Tales of Ordinary Madness (4 page)

Well, I am six foot and 232 pounds, so I just threw a body-block on the biggest sonofabitch there.

I got him from the back when he wasn't looking. And he fell face-forward, and I mean – he FELL! You could hear it all over town.

Then, out of curiosity, I rolled him over, and sure enough I'd broken off his cock, one ball, and another ball neatly sliced in half; part of the nose gone too, and about half the beard.

I felt like a killer.

Then Arthur stepped out and said, “Hank, good to see you!”

And I said, “Sorry about the noise, Art, but I stumbled into one of your little pets out there and the fucking thing tripped-up and fell apart.”

And he said, “That's all right.”

So I went in and we smoked shit all night. And the next thing I knew the sun was up and I was in my car driving along – around nine a.m. – and I drove through all the stoplights and red lights. No trouble at all. I even managed to park the car a block and a half from where I lived.

But when I got to my door I found I had this cement cock in my pocket. The damn thing must have been at least two feet long. I walked down and stuck the thing into my landlady's mailbox, but there was plenty left over that stuck out, bending and immortal, and topped by that huge head, left to the mailman's discretion.

Okay. Back to Mad Jimmy.

“But I mean,” said Mad Jimmy, “do they
really
want me in COURT? In COURT?”

“Listen, Jimmy, you really need help. I'll drive you to Patton or Camarillo.”

“Ah, I'm tired of those fucking shock-treatments.... Burrrrrrr!!!! Burrrrrrr!!!!”

Mad Jimmy rattled his body all about the chair taking the treatments again.

Then he adjusted his new Panama in the mirror, smiled, got up and walked to the phone again.

He dialed his number, looked at me and said, “It just keeps ringing.”

He just hung up and dialed again.

They all come to see me. Even my doctor phones me. “Christ was the greatest head-shrinker and ego of them all – claiming he was the Son of God. Throwing those money-changers out of the temple. Naturally, that was His mistake. They got His ass. Even asked Him to fold his feet so they could save one nail. What shit.”

They all come to see me. There's one guy with a last name like Ranch or Rain, something of the sort, and he's always coming by with his sleeping bags and a sad story. He hits between Berkeley and New Orleans. Back and forth. Once every two months. And he writes bad, old-fashioned rondos. And it's a fiver and/or a couple of bucks each time he hits (or as they like to say, “crashes”), plus whatever he eats and drinks. That's all right, I've given away more money than I have cock, but these people have got to realize that I
also
have some trouble staying alive.

So there's Mad Jimmy and so there's me.

Or there's Maxie. Maxie is going to shut off all the sewers in Los Angeles to help the Cause of the People. Well, it's a damn nice gesture, you've got to admit that. But Maxie, buddy, I say, let me know when you are going to shut off all the sewers. I'm for the People. We've been friends a long time. I'll leave town a weak early.

What Maxie doesn't realize is that Causes and Shit are different things. Starve me, but don't cut off my shit and/or shit-disposal unit. I remember once my landlord left town on a nice two week vacation to Hawaii. Okay.

The day after he left town, my toilet stopped. I had my own personal plunger, being very frightened of shit, but I plunged and plunged and it didn't work. You know what that left me.

So I called up my own personal friends, and I'm the type who doesn't have too many personal friends, or if I have them, they don't have toilets let alone telephones ... more often, they don't have anything.

So, I called the one or two who had toilets. They were very nice.

“Sure, Hank, you can shit at my place anytime!”

I didn't take up their invitations. Maybe it was the way they said it. So here was my landlord in Hawaii watching the hula girls, and those fucking turds just lay on top of the water and whirled around and looked at me.

So each night I had to shit and then pluck the turds out of water, place them in wax paper and then into a brown paper bag and get into my car and drive around town looking for some place to toss them.

So mostly, double-parked with the motor running, I'd just toss the god-damned turds over some wall, any wall. I tried to be non-prejudiced, but this one Home for the Aged seemed a particularly quiet place and I think I gave them my little brown bag of turds at least three times.

Or sometimes I'd just be driving along and roll up the window and rather flick the turds out as one would, say, cigarette ashes or a couple of dozen burnt-out cigars.

