When you're at the hospital or mortuary caring for your wife, be sure to lock up your damn house.
Top of the morning gents,
I was sneaking around a dark empty house when car headlights lit up the goddamned place like halide lights in a grow room or a fucking alien spaceship landed out front. Shit, someone's home. You see, I offset my lean months by creeping and stealing from elderly folks while they're at the hospital. Don't feign shock, offense or grandiose indignation, I had steady bills and expenses with an unsteady criminal income, so diversification of felony malefaction was in order. As a moron and a criminal I fought to resist trends of strangling apathy and trying new reprehensibly indictable schemes worked quite nicely as antidote to afflictions of epidemic complacency.
I had to earn a fucking income. Imagine me homeless, a rabid animal passing myself off as human, sleeping on the sidewalk, displaying a hand-scrawled cardboard sign saying, "Ninjas kidnapped my family. Need money for Kung Fu lessons" or "My life is a complicated drinking game. Please help." Yes, I may be retarded, but I never figured out how welfare worked, so I refuted the notion of waiting in long lines with losers that smelt gruesome and atrocious. Besides, I was too stupid to see the logic in purchasing brown shoe polish to cover my face and blend in.
You coppers know how it is. We all got bills and despite my nemesis Detective Beuler damning me with faint diminished praise I was a dullard genius-savant, gimpy athlete and greatly under-handicapped, I reluctantly began to consider myself a vile iniquitous villain with an extremely crippling alcohol and drug problem. At first blush, you old coppers may presume me benign and harmless, unless you were sitting in a hospital room watching your spouse die while I'm in yer house robbing you blind. Of course, that would be when yer estimation of me would be greatly degraded.
In our younger years my brother Cully worked at Care Medical, otherwise known by his coworkers at Care Less Medical. His job was servicing hospital equipment such as wheelchairs, mechanical hospital beds and any other high-dollar medical shit old fuckers like us gimp about with in our waning days of infirmity, atrophy and expiration.
The primary service Cully rendered was to drive company vans to all the hospitals in the Seattle area to fetch broken equipment and replace them with brand new, repaired, refurbished or overhauled units. The hospital staff would call Care Medical and explain to Cully the make and model of a particular mechanical bed, hoist, lift, stroller or wheelchair that was malfunctioning and he'd load the van with an identical piece and book out there. He was on a first name basis with the floor nurses, X-ray staff and trauma techs and they needed constant visits to service or replace their inventory of mechanized tables, chairs, beds and tools.
On each drive out to the hospitals he'd bring a dozen brand new Sears Die Hard Truck Batteries. Every electric wheelchair required 2 large automobile batteries and all the cordless equipment like rolling gurneys or surgical tables also required two of 'em so Cully's duty was to replace every single one on each visit, regardless of age or current state of charge. Once back at the shop, with these nearly new, barely used batteries in perfect condition, Cully connected chargers to them all and I'd pick them up every weekend and sell them. Everybody I knew wanted brand new (months old) Sears Die Hard batteries for their cars, vans and trucks.
Think about it, in a month or two, how badly could a wheelchair wear out 2 big-ass automobile batteries, they were clean and pristine so I sold them for $25-$35 each and they flew out the front door of my mortuary faster than I could book down to Care Med on weekends and load up my trunk. Nearly every visiting guest at my crack house, for a small fee or bag of weed, I'd pop the hoods, take out the old battery, replace it with a shiny brand new larger one and bungee cord it tightly in place. Occasionally I'd also replace the corroded terminals. After collecting a pile of old shitty batteries, I'd take them to the recyclers and get $6-$10 a piece. Before Red Dog Mine, the world's largest zinc and lead deposit, scrap batteries were worth serious dineros. So were old radiators. I likely sold a hunnert batteries to everybody I knew, quickly installing them in the vehicles they drove in on. I got rather proficient and speedy with my services rendered earning a fee for a brand new battery and also scrap battery monies at the recycle station.
On a side note that rightly should, but doesn't mortify nor humiliate me in the slightest is on his hospital visits, wearing a smart service uniform, Cully would stroll through the Long Term Care Ward, feigning review of important equipment details and flip through the pages on their clipboards, scribble down the home addresses of old dying folks, then give 'em to me. Cully described the old men and women dying in hospital wings he visited on service calls with their spouses of a hunnert years sitting next to them reading poignant, heartbreaking old letters from the war or pointing and touching pictures in family photo albums, then callously give me a time horizon of dead meat mortality. Since both husband and wife stayed in the hospitals for days and weeks till one of 'em died, I deduced their homes were unoccupied and needed my criminal attention. Cully gave me their addresses and then I'd climb and creep their homes and rob them.
That's what I was doing. Late at night, I crept in through windows or jimmied doors with plastic credit cards and while grandpa and grandma were laughing or crying at the hospital I was opening liquor cabinets, medicine chests, drawers and jewelry boxes or prying open gun cabinets looking for loot to fill my backpack with. Dying oldsters usually had pounds of narcotics, barbiturates and opiates, so after loading up major tonnage plunder my crack house and mortuary was stocked and inventory bins overflowing. I'd done roughly a dozen residences and the homes were usually quiet and empty. After hauling my loot, I'd lock up and leave the place perfectly intact, tidy, without a trace of evidence of burglary, except the missing treasure. Shit, like TV crooks, I wore leather gloves cuz I thought they made me look cool.
Some houses had little yipper dogs licking my hand happy to have human companionship while the owners were away sitting vigil aside dying beds. I'm a such a filch, but after verifying the ingredients included dead hooker pie filling or dead crack nigger butt paste, I'd open cans of dog food, fill their food bowls, rinse and top off their water bowls and talk cheerfully to the little pooches as I stealthily ransacked the residence and filled my backpack with odd bits I fancied and could sell or melt. I'm an old hand at the stolen jewelry business, meaning the rare metal recycling business. I may suffer massive drain-bramage, possess a poorly organized library of memories, have no forgivable criminal history and no legitimate biography free of sin, but I surely enjoyed recycling rare valuable metals and re-purposing a shit-load of stolen guns. The stolen drugs and liquor were immediately applied to commercial utility and liquidity.
Remember, all pawn shops and jewelers in the Seattle area have hot sheets of stolen merchandise circulated by the bacon bits, so my arriving with gawdy gold baubles and shiny silver bits stolen just last week proved problematic. My remedy was to visit the gold and silver buyers and let 'em examine the stuff, weigh it and offer me a price. Gold was around $500 an ounce back then and what's ironic is the melt weight price exceeded the monies I'd receive from hose-bag pawn brokers and unscrupulous dirty jewelers who paid dimes instead of dollars and melting the shit skirted police scrutiny. Fuck it, I stole it, I'm gonna melt it. I'm a fan of green ecology and I recycled non-ferrous metals such as gold, silver and lead like a motherfucker.
Okay, back to my unsolicited home invasions. Some dogs were mean and tried to bite me so I did the farm boy football punt and kicked 'em through the field goal posts then performed the George Floyd nigger neutralizer maneuver and stepped on their necks. Fuck, you coppers think you're the only fuckers that kilt a hunnert dogs? I'm there dude, but I went one step further. Prior to my shooting stray dogs on foot patrol duty in Alaska, in the Seattle home I burgled, some dogs I twisted and broke, then staged their canine corpses at the bottom of the stairwell or simply carried the cute little pooch carcasses away and stowed them in Goodwill used clothing bins or stuffed them in some fucker's mailbox as gag junk mail. What are ye gonna do? I didn't fuck the damn animals so ye can't cite me for impersonating a police officer.
Some dogs had swinging pet entrances and exits built into the backdoor and if I got my hands on them snapping at me in the backyard, they died quickly and I'd arrange their canine remains adjacent to the curb on the street or under recently parked cars. Stupid pooches, they died behaving exactly like dogs should, guarding their castles. Some loud barking dogs I simply pitched into bathrooms or tossed them downstairs and closed the door so I could continue pillaging in peace and quiet. Occasionally, I pulled open the back door, stepped aside and let a vicious dog run into the backyard so Dopey the Doberman could practice his dog-fighting techniques. You'll laugh, but even if the pooch was a male, Dopey mounted and fucked it. He probably got that from you guys.
On this particular evening, the old man came home before I even got started. He pulled into his driveway, closed the car door (only one) and came in through the front door. He dropped his keys and coins in a ceramic tray, hanged his coat and scarf and put his hat next to his keys. The old man walked in to the kitchen, put on a pot of coffee, then entered the living room and sat on the sofa. I stayed still and silent concerned he'd cut the cheese, pass gas with weathered bovine vaginal flaps or fumigate my crime scene with freshly baked butt brownies. Old folks let rip if nobody is watching or nearby to choke.
