history. This is true of any/every where I’ve ever been. So far I haven’t dropped anything so heavy as a name and I am gonna try to not leave any trace, for it’s not my place to bring anybody down here with me. If you’d like to invite yourself in, go ahead and attach your moniker like a remora to the ray of the shark of this so far semi sordid sunshine statement. It was here that I developed some of the more sickening(sycophantic) traits of the character I would portray. I must confess, I became a grind-core groupie. Golly that sure was gross, I am glad we got outta there when we did. Yeah, I had to leave, but not before getting good and burned out and learned about the miracle of gold bond medicated powder after I got my first shot of crotch-rot. At first I thought it might be the clap, but I would be lying if I said I went anywhere near all the way with many(if any) of the candy coated princesses I courted. I usually blew it by being too blotto and blacking out.I told you I was a late bloomer.

comeback

Life was coming at me half speed before I bused back to Universal City, TX. I came close a couple of times to getting cut from the team, if you know what I mean. I didn’t aim to keep on trucking, see what I am saying? I wanted to die, but I never did. I came into contact with a rival renegade and when we did decide to work together at not working, we tried to stay young forever. We made it happen for a little over a year past the turning point of eighteen. That boy could really write the riffs, seriously, you had to be an idiot not to notice his gleaming talent. We pooled our resources, and planned to purchase a three-piece drum set at the right time, just around the autumnal equinox. We then enlisted another brother who was no slouch when it came down to the bottom. I mean rhythm see, for he was/is a bad bass player. Spicoli Youth(that’s the name they gave me) was a guaranteed good time for we three. We spent the next calendar year worrying about nothing but nursing our broken hearts(both my band mates high school sweet hearts turned stank stripper girlfriends) seeking haven on the roof top of an abandoned hydro-electric plant, hauling gravity bongs into tree houses to see if we could get any higher, bringing the neighborhood dog(R.I.P Zeppelin) along for the ride every where we went. We gave each other bad tattoos, funny hair cuts, and played some goofy gigs until we finally fell out and gave up trying. Before we disbanded we managed to do very few of the things most responsible young professionals have to do on a daily dose. We never lost until time ran out, somebody pressed pause and we got split up.

work sucks, but I need the bucks

When I was an itty-bitty baby boy, like learning to talk little, I needed a word or phrase for describing what came out when I went #2. The powers that be(my folks) told me to call it a bad job(pronounced: badge-awb). I was already calling my ding-dong a winky-tinky, everybody kept calling me pooh-bear, so no wonder I became  a total perv! My sister and I both called it that, like one word. When asked what we were doing in there we would reply…”I was doing a bad job.” What was I gonna do but lose? We were right too, I think. It is a bad job, indeed.

Life just kept on keeping on coming at me as a series of twisted scenes. I was in a blur of  bad jobs, one after another in rapid secession in a maniacal montage of lame gigs. A barrage of hirings, firings, and(my personal favorite) quitting. Here is a short list of my many short-lived career  niches and nooks(on and off the books):ice cream vendor, parking lot attendant, dish washer, line cook, nude model, drug dealer(not a very successful one), telemarketer, truck loader/un-loader, record store lurker, video store stalker, stock boy, tank cleaner, bus boy, street performer, barbecue chef, petty thief, flower salesman, movie theater monkey man, you name it, I got fired from it. “little poor boy,took all he had, started down the road, started down the road…” I got my G.ood E.nough D.iploma, started an improvisational metal band(Altered Beast was kinda like Bon Scott singing while John Coltrane sits in with Man is the Bastard), enrolled and commenced to cut class at community college. I didn’t do too well in school. It might have something to do with the fact that I was taking more acid and staying up for days at a time writing cracked words on pieces of paper to pass as poetry. The band kept breaking up into little particles while I got hooked on the self exploitation aspect of performing, it was almost like heroin. I would actually skip class to do a little karaoke. I was nineteen, almost twenty, living in another acid house on one of the main drag strips near downtown San Antonio.I had just lost my job as kitchen bitch when I threw a fit and quit on the swish owner of the coffee-house where I worked part-time, then got fired from the brewing company in an artist compound where I held a head host position for a little while.(I was a head and I was a host, so technically head+host=head host.) A friend of mine was dating the girl who got me the job. She was the niece of the least of the beats. Her uncle was one big famous poet. Her uncle was as famous as a poet can get. Her uncle’s name rhymes with Pregory Torso. He wrote a poem about her called “for my niece” or “about my niece”. Which reminds me that I should write some poems about my nieces. Anyway, you had to wear a uniform that consisted of khaki pants and a polo shirt. The day I got fired, she was complaining that she wasn’t wearing a belt and didn’t look good. The other day I forgot my belt and I didn’t like how I felt. I think I would’ve felt worse if I’d borrowed someone else’s belt. So, this chick asked me to give her my belt. I gave her the damn belt, and then I felt stupid for having done so. She was always trying to seduce me but I wouldn’t give in because her boy was my friend. My buddy was her beau, so I sucked it up and blew her off. That didn’t sound right, I mean to say that I was resistant to her advances. I seated some people, cleared some tables, just doing my thing and she tells me to come into the bathroom. I was/am perverted, so I follow her in the men’s and she sez to take a look at myself in the mirror, I do and see that My forehead is bleeding profusely like Dusty Rhodes in a bull rope match, then she shows me this bloody napkin and tells me “you’re fired.”