And speaking of shit, constipation has always been a greater fear to me than cancer. (We'll get back to Mad Jimmy. Listen, I told you I write this way.) If I miss one day without shitting, I can't go anywhere, do anything – I get so desperate when that happens that oftentimes I try to suck my own cock to unclog my system, to get things going again. And if you've ever tried to suck your own cock then you only know the terrible strain on the backbone, neckbone, every muscle, everything. You stroke the thing up as long as it will get then you
really
double up like some creature on a torture rack, legs way over your head and locked around the bedrungs, your asshole twitching like a dying sparrow in the frost, everything bent together around your great beer belly, all your muscle sheathes ripped to shit, and what
hurts
is that you don't miss by a foot or two – you miss by an eighth of an inch – the end of your tongue and the tip of your cock that close, but it might as well be an eternity or forty miles. God, or whoever the hell, knew just what He was doing when He put us together.

But back to the insane.

Jimmy just dialed the same number over and over from one-thirty p.m. until six p.m. when I gave way. No, it was six-thirty p.m. when I gave way. What does it matter? So, after the 749th phone call, I allowed my robe to flop open, walked over to Mad Jimmy, took the phone out of his hand and said, “No more.”

I was listening to Hayden's Symphony #102. I had enough beer to last the rest of the night. And Mad Jimmy was boring me. He was a boor. A sandfly. A crocodile's tail. Dogshit on the heel.

He looked at me. “Court? You mean she's going to take me to court? Oh no, I don't believe in these games people play ...”

Platitudes. And wax in his ears.

So I yawned and phoned Izzy Steiner, his best friend who had dropped him on me. Izzy Steiner claimed to be a writer. I said he couldn't write. He said I couldn't write. It was possible that one of us was right, or wrong. You know.

Izzy was a young huge Jewish lad around 5-5 tipping in at 200 pounds – thick-armed, thick-wristed, bull neck with head-tick; small little eyes and a very unsympathetic mouth – just a small hole in his head that whistled out the glory of Izzy Steiner and ate continually: chickenwings, turkeylegs, loaves of Frenchbread, spider-dung – anything, anything that held still long enough for him to letch upon it.

“Steiner?”

“Uh?”

He was studying to be a Rabbi but he didn't want to be a Rabbi. All he wanted to do was eat and grow larger and larger. You could go in for a one minute piss and when you came out your refrigerator would be empty, or he'd be standing there with that greedy, ashamed look, chunking the last of it down. The only thing that saved you from complete ambush when Izzy came around is that he wouldn't eat raw meat – he likes it rare, very, but not raw.

“Steiner?”

“Glub....”

“Look, finish your mouthful. I have something to say to you.”

I listened to him chewing. It sounded like twelve rabbits fucking in the straw.

“Listen, man. Mad Jimmy's here. He's your boy. He rode up on a bicycle. I'm about to vomit. Come right over. Hurry. I warn you. You're his friend. You're his only friend. You better hurry over here. Take him away from me, take him away from my eyes. I can't be responsible for myself much longer.”

I hung up.

“Did you call Izzy?” asked Jimmy.

“Yeah. He's your only friend.”

“Oh, jesus christ,” said Mad Jimmy, and then he started dumping all his spoons and stuff and wooden dolls into a sack and he ran out to his bicycle and hid them in the paper-rack.

Poor Izzy was on the way. The tank. Little air-hole mouth sucking in the sky. He was fucked-up mainly on Hemingway, Faulkner and a minor admixture of Mailer and Mahler.

Then suddenly, there was Izzy. He never walked. He just seemed to swing through a door. I mean, he ran along on little balls of air – hungry and damned near invincible.

Then he saw Mad Jimmy and his wine bottle.

“I need money, Jimmy! Stand up!”

Izzy ripped Jimmy's pockets inside out and found nothing.

“Watcha doin', man?” asked Mad Jimmy.

“The last time we got in a fight, Jimmy, your ripped my shirt, man. You ripped my pants. You owe me $5 for the pants and $3 for the shirt.”

“Fuck man, I didn't rip your fucking shirt.”

“Shut up, Jimmy, I'm warning you!”

Izzy ran out to the bicycle and began going through the paper-sack which hung over the back rack. He came in with the brown bag. Dumped it on the coffee table.