From an unused musty guest bedroom I could hear the old man sitting still and breathing. He was as silent as I was and I couldn't even move a muscle without squeaking my sneakers or a noisy floor board. I could hear the old man breathing and I considered making a loud distraction and bolt out the back door to my car and flee. This old dude looked like my grandpa and the notion of scaring him to death and leaping off his back porch didn't sit right with me, so I layed low, down the hallway and waited for him to go back to the hospital or step into the bathroom, then silently sneak out. My calculations were grossly incorrect.
He was never returning to the hospital, I heard him say something that grasped my heart like a vice. He said, "I'm gonna miss you sweetheart." My timing was shit. I was breaking into his house and robbing an old man on the evening his wife died. He was tall like me, fair skin, silver hair combed back and he was just breathing, sighing deeply, but not crying. He was absorbing the sounds of a newly silent home without his wife. Except I was on hand to observe him and it felt awful. My guts were already stressed and now I hear the old man grieving. I was also saddened Cully never told me this old guy looked like our grandpa and I felt like shit fleeing while that old man was in the midst of blinking away his vale of tears.
Stealing from other classes and colors is simple. Robbing yer own kind is upsetting. So is burying yer own kind. I suffered through funerals and they're sickening. When it came time to closing the coffin lids on my grandparents, seeing the surviving spouses weep and fall apart tore my shit up. I seen grandma lean over and kiss her husband on the cheek saying goodbye crying. This same grandma enjoyed her fancy cigarettes for 80 of her 90 years, developed tumors in her sinuses, throat and lungs spreading everywhere else, leaving us kids to attend a funeral that was kind of disturbing, she didn't look like grandma. One aspect of funerals is they can serve as family reunions.
At one funeral I attended I was surrounded by millions of my closest family relationships. It was wonderful to see so many ugly motherfuckers that looked just like me. As the party ebbed I noticed the funeral parlor vacated and convention hall was completely empty. The millions of my closest family relations simply vanished. Coming to my senses, I realized in one terrifying moment, my sister had swallowed every single one of 'em. Fuck, don't make me spell it out. Connect the dots you mongoloids.
In death, cancer makes everybody look different and weird. At open coffin ceremonies, makeup and wigs don't help shit and I told my brother Cully grandma looked like are a scary clown. Cully's opinion was, "Her tits feel real. Here, smell my finger." My other grandma, after a life of recurring problems with a rich woman's habit of refined distilled beverages died of colon cancer losing half her weight. We didn't get an open coffin, that'd be a bit too much to witness and endure and what's left after cancer's wreckage, a junk man or recycler like myself would've been out of his mind to offer more than $50 for the cadaver.
So, here I was, hiding in an old man's house listening to him breathe and sigh. Not one of my finer moments. In the kitchen I heard his Mr. Coffee Maker gurgle and chuff as it finished brewing and the old man stood and went to tend to it. I smelt the coffee and I thought I should join him fer a cuppa, but that would've scared him shitless and stopped his heart. He was running the kitchen faucet and banging around noisily washing cups and saucers so I stood and silently stepped out the back door, sneaked through dark rain to my car and left. My backpack was empty, but if I'd pilfered any loot, I would've placed all of it in his mailbox. Now, 40 years later, I believe I meant it.
Witnessing old men left all alone hurts and humiliates like a motherfucker and I thought I'd use this parable as notice to you coppers. We'll likely outlive our wives and end up just like that old man sitting quietly on the sofa in a silent lonesome house. We have to get over it already. We'll have to clean and dust our old houses, though the only thing widowers' homes are good for, in our lonely old age, is keeping termites, mice, rodents and stray mutts out of the rain and from getting pneumonia. Fuck it, yer wives are dead. Call a Realtor, get a decent price and dump the wreck formerly bearing your mailing address for the last century. Move to a resort-like senior center. Your new lifelong best pals and comic sidekicks are already there waiting fer ye.
Speaking of yer wives, their old bodies, to tell you the plain truth weren't anything to get excited about, and having to haul the broken thing around made her gloomy during her final days as she dropped pieces and neared death. Your wives couldn't help it, poor souls, any more than anybody else could help what sort of body they'd been born with or died with. Be real, our wives face the dilemma that complicates the lives of cannibals, namely, that a single body cannot be used over and over and departing it's scant decaying messy remnants can be tearful.
I sent you pictures of me and like your wives, we inherited defective genes requiring constant medical attention: degenerative spinal columns, numerous teeth capped and crowned, failing organs such as our lungs, livers and pancreas and ever-increasing tumor removal surgeries. Plus, we're ugly drunks and smoked too much. Be real, it's been decades since yer coworkers at KPD or AST were seen fighting over other cops' wasted wives looking fer a quickie. Jesus fuck, I coveted Vernetta Nay in a big way and witnessed how coppers boned and groped other cops' wives. Therein lies more peril in your fists and pistols than twenty of their puny dicks. The only humor in that image is the thought of 2 wasted half-breed piglets (think Erlich and Westlake) playing tug-of-war over another cop's drunken wife, thus creating images more aptly framed as pulled pork. When tossing Erlich and Westlake off a building and betting which one first hits the pavement below, who'd care? Life is a cheap thing besides a policeman's work.
Maybe we had wonderful minds, but our bodies ain't silver or gold. After a soul is freed from its deteriorating body, losing parts and tumors, the corpse is about as much use as a railway flatcar heaped with scrap iron. Get real. Explaining everything you see, smell and taste on yer wives old failing bodies, would scare a marble statue into moving far away from ye and send a faggot fleeing breathless and nauseated. Even yer daughters are approaching menopause and grand motherhood with their mountain dew becoming mounted, rutted dust. Time to book to the old folks' home, dress up, buy expensive haircuts, drink endless umbrella drinks, smoke cigarettes 9 miles long and stare at and drool over naked young women we used to harvest like stacks of tasty pallets of bodacious fruit, flora and fauna. Then we'd be embracing the eternal essence of nature taking on the order of the universe within our mortal human frame. I read that somewhere and I think it means injecting your scrotum's high-protein output into hungry naked girls.
When a soul parts with the body we no longer take up space here on Earth, we no longer require so much food everyday and we're not subject to the passions of our bodies. Our glands give us wood, our anger withers our patience and our hearts drive force and speed to our feet and fists. Once dead, all things bodily vanish and we can finally get along without competing for resources like electricity, heat, food, clothing and shelter.
Proceeding beyond our elderly years and transitioning into becoming rotters, we're freed from medicines and prosthetic equipment, cholesterol and blood pressure pills, hearing aids, canes, strollers, eyeglasses and future surgeries to re-attach our retinal sheathing from the blows you suffered on duty or simply due to normal age-related macular degeneration. Personally, I'll be free of my twice monthly visits to the chiropractor. All the centuries lifting freight, farm animals, drunks, dead bodies and stolen loot have taken tolls on each vertebral disk. I expect to live as long as my healthier, century-old gramps and grups, but I don't have to like it. I'm sick of old fart health care.
After sneaking out of that grieving old man's house empty-handed, I told Cully about the close call with the old man coming home while I was in the house, he shook his head and advised we pause the B&E (breaking and entering) scheme. My brother had a real eye for the obvious. Possessing a surplus of shit I'd kyped: pistols, poundage of drugs and surplus jewelry we continued the battery operation until we saturated the market and everybody and their uncle had new batteries in their cars. The last dozen I kept on hand to install in the old-fashioned used cars we purchased at the school district and city hall surplus equipment auctions.
Those vehicles, being rather mature looking, served our purposes because they were sleeper drug delivery cars and were upgraded with basically everything: tune-ups, oil changes, filters, tires, brakes, shocks, alignments, wipers, belts and hoses. And new batteries. On my pair of 66 Dodge Darts both needed new carburetors, they were black and foul, so I pitched the old factory junk and bolted on a new Weber carb on one Dart and a Holley carb in the other. These new larger carburetors broadened the power curves, brought me greater fuel economy and increased performance.
Those old geezer cars, once refurbished would dependably drive all over the Pacific Northwest from Canada to Lancaster, CA. They drove nice and smooth and at or near the legal speed limit, got excellent fuel mileage, ran at optimal engine temps not using a drop of oil. They were also conveniently overlooked by highway patrols and with topped off tanks of premium, drove flawlessly for days on end. Wearing my grandpa's clothes, wasted on the products I delivered, I'd drive for days on end too.
On my missions from Seattle to California I had a copilot, Dennis Singleton. He was pals with the wholesalers in Lancaster, CA, directly east of Los Angeles. We did a lot of large-scale partnerships that worked wonderfully and I always enjoyed his humor on long drives. One time we got pulled over by a CHIP's unit (California Highway Patrol) and the patrolman requested my license and registration, commenting on our being from out of state (Washington plates). He then stated that the reason he pulled us over is he was looking for two child molesters. I leaned over to Dennis and whispered to him conspiratorially, Dennis nodded and I then turned back to the patrolman and replied, "Okay, we'll do it!" That was a joke.