end numero tres

As I stood in front of the mirror washing the blood off my face I couldn’t figure out for the life of me how I’d been cut. I wondered how so much blood could come from such an insignificant little scratch? It didn’t mean a difference to the owner, why should it matter to me? I walked out the front door, got in my car and drove off. The next day a mutual friend of my roommate showed up unexpectedly and offered to buy my Camaro. “Easy money” I thought…so I sold it to him for minimal money and a mass amount of mota, then I coasted.

sea hag

The apartment house I was living in belonged to this ancient Greco midget landlady named Matilda. She owned the bulk of a bunch of old buildings in the college ghetto section NW of downtown San Anto and probably still does. When my best buddy Lane Henson and I rented the place from her we never signed a lease, she wrote out a weird contract. It read:

No devil worshing

No drugs

No black, blue marks

No boys on the porch

We agreed to the terms and signed the bottom of the page.

The place was thrashed. Matilda would send her knucklehead sons over to shut off the water when I was late with the rent. People referred to her as the sea hag. “She’s a bruja!” they’d say down the street at the outdoor laundry mat. “She’s a witch.”

I never had hot water.  I took cold baths. I had allowed the dishes to sit in the dirty sink full of standing water breeding maggots. We used to joke that one big maggot had formed in there. Once we were sitting in the living room trying to watch watership down, there was an immaculate infest of full-grown horseflies. It took the two of us about 45 minutes to kill em’ all. It was like a plague. You had to remember to lift the toilet seat before you went to take a dump because giant flying cockroaches liked to post up in there at the tail end of the bowl under the lid. I could only imagine where they wanted to go. There were four apartments in the building, but only one being occupied by us. Actually there was this creepy lady living downstairs at first, but she got the boot. She didn’t have any furniture and stole the fuses out of our power box until I put a lock on it. The rest of the house was full of shadows, spectres, and drug induced nightmares. Anyway, I sold my car and decided to move.

because the night

I had gotten a job washing dishes at this Greek restaurant and started buying acid from one of the cooks who went by the name of  Cake. Cake had a bunch of piercings and collected reptiles. He seemed dirty but his acid was very clean. His roommate Jarvis was a swell guy, a beautiful human being. We got to talking and he mentioned that their neighbor was looking for a housemate. He said he could arrange an introduction, if I was interested. One night after work I walked over to the house and met him on the porch. He told me he’d heard some of my poetry and he didn’t like it. “That’s fine” I agreed, ” I don’t like it  either.”I said “you need a roommate?” It was decided. Jarvis was a real gonna get er’ done kind of dude. He had a truck ,and in it, we made a midnight run so I could bail out of my previous digs. Jarvis marveled at how I didn’t have much of a plan of attack when it came to moving my possessions. I was terribly disorganized. I basically dumped everything over the rail of the balcony and shoved it in the truck. The power was cut so I was moving out in the dark.

house of styles

The first thing I did in that house was cocaine, after that I burned some sage atop of my prized longhorn skull in the center of the floor, then we brought in my mattress, t.v. and drum set. The layout was weird. The only shower was in my room and the rest of the house was all empty, sprawling wood floors covered by threadbare rugs, and walls lined with broken mirrors. The house was like the inside of one of those bad trip tee pees. I had my area set up within a day. A buddy came by and said my room looked like a sonic youth  record cover. I lost the dish gig a few days after the move, I would often wander back to the maggot haus in the afternoon  to rifle through the mess, looking for anything meaningful that might’ve been left behind in the wake. While I was digging during the day one of my oldest better friends Merle Tacoma happened by, being the thinking ahead type that he is,bought and brought along a nice big ball of coke for us to fuck with. He said he was walking on his way to an aging punk’s wedding, and thought he’d stop over to see if I wanted to crash into the party with him…or not.

