Give it a name. Me too.

Top of the morning gents,

I’m losing my mind. Nobody calls me shithead, fuck-face or asshole any longer. I miss my cop, criminal and swim team pals and all their healthy abuse. I never hear anybody yell curses and foul names at me. Pussies. What’s worse is I’ve moved so many times nobody knows who the fuck "Karl-n-bun" are. As I rotate throughout Alaska, fewer mongoloids refer to me in the professional manner like Officer Octuck’s, “way to go dumbass.” The 907 dumps I’ve squatted fade from my memory as did local nicknames such as “white boy, white bread, white trash, and dummy.” Kotzebue and Barrow gave me the names of “Narc” and “Nigger” respectively. But the armpits and butt-crotch towns like Dutch, D-ham, Cold Bay, Galena, Nome, Clam Gulch, Soldotna, Sterling and Nikiski simply call me Karl. When did broke-back-geezers around me get so polite? So gay.

I used to hear some funny names and insults from my mates on the swim team when they arrived early in the morning picking me up for turnout. Some mornings me and Cully would be milking the goats or delivering newspapers and by memorizing our paper route, my chlorine smelling swimmer dudes would drive all over our in-bred hillbilly mud farmer trailer court neighborhood and track us down. Pim Vanden Ende, Steve Senn, Todd Larson and Eric Bjodstrup would sneak up on us in the dark and honk the horn or yell friendly obscenities at me to get my shit together and hurry up. The worst and most abrupt is if I’ve overslept. My brother Cully would kick the bed frame or throw something at me and wake me telling me Larson was out front. Mixed in a chorus of horn honks, whistles and mimicked animal sounds I’d hear my trademark, "Hey goat milker! Hurry up, we're gonna be late."

Being a team player meant busting balls and eating crap off your only friends in the universe. From the age of 6 all the way into the College Masters Swim Leagues I took shit from those funny fuckers. I also enjoyed having a whole team of boys that would come running if bullies or assholes were shoving me around or trashing my possessions in the cafeteria or on the way home from school. If you want to see some righteous paybacks and ass-stomping, you oughta see those boys ambush a fucking asshole bully and wail the shit out of him. Aside from tobacco loser welfare bullies, these assholes were occasionally football players or wrestlers receiving injuries so grievous they’d miss games. Or entire seasons. One senior football player that picked on a younger swimmer got an arm broken, shoulder shredded, and testicles mushed: ending his college scholarship and future as a bully. Plus, he couldn’t breed any mean shitty fuckhead offspring. You’d smile at that flurry of 6-to-1 ratio ass beat down by my dudes. Wouldn't trade it for the world. In return for athletic protection rackets, I had to endure healthy shit off my swim team homeboys and thoroughly enjoyed each insult, cut and josh.

A traditional KPD greeting was “how’s your wife and my kids.” But decades prior to my taking shit offa my abusive cop pals, I also enjoyed rations of shit from fellow workers in other vocations. I had a job restoring a hundred-year-old building in Seattle's University District called the Campus Apartments built in 1880. It had 40 units (4 floors, 10 units each) that were originally hotel rooms, flop house, worker dorms, prostitution hot sheets, eventually becoming apartments for students and changing its name to the current Campus Apartments.

You coppers will shit yer pants, but in the last century child prostitution used to be totally legal in Alaska and Seattle with the most expensive tricks being little boys and girls. My great-grandfather co-owned a shipping magnate called Archer Ewing Inc. and shipped “mining supplies” meaning liquor, laudanum, women and children to the Klondike Gold Rush and Nome Gold Rush. What a flight plan: load a few tons of heroin, morphine and liquor mixers, purchase thousands of kids from Seattle orphanage auctions and deliver it all to brothel cities like Skagway, Ketchikan and Nome. Gold rushes had little to do with gold, they were meccas for suckers, con-artists and places to get high and over-inflate children and young women with sperm to near bursting. Makes me puke.