With the 6-cylinder vehicles (2 Dodge Darts and 1 Ford Econoline van) we had to hot tank, meaning acid bath and machine the cylinder heads to clean the burnt areas where the head gaskets blew out and leaked compression and install new rocker arm assemblies. Planing down the matching faces on the bottom of the cylinder head and the top of the block is where we gained a little more compression and a little more power requiring premium fuels to prevent knocking and dieseling.
Straight (inline) 6 cylinder engines seem to get hot pistons at each end, fore and aft cuz the tiny original factory single barrel carbs were rich in the middle cylinders and lean at the ends. The carbs also built up sludge so replacing them with Weber and Holley upgrades worked like a champ. Carbon deposits developed around the intake and exhaust valves so after tanking and machining, some valves got replaced due to pitting from shitty gasoline and operators not adding cleaning agents with every other tank. Which reminds me, I bought a pint of fuel injector cleaner and a pint of Iso-Heet that need to be added to my Subaru tank of premium this morning. Fuck, centuries have passed and I still treat my cars better than I do myself.
You coppers may wonder why I didn't maintain full-time employment nearly half a century ago, but I tried. My specialty was cleaning and restoring houses and buildings but jobs and projects have beginnings and endings and lining up work, back to back was damn near impossible. I told you about working at the old Campus Apartment Building (1889) in the U-District, the commercial area around University of Washington. We restored 40 apartments, added 8 more converting the old large 3-bedroom apartments, storage spaces and boiler (furnace) rooms into extra studio apartments. That job had numerous breaks as the manager, Don Heupel raised rents and evicted old slummy tenants, thus freeing us to overhaul the apartments.
I worked for a couple other construction outfits in the Puget Sound area too, but if the forecast foretold periods of unemployment, I was looking north to Alaska fer werk. I flew up 3 times: Dutch, Cold Bay and D-Ham sliming crab and fish guts. The processing lines were boring so I always put in for other jobs such as pushing fish heads, guts and blood with a 6-foot wide rubber scupper into the floor drain grinder and power-washing everywhere inside the warehouses. I also got gigs working S&R (shipping and receiving) loading pallets, moving them around with forklifts for outbound freighters and stacking mountains of incoming freight as the shit came off the boats. I worked graveyard shifts due to the higher hourly wages and during these late shifts, as at local PD's and trooper offices, I learnt teamwork and to take care of my coworkers.
Everyday after shift at 8:00 am, I'd book down to Carl's Elbow Room and pick up a half-gallon of whatever the clerk had on sale from the bar and package liquor store. The dude always seen me coming and would have mark-downs already piled up for me to choose from. I usually tried to stretch my meager pocket money as far as possible, buying the best quality from the heap of discounted cheaper brand booze. I'd make my purchase, usually round $8-$10 for a half-gal torpedo, stow it in my backpack and book to my dorm to shower and catch 40 winks before my next 12-hour shift, 7 days a week.
Arriving on duty at 8:00 pm every night, I'd stash my backpack in the shelf allocated to me, take my work orders from the freight shack at the end of the pier and start my 12-hour shift hauling, hefting or stacking fish and crab packaged outgoing product as directed. If the pier was messy, or more likely a disaster, I'd fire up my flatbed 10-ton truck, load it with busted shit and garbage and take it to the dump. We took numerous coffee breaks throughout our shifts, a quick lunch break, then near the end of shift, round the 8-hour mark, we'd gather for a toke sesh and pass around a jug. That was my contrib.
I was surrounded by older beat-up lifers that looked a lot like my compatriots at my mandatory Alcoholics Anonymous meetings with Don Beuler back home. We'd chief up brown Mexican (Dumbo) weed, Colombian (Lumbo) Gold, harsh Panama Red shit and even some Thai Stick that was supposedly opiated. Don't believe it. This is years before CRB, cancer research bud, meaning the designer green bud you see at Cannabis Shoppes today. We were smoking bugs and shit when we blew out giant plumes of pot smoke that was basically dirt weed arriving from south of the border. We also likely choked down a fair amount of paraquat.
To wash it all down I took the cap off the half-gallon of discount whiskey, rum or vodka I stashed in my backpack and passed it around till it was drained empty. No red-blooded white man, tall native or black dude drinks gin or scotch. We were juiced up nicely on liquor and big tokes of weed, likely looking like glowing red, blood-filled ticks, primed and ready to get back to work.
During our 420 safety meetings I learnd a shit-load of tasteless racist jokes that float to the surface in my old age. Like right now. Here's a native joke describing their toothless hair-lip speech. "Knock knock. Who'sh dare? Dishes. Dishes who? Dishes yer father nigger, bend over!" I might have been a skinny 18 year old kid, but I found my place in this crowd of old drunks that are likely still there, working long-ass shifts, drinking like me. Okay, maybe not. You soldiers know they're all dead like my pals, brothers and coworkers. It's a fucking miracle you coppers are still with me breathing God's air.
After we blasted mucho weed and downed all that liquor, the last 4 hours of our shift went by in a blur, but a pleasant experience. We'd be cheesing and grinning, energized, running round wrapping up our work duties as the sun rose. I worked most of the summer and finished after 6-10 weeks of work. That put a couple grand in my pocket, after deductions for military defense and senior citizen pensions and health care, whatever the IRS and Juneau's income taxes left me, allowing me to scrimp and save during my time back home in Seattle. After my 3rd trip up to D-Ham I made a bit more and had enough money to set up a profitable drug house. I should've stayed up in Alaska with those lifers I worked with. They stopped going home, staying in Unalaska working Unisea, Trident, Pan-Alaska fisheries year round. Their explanation was police troubles they got into whence they arrived back home: drugs, fighting, driving offenses etc. I didn't have a clue what they were talking about.
If you venture out to the Aleutian Chain and spend time with the folks that work those shitty shifts, you'll find mostly weathered, worn men inhabiting empty shells. Some were scarred up ugly bikers and others were fucked up morally crippled veterans with nowhere left to go. Alaska to most men like us is the end of the road. It's the last and final stop. Their war stories were awful and nearly impossible to forget. Those boys told remembrances of potting gooks, meaning blowing off body parts and faces of women, children and old slant-eyed chinks, otherwise described as "bowling fer zipper-heads." I know, nobody says chinks, zipper-heads and gooks anymore, unless they're wearing robes and burning crosses.
One black dude described getting a blow-job from a little Asian girl. After putting a bullet in her head he nearly busted her teeth and jaw to get his dick out her dead mouth locked shut. I didn't ask to see the scars where that trouser mousetrap snapped shut. Other old fuckers explained genocide in South America blasting Indian families to bits, clearing villages for oil and resource mining identical to fabled American tales of how the west was won. You may recall your history lessons: out on the American west and Alaskan northern frontiers, the total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation.
Don't think these crippled soldiers went off the reservation or gone rogue, they were just doing their job. American Imperialism means killing American Indians. And gooks. Being hidden way out on Alaska's Aleutian Chain, working slave wages was penance for their crimes and also provided a work environment with medically beneficial amounts of alcohol and drugs on the job, in the workplace, employee break room, late at night at the end of the pier. A likely scenario is that all my former coworkers reside in hospitals dying in the same equipment my brother Cully serviced and replaced. Albeit with drip trays beneath. Shit, ain't none of 'em fit fer humane society. Just like us. Don't kid yourselves.
I've chatted and discussed deadly habits with my pals in Alaska and one friend I called Chief, a tall handsome Indian mountain that walked like a man explained it to me this way. "Karl, my sister smoked too much, my father smoked too much and my mom smoked even more. That's why I smoke. Everyday I wake up and look in the mirror and see a fucked up Indian, so smoking is the Native American way of committing suicide. Suicide by cigarettes." My buddy Chief smoked Pall Malls and stated it was the favored brand of authentic First Nation suicides.
His paps died in his forties and he was glad to be out of it. Meaning out of life. The Indian life. "Karl, try sleeping on the floor, eating only government commodity foods, pissing outside and honeymooning in the outhouse. Rez life was shit. I grew up behind barbed wire. Here at the canneries I got it better than back on the rez. Besides, I ain't homeless like my buddies in town." In summation, Chief explained that IHS doctors never mentioned the primary reason many native Americans have for smoking heavily is that smoking is the fairly sure, fairly honorable form of suicide.
I never put a bullet in the brain nor strangled any girl I was fucking, but the thought of killing a bitch while fucking her and feeling her pussy bite my dick off sounds interesting. Every human being that occasionally or frequently drank to excess, needs time upon waking to clear their fogged brains and recount memories of sexual pursuits. Furthermore, time to overcome the sense of dread following long nights of drinking, where you could remember having your pants around your ankles at some point but not much more than that. I've woken up next to shit-soaked puking women of many colors, north and south of the Arctic Circle, yet never found sufficient rationale to chew my arm off. Or my dick.
