Worst human ever.
Top of the morning gents,
After driving all over fucking Seattle, I had Cully drop me off along the side of Interstate 5. He dreaded driving through the litter-strewn winding residential streets of my shit-ass, poor white-trash neighborhood best described as a contagious miasma of misery, hardship and misfortune. Dumping me on the freeway was WAY quicker and easier, and a soul needn't thoroughly scour themselves and burn all their clothes after exiting my neighborhood. Mountlake Terrace was a rubbish collection bin of Washington's pauperism, indigence and beggary and in it, I found myself happily immersed in criminal opportunities boundless.
You coppers have suffered shit-poor communities and similarly, Cully and my pals were averse to this human dump site due to it's populace being more desperate and dangerous than any of us. With me being the worst human ever, I was perfectly at home. I know, I can hear you coppers saying, "No shit Sherlock!" Story of my fucking life. And that's saying something. You see, poverty is a lifestyle choice and career decision and myself peddling industrial strength illegal drugs in the heart of concentrated ignorant poverty was a golden opportunity for guys like me. I also had to accept the collateral violence and hospital bills and criminal arrest records.
The reason for my roadside jump, hopping out along the freeway, allowed me to book up the treed embankment and sneak through the rusty gate directly across the street to my blessed crack house: a shortcut avoiding dysentery-rich real estate. Public assistance creates unlimited drug revenues and my job was to harvest gold nuggets from impoverished excrement and fluid stool, meaning ugly poor people, simple rube shits flying Confederate flags, breeding junk cars and handicapped kids.
Strained and sifted from this ocean of rectal muck, I collected a king's ransom in stacks of hundreds and then paid a shit load of bills with my blood money and diarrhea dineros. We zeroed out both mine and Cully's rents, yutes (utilities: water, sewer, garbage, electricity), our accumulated shop charges for repairs and fuel at R&R Automotive and Cully's new enterprise. Dropping me off on the freeway was way quicker and l desperately needed to return to Lem's to re-up, pony up a $200 down payment per ounce of blow and get back to business. Utilizing LBO's, leveraged buyouts and minimally collaterallized debt financing, crime and calamity were my lifeline, occupation and career and opportunities awaited me.
Cully's recent venture was a big old 2-car garage and I paid his first month's rent and deposit. His plan was to convert this shabby shop into a jam shed and recording studio. Shit, these obligations cost a lot of ill-gotten cash: two rents for each of our houses, all the yutes (utilities) and the up front payments for his new garage project. I was out nearly three grand and 40 years ago, that was a fuck-load of real hard-earned money. Given my limited virtue, paying all of our bills with drug money, leaving only a couple hunnert bucks remaining in me pocket, left me deeply satisfied that so much dirty money was thoroughly cleaned and laundered. Too bad my clothes, teeth and hair weren't.
After bailing on the side of the freeway I booked up the hill and into the woods. Cully floored his van, vigorously engaged the clutch and spun his tires to accelerate and merge with traffic. Driving a surplus auction school district Ford Van with a 240 cubic inch 6 cylinder, new higher compression cylinder head, tuned up and high octane fuel, Cully could muscle through the 3-speed column shift, then disappear rapidly towards the off-ramp to do his customary U-turn to re-enter I-5 southbound. He crossed the 220th street freeway overpass and headed the reverse direction, back down the freeway towards his little house in Ballard. The regular 'adios' signal for him was to honk his horn on his pass the other direction. I booked up the wooded hill to slip open the rusted gate in the cyclone freeway fencing to my home. Known commonly as Lem's Mortuary and Crack House or 1600 Dumpster Avenue, home of humanity's worst human being.
Just not today. I saw a sheriff's car around the corner and another down the road. County Mounties drive square cars like Dodge Diplomats that have lots antennas like a porcupine facilitating their tactical retarded redneck cop-talk back and forth and discuss the felony warrant take-down they'd planned. It was obvious I was the butt of their jokes. And their suspect. "Breaker breaker 19, this here's the rubber anal dildo, you got eyes on the bogey? Come on back." "That's a negatory there ass to cotton mouth herpes. Coast is clear, no dumb ass in sight." Fucking cops. Back 4 decades we viewed county piglets as Jews viewed Nazis and to haul police up by the heels and shoot them would be construed as an act of sportsmanship. In my cesspool community, gunfire never drew police responses and I was of the mindset that shooting my way home seemed logical, but at that moment, I had zero guns on me. Shut up and keep reading and gaze upon a self-portrait of a real-life butt-face you knew fer a million fucking years.
I stayed low in the trees and bushes on the freeway side of the fence and looked for a way to get home and make some calls to find out why I was the center of attention by these plain-clothed clowns in blue. Nonesuch luck, so I booked north along the freeway to get closer to Franky's, hop the fence and see what he knew about all the fucking bacon bits at my place. I neared his house, sneaked next to the highway fencing and looked up and down the road and saw 2 more bland American-made municipal sedans and it was obvious his place was getting the evil stink-eye from the narc squad too.
Shit, the illegal drug industry requires implicit permission from police, corruption tolerated by neighbors and profitable donations to elected officials. Plus, to tell you the truth, cops are interested in solving violent drug-related crimes in the same way a parasite is interested in it's host. Same shit, different day: greedy cops looking to scoop up tons of free green monies and abscond white powder from naive dirty white boys whose rumors of death have no confirmation this side of the grave.
Another problem of the cop/drug trade-off is most freshly busted dip-shits leak more intel than a pack of dogs with bad kidneys and most cops looking to skim cream off my mortuary know where these sick dogs lift their legs. Fucking A, it'd be a rare day to be surprised at reading these rat's testimonials leading to my own obituary. Or worse, my arrest warrant. Knowing the trade-offs between shit-ass cops and my shit-ass pals that frequented the city jail, I often had that dark sense, one of those premonitions a lizard must get just before becoming roadkill.
Real life for scum-bag druggies like us sucks. I had no 'go bag' prepacked, ready for me to flee the bad guys like you see on TV. In the American War on Drugs, the cops were the bad guys and us drug dealers were the patriots similar to moonshiners versus revenue agents or early bush pilots bootlegging across rural Alaska. My heroes were Art Fields, Roger Nordlum, Lee Staley, Leon Shellabarger, Joe Jackson, Nelson Walker, Ray, Donald and Archie Ferguson, Jim Rood, Carl Weisner, Bob Baker, Thomas Richards, Warren Thompson, Mike Spezak, Mark Fairbanks and Mark Borchard. Wild West bandits that became legitimate business men. Alaska's La Cosa Nostra, organized airborne crime mobsters, turning to strip clubs and casinos, I mean politics, bush airlines and running native corporations. Same shit.
In my case, transcending drug dealing to working with you coppers. I never broke out the red tights and blue cape with a big S on it. Fuck it, I had a secret Bat Cave, meaning grampa's trailer an hour up north and a few AK dimes ($100 dollar bills) in me pocket originally intended to get back-stocked into bulk product. With my car stranded in my driveway, stupid piglets on the lookout, I was stuck with only shoe leather for transpo. I was grimming and slumming with my place and Spanky's house under surveillance and no way to make calls nor get into my 72 AMC Ambassador, burn rubber and make tracks.
That dependable 72 AMC burned premium Union 76 fuel through a factory stock powerful International Harvester 304 cubic inch V-8 with a Chrysler 904 Torque-Flight transmission, hence the joke that AMC meant "All Makes Combined." It was the car Brian Higman left me as reimbursement after his 2-week vacation for wisdom teeth surgery, cocaine therapy and chronic partying on dark beer and green bud with his old pals back home. Leaving Mountlake Terrace and returning to Kotzebue I believe was analogous to death by immersion in fecal matter. Shaking hands and bidding farewell to Micro-dot (Brian Higman) at Sea-Tac Airport, his eyes were filling and his Adam's apple bobbed like it was psyching itself for a half-gainer from a ten-meter diving platform. Brian was going home to a shitty town and a really ugly wife. With a doozy of a hangover, we sadly parted ways at the airport and he booked back to Kotz. Pissed me off and wet my eyes.
Avoiding the additional pair of surveillance piggies on Spanky's (Frank Empfield's) street I sneaked past and booked across the freeway overpass Cully just took to make his U-turn back home, then walked briskly to the gas station to buy coffee, make change, then catch a bus north. I filled my coffee, went to the counter to pay, and when the dude saw my hundred dollar bill, he just waved me off, no charge. How was I gonna break this hunnert dollar bill and hop the bus? I didn't even have any coins for the fucking phone booth and call home to tell the girlfriend of the week to feed the dogs.
You see, alcoholic women serve as chemical cunts and snatch-snacks, so feeding dogs or themselves was likely way beyond their capabilities and dim wits. Fuck, I'll phone her later, tell her to smear bacon grease on her snatch and anus and feed the dogs that way. My crack whores never noticed the difference between my mandibular vacuum on their jelly rolls and fucking themselves with canine fangs. I suck snatch with so much power, I create low pressure weather troughs over the entire Puget Sound. WTF, I tend to fuck the shit outa brain-dead screamers, commonly known as Nurse Diesel and the Herp Queens, that are both prodigious secretors and excretors and with so much shedding surplus fetal tissue and infected rectal material coated in bacon grease, the dogs oughta have plenty to eat.