The mayors and mob bosses of Nome and Skagway were Wyatt Earp and Soapy Smith respectively and they paid top dollar for barrels of fine opium cocktails and shiploads of children to stock thousands of flophouses and fuck-shacks at Alaska’s #1 drug and sex tourism destinations. There’s a fine ass itinerary: haul baby meat-puppets up north (mining the miners) and pick up gooks for the railway slave trade on the way back. Those steamers logged in a million freight miles hauling child sex slaves and opium northbound to the gold fields of Alaska with a stopover on the return trip in Canada to repack the cargo ships with illegal Chinese immigrant slaves to work in Washington, Oregon and California. To keep gooks, slopes, dinks and zipper-heads locked up in bonded railroad labor Congress passed laws banning fresh gook niggers from entering America. Hence, smuggling contraband chinks became big money like cocaine: human smuggling and slave importation just got more valuable. Liquor, under-age tiny-cooter child-pussy and narcotics up north to Alaska, chink niggers with tiny-ricey-dicks back south to Washington’s slave marts. That’s a fucking recipe for success. Bootlegging, human trafficking with a side order of dope. Family tradition.

After Kennedy Real Estate bought the Campus Apartment building, I was hired to work with Donald Heupel and Earl Tenley, better known as D-Hypes and Skeeter. We spent years going through every apartment hauling out trash and old iron radiators, sanding and varnishing floors, textured and painting walls and trim and replacing faulty lights and plumbing. We pulled out the old ten-ton iron steam radiators and then installed electric baseboard heaters sticking the heat costs on the tenant and running up their fucking power bill. After cutting up and hauling away the old coal-fired boiler downstairs, we built 2 apartments in the storage and boiler rooms, then converted the larger apartments into studios and added 6 more apartments which gave us a total of 48 units to rent.

These old hotel rooms had cupboards in the hallways for waiters to remove chamber pots, linens, dishes and prostitute wash basins from each hotel room. "Dumb waiter" is the official term, but I got the impression that stinky niggers hauled the dishes and whore slop away at night: out of sight, out of smell. These dumb waiter cabinet doors were removed and patched with sheet rock and textured over to conceal any seams. We also removed the old rickety elevator and installed floors at each level creating space for a 2 washer and 2 dryer laundry room on each floor. Punk-ass students can hike the stairways.

Another aspect of work in Seattle was battling and cleaning up after drunken homeless scumbags camping all over the fucking UW community: including the Campus Apartment building I was hired to restore. Those filthy pukes would eat, sleep and shit around the back alley and present fine ass targets of opportunity. Heupel, Skeeter and I would climb up on the roof, reach over the parapet and pour gallons of ammonia or bleach 3 floors down on them stinky fucks. We did the world a favor and improved the aroma of the Pacific Northwest as they fled screaming and crying. Just like the bratty dirty homeless drunks we see piling up in Anchorage and Kenai. Don’t claim any racist bias in this missive: these homeless garbage butts were the spectrum of colored subhuman fecal piles you’re all too familiar with: Seattle’s rainbow dispersion of piss, puke, shit and dirty clothing mirroring the composition our own Alaskan families. One dumbass white dude, 2 niggers and 7 fucking natives. Smell my finger.

We scheduled work restoration completion on Fridays, so we pulled tape and rolled up painting tarps with D-Hypes and Skeeter wiping and cleaning the new apartments to a level of cleanliness that I dubbed "cruel and unusual." No tenant could accomplish the original sparkle and shine they achieved prior to occupancy. While Skeeter and D-Hypes did the finishing touches, I was directed to the apartment at the high end of the hallway on each floor and performed tool and hardware clean-up. Since sewer drains run downhill, each hallway has a high end and a low end. My job was to report to the unoccupied apartment at the high end and clean all the paint brushes, rollers and extension poles, doorknobs, brass hinges and fixtures with gallons of solvent, paint thinner, TSP and jugs of Dawn dish soap.

D-Hypes used to yell into the designated apartment "Hey Dummy! We got buckets of bar soap scraps, shampoos and dish soaps for you to dump in the bathtub." On clean-up Friday my job was to run the bathtub, bathroom sink and kitchen sink on full hot water for couple of hours while I cleaned all the tools and trim pieces. We're talking scalding hot water. After a hundred years of poop, grease and hair slowly plugging the drains, my job was to dump buckets of bar soap scraps, shampoos, laundry left-overs, Tri-sodium-phosphate and gallons of paint thinner I used to wash my tools and hardware down the drain with a few thousand gallons of scalding hot water. No kidding, straight boiling hot water for hours at a time. To ensure that I move more poop sludge, hair and grease products downriver, I was instructed to also flush the toilet after each tool and piece of hardware I cleaned.