Even an armed social worker from Manilaq making frequent home visits is a futile effort, natives die by their own hand in droves and are now replaced by fish processors with crabs: illegal immigrants speaking no English. What's the world come to? Alaska's fishing industry needed new slaves and natives, niggers and white trash spawn-tards like me are obsolete. I blame the Methicans and Asians, they're everywhere but won't put a bullet in our brains while fucking us. We kilt ourselves with booze and smokes.
Another note of import. Unlike Red Dog Mine or Prudhoe Bay, none of the fish slime and crab gut factories throughout Alaska did a lick of drug testing. You know a hunnert dumb fuckers working mines or petroleum that smoked fat bowls on their 2 weeks off and whence returning, were ordered to take a drug test. Workers used to take weird commercial over-the-counter herbal potions like Zydot, Terminator Gold and Test-Free the day prior to their piss tests to mask their weed habits but now cheek swabs are taken and that shit don't lie. You get a pink slip on yer locker saying good-bye sucker, adios chump, smell ye later nigger, food stamps will look good on you.
Chronic green bud takes roughly a month to clear yer system but alcohol, similar to cocaine and meth are gone after 3-4 days. Not a tough decision there. On yer days off, drink like a fish and snort powders like me, a drug fiend, you'll be fine. Shit, smoke yer meth and coke, you'll be even better. I think I see yer lungs, liver and pancreas in my septic tank yet I know to say nothing but good of the dead.
You might wonder why I'm always speaking to economic trends. Well, in America we can freely cross state lines for work and travel to any shit hole we desire fer wages. Makes sense huh? In Washington State during the 70's we suffered a MAJOR recession and finding decent work weren't happening. If a kid was 16 years old he could fly to Alaska and work all summer, providing you never missed a day of compulsory K-12 schooling. All us skinny kids pursued this.
A nice deal about Alaska was even a toe-headed kid like myself could walk into any liquor store or tavern and buy alcoholic beverages cuz the legal drinking age back then was only 19 years of age. Cool huh? Even at my ripe old age of 18 I entered bars and package liquor stores and purchased anything off the shelf. I was never asked for ID in Alaska, but in Washington the legal drinking age was 21 so I was forced to make use of my deceased pal Gary Los's drivers license. Weird, in the 907 I bought half-gallons fer werk everyday but in the Pacific Northwest I resorted to using identification of a dead man. If you include ID theft, I stole fucking everything not nailed down.
I kept Gary's drivers license buried in the deep recesses of my wallet, facing backwards and book-ended with my library card and my bus pass, in case the cops snatched my wallet to examine it for explosives or gory dildos smelling like their wives' cunts. Cops are funny that way. Oops, you boys already know this. Go ahead, punch the old bag and kick yer cross-eyed mud children that look weird and out of place in your family portraits. There's always at least one bastard in every brood that came out of a stinky dick that wasn't yours. Kill it now.
Okay, wash off yer boots, I'm continuing onward describing Alaska's numerous gold rushes, oil booms and work jags that brought fuck-ups like me north. By the thousands. The first big pull was obviously the flimflam scam gold rushes such as Klondike and Nome, platinum mining in McGrath before and during WWII, then came Cook Inlet oil and gas work authorized by President Eisenhower over 70 years ago.
The Cook Inlet petroleum fields provided so much oil and gas we loaded supertankers filled with both resources, shipping giant volumes to ports around the world. Now these mature fields are declining rapidly and instead of piping liquefied natural gas from the North Slope down to us, South Central Alaska is now poised to import natural gas from outside to supply the heat and electricity demands of Anchorage, Mat-Su and Kenai customers. Imported natural gas for electricity and heat will be roughly double what we pay from local sources today. Scrutinize yer bills, grab yer dicks and get ready to shit a brick.
Following the giant boom of fish and crab harvests throughout the 70's was the Trans-Alaska Pipeline build-up facilitating the Prudhoe Bay 12.5% well-head royalty money flows. Once oil revenues flooded the coffers in Juneau you coppers witnessed the construction and municipal staffing boom across Alaska's 320 towns and villages. Every community screamed for schools, hospitals, public safety, water and sewer service and airports. That's the economic flood bringing most of you coppers to our dearly beloved shit holes, meaning a job, a wife and family. Since winding down Cook Inlet, Big Fish and Prudhoe Bay the current boom is welfare and hires nearly 4 out of every 10 Alaskans. I'm being facetious using the word 'hire' like smearing turds on bread and liking the taste.
I caught the fish boom, the school boom, the municipal boom, the university boom and finally the pension boom. I never worked oil or gas but my employment was derivative of these royalty revenue streams. The fish boom is self-explanatory, the school boom brought me to Kotz working with MicoDot (Brian Higman) doing inventories borough-wide, the municipal boom gave me work alongside you killers at local PD's and trooper offices, the university boom happened in the 90's while I was at UAF and the pension boom pays me a decent monthly stipend, but the medical, dental, vision, audio and pharmacy benefits plus long term care is the vein of gold I'm now mining.
You may wonder what kind of lavish spending madness possessed the university system whilst I attended. Two words, Ted Stevens. The federal and state funding ran way over its river banks and I snagged a piece working the computer lab powered by 2 Cray Super Computers (there were only 7 in the entire world), flying all over Europe promoting UAF's International Exchange Program and a brand new car to drive as part of my weird campus job description.
Now follow my silly reasoning. The current welfare boom is federal money with a 10% state funding match: food stamps, Medicaid and Housing vouchers. The food stamp program is a mad gush of dineros that props up shitty businesses such as Rotman's, Alaska Commercial and every crap-ass native grocery store throughout rural retard-ville. The free handout monies subsidize food purchases and drive up food prices. The profits are so lavish, Mark Begich is now managing the largest grocery store in Barrow and the North Slope. "The little faggot got his own jet airplane, the little faggot is a millionaire" (Dire Straits/Sting, I want my MTV). The free medical coverage (Medicaid) subsidizes medical services and pharmacy purchases statewide. Every private, public and native clinic and pharmacy would be out of business without the Big Dog money Medicaid brings.
Rents in Alaska are artificially high because AHFC/HUD, (Alaska Housing Finance Corporation/Housing and Urban Development) hands out rent vouchers for every low-income zombie obese slug that meets the poverty guidelines on their monthly household reports. Northwest Inupiaq Housing, Barrow's Housing Authority and every other guv-ment public housing outfit would cease to exist without so many poor fucking whites, blacks and reds pissing, shitting and trashing the multitudes of free and low income apartments and houses all over Alaska. Private landlords smile at this program and can rent total shit-holes to poor families for these monthly vouchers worth their weight in gold. I mean cash-bucks.
So there you have it. Gold boom, fish boom, oil boom, school boom, municipal boom, UAF boom and now pension boom. I missed the welfare boom and should have my head examined. All those years of stressful, hard work and I coulda been sitting on my ass in public housing, eating food stamp foods and getting my dick scrubbed and de-blistered with Medicaid. What was I thinking? I'm still pissed off at my work doing a dozen narc jobs across Alaska thinking it would somehow improve the lives of our fellow citizens, a fading glimpsed mirage of something better. I'm fucking retarded and now a lowly civilian puke.
Poverty is generational, obesity and illness are forever and as long as the welfare boom continues, we'll be surrounded by newly arriving trailer trash with their hands out demanding public assistance, heating assistance, energy assistance and if they're old fucking prunes, longevity bonuses, meaning Senior Benefits assistance. Plus a full bountiful Permanent Fund Dividend. I clearly specified we all came here for ball-busting hard work, but what did all these stinky unemployable motherfuckers come here for?
I'm repeating myself, but as a moron and a criminal I fought to resist trends of strangling apathy and trying new reprehensibly indictable schemes worked quite nicely as antidote to afflictions of epidemic complacency. Real soon, instead of aggressive, capable workers applying for a long list of boom-related jobs, we'll be surrounded by apathetic welfare bums extracting public assistance like painful blood-engorged ticks on our gonads and expensive parasites in our wallets, greedily sucking down dwindling revenues and state budgets.
I'm of the thought you coppers worked way too hard, way too long, for way too little pay. I wouldn't change a thing though. I modeled my own behavior after your honorable intent, long-ass shifts and realized new concepts in public altruism formerly foreign and disgusting to me. You fuckers were role models for this reformed crook and addict and despite injuries unhealed, scars and arthritic joints, it feels quite nice.
Fuck, I realized by working my miserable and mostly honest life away in Alaska, abstaining from my full throttle self-made crime wave, I possibly took the steam out of the crime boom I theoretically may be responsible for yonder 48.
In closing, despite the nail hole, I grasp your hand.