My brother Cully oft recited that, "Any girl Karl fucks is a complete misuse of tissue." Meaning I confuse brutality for affection and fuck like I'm fighting, just with my dick. Numerous times, upon departing the shower, I'd ask my roommates for a pair of scissors to cut off a condom that appeared out of nowhere, cuz I never practiced safe sex, and seemed persistently twisted around my Johnson. Cully would comment, "Shit, that ain't a condom, it's vaginal tissue. Or intestine." Yup, real funny fucker. I like insults. Now, in my old age, I phone down to my old pals in Seattle and whisper, "Grandma got poopy butt. Want some?" Then hang up. I know, I'm retarded. It'd be funnier if I phoned KPD and made fart sounds.
You see, poor white farm 'tards like me, my alcoholic family and dysfunctional community breed like rats and instead of stretching a tarp over our junk, we spooge in every orifice available, then get abortions on a wholesale level. I should have dozens of nieces and nephews if it hadn't been for abortion clinics and turbo toilets facilitating the removal and supercharged disposal of a hunnert deformed special-needs gimplets and unborn pickled crack fetuses. I've seen my own fucked-up sisters and drunken girlfriends look down at their growing bellies and engorged leaking itty bitty titties, then look skyward and say, "Thanks God, now I don't have to go to college or get a job!" "I can hook up with an alcoholic and live in a crack house like my brother Karl!" My thoughts were to kill both host and parasite. If you met my impaired family and inebriated girlfriends, you'd be the first to clear leather and light their shit up with JHP magnums. Right after ye fucked 'em. With Westlake's dick.
Me and Cully laughed at terminated pregnancies, prematurely dead crack whore girlfriends and the noisy death rattles all of our leaking fuck-mates and kicking spoogelets would make. In common parlance, the "death rattle" is one of those terms that through repeated usage by cops, detectives, medical examiners and morticians has passed into the realm of sick-fiction fantasy. Most no longer believe that gasps, moans, kicks, flailed arms and yelling from the deceased actually happens, but it's so prevalent in modern psychology, it's often repeated as explanations for noises we hear in corpse coolers, caskets, trunks of cars and under toilet seats in outhouses. Taking a step further, my pretty Eskimo wife believes all the sperm I shoot on the bed, pillow or her eyeglasses make noises as they scurry and die, similarly, she calls them "screamers." Audible shrieks and barks arising from post-mortem tissue death is funny shit.
Forensic experts tell us the death rattle is the result of involuntary spasms in the limbs, lungs, throat and larynx resulting in mysterious bumps, thumps and knocking from limbs of the dead flinching spastic minutes and hours after they done croaked. Family members, investigators and ME's will attest to hearing scary barks and gasped profanities emitting from long-dead corpses, insofar as claims of hearing moans and groans like old-fashioned ghosts. I've shared with my pals the verbal death rattles dead niggers yell on the way to the outhouse. "Hey, this is bullshit. Fucking whitey break my neck and look like he gonna puke. That baseball bat upside my head piss me off. I oughta climb out this trunk and put a cap in yo ass. Wake me up when we get there. Hey! Why the big-ass bonfire? Very funny motherfucker!" That shit is comic to me and my brother. One wonders what kind of death rattle a fetus or pre-birth nigger makes spiraling the toilet, circling the drain finally splashing into a toxic biologically active septic tank. Fuck it, feed the dogs yer anal seepage, labial nuvuk and cunt blobs. Its the only humane thing to do with buckets of miscreant miscarriages of color.
Don't give me that look, abortions are good for humanity and even better for your IRS tax bills. Every one of my shredded nieces and nephews would've been welfare niggers of the paler persuasion. Public assistance for spastics, retards and mini-limbers is expensive and my slow offspring would fill Public Housing to overflowing, or end up in Everett, Washington. Besides, I hate child support almost as much as having dark-skinned cross-eyed toddlers piss and shit all over my mortuary. It's okay for my dying pals and long dead fuck-toy bitches to blow chunks and spew juices after they croak, just not infants. Their shit stinks sweet and gags me enough to launch them a mile in the air with my giant 2-man potato launcher slingshot over the fence, out into traffic on I-5 and torpedo traffic speeding by. I'm not sure if wiper blades and windshield washer fluid would clear yer vision after I shoot a high-speed aborted torpedo fetus at yer car on I-5 doing 60 mph. I suppose one could look out the side window after intercepting one of my incoming 2-pound blood clot missiles that look stangely like Octuck or Erlich. Or worse, like Billy Byrd.
Back to fleeing the cops. With a cup of gas station coffee I went over to the sandwich shop across the road to buy a sandwich and break a bill into smaller denominations. I ordered their special of the day, wolfed it down and finally had singles to hop the bus. Which I did. The bus took me to the Lynnwood Park and Ride then I hopped the northbound bus to Everett. My plan was to catch the next bus to Marysville and disembark down the road from my grampa's 5 acre property. Fuck, it was Saturday evening and all the buses were zeroed out until Monday morning. No Sunday service for that bus route. On a park bench at the bus stop I saw a really weird quote from the Gospel Mission that's stuck with me for nearly half a century. "He whom the gods destroy first they make proud." Surrounded by homeless derelicts and drunks, I was stumped what that seemingly biblical passage meant.
As stated before, I used gramp's place with the trailer, sauna and tool shed as my source for firewood and hideout. Plus dead body disposal site with a big fire pit and foul outhouse the contained the powdered bones and ash remains of 3 dead niggers that tried to rob us, got dead, got burned, then dumped onto a massive heap of liquid shit and piss way down below the shitter seat. Fitting coda. Instead of images of iron cell doors, niggers oughta think of outhouse doors swinging shut. Any bad-ass coon or delinquent boon-rat would run in terror seeing us tall rednecks drinking beer, tuning chainsaws and growing beards like Abraham Lincoln as we pull a giant bong rip and sing, "Put another log on the fire."
My bus to Marysville wasn't scheduled until Monday morning. It was Saturday evening and there wasn't any bus service on Sundays. Meaning I had to sleep rough 2 nights in Everett, Washington, a shitty city without any pals nor girlfriends besides homeless soggy poopy casualties. So I walked around and scoped a place to crash. As I strolled past storefronts and shitty bars I looked in windows at my reflection just to prove I still existed. As I walked past phone booths I tried a bunch of phone numbers and hung up after 3 rings to avoid hearing stupid answering machines and losing my quarter. I walked up and down a million ugly city blocks as the sun set between the old buildings, darkness became so black the curbs reached up and fucking tripped me, Sherlock Homeless, the worst human being ever.
I fucking hate being far from home in the wrong slum. I was quite comfortable in my crack house and the business was steady and paid the bills. To me, selling wholesale volumes of blow was the last social safety net for me, and for all the others like me that lived on the edge. Euphemistically called living on the wire. My humble abode was a place we called Lem's, a house of ill-repute and existed solely for the fallen. And we all had fallen. As folks phoned in and set up amounts of coke and prices, then dropped by to do some lines, smoke a few bowls and down beers, I filled my hours and days with other people's tragedies. Looking back, it better prepared me for my own. Running from the cops watching my house and Franky's surely qualified as more than a speed bump, it was my very own comedy and tragedy.
Walking all over Everett, Washington wasted too much of my time and settling down after running from the cops made my hands shaky and was exhausting dehydrating work. Nearby I heard crackling gunfire, saw men squat and shit, crawl and die, becoming excrement or sustenance, sometimes the same man in the same hour. I thought myself bullet-proof, but not fist-proof nor knife-proof and was getting desperately thirsty and needed a bar fast. Shit, who am I kidding, my alcoholism was demanding a fucking river of drinks and at my skinny booze weight, thinner and taller than I can remember, walking all over a dying city, I seemed to be growing out of myself and like a cadaver losing gray organs and sloughing skin. I was shedding what was already dead.
I'm a regular at all the bars throughout North Seattle. I did a lot of business there and also got my meals there too. Most bars had free pots of chili or soup and baskets of Saltine Crackers as sustenance for day drunks and poison peddlers like myself. I knew what was on the menu at every bar in town, but here in Everett I was a stranger, in between familiar communities, cultures and without any packets of blow, I was between gainful incomes and between chances. If I didn't get some beer down the hatch and something to eat I was gonna get outlined in chalk.
You see, Everett, Washington made a brief attempt at renaissance during the mid-1900's before crime and White Flight nailed a stake into the heart of any chance of competing with it's cleaner affluent neighbors Bellingham and Seattle. Everett is a ghetto-mod dump site with so much shit on the sidewalks you'd think it was home to a million fucking native Americans that saturation bombed every flat surface giving it a bakery-like appearance, except that brown stuff wasn't rich, creamy chocolate. There was so much shit on the ground that if I worked it right, I wouldn't have to step in it, yet the only place I could eat off of because everything else is dirtier. Anyone walking late at night in shit and garbage knows loneliness as peculiarly hurtful, a species of pain that rotted the soul.