“I gotta go to work” I explained as I prepared a couple third rails on a small Blizzard of Ozz mirror, a souvenir from some suicide night of a long forgotten county fair…”Okay, bro.” sssssssNORt!

I did up a monster rail road of a line that changed my mind. We went across the street to my stoner friends’ to use their phone and hit their bong. I told them that my grandmother had been in an accident and someone had to keep an eye on my down syndrome cousin. I thought this would be  soluble enough to suffice, certainly shit doesn’t always float just because it stinks! They were not buying any of my bologna, and informed me that I would be fired if I walked in even one minute late(Oops! Maybe it was the tincture of the clenched teeth, slurred speech, and a speedy delivery of the real doozie of an excuse moi?) And so we strutted halfway clear across town to get down with the Texas rock fogies. I was smart enough not to take my sunglasses off the entire time, even when we toasted the happy couple, given a strange sweaty hug wishing them well on their way ,then rushed off to the toilet… SNORT, SNORT: of course we didn’t get laid, probably due to the fact that we were a little too noided out to consider sharing any of the remaining teenth.

efil4zaggin

The next day I walked into the restaurant to discover that the schedule had a new design and my name replaced by the long red line. I was still wired so I did what drug addled poem pervs do with paper and penned a gem. I figured I’d press down kinda hard on the detonator and write out some random riff job thet would reveal all my inner most deepest(that’ll show em’) in turn,the bridge burned,  I was banned from eating in the nearest of restaurants where even the belly dancer loving, acid dealing, scummy gamer staff were thouroughly disgusted with the look of the liar in me. We did have fun at the wedding though.

free ride

I used the leftover camaro money to buy some time, about thirty days of it, actually. I should’ve been looking for a job, but instead filled my days chasing strays, drinking with Merle, and working up these lousy little bits that I would strut halfway across town in my cheap shoes just to spit back into some microphone in front of any, every, and almost no one!  Yeah, I fancied myself a wordsmith when the reality was that I knew where the literate typers would be, and I’d scribble something out at the last minute, fold her up and show up late so I’d get to go on after all else failed to feel (I’d have to beg for permission to perform at all)when everybody present was good and goofy. Anyhow, Merle and I became full time drinking buddies and he and I’d go barging in on all kind of arty farty. Why once we were so gassed up to participate in some open mic we crashed his trusty volvo into the sidewall of the venue hood first, strode on in and did everything next to striptease, slutting it up with some borrowed guitar. Along the way I bought some tickets to a Monday night wrestling promotion, and a nice little chrome bmx bike. One day my mama showed up in my big sister’s little white Chevy, handed me the keys and said “have at it hoss!” She never actually said that, but it was implied. Soon after my new roomie smashed his big blue Ford pickup into the passenger side door. A dear friend mended the wounded door with four pieces of electrical tape in the shape of the black flag. I asked my new pal Nix’s girlfriend if she would accompany me to the pro wrestling spectacle, she agreed to show up early enough so that we could decorate bright neon poster board we could wave over our heads, get high, and pedal our skinny little behinds over to the megadome. Her boy Nix had shown up with some fresh free jazz records that left me inspired, so I scribbled my heart all over my self and we scrambled to make it on time. It was there that I ran into my old bro. Go Joe from the original lousy tattoo crew, and we were so smitten at the chance to regress with each other that we forgot all about the main event, loaded up our bikes in his tiny Honda hatch back, and hauled ass backwards. The next day I decided that I liked hanging on to him so much that I might as well follow the fellow home five and a half hours away to fry street. While I was there I did pretty much every other thing there was to do, at one point somebody came out of a cake somewhere at some kind of (how much art can you take?)THING. I called someone who cared and they told me my time was most certainly up, rent was due, and there was hell to pay. I was out of money, precious time was spent, but I was not the least bit worried about the rent.

I went to the  7-11 and got lucky. I pulled up to the tank and pumped ten bucks worth(prior to pre-pay) walked in and fixed up a jalapeno hot dog, sauntered over to the counter and pleaded my case to the young convenience store clerks. I was stranded, I explained. They heard my plea, and allowed me to go freeballing in my tight little hand me down black denim dungarees on which some sweet soul had chainstitched by hand the word hoodrats, and left it hanging upside down, reading my behind from left to right said starpooh barreling down the long stretch of  Texas Highway South bound where I’d come unwound, remembering that the second to last place I’d been fired from still had my first/last, so I sidled on by to see about collecting my pences. It was just about closing time when I arrived, and was met by the owner, whom I had most certainly insulted whenever I was quit/fired. I nervously begged for his forgiveness, and he handed me the check. I also asked if there might be any chance of my getting rehired, but there was indeed none, not even a fat one.

end part IV