And shake it.
Karl.
I was sneaking around a dark empty house when car headlights lit up the goddamned place like halide lights in a grow room or a fucking alien spaceship landed out front. Shit, someone's home. You see, I offset my lean months by creeping and stealing from elderly folks while they're at the hospital. Don't feign shock, offense or grandiose indignation, I had steady bills and expenses with an unsteady criminal income, so diversification of felony malefaction was in order. As a moron and a criminal I fought to resist trends of strangling apathy and trying new reprehensibly indictable schemes worked quite nicely as antidote to afflictions of epidemic complacency.
I had to earn a fucking income. Imagine me homeless, a rabid animal passing myself off as human, sleeping on the sidewalk, displaying a hand-scrawled cardboard sign saying, "Ninjas kidnapped my family. Need money for Kung Fu lessons" or "My life is a complicated drinking game. Please help." Yes, I may be retarded, but I never figured out how welfare worked, so I refuted the notion of waiting in long lines with losers that smelt gruesome and atrocious. Besides, I was too stupid to see the logic in purchasing brown shoe polish to cover my face and blend in.
You coppers know how it is. We all got bills and despite my nemesis Detective Beuler damning me with faint diminished praise I was a dullard genius-savant, gimpy athlete and greatly under-handicapped, I reluctantly began to consider myself a vile iniquitous villain with an extremely crippling alcohol and drug problem. At first blush, you old coppers may presume me benign and harmless, unless you were sitting in a hospital room watching your spouse die while I'm in yer house robbing you blind. Of course, that would be when yer estimation of me would be greatly degraded.
In our younger years my brother Cully worked at Care Medical, otherwise known by his coworkers at Care Less Medical. His job was servicing hospital equipment such as wheelchairs, mechanical hospital beds and any other high-dollar medical shit old fuckers like us gimp about with in our waning days of infirmity, atrophy and expiration.
The primary service Cully rendered was to drive company vans to all the hospitals in the Seattle area to fetch broken equipment and replace them with brand new, repaired, refurbished or overhauled units. The hospital staff would call Care Medical and explain to Cully the make and model of a particular mechanical bed, hoist, lift, stroller or wheelchair that was malfunctioning and he'd load the van with an identical piece and book out there. He was on a first name basis with the floor nurses, X-ray staff and trauma techs and they needed constant visits to service or replace their inventory of mechanized tables, chairs, beds and tools.
On each drive out to the hospitals he'd bring a dozen brand new Sears Die Hard Truck Batteries. Every electric wheelchair required 2 large automobile batteries and all the cordless equipment like rolling gurneys or surgical tables also required two of 'em so Cully's duty was to replace every single one on each visit, regardless of age or current state of charge. Once back at the shop, with these nearly new, barely used batteries in perfect condition, Cully connected chargers to them all and I'd pick them up every weekend and sell them. Everybody I knew wanted brand new (months old) Sears Die Hard batteries for their cars, vans and trucks.
Think about it, in a month or two, how badly could a wheelchair wear out 2 big-ass automobile batteries, they were clean and pristine so I sold them for $25-$35 each and they flew out the front door of my mortuary faster than I could book down to Care Med on weekends and load up my trunk. Nearly every visiting guest at my crack house, for a small fee or bag of weed, I'd pop the hoods, take out the old battery, replace it with a shiny brand new larger one and bungee cord it tightly in place. Occasionally I'd also replace the corroded terminals. After collecting a pile of old shitty batteries, I'd take them to the recyclers and get $6-$10 a piece. Before Red Dog Mine, the world's largest zinc and lead deposit, scrap batteries were worth serious dineros. So were old radiators. I likely sold a hunnert batteries to everybody I knew, quickly installing them in the vehicles they drove in on. I got rather proficient and speedy with my services rendered earning a fee for a brand new battery and also scrap battery monies at the recycle station.
On a side note that rightly should, but doesn't mortify nor humiliate me in the slightest is on his hospital visits, wearing a smart service uniform, Cully would stroll through the Long Term Care Ward, feigning review of important equipment details and flip through the pages on their clipboards, scribble down the home addresses of old dying folks, then give 'em to me. Cully described the old men and women dying in hospital wings he visited on service calls with their spouses of a hunnert years sitting next to them reading poignant, heartbreaking old letters from the war or pointing and touching pictures in family photo albums, then callously give me a time horizon of dead meat mortality. Since both husband and wife stayed in the hospitals for days and weeks till one of 'em died, I deduced their homes were unoccupied and needed my criminal attention. Cully gave me their addresses and then I'd climb and creep their homes and rob them.
That's what I was doing. Late at night, I crept in through windows or jimmied doors with plastic credit cards and while grandpa and grandma were laughing or crying at the hospital I was opening liquor cabinets, medicine chests, drawers and jewelry boxes or prying open gun cabinets looking for loot to fill my backpack with. Dying oldsters usually had pounds of narcotics, barbiturates and opiates, so after loading up major tonnage plunder my crack house and mortuary was stocked and inventory bins overflowing. I'd done roughly a dozen residences and the homes were usually quiet and empty. After hauling my loot, I'd lock up and leave the place perfectly intact, tidy, without a trace of evidence of burglary, except the missing treasure. Shit, like TV crooks, I wore leather gloves cuz I thought they made me look cool.
Some houses had little yipper dogs licking my hand happy to have human companionship while the owners were away sitting vigil aside dying beds. I'm a such a filch, but after verifying the ingredients included dead hooker pie filling or dead crack nigger butt paste, I'd open cans of dog food, fill their food bowls, rinse and top off their water bowls and talk cheerfully to the little pooches as I stealthily ransacked the residence and filled my backpack with odd bits I fancied and could sell or melt. I'm an old hand at the stolen jewelry business, meaning the rare metal recycling business. I may suffer massive drain-bramage, possess a poorly organized library of memories, have no forgivable criminal history and no legitimate biography free of sin, but I surely enjoyed recycling rare valuable metals and re-purposing a shit-load of stolen guns. The stolen drugs and liquor were immediately applied to commercial utility and liquidity.
Remember, all pawn shops and jewelers in the Seattle area have hot sheets of stolen merchandise circulated by the bacon bits, so my arriving with gawdy gold baubles and shiny silver bits stolen just last week proved problematic. My remedy was to visit the gold and silver buyers and let 'em examine the stuff, weigh it and offer me a price. Gold was around $500 an ounce back then and what's ironic is the melt weight price exceeded the monies I'd receive from hose-bag pawn brokers and unscrupulous dirty jewelers who paid dimes instead of dollars and melting the shit skirted police scrutiny. Fuck it, I stole it, I'm gonna melt it. I'm a fan of green ecology and I recycled non-ferrous metals such as gold, silver and lead like a motherfucker.
Okay, back to my unsolicited home invasions. Some dogs were mean and tried to bite me so I did the farm boy football punt and kicked 'em through the field goal posts then performed the George Floyd nigger neutralizer maneuver and stepped on their necks. Fuck, you coppers think you're the only fuckers that kilt a hunnert dogs? I'm there dude, but I went one step further. Prior to my shooting stray dogs on foot patrol duty in Alaska, in the Seattle home I burgled, some dogs I twisted and broke, then staged their canine corpses at the bottom of the stairwell or simply carried the cute little pooch carcasses away and stowed them in Goodwill used clothing bins or stuffed them in some fucker's mailbox as gag junk mail. What are ye gonna do? I didn't fuck the damn animals so ye can't cite me for impersonating a police officer.
Some dogs had swinging pet entrances and exits built into the backdoor and if I got my hands on them snapping at me in the backyard, they died quickly and I'd arrange their canine remains adjacent to the curb on the street or under recently parked cars. Stupid pooches, they died behaving exactly like dogs should, guarding their castles. Some loud barking dogs I simply pitched into bathrooms or tossed them downstairs and closed the door so I could continue pillaging in peace and quiet. Occasionally, I pulled open the back door, stepped aside and let a vicious dog run into the backyard so Dopey the Doberman could practice his dog-fighting techniques. You'll laugh, but even if the pooch was a male, Dopey mounted and fucked it. He probably got that from you guys.
On this particular evening, the old man came home before I even got started. He pulled into his driveway, closed the car door (only one) and came in through the front door. He dropped his keys and coins in a ceramic tray, hanged his coat and scarf and put his hat next to his keys. The old man walked in to the kitchen, put on a pot of coffee, then entered the living room and sat on the sofa. I stayed still and silent concerned he'd cut the cheese, pass gas with weathered bovine vaginal flaps or fumigate my crime scene with freshly baked butt brownies. Old folks let rip if nobody is watching or nearby to choke.