Coincidence is a tricky beast. With a hunnert bars all over this dead town I needed to find one that served something to eat and was near a cheap flop house. With swollen feet, colder'n a bitch I walked past Harvey's Tavern and from the doorway I smelled hot dogs and beer. The dinner bell just rang. Plus, next door was a seedy shitty hotel advertising hourly, nightly and weekly rates for $19.99 a night and $79.99 a week. My kind of place, cuz I'm that kind of guy. I'm nocturnal with a growing awareness of the shadow beasts that would soon arrive. I'd heard the beasts already, for by nature they weren't night-dwellers, they feared the dark and were awkward in it, making bad decisions and ratcheting into panic at the slightest disturbance. Again, that would be me, disturbing.
I walked in and headed to the bar while looking around at the low-lifes slouched at the tables and looked to see what they were eating and drinking. A big sign stated Hot Dogs 25 cents and pitchers of Rainier Dark beer $2 dollars. Rainier Dark was a cheap, strong beer with an 8% alcohol rating preferred by low-class alcoholics, just like me. You college partiers may remember a similar brand of beer called Olde English 800, big bang for the buck swill. I pulled myself onto a bar stool and ordered a pitcher of Rainier Dark beer and a dollar's worth of hot dogs. The pitcher arrived and the ugly bartender nodded his head towards the kitchen service window. I grabbed 4 dogs, loaded them up with everything, then got to business. I was famished and dying a drunk's thirst.
I inhaled the dogs, swam upriver into the pitcher of dark beer, then ordered another round of the same. My aggressive drinking is the universal sign language like a blood oath between the crew of brother inebriates trying not to look at me. I downed everything overly fast, wiped my face, then booked to the bathroom to clean up and take a major fucking piss. Looking in the shitter mirror, I saw my hair was filled with twigs and leaves similar to a bear that ran through a wheat field and my clothes looked unfit for a hobo. When I exited the bathroom the bar was nearly empty. I returned to my seat and the bartender looked at me apprehensively hoping I'd finish my business soon. My un-groomed appearance gave me a knack for clearing areas quickly. Shit, the cops oughta use unclean hairy bearded losers like me to break up riots. Nobody wants to be around the remains of a human being. Especially if it was still alive.
I was full from the hot dogs and a little too drunk from the high-proof beer, so I decided to leave and hoofed, still upright, next door to rent a room for two nights, Saturday and Sunday night, with the plan of catching the bus up North to my grandpa's wooded lot and trailer Monday morning. Inside the motel lobby the stench was as fat as a fist. I resisted breathing through my nose to avoid inhaling smells of rotten feet, rotten armpits and to me was the ripe rank odor of poop and corpse drippings. Moments like this make a dying soul wish he carried cigarettes.
So that's what I did. I bought a pack of cigarettes from the grizzled ugly hotel clerk, tore open the pack and despite the No Smoking placard, I lit one up. I hadn't smoked much tobacco since marijuana was my primary habit, but the first drag calmed me WAY down. I drew the smoke deep into my lungs and let it play there, echoing off the blackened tissue, creeping back up the rope of my throat and out my mouth. It burned ever-so enjoyably and tasted absolutely perfect. That smoke was just right.
The dudes loitering around the lobby were better suited for a morgue and I refrained from showing any interest in their poorly-assembled jigsaw faces, missing teeth and rectal breath, mixed attire, purple colored heads and patchy wigs. I picked a flop house that catered to ugly motherfuckers just like me. Myself in the future, meaning in a few weeks. Two nights was long enough and if I stayed longer Death would've pursued me and gotten a hold of me in a full nelson with formaldehyde soaked arms. Guys like me always fit chalk outlines of recent homicides perfectly and in the cool softness of concrete I can rest in peace comfortably in the garbage slime down alleyways all over Washington. Soon, all that would remain of me would be the chalk outline, picked clean by scavengers, my guts eaten with glee by birds and hopefully I was dead, leaving only the legacy of an alcoholic, amateur killer, drug addict and angry criminal madman.
I paid for 2 nights, grabbed the key and quickly made tracks to my room to crash. My feet were screaming at me, my clothes were dirty and I was beat. The 2 pitchers of dark high-proof beer got me super drunk and nearly masked my Jones for a big pile of coke and monster bong rips of green bud. My room was tiny, with only a bed, small bathroom and a TV bolted to the wall. I showered, washed all my clothes with bar soap in the shower with me, hung them over the door and shower curtain rod, climbed into the worn out bed, hard sheets and skimpy thread-bare blanket and watched TV. I lay there regretting my purchase of the room in this flop house. Fuck it. Without a gram of blow and fifth of Jim Beam, it's hard to find a stretch of pavement soft enough to sleep on.
I awoke as scared as a child with a hangover that pulsed like a fetus kicking in my head and neck and breathed out a deep shaky yawn like a man before a firing squad that's shot blanks. I preferred the steadily straightened bones passing out on the floor surrounded by my dogs, not a park bench and not an uneven squeaky bed no better than a shelter cot. I was alone and didn't need to look in the mirror to tell me I was a loser and my freedom was quickly running out. It was still dark out and the city noises reminded me of the years, months and days I had left. Fuck, all my thoughts of my drug and alcohol consumption, stupid injuries, nicks and cuts made it easier not to think at all. Laying in that shit hole dump, noisy bums coughing just outside my door and window, I discovered my body was already preparing for it's final day. From the point of view of mud flowing from a rectum, I smelt funny.
The memorable patches of invisibility and dragging shreds of myself to this flop house and onward up North left me scared and worthless. I really didn't have any friends, no friends worth having that ain't dead and no friends worth killing that ain't enemies. This is how single scabby men think. I'd been on my own for years and now existed in an imagined city that care forgot. Shit, at least in this bed of worn out thrift store linens I was free of conversation, clean dry clothes and no decent meal that didn't start with me being consumed and chemically eroded. I looked no better than a fashion magazine model featuring used clothes compliments of the Lord's Salvation Army soldiers. I was a middle-aged 20 year old, been through too much shit and I suspected the forecast for tonight and into the next decade was more shit, heavy at times.
On depressing mornings like these I made myself a promise to flee. It's the same promise I made since I was a little boy. A promise I failed to fulfill, yet I'd never made any promises beyond this one. I needed another town, another family and another occupation and I needed to stop making my own troubles on someone else's terms. Fuck, I needed a plate-iron backpack keeping everything in front of me and never get chased by cops, robbers and killers, that's when you're vulnerable. Ain't that an understatement.
If a loser resigned to live peddling lethal poison, it took just as much concentration and discipline as any other way of life. But, such a career nearly forced mortals like us to wash down every day with a bottle of booze or buckets of beer. I'd seen and smelt every rank, rasty odor a man or woman could collect and heave upon me. I've seen open cuts that were red, yellow and black and seen body parts hoping to fall off to avoid the shame of being attached to such miserable and destroyed owners. I'd seen eyes forever closed or cloudy, tongues swollen up like half-eaten blue racquetball court balls yet I still believed in the possible dignity of dying on the floor of my mortuary and crack house surrounded by a 3-pack of hungry, starving dogs.
My self-preservation punched my insides hard as prison bars every damn passing moment until the day it all goes away. I should've crashed in a church. Shit, at least in a church you can bleed anywhere you want. I'd been running for so long I finally sneaked up on myself and the picture wasn't pretty. I'm a scraggly kid, detoxing in a shitty bed in a shitty hotel, hungover from beer, hot dogs and a shitty life. So shitty, all my deeds made wine into water proving a life without faith, any faith at all, was deeply, darkly lonely. I knew I was dying. It was plain as the sand in my eyes and bruises between my ears. That grim future was my only constant companion.
My friends were ineffectual as ghosts and none you could count on. Prisons in Washington are littered with the bodies of men, mostly partiers and good-time Charlies, people for whom any serious crime was their farthest thought. They now do the brickyard walk for stretches of years because they obstructed justice or committed perjury for a good friend pinched for dealing drugs or hiding ash-roached niggers in an outhouse. Cops don't mind pals lying for their best friends, perjurers and obstructionists fill their dragnets just as quickly. My dudes were wise, saying only one word, "lawyer" and didn't fancy trying on prison fashion-chic horizontal stripes seen in old black and white silent movies.
Under violent brutal interrogation by fat sweaty cops, when questioned, it's best to know nothing, admit nothing and let guys like me do our own hard time, straight no chaser. Put another way, when me and my childhood pals play "Hangman" with crude stick figures, we place the figure on it's hands and knees, with a Y-shaped ass high in the air adding a fiendish nigger stroking his wood with its destination way deep in a bleeding man's catcher's mitt. Most niggers ain't homosexual faggots like Michael Jackson and Mr. T, just cruel and love seeing that horrible expression on the faces of raped inmates unable to flee with scrambled guts.
My stay at the flea bag motel seemed to last more than a week. Sunday I bought newspapers and read every word, then watched TV. After noon, I showered again, put on my damp clothes and went back to Harvey's for another couple pitchers of cheap strong beer and chow down some hot dogs. I still had my pack of cigarettes so I completed my healthy meal of high-proof beer and junk food hot dogs fortified with eyes and beaks, followed by nutritious smokes. Then took a walk around Everett to see what sites a garbage dump-town had to offer. The answer, very little. Lots of staggering natives, niggers and white dudes that looked surprisingly, just like me. I fucking booked back to hide in my dive-hotel, low-rate crash pad.