Spoons, knives, forks, rubber dolls ... carved wooden images....

“This stuff ain't worth shit!”

Izzy ran back to the bicycle and searched the paper bags some more.

Mad Jimmy came up and began dumping his shit back into the brown paper bag. “This silver alone is worth twenty bucks! You see what an asshole he is?”

“Yeah.”

Izzy ran back on it. “Jimmy, you ain't got shit on that bike! You owe me eight bucks, Jimmy. Listen, the last time I beat you up, you tore my clothes!”

“Fuck you, mother!”

Jimmy adjusted his new Panama once again in the mirror.

“Look at me! Look how handsome I look!”

“Yeah, I see,” said Izzy, and then he walked over and took the Panama and ripped a long hole in the outer brim. Then he ripped a slit on the other and put the Panama back on Jimmy's head. Jimmy didn't look so handsome anymore.

“Get me some scotch tape,” said Jimmy, “I gotta fix my hat.”

Izzy walked over, found some scotch tape, jammed tassles of it into the hole, then he ran a whole hunk of it over the rip, but missed most of it, and a big strip of tape ran over the brim and down into Jimmy's face, dangling right over the nose.

“Why do they want me in court? I don't play games! What the hell is this?”

“All right, Jimmy,” said Izzy, “I'm driving you to Patton. You're a sick man! You need help! You owe me $8, you busted Mary's rib, you hit her in the face ... you're sick, sick, sick!”

“Fuck you, mother!” Mad Jimmy got up and swung at Izzy, missed, then fell to the floor. Izzy picked him up and began to give him the airplane spin.

“Don't, Izzy,” I said, “you'll slash him to ribbons. There's too much glass on the floor.”

Izzy tossed him on the couch. Mad Jimmy ran out with his brown paper bag, stuffed it into the paperholder and then began cussing.

“Izzy, you stole my bottle of wine! I had another bottle of wine in that papersack! You stole it, bastard! Come on now, that bottle cost me 54 cents. When I bought it, I had 60 cents. Now I only have six cents.”

“Look, Jimmy, would Izzy take your bottle of wine? What's that next to you there? On the couch?”

Jimmy picked it up. He looked down into the eye of the bottle.

“No, this isn't the one. There's another one, Izzy took it.”

“Look, Jimmy, your friend doesn't drink wine. He doesn't want your bottle. Why don't you get off your imaginary kick and ride your bike the hell out of here?”

“I'm sick of you too, Jimmy,” said Izzy, “now peddle off. You've had it.”

Jimmy stood in front of the mirror adjusting what was left of the Panama. Then he walked out, got on Arthur's bicycle and rode off under the moon. He'd been at my place for hours. Now it was night.

“Poor crazy bastard,” I said, watching him peddle off, “I'm sorry for him.”

“Me too,” said Izzy.

Then he reached under a bush and got the wine bottle. We walked inside.

“I'll get a couple of glasses,” I said.

I came back and we sat there, drinking the wine.

“Have you ever tried sucking your own dick?” I asked Izzy.

“I'll try it when I get home.”

“I don't think it can be done,” I said.

“I'll let you know.”

“I fall about an eighth of an inch short. It's frustrating.”

We finished the wine and then walked down to Shakey's and drank the deep brown beer by the pitcherful and watched the old-time fights – we saw Louis get dumped by the Dutchman; the third Zale-Rocky G. fight; Braddock-Baer; Dempsey-Firpo, all of them, and then they put on some old Laurel and Hardy flicks ... there was one where the bastards were fighting for covers in the sleeper of a Pullman. I was the only one who laughed. People stared at me. I just cracked peanuts and kept on laughing. Then Izzy began laughing. Then everybody started laughing at them fighting for the covers in the Pullman. I forgot all about Mad Jimmy and felt like a human being for the first time in hours. Living was easy – all you had to do was let go. And have a little money. Let the other men fight the wars, let the other men go to jail.

We closed the place up and then Izzy went to his place and I went to mine.

I stripped, worked up a lather, hooked my toes in the bed rungs and doubled into a circle. It was the same – an eighth of an inch short. Well, you couldn't have it all. I reached over, opened it in the middle, and began reading Tolstoy's
War and Peace.
Nothing had changed. It was still a lousy book.