From an unused musty guest bedroom I could hear the old man sitting still and breathing. He was as silent as I was and I couldn't even move a muscle without squeaking my sneakers or a noisy floor board. I could hear the old man breathing and I considered making a loud distraction and bolt out the back door to my car and flee. This old dude looked like my grandpa and the notion of scaring him to death and leaping off his back porch didn't sit right with me, so I layed low, down the hallway and waited for him to go back to the hospital or step into the bathroom, then silently sneak out. My calculations were grossly incorrect.
He was never returning to the hospital, I heard him say something that grasped my heart like a vice. He said, "I'm gonna miss you sweetheart." My timing was shit. I was breaking into his house and robbing an old man on the evening his wife died. He was tall like me, fair skin, silver hair combed back and he was just breathing, sighing deeply, but not crying. He was absorbing the sounds of a newly silent home without his wife. Except I was on hand to observe him and it felt awful. My guts were already stressed and now I hear the old man grieving. I was also saddened Cully never told me this old guy looked like our grandpa and I felt like shit fleeing while that old man was in the midst of blinking away his vale of tears.
Stealing from other classes and colors is simple. Robbing yer own kind is upsetting. So is burying yer own kind. I suffered through funerals and they're sickening. When it came time to closing the coffin lids on my grandparents, seeing the surviving spouses weep and fall apart tore my shit up. I seen grandma lean over and kiss her husband on the cheek saying goodbye crying. This same grandma enjoyed her fancy cigarettes for 80 of her 90 years, developed tumors in her sinuses, throat and lungs spreading everywhere else, leaving us kids to attend a funeral that was kind of disturbing, she didn't look like grandma. One aspect of funerals is they can serve as family reunions.
At one funeral I attended I was surrounded by millions of my closest family relationships. It was wonderful to see so many ugly motherfuckers that looked just like me. As the party ebbed I noticed the funeral parlor vacated and convention hall was completely empty. The millions of my closest family relations simply vanished. Coming to my senses, I realized in one terrifying moment, my sister had swallowed every single one of 'em. Fuck, don't make me spell it out. Connect the dots you mongoloids.
In death, cancer makes everybody look different and weird. At open coffin ceremonies, makeup and wigs don't help shit and I told my brother Cully grandma looked like are a scary clown. Cully's opinion was, "Her tits feel real. Here, smell my finger." My other grandma, after a life of recurring problems with a rich woman's habit of refined distilled beverages died of colon cancer losing half her weight. We didn't get an open coffin, that'd be a bit too much to witness and endure and what's left after cancer's wreckage, a junk man or recycler like myself would've been out of his mind to offer more than $50 for the cadaver.
So, here I was, hiding in an old man's house listening to him breathe and sigh. Not one of my finer moments. In the kitchen I heard his Mr. Coffee Maker gurgle and chuff as it finished brewing and the old man stood and went to tend to it. I smelt the coffee and I thought I should join him fer a cuppa, but that would've scared him shitless and stopped his heart. He was running the kitchen faucet and banging around noisily washing cups and saucers so I stood and silently stepped out the back door, sneaked through dark rain to my car and left. My backpack was empty, but if I'd pilfered any loot, I would've placed all of it in his mailbox. Now, 40 years later, I believe I meant it.
Witnessing old men left all alone hurts and humiliates like a motherfucker and I thought I'd use this parable as notice to you coppers. We'll likely outlive our wives and end up just like that old man sitting quietly on the sofa in a silent lonesome house. We have to get over it already. We'll have to clean and dust our old houses, though the only thing widowers' homes are good for, in our lonely old age, is keeping termites, mice, rodents and stray mutts out of the rain and from getting pneumonia. Fuck it, yer wives are dead. Call a Realtor, get a decent price and dump the wreck formerly bearing your mailing address for the last century. Move to a resort-like senior center. Your new lifelong best pals and comic sidekicks are already there waiting fer ye.
Speaking of yer wives, their old bodies, to tell you the plain truth weren't anything to get excited about, and having to haul the broken thing around made her gloomy during her final days as she dropped pieces and neared death. Your wives couldn't help it, poor souls, any more than anybody else could help what sort of body they'd been born with or died with. Be real, our wives face the dilemma that complicates the lives of cannibals, namely, that a single body cannot be used over and over and departing it's scant decaying messy remnants can be tearful.
I sent you pictures of me and like your wives, we inherited defective genes requiring constant medical attention: degenerative spinal columns, numerous teeth capped and crowned, failing organs such as our lungs, livers and pancreas and ever-increasing tumor removal surgeries. Plus, we're ugly drunks and smoked too much. Be real, it's been decades since yer coworkers at KPD or AST were seen fighting over other cops' wasted wives looking fer a quickie. Jesus fuck, I coveted Vernetta Nay in a big way and witnessed how coppers boned and groped other cops' wives. Therein lies more peril in your fists and pistols than twenty of their puny dicks. The only humor in that image is the thought of 2 wasted half-breed piglets (think Erlich and Westlake) playing tug-of-war over another cop's drunken wife, thus creating images more aptly framed as pulled pork. When tossing Erlich and Westlake off a building and betting which one first hits the pavement below, who'd care? Life is a cheap thing besides a policeman's work.
Maybe we had wonderful minds, but our bodies ain't silver or gold. After a soul is freed from its deteriorating body, losing parts and tumors, the corpse is about as much use as a railway flatcar heaped with scrap iron. Get real. Explaining everything you see, smell and taste on yer wives old failing bodies, would scare a marble statue into moving far away from ye and send a faggot fleeing breathless and nauseated. Even yer daughters are approaching menopause and grand motherhood with their mountain dew becoming mounted, rutted dust. Time to book to the old folks' home, dress up, buy expensive haircuts, drink endless umbrella drinks, smoke cigarettes 9 miles long and stare at and drool over naked young women we used to harvest like stacks of tasty pallets of bodacious fruit, flora and fauna. Then we'd be embracing the eternal essence of nature taking on the order of the universe within our mortal human frame. I read that somewhere and I think it means injecting your scrotum's high-protein output into hungry naked girls.
When a soul parts with the body we no longer take up space here on Earth, we no longer require so much food everyday and we're not subject to the passions of our bodies. Our glands give us wood, our anger withers our patience and our hearts drive force and speed to our feet and fists. Once dead, all things bodily vanish and we can finally get along without competing for resources like electricity, heat, food, clothing and shelter.
Proceeding beyond our elderly years and transitioning into becoming rotters, we're freed from medicines and prosthetic equipment, cholesterol and blood pressure pills, hearing aids, canes, strollers, eyeglasses and future surgeries to re-attach our retinal sheathing from the blows you suffered on duty or simply due to normal age-related macular degeneration. Personally, I'll be free of my twice monthly visits to the chiropractor. All the centuries lifting freight, farm animals, drunks, dead bodies and stolen loot have taken tolls on each vertebral disk. I expect to live as long as my healthier, century-old gramps and grups, but I don't have to like it. I'm sick of old fart health care.
After sneaking out of that grieving old man's house empty-handed, I told Cully about the close call with the old man coming home while I was in the house, he shook his head and advised we pause the B&E (breaking and entering) scheme. My brother had a real eye for the obvious. Possessing a surplus of shit I'd kyped: pistols, poundage of drugs and surplus jewelry we continued the battery operation until we saturated the market and everybody and their uncle had new batteries in their cars. The last dozen I kept on hand to install in the old-fashioned used cars we purchased at the school district and city hall surplus equipment auctions.
Those vehicles, being rather mature looking, served our purposes because they were sleeper drug delivery cars and were upgraded with basically everything: tune-ups, oil changes, filters, tires, brakes, shocks, alignments, wipers, belts and hoses. And new batteries. On my pair of 66 Dodge Darts both needed new carburetors, they were black and foul, so I pitched the old factory junk and bolted on a new Weber carb on one Dart and a Holley carb in the other. These new larger carburetors broadened the power curves, brought me greater fuel economy and increased performance.
Those old geezer cars, once refurbished would dependably drive all over the Pacific Northwest from Canada to Lancaster, CA. They drove nice and smooth and at or near the legal speed limit, got excellent fuel mileage, ran at optimal engine temps not using a drop of oil. They were also conveniently overlooked by highway patrols and with topped off tanks of premium, drove flawlessly for days on end. Wearing my grandpa's clothes, wasted on the products I delivered, I'd drive for days on end too.
On my missions from Seattle to California I had a copilot, Dennis Singleton. He was pals with the wholesalers in Lancaster, CA, directly east of Los Angeles. We did a lot of large-scale partnerships that worked wonderfully and I always enjoyed his humor on long drives. One time we got pulled over by a CHIP's unit (California Highway Patrol) and the patrolman requested my license and registration, commenting on our being from out of state (Washington plates). He then stated that the reason he pulled us over is he was looking for two child molesters. I leaned over to Dennis and whispered to him conspiratorially, Dennis nodded and I then turned back to the patrolman and replied, "Okay, we'll do it!" That was a joke.