On the evening news I watched a segment about a multiple homicide in Mountlake Terrace and that no names or details were available. Just Chief Don Beuler and his defective detectives explaining the plague of drug crimes and the police department's effort to restore peace to their town. Sure. I assumed it was one of my neighbors, or my girlfriend letting in strangers looking to rob my place while I was away, completely out of product with predictable result of folks getting dead with in-house shooting celebratory fireworks for very few.
Dead humans resulting from close quarters executions display wave like distortions in skin and meat from bullets that produce a tidal wave of pressure as it passes through the body and it is that pressure that erupts on the other side. With head wounds, back to front, looking at the face isn't easy. They're rearranged, all the features askew and unrelated to other features, identifiable by shape but not location. The cavity remaining discloses hideous gobbits of awful colors, bits of bone, usually one eye missing, tatters, blobs and noodles of tissue and the remaining eye clouded and drained of spark and zero recognition of me looking directly at them. Death takes away everything, including their knowing us and loving us.
I slept all the rest of the evening and all night, waking up at 5am, so I watched TV and prepared to book to the bus stop. I showered again, grabbed a coffee across the street, then headed to my high speed escape vehicle, a city bus that dragged its ass up Highway 99 at barely the legal speed limit. As I approached grampa's wooded property I pulled the Stop Request cable, allowed the bus to slow down and made my way to the exit. I disembarked and the bus rolled onward. I quickly walked the road and made a stealthy entrance to my hideout.
Cully was there with Callahan and they had a fire burning and cases of beer on the ground, as if waiting for me. I yelled "Dudes!" as I approached and they all smiled bigger'n halide grow lamps, stood up and ran towards me. They were talking over each other, so I told them, one at a time. That's when Cully told me he saw cops watching his house, so he picked up Callahan, drove by my house, then Franky's, only to find multiple patrol car squadrons at each address. I asked how my house looked and Callahan stated that the dogs killed and ate my girlfriend. I laughed and told him my instructions to smear bacon grease on her ass and pussy and let the dogs feast on her shit. Callahan laughed and asserted they'd consumed everything worth eating. And didn't puke. After all, my girlfriends were little more than life support systems fer cunts. The asshole was just dog food appetizer, icing on the bottom of the butt cake. Sort of like chewy rubber taint, yummy labia sushi and poop-filled canine calamari.
We sat and I caught them up on the details of my seeing the cops, fleeing north and my ordeal crashing two night in Everett and seeing the homicide in Mountlake Terrace on the TV in my flea bag crusty flop room. They looked at me stunned. Nobody is brave enough to spend a night in Everett. That place is like a haunted house at the carnival, a dump for humanity's walking garbage and no place for a fine upstanding citizen like me. To my brother and pals, Everett was just like Mountlake Terrace, but worse of a murder zone and sewer. I gravitated to human shit and I realized the addresses I'll inhabit for the rest of my life will be morgues, toilets and cemeteries. I didn't share my revelations, insights and self-examination of my decay, impending death and the sicknesses I conceal. That's a buzz kill and we had beer and green bud, why fuck up a good thing?
The gory homicide was the reason our neighborhood was flooded with fucking cops. The crime scene investigators documented a man, woman and 2 children were beaten, cut up and executed at gunpoint. Meaning tortured and smoked. According to the police spokesman, the reason for this was the intruders were apparently looking for a sizable stash of drugs and cash because the place was torn up and trashed. No information was available if the intruders were successful in finding any treasure, but it don't take a genius to figure out that the tenants fell victim to the same aggressive tactics that happened at my place. Drugs and money bring crooks, killers and cops. All wanting to abscond large dineros or bulk product. I know the address, vaguely aware of their operation selling speed and crank but wasn't familiar with the faces of the deceased. Tough luck, tough business. Nearly half century later, no need to start caring now.
Anyone reviewing decedents of the violence and overdose deaths from the cocaine rave to today's opiate and opioid crisis, they'd know the dead were ours. I've visited a memorial to the dead in Seattle and spoke to the curator responsible for its development and maintenance. I assumed he was sent punitively because he was a screw-up or perhaps he volunteered, but the extraordinary hard work didn't allow him to become inured to it. My bet was that the curator was from the funeral industry or in training. He was like a medic and used to the impact of drugs, firearm violence of steel on flesh from a single red hole dead center of the chest to a sack of body parts that might or might not have been just one man.
The memorial to the 50 Years War on Drugs Memorial tricks the mind into believing odor is also part of the display. What you see is a democracy of the dead where white and colored, rich and poor, educated and ignorant lay in no visible rank or order. A man too sensitive to ontological meaning would don straitjackets and enjoin long term tenancy in a rubber asylum room. I inquired if the curator was impoverished of imagination, receiving a knowing smile with a statement, "You're still among the living Karl." Working with you lot, I'm not so sure.
Me, Cully and Callahan achieved a good solid buzz. Then we fired up the barrel stove in the sauna, drank a bunch of cold beers and smoked fat chiefs and toked ourselves Chinese, then steamed our shit till completely cooked. We rinsed, toweled off, then staggered to the trailer, turned on grandpa's ceremonial Canadian talk radio station, and passed out. The radio station we never touched since we were little kids, it was my grandpa's original choice and we all felt like he was nearby drinking, listening and talking with us. What we never listened to was his caution about familial alcoholism and Alzheimer's.
My grandpa had fled Estonia during WWI after the Germans executed everybody's fathers, so he knew Death as well as I. On his walk to school, dozens of men were hanging dead from the bridge gramps and kith walked under. My grampa and his younger brother were frequent visitors to German ammo dumps, meaning storage warehouses full of munitions. The ordinance made fun hobby bombs for gramps, his little brother and pals to blow shit up. They'd detonate crap and pretend to play Army, but not Cowboys and Indians, that notion is strictly American, but play they did, until a premature explosion removed his little brother's hand and parts of his face, including one eye.
No need to hang and chill, like me he fled, leaving his younger brother, ironically named Karl, behind. Gramps was refused entrance at Ellis Island because he was a WOP, meaning With Out Papers, migrated all the way across Canada and after decades allowed citizenship in America. Like my leaving my own little brother to die an early death, my gramps mourned the death of his little brother in the same way any of us that've buried grandchildren, parents, brothers and sisters, and recently best friends and coworkers. Looking back, Death leaves no trace of it's captors, save our memories and heartbreaks, with us feeling like the lowest life forms on Earth. A common syndrome is survivor's guilt and everybody recites the words to the song, "It should've been me."
After grampa died, we kept every Canadian Maple Leaf flag flying in his home and trailer. We also kept every ancient foreign yellowed postcard from Olde Europe pinned up and took saunas following his weird Scandinavian rituals. Meaning lots of hard work, lots of liquor and steam. The liquor part contributed to my grand father's early onset dementia and none of us were of the depth of character or perception to understand this phenomena. We were drunks and druggies and proud of it. We can't shake hands with a memory, plus drunken amnesia cleanses us when re-examined, Death missed us, but taking far more than bearable.
The lucky still must survive when disaster puts a fork in our roads. After Callahan got back from Alaska, he took all his money and purchased a nearly new Toyota Cressida, a gorgeous 4-door sedan, mint condition with a dynamite stereo. One evening after piles of blow, gallons of liquor and beer with enough green bud to cause climate change, we took his brand new car for a spin. We were wasted. We flew all over North Seattle and hung a hard right down Perkins Way, a winding dark road that was a blast to drift the corners. Callahan over-steered, crossed it up sideways and smashed into a mammoth tree that caved in the passenger side of the car. Where I was seated. That brand new car was smashed to bits, crushed nearly half-way in and completely totaled beyond repair. The door and frame was shoved so far in I couldn't climb out. I was in a pinch so Franky and Callahan pulled me out and no human could climb back in to my former place riding shotgun. Examining my right side and leg I looked like a big-cat scratch pole. I slipped the grasp of Death once again. This car-tree collision was one of many alcohol-related disasters to come.
My brother Toby beat his girlfriend Patty to miscarriage, wasted, then later rolled his brand new truck and horse trailer all over the highway coming over Snoqualmie Pass, recreating the familiar sentiment of organ donor and yard sale. He was blasted drunk and was directed by the courts to treatment. He never drank again.
My older sister Moira Ann did an equally horrible alcohol-related auto disaster. She drove over a handicapped lady and completely smashed her into a flat, red artifact blending flesh, clothing and chrome wheelchair into a road pancake. We're talking ugly. She lost her commercial driver's license and took work at a State of Washington Liquor Store, eventually retiring on a WA PERS pension similar to AK PERS pensions. Ya gotta hand it to her, bouncing back from squashing a ripe, stinky gimp and getting a life-long job at a state run liquor store was pretty darn smart. I should've thought of something like that. Oh yeah, Washington State still hasn't opened a Cocaine Store nor hired me as quality control and inventory clerk. If it's any indication of my mental retardation, I got hired on with numerous police departments and agencies with names I cannot recall.
I got a hunnert jobs all over the NWAB and NSB, taking narc jobs in the Mat-Su and Interior Fairbanks. Shit, I even worked my years at UAF as computer lab monitor and dozens of trips overseas promoting the International Exchange Student Program. At least that's my story.
When I walk past shitty bars and store windows I still see that same corpse bearing my face and reinforcing my status as the worst human ever.
Except for all the rest.
Sherlock Homeless.
