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Jay
Alien Abductee
Vatican City
2279 Posts |
 Posted - 07/10/2003 : 02:40:05 AM
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I pumped this out between Two and Three last Night. I don't have a name for it yet, because the two main characters are still foggy to me. I also don't have very much written, but what I have done is here.
Richie sat near the window all day. Somewhere in the distance, he could see the ice cream truck as it delivered half melted ice cream to half melted kids. Also, since it was curiously placed in the center of an extremely large baseball field, Richie could see an ambulance on cinderblocks, its wheels, lights, and windshield removed. Next to this proud, shimmering monument to the advances of the American Society Club was Alkie, the town drunk. Towns across this forbidden no-man’s-land called America posses this amazing sub-species of human. There are always many drunks in town, but only one Town Drunk. To qualify for this position, not one soul in the town can know where you came from or what you did for a living. You must be so unknown and forgein to the town that its inhabitants begin to start saying such lines as “I heard that if you follow him after he comes out of the 7-11, he’ll lead you into the ravine and scoop your brains out with the curved (but sharp side) of a broken whiskey bottle,” or the beautiful, timeless “That man killed his wife, that’s why he drinks so much.” Richie’s town possessed the only town drunk that lived in an ambulance. Usually, Alkie was well-received among townsfolk, he was always very sweet and kind, he always wore a smile…sometimes just a smile…but he never caused any trouble. He just got drunk and walked to his little morbid shack and ate tomato soup made of stolen ketchup and rainwater. On this particular day, though, Alkie was preaching about something to a group of six-year-old baseball players from the city. He was holding a sign that read “Live Coast for Coast WAR MANAGERS AND ASTRONOTS NEEDED!” Richie knew that Alkie was prone to hallucinations, because, as he told me when I talked to him in ’82, “He licks a lot of stamps.”
It was one of those days, the kind where anything black (including Richie) absorbed so much heat that one need employ a liquid-nitrogen bottle to cool the leather seats of said human’s BMW. Richie didn’t own a BMW, or a Chevy, or a Ford for Christ’s sake. He owns a Huffy from Wal*Mart. The last time he checked, however, the frame was broken and the handlebars bent. Richie told me in ’82 that he remembers trying to ride that bike. Basically, in Richie’s words, the story is this:
“I sat down, and it broke.”
Richie didn’t like to go to the grocery store, so he usually had one of the neighborhood kids go and buy his food and hygiene items. He had a list ready for Raul, the nine-year-old he had hired to do his shopping, and it went as follows:
2 dozen
Four Bottles of Shampoo
A bunch of pudding
Crackers (Animal)
Jalapeno Cheese Whiz
Cookies
Seven cans of fruit or vegetables or meat
Flintstone’s Vitamins (Please eat the Betty’s and the Barney’s, as long as they aren’t red)
Crest
Smokes (Tell the clerk you’re 18. He’s Mexican, like you. He’ll give them to you.)
Richie wasn’t a man about town, either. He was generally loved in town, but after the infamous “Pipe Organ Incident” of ’64, things haven’t really been the same. Detail of the only known death caused by Cathedral Music-Influenced heart rupture will come later.
Near the church was Dr. Peters’ house. Dr. Peters was never really respected much by the folks that knew him, mostly because of his tendency to be a know-it-all when approached about things like food safety. Doc Peters was an endodontist…he worked on old men’s rotting teeth. Doc was constantly moaning about how people need to brush and eat “Safe” foods. His motto was “You should never have to come to my office…ever.” No one liked him much.
Doc loved money. But, even more than money, Doc loved boats. He owned seven. All of them in tip-top shape scattered about the country in lakes and oceans. The morning Richie sat in his window, Doc was out on Lake Erie in his cruiser aptly named “The Tooth.” Richie went out on it once and came home drunk as a skunk with Doc’s car key in his stomach. Richie loved Doc dearly. Doc was the only guy on earth that would let douse his F-350’s key in cooking oil and swallow it. Doc was the only guy on earth that would hotwire his own truck to speed you to the hospital to have the key removed. Doc was also the only guy on earth that would drive you home because the emergency room was too full of people with minor head injuries and broken fingers. Richie thought for a split second that he could just pass the key…but shuddered at the thought and drove himself to another hospital out in the country. A little anesthesia and some hospital food later, the key was out. How Richie swallowed the key and kept it down is part of what made Richie, Richie.
Next door to Doc Peters’ house was Marlene. Marlene was the kind of woman you love to hate, and hate to love. She was easily the most evil woman ever to grace the planet…all 650 pounds of her. She ate more food than New Zealand and the entire continent of Africa combined. She smelled like pork and gasoline, and she ordered Chinese food four times a day. Her house looked like it was some sort of sick, twisted child’s art project; like toothpicks stuck in balls of brown clay, with shards of broken beer bottles for windows and fingernails for doors. The only comparison that can be made to the color of her grass is the color of the liquid extracted from three bison that were victims of a heat stroke. The grass itself was dead; cattails had started to replace it. If the entire state saw no rain for seventy years, Marlene’s lawn would still be as marshy as the Everglades. She sometimes saw it fit to have Raul, the same Mexican boy who shops for Richie, hang a pot of plastic flowers from a sinister looking hook screwed into the porch ceiling.
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"Hey man...you smell..."
"Oh yeah?"
"yeah...like dinner..." |
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Something I've been working on...