With the 6-cylinder vehicles (2 Dodge Darts and 1 Ford Econoline van) we had to hot tank, meaning acid bath and machine the cylinder heads to clean the burnt areas where the head gaskets blew out and leaked compression and install new rocker arm assemblies. Planing down the matching faces on the bottom of the cylinder head and the top of the block is where we gained a little more compression and a little more power requiring premium fuels to prevent knocking and dieseling.
Straight (inline) 6 cylinder engines seem to get hot pistons at each end, fore and aft cuz the tiny original factory single barrel carbs were rich in the middle cylinders and lean at the ends. The carbs also built up sludge so replacing them with Weber and Holley upgrades worked like a champ. Carbon deposits developed around the intake and exhaust valves so after tanking and machining, some valves got replaced due to pitting from shitty gasoline and operators not adding cleaning agents with every other tank. Which reminds me, I bought a pint of fuel injector cleaner and a pint of Iso-Heet that need to be added to my Subaru tank of premium this morning. Fuck, centuries have passed and I still treat my cars better than I do myself.
You coppers may wonder why I didn't maintain full-time employment nearly half a century ago, but I tried. My specialty was cleaning and restoring houses and buildings but jobs and projects have beginnings and endings and lining up work, back to back was damn near impossible. I told you about working at the old Campus Apartment Building (1889) in the U-District, the commercial area around University of Washington. We restored 40 apartments, added 8 more converting the old large 3-bedroom apartments, storage spaces and boiler (furnace) rooms into extra studio apartments. That job had numerous breaks as the manager, Don Heupel raised rents and evicted old slummy tenants, thus freeing us to overhaul the apartments.
I worked for a couple other construction outfits in the Puget Sound area too, but if the forecast foretold periods of unemployment, I was looking north to Alaska fer werk. I flew up 3 times: Dutch, Cold Bay and D-Ham sliming crab and fish guts. The processing lines were boring so I always put in for other jobs such as pushing fish heads, guts and blood with a 6-foot wide rubber scupper into the floor drain grinder and power-washing everywhere inside the warehouses. I also got gigs working S&R (shipping and receiving) loading pallets, moving them around with forklifts for outbound freighters and stacking mountains of incoming freight as the shit came off the boats. I worked graveyard shifts due to the higher hourly wages and during these late shifts, as at local PD's and trooper offices, I learnt teamwork and to take care of my coworkers.
Everyday after shift at 8:00 am, I'd book down to Carl's Elbow Room and pick up a half-gallon of whatever the clerk had on sale from the bar and package liquor store. The dude always seen me coming and would have mark-downs already piled up for me to choose from. I usually tried to stretch my meager pocket money as far as possible, buying the best quality from the heap of discounted cheaper brand booze. I'd make my purchase, usually round $8-$10 for a half-gal torpedo, stow it in my backpack and book to my dorm to shower and catch 40 winks before my next 12-hour shift, 7 days a week.
Arriving on duty at 8:00 pm every night, I'd stash my backpack in the shelf allocated to me, take my work orders from the freight shack at the end of the pier and start my 12-hour shift hauling, hefting or stacking fish and crab packaged outgoing product as directed. If the pier was messy, or more likely a disaster, I'd fire up my flatbed 10-ton truck, load it with busted shit and garbage and take it to the dump. We took numerous coffee breaks throughout our shifts, a quick lunch break, then near the end of shift, round the 8-hour mark, we'd gather for a toke sesh and pass around a jug. That was my contrib.
I was surrounded by older beat-up lifers that looked a lot like my compatriots at my mandatory Alcoholics Anonymous meetings with Don Beuler back home. We'd chief up brown Mexican (Dumbo) weed, Colombian (Lumbo) Gold, harsh Panama Red shit and even some Thai Stick that was supposedly opiated. Don't believe it. This is years before CRB, cancer research bud, meaning the designer green bud you see at Cannabis Shoppes today. We were smoking bugs and shit when we blew out giant plumes of pot smoke that was basically dirt weed arriving from south of the border. We also likely choked down a fair amount of paraquat.
To wash it all down I took the cap off the half-gallon of discount whiskey, rum or vodka I stashed in my backpack and passed it around till it was drained empty. No red-blooded white man, tall native or black dude drinks gin or scotch. We were juiced up nicely on liquor and big tokes of weed, likely looking like glowing red, blood-filled ticks, primed and ready to get back to work.
During our 420 safety meetings I learnd a shit-load of tasteless racist jokes that float to the surface in my old age. Like right now. Here's a native joke describing their toothless hair-lip speech. "Knock knock. Who'sh dare? Dishes. Dishes who? Dishes yer father nigger, bend over!" I might have been a skinny 18 year old kid, but I found my place in this crowd of old drunks that are likely still there, working long-ass shifts, drinking like me. Okay, maybe not. You soldiers know they're all dead like my pals, brothers and coworkers. It's a fucking miracle you coppers are still with me breathing God's air.
After we blasted mucho weed and downed all that liquor, the last 4 hours of our shift went by in a blur, but a pleasant experience. We'd be cheesing and grinning, energized, running round wrapping up our work duties as the sun rose. I worked most of the summer and finished after 6-10 weeks of work. That put a couple grand in my pocket, after deductions for military defense and senior citizen pensions and health care, whatever the IRS and Juneau's income taxes left me, allowing me to scrimp and save during my time back home in Seattle. After my 3rd trip up to D-Ham I made a bit more and had enough money to set up a profitable drug house. I should've stayed up in Alaska with those lifers I worked with. They stopped going home, staying in Unalaska working Unisea, Trident, Pan-Alaska fisheries year round. Their explanation was police troubles they got into whence they arrived back home: drugs, fighting, driving offenses etc. I didn't have a clue what they were talking about.
If you venture out to the Aleutian Chain and spend time with the folks that work those shitty shifts, you'll find mostly weathered, worn men inhabiting empty shells. Some were scarred up ugly bikers and others were fucked up morally crippled veterans with nowhere left to go. Alaska to most men like us is the end of the road. It's the last and final stop. Their war stories were awful and nearly impossible to forget. Those boys told remembrances of potting gooks, meaning blowing off body parts and faces of women, children and old slant-eyed chinks, otherwise described as "bowling fer zipper-heads." I know, nobody says chinks, zipper-heads and gooks anymore, unless they're wearing robes and burning crosses.
One black dude described getting a blow-job from a little Asian girl. After putting a bullet in her head he nearly busted her teeth and jaw to get his dick out her dead mouth locked shut. I didn't ask to see the scars where that trouser mousetrap snapped shut. Other old fuckers explained genocide in South America blasting Indian families to bits, clearing villages for oil and resource mining identical to fabled American tales of how the west was won. You may recall your history lessons: out on the American west and Alaskan northern frontiers, the total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation.
Don't think these crippled soldiers went off the reservation or gone rogue, they were just doing their job. American Imperialism means killing American Indians. And gooks. Being hidden way out on Alaska's Aleutian Chain, working slave wages was penance for their crimes and also provided a work environment with medically beneficial amounts of alcohol and drugs on the job, in the workplace, employee break room, late at night at the end of the pier. A likely scenario is that all my former coworkers reside in hospitals dying in the same equipment my brother Cully serviced and replaced. Albeit with drip trays beneath. Shit, ain't none of 'em fit fer humane society. Just like us. Don't kid yourselves.
I've chatted and discussed deadly habits with my pals in Alaska and one friend I called Chief, a tall handsome Indian mountain that walked like a man explained it to me this way. "Karl, my sister smoked too much, my father smoked too much and my mom smoked even more. That's why I smoke. Everyday I wake up and look in the mirror and see a fucked up Indian, so smoking is the Native American way of committing suicide. Suicide by cigarettes." My buddy Chief smoked Pall Malls and stated it was the favored brand of authentic First Nation suicides.
His paps died in his forties and he was glad to be out of it. Meaning out of life. The Indian life. "Karl, try sleeping on the floor, eating only government commodity foods, pissing outside and honeymooning in the outhouse. Rez life was shit. I grew up behind barbed wire. Here at the canneries I got it better than back on the rez. Besides, I ain't homeless like my buddies in town." In summation, Chief explained that IHS doctors never mentioned the primary reason many native Americans have for smoking heavily is that smoking is the fairly sure, fairly honorable form of suicide.
I never put a bullet in the brain nor strangled any girl I was fucking, but the thought of killing a bitch while fucking her and feeling her pussy bite my dick off sounds interesting. Every human being that occasionally or frequently drank to excess, needs time upon waking to clear their fogged brains and recount memories of sexual pursuits. Furthermore, time to overcome the sense of dread following long nights of drinking, where you could remember having your pants around your ankles at some point but not much more than that. I've woken up next to shit-soaked puking women of many colors, north and south of the Arctic Circle, yet never found sufficient rationale to chew my arm off. Or my dick.