After driving all over fucking Seattle, I had Cully drop me off along the side of Interstate 5. He dreaded driving through the litter-strewn winding residential streets of my shit-ass, poor white-trash neighborhood best described as a contagious miasma of misery, hardship and misfortune. Dumping me on the freeway was WAY quicker and easier, and a soul needn't thoroughly scour themselves and burn all their clothes after exiting my neighborhood. Mountlake Terrace was a rubbish collection bin of Washington's pauperism, indigence and beggary and in it, I found myself happily immersed in criminal opportunities boundless.
You coppers have suffered shit-poor communities and similarly, Cully and my pals were averse to this human dump site due to it's populace being more desperate and dangerous than any of us. With me being the worst human ever, I was perfectly at home. I know, I can hear you coppers saying, "No shit Sherlock!" Story of my fucking life. And that's saying something. You see, poverty is a lifestyle choice and career decision and myself peddling industrial strength illegal drugs in the heart of concentrated ignorant poverty was a golden opportunity for guys like me. I also had to accept the collateral violence and hospital bills and criminal arrest records.
The reason for my roadside jump, hopping out along the freeway, allowed me to book up the treed embankment and sneak through the rusty gate directly across the street to my blessed crack house: a shortcut avoiding dysentery-rich real estate. Public assistance creates unlimited drug revenues and my job was to harvest gold nuggets from impoverished excrement and fluid stool, meaning ugly poor people, simple rube shits flying Confederate flags, breeding junk cars and handicapped kids.
Strained and sifted from this ocean of rectal muck, I collected a king's ransom in stacks of hundreds and then paid a shit load of bills with my blood money and diarrhea dineros. We zeroed out both mine and Cully's rents, yutes (utilities: water, sewer, garbage, electricity), our accumulated shop charges for repairs and fuel at R&R Automotive and Cully's new enterprise. Dropping me off on the freeway was way quicker and l desperately needed to return to Lem's to re-up, pony up a $200 down payment per ounce of blow and get back to business. Utilizing LBO's, leveraged buyouts and minimally collaterallized debt financing, crime and calamity were my lifeline, occupation and career and opportunities awaited me.
Cully's recent venture was a big old 2-car garage and I paid his first month's rent and deposit. His plan was to convert this shabby shop into a jam shed and recording studio. Shit, these obligations cost a lot of ill-gotten cash: two rents for each of our houses, all the yutes (utilities) and the up front payments for his new garage project. I was out nearly three grand and 40 years ago, that was a fuck-load of real hard-earned money. Given my limited virtue, paying all of our bills with drug money, leaving only a couple hunnert bucks remaining in me pocket, left me deeply satisfied that so much dirty money was thoroughly cleaned and laundered. Too bad my clothes, teeth and hair weren't.
After bailing on the side of the freeway I booked up the hill and into the woods. Cully floored his van, vigorously engaged the clutch and spun his tires to accelerate and merge with traffic. Driving a surplus auction school district Ford Van with a 240 cubic inch 6 cylinder, new higher compression cylinder head, tuned up and high octane fuel, Cully could muscle through the 3-speed column shift, then disappear rapidly towards the off-ramp to do his customary U-turn to re-enter I-5 southbound. He crossed the 220th street freeway overpass and headed the reverse direction, back down the freeway towards his little house in Ballard. The regular 'adios' signal for him was to honk his horn on his pass the other direction. I booked up the wooded hill to slip open the rusted gate in the cyclone freeway fencing to my home. Known commonly as Lem's Mortuary and Crack House or 1600 Dumpster Avenue, home of humanity's worst human being.
Just not today. I saw a sheriff's car around the corner and another down the road. County Mounties drive square cars like Dodge Diplomats that have lots antennas like a porcupine facilitating their tactical retarded redneck cop-talk back and forth and discuss the felony warrant take-down they'd planned. It was obvious I was the butt of their jokes. And their suspect. "Breaker breaker 19, this here's the rubber anal dildo, you got eyes on the bogey? Come on back." "That's a negatory there ass to cotton mouth herpes. Coast is clear, no dumb ass in sight." Fucking cops. Back 4 decades we viewed county piglets as Jews viewed Nazis and to haul police up by the heels and shoot them would be construed as an act of sportsmanship. In my cesspool community, gunfire never drew police responses and I was of the mindset that shooting my way home seemed logical, but at that moment, I had zero guns on me. Shut up and keep reading and gaze upon a self-portrait of a real-life butt-face you knew fer a million fucking years.
I stayed low in the trees and bushes on the freeway side of the fence and looked for a way to get home and make some calls to find out why I was the center of attention by these plain-clothed clowns in blue. Nonesuch luck, so I booked north along the freeway to get closer to Franky's, hop the fence and see what he knew about all the fucking bacon bits at my place. I neared his house, sneaked next to the highway fencing and looked up and down the road and saw 2 more bland American-made municipal sedans and it was obvious his place was getting the evil stink-eye from the narc squad too.
Shit, the illegal drug industry requires implicit permission from police, corruption tolerated by neighbors and profitable donations to elected officials. Plus, to tell you the truth, cops are interested in solving violent drug-related crimes in the same way a parasite is interested in it's host. Same shit, different day: greedy cops looking to scoop up tons of free green monies and abscond white powder from naive dirty white boys whose rumors of death have no confirmation this side of the grave.
Another problem of the cop/drug trade-off is most freshly busted dip-shits leak more intel than a pack of dogs with bad kidneys and most cops looking to skim cream off my mortuary know where these sick dogs lift their legs. Fucking A, it'd be a rare day to be surprised at reading these rat's testimonials leading to my own obituary. Or worse, my arrest warrant. Knowing the trade-offs between shit-ass cops and my shit-ass pals that frequented the city jail, I often had that dark sense, one of those premonitions a lizard must get just before becoming roadkill.
Real life for scum-bag druggies like us sucks. I had no 'go bag' prepacked, ready for me to flee the bad guys like you see on TV. In the American War on Drugs, the cops were the bad guys and us drug dealers were the patriots similar to moonshiners versus revenue agents or early bush pilots bootlegging across rural Alaska. My heroes were Art Fields, Roger Nordlum, Lee Staley, Leon Shellabarger, Joe Jackson, Nelson Walker, Ray, Donald and Archie Ferguson, Jim Rood, Carl Weisner, Bob Baker, Thomas Richards, Warren Thompson, Mike Spezak, Mark Fairbanks and Mark Borchard. Wild West bandits that became legitimate business men. Alaska's La Cosa Nostra, organized airborne crime mobsters, turning to strip clubs and casinos, I mean politics, bush airlines and running native corporations. Same shit.
In my case, transcending drug dealing to working with you coppers. I never broke out the red tights and blue cape with a big S on it. Fuck it, I had a secret Bat Cave, meaning grampa's trailer an hour up north and a few AK dimes ($100 dollar bills) in me pocket originally intended to get back-stocked into bulk product. With my car stranded in my driveway, stupid piglets on the lookout, I was stuck with only shoe leather for transpo. I was grimming and slumming with my place and Spanky's house under surveillance and no way to make calls nor get into my 72 AMC Ambassador, burn rubber and make tracks.
That dependable 72 AMC burned premium Union 76 fuel through a factory stock powerful International Harvester 304 cubic inch V-8 with a Chrysler 904 Torque-Flight transmission, hence the joke that AMC meant "All Makes Combined." It was the car Brian Higman left me as reimbursement after his 2-week vacation for wisdom teeth surgery, cocaine therapy and chronic partying on dark beer and green bud with his old pals back home. Leaving Mountlake Terrace and returning to Kotzebue I believe was analogous to death by immersion in fecal matter. Shaking hands and bidding farewell to Micro-dot (Brian Higman) at Sea-Tac Airport, his eyes were filling and his Adam's apple bobbed like it was psyching itself for a half-gainer from a ten-meter diving platform. Brian was going home to a shitty town and a really ugly wife. With a doozy of a hangover, we sadly parted ways at the airport and he booked back to Kotz. Pissed me off and wet my eyes.
Avoiding the additional pair of surveillance piggies on Spanky's (Frank Empfield's) street I sneaked past and booked across the freeway overpass Cully just took to make his U-turn back home, then walked briskly to the gas station to buy coffee, make change, then catch a bus north. I filled my coffee, went to the counter to pay, and when the dude saw my hundred dollar bill, he just waved me off, no charge. How was I gonna break this hunnert dollar bill and hop the bus? I didn't even have any coins for the fucking phone booth and call home to tell the girlfriend of the week to feed the dogs.
You see, alcoholic women serve as chemical cunts and snatch-snacks, so feeding dogs or themselves was likely way beyond their capabilities and dim wits. Fuck, I'll phone her later, tell her to smear bacon grease on her snatch and anus and feed the dogs that way. My crack whores never noticed the difference between my mandibular vacuum on their jelly rolls and fucking themselves with canine fangs. I suck snatch with so much power, I create low pressure weather troughs over the entire Puget Sound. WTF, I tend to fuck the shit outa brain-dead screamers, commonly known as Nurse Diesel and the Herp Queens, that are both prodigious secretors and excretors and with so much shedding surplus fetal tissue and infected rectal material coated in bacon grease, the dogs oughta have plenty to eat.