I'd scrub all my tools and trim-work in the kitchen sink with a wire brush, gallons of paint thinner and jugs of dish soap while the tub, bathroom and kitchen sink were steaming chimneys gushing every kind of soap and cleaner known to mankind down the drains. I scrubbed paint brushes, rollers, spackle and putty blades and every old brass hinge or old glass doorknobs to brand new condition. Imagine the loads of paint thinner, grease sludge and human goop I was flushing out of that 100-year-old building and into Seattle's sewer system.

Near quitting time each Friday D-Hypes and Skeeter used to yell "Dummy, coffee and bong hits!" at me and ordered me down to the basement for a 420-safety meeting, chug down beers and bong hits and snarf bags of blow. We'd also pull the drain clean-outs to inspect the results of my half-day sewer douche and were amazed how hot the pipes got and clean they were. I'd brag that I was a one-moron poor man's Roto-Rooter squad with those guys still busting balls and slinging friendly obscenities at me. It’s called “shooting the shit.” I sure love team abuse.

When me and bun lived in the 29-unit and 41-unit apartment buildings I followed Public Work water/sewer monkey Sandy Huss's advice for the community of Kotzebue to flush toilets hourly to move solids and frost to prevent freeze up. While I vacuumed, mopped and washed dishes I ran the bathroom sink and bathtub faucets on full hot water for about an hour a day with all kinds of abandoned laundry room soap in the tub for a foamy scalding drain douche. Jeff Skinner thought I was nuts until he was assigned by KIC to clean and inspect the sewer clean-outs under the 2 apartment buildings. He laughed and shook my hand and told me the drains were hot as hell but super clean. Apartment dwellers frequently dump cooking oil, grease and food waste down the drain which catches rock solid poop logs, toilet paper and hair balls and plugs shit up. Jeff Skinner didn't call me Dummy but he abused me in his own way. I sure miss that guy.

Goat milker, dummy, and insults from the uniforms: now you see my life. During my tenure at UAF I earned the moniker of "Soldier." Jay Gardner was in the same business/econ program as me, so he always ragged my shit to go over the reading and lecture notes with him. Did you know that the UAF Pub was a damn nice place to study for exams and oral presentations? Jay Gardner was a Captain in the US Army on leave to earn a bachelor's degree on the GI Bill and over the years became my friendly abusive squad-leader. His common insult was "What's yer major malfunction soldier?" I sure liked that guy.

Gardner and another GI Bill scholarship soldier from the Navy was a black gentleman named Chermaine Fullinck and the 3 of us dominated the top slots in the high-grade point average game and stole the tuition, cafeteria and housing scholarships away from the fatty white bitches and high-stepping yellow natives. Gardner and Fullinck also badgered me to apply for the computer lab job so that I could catch up to the 90's and leap across the digital divide that kept Alaskans sucking dirt and eating shit a century behind the outside world. I also learned to avoid using the term "nigger" when I was around such educated chaps. One time those two told me that good killers make the worst soldiers and they sure coulda used a hunnert guys like me. Compliments like that echo throughout our minds for decades.

In Finland I got stuck with the stupid name of "Uusi Suomen" which means New Finn (the implication that I was a cherry to the secret Fino/Russo cold war). Timo Aristo was in the Helsinki School of Economics MBA program and stuck that tag on me. Three other MBA students (and intelligent agents) were Dwane Welleschuck, Paul Quinn and Marku Kuusinen liked this nickname and dogged me with an additional nickname of “Neger-ensuko” meaning nigger-lover, so I guess I was on another team, again. It became a code, because when I got out of jail my boss gave me a card with Uusi Suomen and X’s and O’s scribbled on envelopes with welcome back and get well soon cards inside it. Then I was deported back to Alaska and put on a dozen “no-fly” lists. Fuck me. Flipping shit and busting balls can sure make a guy feel like part of crew. Us old men can only smile through watering eyes when we hear fading echoes of old insults from our few remaining friends. X’s and O’s: Nigger-lover, how pleasant.