Even an armed social worker from Manilaq making frequent home visits is a futile effort, natives die by their own hand in droves and are now replaced by fish processors with crabs: illegal immigrants speaking no English. What's the world come to? Alaska's fishing industry needed new slaves and natives, niggers and white trash spawn-tards like me are obsolete. I blame the Methicans and Asians, they're everywhere but won't put a bullet in our brains while fucking us. We kilt ourselves with booze and smokes.
Another note of import. Unlike Red Dog Mine or Prudhoe Bay, none of the fish slime and crab gut factories throughout Alaska did a lick of drug testing. You know a hunnert dumb fuckers working mines or petroleum that smoked fat bowls on their 2 weeks off and whence returning, were ordered to take a drug test. Workers used to take weird commercial over-the-counter herbal potions like Zydot, Terminator Gold and Test-Free the day prior to their piss tests to mask their weed habits but now cheek swabs are taken and that shit don't lie. You get a pink slip on yer locker saying good-bye sucker, adios chump, smell ye later nigger, food stamps will look good on you.
Chronic green bud takes roughly a month to clear yer system but alcohol, similar to cocaine and meth are gone after 3-4 days. Not a tough decision there. On yer days off, drink like a fish and snort powders like me, a drug fiend, you'll be fine. Shit, smoke yer meth and coke, you'll be even better. I think I see yer lungs, liver and pancreas in my septic tank yet I know to say nothing but good of the dead.
You might wonder why I'm always speaking to economic trends. Well, in America we can freely cross state lines for work and travel to any shit hole we desire fer wages. Makes sense huh? In Washington State during the 70's we suffered a MAJOR recession and finding decent work weren't happening. If a kid was 16 years old he could fly to Alaska and work all summer, providing you never missed a day of compulsory K-12 schooling. All us skinny kids pursued this.
A nice deal about Alaska was even a toe-headed kid like myself could walk into any liquor store or tavern and buy alcoholic beverages cuz the legal drinking age back then was only 19 years of age. Cool huh? Even at my ripe old age of 18 I entered bars and package liquor stores and purchased anything off the shelf. I was never asked for ID in Alaska, but in Washington the legal drinking age was 21 so I was forced to make use of my deceased pal Gary Los's drivers license. Weird, in the 907 I bought half-gallons fer werk everyday but in the Pacific Northwest I resorted to using identification of a dead man. If you include ID theft, I stole fucking everything not nailed down.
I kept Gary's drivers license buried in the deep recesses of my wallet, facing backwards and book-ended with my library card and my bus pass, in case the cops snatched my wallet to examine it for explosives or gory dildos smelling like their wives' cunts. Cops are funny that way. Oops, you boys already know this. Go ahead, punch the old bag and kick yer cross-eyed mud children that look weird and out of place in your family portraits. There's always at least one bastard in every brood that came out of a stinky dick that wasn't yours. Kill it now.
Okay, wash off yer boots, I'm continuing onward describing Alaska's numerous gold rushes, oil booms and work jags that brought fuck-ups like me north. By the thousands. The first big pull was obviously the flimflam scam gold rushes such as Klondike and Nome, platinum mining in McGrath before and during WWII, then came Cook Inlet oil and gas work authorized by President Eisenhower over 70 years ago.
The Cook Inlet petroleum fields provided so much oil and gas we loaded supertankers filled with both resources, shipping giant volumes to ports around the world. Now these mature fields are declining rapidly and instead of piping liquefied natural gas from the North Slope down to us, South Central Alaska is now poised to import natural gas from outside to supply the heat and electricity demands of Anchorage, Mat-Su and Kenai customers. Imported natural gas for electricity and heat will be roughly double what we pay from local sources today. Scrutinize yer bills, grab yer dicks and get ready to shit a brick.
Following the giant boom of fish and crab harvests throughout the 70's was the Trans-Alaska Pipeline build-up facilitating the Prudhoe Bay 12.5% well-head royalty money flows. Once oil revenues flooded the coffers in Juneau you coppers witnessed the construction and municipal staffing boom across Alaska's 320 towns and villages. Every community screamed for schools, hospitals, public safety, water and sewer service and airports. That's the economic flood bringing most of you coppers to our dearly beloved shit holes, meaning a job, a wife and family. Since winding down Cook Inlet, Big Fish and Prudhoe Bay the current boom is welfare and hires nearly 4 out of every 10 Alaskans. I'm being facetious using the word 'hire' like smearing turds on bread and liking the taste.
I caught the fish boom, the school boom, the municipal boom, the university boom and finally the pension boom. I never worked oil or gas but my employment was derivative of these royalty revenue streams. The fish boom is self-explanatory, the school boom brought me to Kotz working with MicoDot (Brian Higman) doing inventories borough-wide, the municipal boom gave me work alongside you killers at local PD's and trooper offices, the university boom happened in the 90's while I was at UAF and the pension boom pays me a decent monthly stipend, but the medical, dental, vision, audio and pharmacy benefits plus long term care is the vein of gold I'm now mining.
You may wonder what kind of lavish spending madness possessed the university system whilst I attended. Two words, Ted Stevens. The federal and state funding ran way over its river banks and I snagged a piece working the computer lab powered by 2 Cray Super Computers (there were only 7 in the entire world), flying all over Europe promoting UAF's International Exchange Program and a brand new car to drive as part of my weird campus job description.
Now follow my silly reasoning. The current welfare boom is federal money with a 10% state funding match: food stamps, Medicaid and Housing vouchers. The food stamp program is a mad gush of dineros that props up shitty businesses such as Rotman's, Alaska Commercial and every crap-ass native grocery store throughout rural retard-ville. The free handout monies subsidize food purchases and drive up food prices. The profits are so lavish, Mark Begich is now managing the largest grocery store in Barrow and the North Slope. "The little faggot got his own jet airplane, the little faggot is a millionaire" (Dire Straits/Sting, I want my MTV). The free medical coverage (Medicaid) subsidizes medical services and pharmacy purchases statewide. Every private, public and native clinic and pharmacy would be out of business without the Big Dog money Medicaid brings.
Rents in Alaska are artificially high because AHFC/HUD, (Alaska Housing Finance Corporation/Housing and Urban Development) hands out rent vouchers for every low-income zombie obese slug that meets the poverty guidelines on their monthly household reports. Northwest Inupiaq Housing, Barrow's Housing Authority and every other guv-ment public housing outfit would cease to exist without so many poor fucking whites, blacks and reds pissing, shitting and trashing the multitudes of free and low income apartments and houses all over Alaska. Private landlords smile at this program and can rent total shit-holes to poor families for these monthly vouchers worth their weight in gold. I mean cash-bucks.
So there you have it. Gold boom, fish boom, oil boom, school boom, municipal boom, UAF boom and now pension boom. I missed the welfare boom and should have my head examined. All those years of stressful, hard work and I coulda been sitting on my ass in public housing, eating food stamp foods and getting my dick scrubbed and de-blistered with Medicaid. What was I thinking? I'm still pissed off at my work doing a dozen narc jobs across Alaska thinking it would somehow improve the lives of our fellow citizens, a fading glimpsed mirage of something better. I'm fucking retarded and now a lowly civilian puke.
Poverty is generational, obesity and illness are forever and as long as the welfare boom continues, we'll be surrounded by newly arriving trailer trash with their hands out demanding public assistance, heating assistance, energy assistance and if they're old fucking prunes, longevity bonuses, meaning Senior Benefits assistance. Plus a full bountiful Permanent Fund Dividend. I clearly specified we all came here for ball-busting hard work, but what did all these stinky unemployable motherfuckers come here for?
I'm repeating myself, but as a moron and a criminal I fought to resist trends of strangling apathy and trying new reprehensibly indictable schemes worked quite nicely as antidote to afflictions of epidemic complacency. Real soon, instead of aggressive, capable workers applying for a long list of boom-related jobs, we'll be surrounded by apathetic welfare bums extracting public assistance like painful blood-engorged ticks on our gonads and expensive parasites in our wallets, greedily sucking down dwindling revenues and state budgets.
I'm of the thought you coppers worked way too hard, way too long, for way too little pay. I wouldn't change a thing though. I modeled my own behavior after your honorable intent, long-ass shifts and realized new concepts in public altruism formerly foreign and disgusting to me. You fuckers were role models for this reformed crook and addict and despite injuries unhealed, scars and arthritic joints, it feels quite nice.
Fuck, I realized by working my miserable and mostly honest life away in Alaska, abstaining from my full throttle self-made crime wave, I possibly took the steam out of the crime boom I theoretically may be responsible for yonder 48.
In closing, despite the nail hole, I grasp your hand.
And shake it.
Karl.
posted by Alaska: Local And State News. at 1:57 PM
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