My brother Cully oft recited that, "Any girl Karl fucks is a complete misuse of tissue." Meaning I confuse brutality for affection and fuck like I'm fighting, just with my dick. Numerous times, upon departing the shower, I'd ask my roommates for a pair of scissors to cut off a condom that appeared out of nowhere, cuz I never practiced safe sex, and seemed persistently twisted around my Johnson. Cully would comment, "Shit, that ain't a condom, it's vaginal tissue. Or intestine." Yup, real funny fucker. I like insults. Now, in my old age, I phone down to my old pals in Seattle and whisper, "Grandma got poopy butt. Want some?" Then hang up. I know, I'm retarded. It'd be funnier if I phoned KPD and made fart sounds.
You see, poor white farm 'tards like me, my alcoholic family and dysfunctional community breed like rats and instead of stretching a tarp over our junk, we spooge in every orifice available, then get abortions on a wholesale level. I should have dozens of nieces and nephews if it hadn't been for abortion clinics and turbo toilets facilitating the removal and supercharged disposal of a hunnert deformed special-needs gimplets and unborn pickled crack fetuses. I've seen my own fucked-up sisters and drunken girlfriends look down at their growing bellies and engorged leaking itty bitty titties, then look skyward and say, "Thanks God, now I don't have to go to college or get a job!" "I can hook up with an alcoholic and live in a crack house like my brother Karl!" My thoughts were to kill both host and parasite. If you met my impaired family and inebriated girlfriends, you'd be the first to clear leather and light their shit up with JHP magnums. Right after ye fucked 'em. With Westlake's dick.
Me and Cully laughed at terminated pregnancies, prematurely dead crack whore girlfriends and the noisy death rattles all of our leaking fuck-mates and kicking spoogelets would make. In common parlance, the "death rattle" is one of those terms that through repeated usage by cops, detectives, medical examiners and morticians has passed into the realm of sick-fiction fantasy. Most no longer believe that gasps, moans, kicks, flailed arms and yelling from the deceased actually happens, but it's so prevalent in modern psychology, it's often repeated as explanations for noises we hear in corpse coolers, caskets, trunks of cars and under toilet seats in outhouses. Taking a step further, my pretty Eskimo wife believes all the sperm I shoot on the bed, pillow or her eyeglasses make noises as they scurry and die, similarly, she calls them "screamers." Audible shrieks and barks arising from post-mortem tissue death is funny shit.
Forensic experts tell us the death rattle is the result of involuntary spasms in the limbs, lungs, throat and larynx resulting in mysterious bumps, thumps and knocking from limbs of the dead flinching spastic minutes and hours after they done croaked. Family members, investigators and ME's will attest to hearing scary barks and gasped profanities emitting from long-dead corpses, insofar as claims of hearing moans and groans like old-fashioned ghosts. I've shared with my pals the verbal death rattles dead niggers yell on the way to the outhouse. "Hey, this is bullshit. Fucking whitey break my neck and look like he gonna puke. That baseball bat upside my head piss me off. I oughta climb out this trunk and put a cap in yo ass. Wake me up when we get there. Hey! Why the big-ass bonfire? Very funny motherfucker!" That shit is comic to me and my brother. One wonders what kind of death rattle a fetus or pre-birth nigger makes spiraling the toilet, circling the drain finally splashing into a toxic biologically active septic tank. Fuck it, feed the dogs yer anal seepage, labial nuvuk and cunt blobs. Its the only humane thing to do with buckets of miscreant miscarriages of color.
Don't give me that look, abortions are good for humanity and even better for your IRS tax bills. Every one of my shredded nieces and nephews would've been welfare niggers of the paler persuasion. Public assistance for spastics, retards and mini-limbers is expensive and my slow offspring would fill Public Housing to overflowing, or end up in Everett, Washington. Besides, I hate child support almost as much as having dark-skinned cross-eyed toddlers piss and shit all over my mortuary. It's okay for my dying pals and long dead fuck-toy bitches to blow chunks and spew juices after they croak, just not infants. Their shit stinks sweet and gags me enough to launch them a mile in the air with my giant 2-man potato launcher slingshot over the fence, out into traffic on I-5 and torpedo traffic speeding by. I'm not sure if wiper blades and windshield washer fluid would clear yer vision after I shoot a high-speed aborted torpedo fetus at yer car on I-5 doing 60 mph. I suppose one could look out the side window after intercepting one of my incoming 2-pound blood clot missiles that look stangely like Octuck or Erlich. Or worse, like Billy Byrd.
Back to fleeing the cops. With a cup of gas station coffee I went over to the sandwich shop across the road to buy a sandwich and break a bill into smaller denominations. I ordered their special of the day, wolfed it down and finally had singles to hop the bus. Which I did. The bus took me to the Lynnwood Park and Ride then I hopped the northbound bus to Everett. My plan was to catch the next bus to Marysville and disembark down the road from my grampa's 5 acre property. Fuck, it was Saturday evening and all the buses were zeroed out until Monday morning. No Sunday service for that bus route. On a park bench at the bus stop I saw a really weird quote from the Gospel Mission that's stuck with me for nearly half a century. "He whom the gods destroy first they make proud." Surrounded by homeless derelicts and drunks, I was stumped what that seemingly biblical passage meant.
As stated before, I used gramp's place with the trailer, sauna and tool shed as my source for firewood and hideout. Plus dead body disposal site with a big fire pit and foul outhouse the contained the powdered bones and ash remains of 3 dead niggers that tried to rob us, got dead, got burned, then dumped onto a massive heap of liquid shit and piss way down below the shitter seat. Fitting coda. Instead of images of iron cell doors, niggers oughta think of outhouse doors swinging shut. Any bad-ass coon or delinquent boon-rat would run in terror seeing us tall rednecks drinking beer, tuning chainsaws and growing beards like Abraham Lincoln as we pull a giant bong rip and sing, "Put another log on the fire."
My bus to Marysville wasn't scheduled until Monday morning. It was Saturday evening and there wasn't any bus service on Sundays. Meaning I had to sleep rough 2 nights in Everett, Washington, a shitty city without any pals nor girlfriends besides homeless soggy poopy casualties. So I walked around and scoped a place to crash. As I strolled past storefronts and shitty bars I looked in windows at my reflection just to prove I still existed. As I walked past phone booths I tried a bunch of phone numbers and hung up after 3 rings to avoid hearing stupid answering machines and losing my quarter. I walked up and down a million ugly city blocks as the sun set between the old buildings, darkness became so black the curbs reached up and fucking tripped me, Sherlock Homeless, the worst human being ever.
I fucking hate being far from home in the wrong slum. I was quite comfortable in my crack house and the business was steady and paid the bills. To me, selling wholesale volumes of blow was the last social safety net for me, and for all the others like me that lived on the edge. Euphemistically called living on the wire. My humble abode was a place we called Lem's, a house of ill-repute and existed solely for the fallen. And we all had fallen. As folks phoned in and set up amounts of coke and prices, then dropped by to do some lines, smoke a few bowls and down beers, I filled my hours and days with other people's tragedies. Looking back, it better prepared me for my own. Running from the cops watching my house and Franky's surely qualified as more than a speed bump, it was my very own comedy and tragedy.
Walking all over Everett, Washington wasted too much of my time and settling down after running from the cops made my hands shaky and was exhausting dehydrating work. Nearby I heard crackling gunfire, saw men squat and shit, crawl and die, becoming excrement or sustenance, sometimes the same man in the same hour. I thought myself bullet-proof, but not fist-proof nor knife-proof and was getting desperately thirsty and needed a bar fast. Shit, who am I kidding, my alcoholism was demanding a fucking river of drinks and at my skinny booze weight, thinner and taller than I can remember, walking all over a dying city, I seemed to be growing out of myself and like a cadaver losing gray organs and sloughing skin. I was shedding what was already dead.
I'm a regular at all the bars throughout North Seattle. I did a lot of business there and also got my meals there too. Most bars had free pots of chili or soup and baskets of Saltine Crackers as sustenance for day drunks and poison peddlers like myself. I knew what was on the menu at every bar in town, but here in Everett I was a stranger, in between familiar communities, cultures and without any packets of blow, I was between gainful incomes and between chances. If I didn't get some beer down the hatch and something to eat I was gonna get outlined in chalk.
You see, Everett, Washington made a brief attempt at renaissance during the mid-1900's before crime and White Flight nailed a stake into the heart of any chance of competing with it's cleaner affluent neighbors Bellingham and Seattle. Everett is a ghetto-mod dump site with so much shit on the sidewalks you'd think it was home to a million fucking native Americans that saturation bombed every flat surface giving it a bakery-like appearance, except that brown stuff wasn't rich, creamy chocolate. There was so much shit on the ground that if I worked it right, I wouldn't have to step in it, yet the only place I could eat off of because everything else is dirtier. Anyone walking late at night in shit and garbage knows loneliness as peculiarly hurtful, a species of pain that rotted the soul.