The 15 years I was in Barrow I was a nobody until I got attached to a rather attractive Eskimo woman and from that point forward, we were called "Karl 'n' bun." Even little cross-eyed Eskimo kids would yell from across the street "Hi KarlnBun! Can we come over and play?" I used to let the neighbor kids come over and sit at the computer station to play games, eat fresh-baked pastries and drink coffee and cocoa in exchange for sleds heaped with muktuk. Those kids would watch me trim the pink and black whale candy, pack it up in 50-pound boxes and label it for the elder councils and schools in Selawik, Noorvik, Noatak and Kotzebue. Those in-bred semi-mongoloid kids had no idea where these shit-hole villages were located but they practiced these names and reported back home to their parents what "KarlnBun" were doing with so much fresh kilt whale.

At Cape Smythe Air a freight clerk named Alice Hopson worked in tandem with Solvieg Naylor to ship 2 tons a year at no charge from Barrow to the elder councils and school districts all over the NANA Region. Every morning Alice Hopson would greet me with "Hello Karl Ewing. More freight for Operation Muktuk?" She was trying to sound overly professional and non-native. That greeting still breaks my heart because one morning I was lugging in a batch of heavy ass boxes heading to Patrick Octuck for a big nickipaq for the Stink Induns of his peers. That was when Alice told me that Solvieg Naylor had gotten too drunk, sat down on her front porch and froze solid. Poor Alice cried my coat wet years before Patrick Octuck also went off the great ice flows in the sky.

Eskimos use nicknames far more than real names. I've heard in-laws called goony-goo and muk-muk and my pals still living on the North Slope will forever call me stupid shit. Percy Pikok called me on the phone and greeted me with, "Uchuk-boy! You fucking nigger." Felton Sarren calls me " Stink-man! You stupid fucking white man" with a follow-up clarification that “Groid-man, you’re not just white, you’re super white, but more native than my nigger ass." Beat that.

Down here in God's Waiting Room: the wrinkled 907 borough populated with Alaska’s whitest, oldest, sickest, least vaccinated and enjoying the cheapest cigarettes in the state, I get "Come on old man, let’s go to the gym." Yup, just like Kotzebue and Barrow, bun still drags my sorry ass to the gym EVERY fucking morning. 35 years ago, we walked to the Kotzebue Rec Ctr and lifted weights every afternoon when bun got off work, then we'd go home, eat dinner and I'd sleep until my graveyard shift at the old jail. This morning she did it again and repeated "Come on old man, let's go to the gym", so I drove all the way out of Nikiski into Kenai to the city rec ctr and we did all the machines. They got free weights up the fucking ass, but I still prefer the machines. It only takes about 45 minutes to an hour to do 30-40 reps on all the different lifts and presses. On rare occasions, if I feel extra-tough, I’ll go back over to repeat some machines while bun hops on an exercise cycle for a spell.

That’s my gang: KarlnBun. As women age their knitting circles, coffee and bridge clubs and gossip assemblies at the fish camp grow ever larger with each year. Elderly men like us enjoy fewer and fewer dudes, buddies and pals. Our various jobs were our social clubs. Since leaving Arctic Alaska, in an Inupiaq dialect I’m told, Eskimo men enjoy declining numbers of illyas, oomahs, buds and barts. But in clinical white man language we suffer diminishing peer groups as we age. If I lived near all ye cops, I'd be out front of your houses every morning honking the horn. Yup, it'd be me dragging yer sorry asses to rec ctr to lift weights. I may not be able to force y'all into the swimming pool, but I'd likely get you gents to the weight room and sauna.

Now that our hearing is better, you all can hear me whisper that oughta we let the old ladies chat and cackle whilst we sneak out fer beer and bong hits. Busting balls and friendly obscenities are good for both young men and old cops and just for your benefit and team spirit, I'd probably yell something stupid at you from the main entrance of our cemetery like "Hey assholes! Hurry up, we're gonna be late."

Karl.