Coincidence is a tricky beast. With a hunnert bars all over this dead town I needed to find one that served something to eat and was near a cheap flop house. With swollen feet, colder'n a bitch I walked past Harvey's Tavern and from the doorway I smelled hot dogs and beer. The dinner bell just rang. Plus, next door was a seedy shitty hotel advertising hourly, nightly and weekly rates for $19.99 a night and $79.99 a week. My kind of place, cuz I'm that kind of guy. I'm nocturnal with a growing awareness of the shadow beasts that would soon arrive. I'd heard the beasts already, for by nature they weren't night-dwellers, they feared the dark and were awkward in it, making bad decisions and ratcheting into panic at the slightest disturbance. Again, that would be me, disturbing.
I walked in and headed to the bar while looking around at the low-lifes slouched at the tables and looked to see what they were eating and drinking. A big sign stated Hot Dogs 25 cents and pitchers of Rainier Dark beer $2 dollars. Rainier Dark was a cheap, strong beer with an 8% alcohol rating preferred by low-class alcoholics, just like me. You college partiers may remember a similar brand of beer called Olde English 800, big bang for the buck swill. I pulled myself onto a bar stool and ordered a pitcher of Rainier Dark beer and a dollar's worth of hot dogs. The pitcher arrived and the ugly bartender nodded his head towards the kitchen service window. I grabbed 4 dogs, loaded them up with everything, then got to business. I was famished and dying a drunk's thirst.
I inhaled the dogs, swam upriver into the pitcher of dark beer, then ordered another round of the same. My aggressive drinking is the universal sign language like a blood oath between the crew of brother inebriates trying not to look at me. I downed everything overly fast, wiped my face, then booked to the bathroom to clean up and take a major fucking piss. Looking in the shitter mirror, I saw my hair was filled with twigs and leaves similar to a bear that ran through a wheat field and my clothes looked unfit for a hobo. When I exited the bathroom the bar was nearly empty. I returned to my seat and the bartender looked at me apprehensively hoping I'd finish my business soon. My un-groomed appearance gave me a knack for clearing areas quickly. Shit, the cops oughta use unclean hairy bearded losers like me to break up riots. Nobody wants to be around the remains of a human being. Especially if it was still alive.
I was full from the hot dogs and a little too drunk from the high-proof beer, so I decided to leave and hoofed, still upright, next door to rent a room for two nights, Saturday and Sunday night, with the plan of catching the bus up North to my grandpa's wooded lot and trailer Monday morning. Inside the motel lobby the stench was as fat as a fist. I resisted breathing through my nose to avoid inhaling smells of rotten feet, rotten armpits and to me was the ripe rank odor of poop and corpse drippings. Moments like this make a dying soul wish he carried cigarettes.
So that's what I did. I bought a pack of cigarettes from the grizzled ugly hotel clerk, tore open the pack and despite the No Smoking placard, I lit one up. I hadn't smoked much tobacco since marijuana was my primary habit, but the first drag calmed me WAY down. I drew the smoke deep into my lungs and let it play there, echoing off the blackened tissue, creeping back up the rope of my throat and out my mouth. It burned ever-so enjoyably and tasted absolutely perfect. That smoke was just right.
The dudes loitering around the lobby were better suited for a morgue and I refrained from showing any interest in their poorly-assembled jigsaw faces, missing teeth and rectal breath, mixed attire, purple colored heads and patchy wigs. I picked a flop house that catered to ugly motherfuckers just like me. Myself in the future, meaning in a few weeks. Two nights was long enough and if I stayed longer Death would've pursued me and gotten a hold of me in a full nelson with formaldehyde soaked arms. Guys like me always fit chalk outlines of recent homicides perfectly and in the cool softness of concrete I can rest in peace comfortably in the garbage slime down alleyways all over Washington. Soon, all that would remain of me would be the chalk outline, picked clean by scavengers, my guts eaten with glee by birds and hopefully I was dead, leaving only the legacy of an alcoholic, amateur killer, drug addict and angry criminal madman.
I paid for 2 nights, grabbed the key and quickly made tracks to my room to crash. My feet were screaming at me, my clothes were dirty and I was beat. The 2 pitchers of dark high-proof beer got me super drunk and nearly masked my Jones for a big pile of coke and monster bong rips of green bud. My room was tiny, with only a bed, small bathroom and a TV bolted to the wall. I showered, washed all my clothes with bar soap in the shower with me, hung them over the door and shower curtain rod, climbed into the worn out bed, hard sheets and skimpy thread-bare blanket and watched TV. I lay there regretting my purchase of the room in this flop house. Fuck it. Without a gram of blow and fifth of Jim Beam, it's hard to find a stretch of pavement soft enough to sleep on.
I awoke as scared as a child with a hangover that pulsed like a fetus kicking in my head and neck and breathed out a deep shaky yawn like a man before a firing squad that's shot blanks. I preferred the steadily straightened bones passing out on the floor surrounded by my dogs, not a park bench and not an uneven squeaky bed no better than a shelter cot. I was alone and didn't need to look in the mirror to tell me I was a loser and my freedom was quickly running out. It was still dark out and the city noises reminded me of the years, months and days I had left. Fuck, all my thoughts of my drug and alcohol consumption, stupid injuries, nicks and cuts made it easier not to think at all. Laying in that shit hole dump, noisy bums coughing just outside my door and window, I discovered my body was already preparing for it's final day. From the point of view of mud flowing from a rectum, I smelt funny.
The memorable patches of invisibility and dragging shreds of myself to this flop house and onward up North left me scared and worthless. I really didn't have any friends, no friends worth having that ain't dead and no friends worth killing that ain't enemies. This is how single scabby men think. I'd been on my own for years and now existed in an imagined city that care forgot. Shit, at least in this bed of worn out thrift store linens I was free of conversation, clean dry clothes and no decent meal that didn't start with me being consumed and chemically eroded. I looked no better than a fashion magazine model featuring used clothes compliments of the Lord's Salvation Army soldiers. I was a middle-aged 20 year old, been through too much shit and I suspected the forecast for tonight and into the next decade was more shit, heavy at times.
On depressing mornings like these I made myself a promise to flee. It's the same promise I made since I was a little boy. A promise I failed to fulfill, yet I'd never made any promises beyond this one. I needed another town, another family and another occupation and I needed to stop making my own troubles on someone else's terms. Fuck, I needed a plate-iron backpack keeping everything in front of me and never get chased by cops, robbers and killers, that's when you're vulnerable. Ain't that an understatement.
If a loser resigned to live peddling lethal poison, it took just as much concentration and discipline as any other way of life. But, such a career nearly forced mortals like us to wash down every day with a bottle of booze or buckets of beer. I'd seen and smelt every rank, rasty odor a man or woman could collect and heave upon me. I've seen open cuts that were red, yellow and black and seen body parts hoping to fall off to avoid the shame of being attached to such miserable and destroyed owners. I'd seen eyes forever closed or cloudy, tongues swollen up like half-eaten blue racquetball court balls yet I still believed in the possible dignity of dying on the floor of my mortuary and crack house surrounded by a 3-pack of hungry, starving dogs.
My self-preservation punched my insides hard as prison bars every damn passing moment until the day it all goes away. I should've crashed in a church. Shit, at least in a church you can bleed anywhere you want. I'd been running for so long I finally sneaked up on myself and the picture wasn't pretty. I'm a scraggly kid, detoxing in a shitty bed in a shitty hotel, hungover from beer, hot dogs and a shitty life. So shitty, all my deeds made wine into water proving a life without faith, any faith at all, was deeply, darkly lonely. I knew I was dying. It was plain as the sand in my eyes and bruises between my ears. That grim future was my only constant companion.
My friends were ineffectual as ghosts and none you could count on. Prisons in Washington are littered with the bodies of men, mostly partiers and good-time Charlies, people for whom any serious crime was their farthest thought. They now do the brickyard walk for stretches of years because they obstructed justice or committed perjury for a good friend pinched for dealing drugs or hiding ash-roached niggers in an outhouse. Cops don't mind pals lying for their best friends, perjurers and obstructionists fill their dragnets just as quickly. My dudes were wise, saying only one word, "lawyer" and didn't fancy trying on prison fashion-chic horizontal stripes seen in old black and white silent movies.
Under violent brutal interrogation by fat sweaty cops, when questioned, it's best to know nothing, admit nothing and let guys like me do our own hard time, straight no chaser. Put another way, when me and my childhood pals play "Hangman" with crude stick figures, we place the figure on it's hands and knees, with a Y-shaped ass high in the air adding a fiendish nigger stroking his wood with its destination way deep in a bleeding man's catcher's mitt. Most niggers ain't homosexual faggots like Michael Jackson and Mr. T, just cruel and love seeing that horrible expression on the faces of raped inmates unable to flee with scrambled guts.
My stay at the flea bag motel seemed to last more than a week. Sunday I bought newspapers and read every word, then watched TV. After noon, I showered again, put on my damp clothes and went back to Harvey's for another couple pitchers of cheap strong beer and chow down some hot dogs. I still had my pack of cigarettes so I completed my healthy meal of high-proof beer and junk food hot dogs fortified with eyes and beaks, followed by nutritious smokes. Then took a walk around Everett to see what sites a garbage dump-town had to offer. The answer, very little. Lots of staggering natives, niggers and white dudes that looked surprisingly, just like me. I fucking booked back to hide in my dive-hotel, low-rate crash pad.
On the evening news I watched a segment about a multiple homicide in Mountlake Terrace and that no names or details were available. Just Chief Don Beuler and his defective detectives explaining the plague of drug crimes and the police department's effort to restore peace to their town. Sure. I assumed it was one of my neighbors, or my girlfriend letting in strangers looking to rob my place while I was away, completely out of product with predictable result of folks getting dead with in-house shooting celebratory fireworks for very few.
Dead humans resulting from close quarters executions display wave like distortions in skin and meat from bullets that produce a tidal wave of pressure as it passes through the body and it is that pressure that erupts on the other side. With head wounds, back to front, looking at the face isn't easy. They're rearranged, all the features askew and unrelated to other features, identifiable by shape but not location. The cavity remaining discloses hideous gobbits of awful colors, bits of bone, usually one eye missing, tatters, blobs and noodles of tissue and the remaining eye clouded and drained of spark and zero recognition of me looking directly at them. Death takes away everything, including their knowing us and loving us.
I slept all the rest of the evening and all night, waking up at 5am, so I watched TV and prepared to book to the bus stop. I showered again, grabbed a coffee across the street, then headed to my high speed escape vehicle, a city bus that dragged its ass up Highway 99 at barely the legal speed limit. As I approached grampa's wooded property I pulled the Stop Request cable, allowed the bus to slow down and made my way to the exit. I disembarked and the bus rolled onward. I quickly walked the road and made a stealthy entrance to my hideout.
Cully was there with Callahan and they had a fire burning and cases of beer on the ground, as if waiting for me. I yelled "Dudes!" as I approached and they all smiled bigger'n halide grow lamps, stood up and ran towards me. They were talking over each other, so I told them, one at a time. That's when Cully told me he saw cops watching his house, so he picked up Callahan, drove by my house, then Franky's, only to find multiple patrol car squadrons at each address. I asked how my house looked and Callahan stated that the dogs killed and ate my girlfriend. I laughed and told him my instructions to smear bacon grease on her ass and pussy and let the dogs feast on her shit. Callahan laughed and asserted they'd consumed everything worth eating. And didn't puke. After all, my girlfriends were little more than life support systems fer cunts. The asshole was just dog food appetizer, icing on the bottom of the butt cake. Sort of like chewy rubber taint, yummy labia sushi and poop-filled canine calamari.
We sat and I caught them up on the details of my seeing the cops, fleeing north and my ordeal crashing two night in Everett and seeing the homicide in Mountlake Terrace on the TV in my flea bag crusty flop room. They looked at me stunned. Nobody is brave enough to spend a night in Everett. That place is like a haunted house at the carnival, a dump for humanity's walking garbage and no place for a fine upstanding citizen like me. To my brother and pals, Everett was just like Mountlake Terrace, but worse of a murder zone and sewer. I gravitated to human shit and I realized the addresses I'll inhabit for the rest of my life will be morgues, toilets and cemeteries. I didn't share my revelations, insights and self-examination of my decay, impending death and the sicknesses I conceal. That's a buzz kill and we had beer and green bud, why fuck up a good thing?
The gory homicide was the reason our neighborhood was flooded with fucking cops. The crime scene investigators documented a man, woman and 2 children were beaten, cut up and executed at gunpoint. Meaning tortured and smoked. According to the police spokesman, the reason for this was the intruders were apparently looking for a sizable stash of drugs and cash because the place was torn up and trashed. No information was available if the intruders were successful in finding any treasure, but it don't take a genius to figure out that the tenants fell victim to the same aggressive tactics that happened at my place. Drugs and money bring crooks, killers and cops. All wanting to abscond large dineros or bulk product. I know the address, vaguely aware of their operation selling speed and crank but wasn't familiar with the faces of the deceased. Tough luck, tough business. Nearly half century later, no need to start caring now.
Anyone reviewing decedents of the violence and overdose deaths from the cocaine rave to today's opiate and opioid crisis, they'd know the dead were ours. I've visited a memorial to the dead in Seattle and spoke to the curator responsible for its development and maintenance. I assumed he was sent punitively because he was a screw-up or perhaps he volunteered, but the extraordinary hard work didn't allow him to become inured to it. My bet was that the curator was from the funeral industry or in training. He was like a medic and used to the impact of drugs, firearm violence of steel on flesh from a single red hole dead center of the chest to a sack of body parts that might or might not have been just one man.
The memorial to the 50 Years War on Drugs Memorial tricks the mind into believing odor is also part of the display. What you see is a democracy of the dead where white and colored, rich and poor, educated and ignorant lay in no visible rank or order. A man too sensitive to ontological meaning would don straitjackets and enjoin long term tenancy in a rubber asylum room. I inquired if the curator was impoverished of imagination, receiving a knowing smile with a statement, "You're still among the living Karl." Working with you lot, I'm not so sure.
Me, Cully and Callahan achieved a good solid buzz. Then we fired up the barrel stove in the sauna, drank a bunch of cold beers and smoked fat chiefs and toked ourselves Chinese, then steamed our shit till completely cooked. We rinsed, toweled off, then staggered to the trailer, turned on grandpa's ceremonial Canadian talk radio station, and passed out. The radio station we never touched since we were little kids, it was my grandpa's original choice and we all felt like he was nearby drinking, listening and talking with us. What we never listened to was his caution about familial alcoholism and Alzheimer's.
My grandpa had fled Estonia during WWI after the Germans executed everybody's fathers, so he knew Death as well as I. On his walk to school, dozens of men were hanging dead from the bridge gramps and kith walked under. My grampa and his younger brother were frequent visitors to German ammo dumps, meaning storage warehouses full of munitions. The ordinance made fun hobby bombs for gramps, his little brother and pals to blow shit up. They'd detonate crap and pretend to play Army, but not Cowboys and Indians, that notion is strictly American, but play they did, until a premature explosion removed his little brother's hand and parts of his face, including one eye.
No need to hang and chill, like me he fled, leaving his younger brother, ironically named Karl, behind. Gramps was refused entrance at Ellis Island because he was a WOP, meaning With Out Papers, migrated all the way across Canada and after decades allowed citizenship in America. Like my leaving my own little brother to die an early death, my gramps mourned the death of his little brother in the same way any of us that've buried grandchildren, parents, brothers and sisters, and recently best friends and coworkers. Looking back, Death leaves no trace of it's captors, save our memories and heartbreaks, with us feeling like the lowest life forms on Earth. A common syndrome is survivor's guilt and everybody recites the words to the song, "It should've been me."
After grampa died, we kept every Canadian Maple Leaf flag flying in his home and trailer. We also kept every ancient foreign yellowed postcard from Olde Europe pinned up and took saunas following his weird Scandinavian rituals. Meaning lots of hard work, lots of liquor and steam. The liquor part contributed to my grand father's early onset dementia and none of us were of the depth of character or perception to understand this phenomena. We were drunks and druggies and proud of it. We can't shake hands with a memory, plus drunken amnesia cleanses us when re-examined, Death missed us, but taking far more than bearable.
The lucky still must survive when disaster puts a fork in our roads. After Callahan got back from Alaska, he took all his money and purchased a nearly new Toyota Cressida, a gorgeous 4-door sedan, mint condition with a dynamite stereo. One evening after piles of blow, gallons of liquor and beer with enough green bud to cause climate change, we took his brand new car for a spin. We were wasted. We flew all over North Seattle and hung a hard right down Perkins Way, a winding dark road that was a blast to drift the corners. Callahan over-steered, crossed it up sideways and smashed into a mammoth tree that caved in the passenger side of the car. Where I was seated. That brand new car was smashed to bits, crushed nearly half-way in and completely totaled beyond repair. The door and frame was shoved so far in I couldn't climb out. I was in a pinch so Franky and Callahan pulled me out and no human could climb back in to my former place riding shotgun. Examining my right side and leg I looked like a big-cat scratch pole. I slipped the grasp of Death once again. This car-tree collision was one of many alcohol-related disasters to come.
My brother Toby beat his girlfriend Patty to miscarriage, wasted, then later rolled his brand new truck and horse trailer all over the highway coming over Snoqualmie Pass, recreating the familiar sentiment of organ donor and yard sale. He was blasted drunk and was directed by the courts to treatment. He never drank again.
My older sister Moira Ann did an equally horrible alcohol-related auto disaster. She drove over a handicapped lady and completely smashed her into a flat, red artifact blending flesh, clothing and chrome wheelchair into a road pancake. We're talking ugly. She lost her commercial driver's license and took work at a State of Washington Liquor Store, eventually retiring on a WA PERS pension similar to AK PERS pensions. Ya gotta hand it to her, bouncing back from squashing a ripe, stinky gimp and getting a life-long job at a state run liquor store was pretty darn smart. I should've thought of something like that. Oh yeah, Washington State still hasn't opened a Cocaine Store nor hired me as quality control and inventory clerk. If it's any indication of my mental retardation, I got hired on with numerous police departments and agencies with names I cannot recall.
I got a hunnert jobs all over the NWAB and NSB, taking narc jobs in the Mat-Su and Interior Fairbanks. Shit, I even worked my years at UAF as computer lab monitor and dozens of trips overseas promoting the International Exchange Student Program. At least that's my story.
When I walk past shitty bars and store windows I still see that same corpse bearing my face and reinforcing my status as the worst human ever.
Except for all the rest.
Sherlock Homeless.
posted by Alaska: Local And State News. at 12:22 PM
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