The house was a place of forlorn despair. The lawn was way overgrown and garbage, random junk, and disturbing sculptures sat rusting on the lawn like long-defunct icons. The windows were mostly broken from vandals and drunks that lost their temper but a couple were still intact. The door hung on its hinges and before it was a ripped screen door. Entering the livingroom you would see a few couches, a barrel with a few licks of flame darting out of the rim, two broken televisions stacked on top of each other, a small radio nearly incapable of being broken, blankets, junk, garbage, beercans. The walls were cracked and urine streaked up and down them from people too drunk or tired to make it outside (the toilet didn’t work because nobody paid for water). Blood and shitstains were all over the carpet and the couches, and a lamp hung from the ceiling with six bulbs jutting out from it. Two were broken, two just didn’t work and two were very dim. Flies buzzed hungrily about it occasionally landing and darting around the room. Dead rats and mice sat rotting with maggots in the corners and against the walls. There was a dining room with an table with several square holes in its surface sitting in the corner of the room and the chairs, all four, were without seats and four boards poking up from the floor. In the corner sat a cabinet full of broken wine glasses, cracked plates, and bent silverware. In the kitchen, the refrigerator was full of mostly beer, booze, and little baggies of dogshit, no food. Live fat rats ate rotting bread and meat on the counters and the sink drain was clogged with what looked to be human hair. Exiting the kitchen and into the basement you would find stirrups, an operating table, a furnace and a bathtub. The furnace didn’t work, the dirt floor was uneven. Holes were dug everywhere and overflowing with human waste. In the livingroom sat six bodies.
Cox sat on one couch with glazed-over eyes staring at the floor. Blood dripped off his crooked fingers, which someone had broken years ago, one by one, a man who claimed Cox raped his 7-year-old son. Cox never got them corrected, so they were crooked, hideous, maligned. A cigarette-burned blanket sat over his shoulders, and on his feet he wore two different flip-flop sandals. He wore a shirt that he made himself, painting black and white stripes up and down it, vertically over yellow cloth. There were bloodstains on it from when he drank draino and vomited blood all over himself. The blood dripping off of his arm and into a coffee cup sitting on the ground was from where he tried shooting up heroin. Everyone in the room was passing the needle around, shooting up, all trying to get aids, if they didn’t have it already, and most of them did. He wore a pair of shitstained briefs and was constantly reaching down to pull out his cock and stroke it in front of everyone, most of ‘em didn’t care, some twitched nervously.
Cochraine sat next to him half-drunk, bearded, wild-haired, pounding shots of cheap whiskey, Brookside, and waiting for someone to send the syringe his way so he could shoot up. By now the bloody syringe was on the second person in the group. Cochraine had a huge potbelly, lung cancer, 8 kids from different mothers all with drug or alcohol problems, and would often smoke two or three cigarettes at a time. Cochraine also refused to go to the bathroom. He would just urinate or shit in his pants and sit there letting it age. He smelled like an outhouse and a brewery, sometimes one more than the other.
Next to him on the couch was Harold, the human ashtray. He would sit shivering in filthy briefs and white socks taking whatever drugs were given to him. His hair was uneven and burnt in places and full of cigarette butts. The thing about Harold was that everyone, when they were done with their cigarettes, would walk over to him and put them out on him. Face, thighs, arms, torso, anywhere. Harold would whine with pleasure and writhe around in his spot. He rarely said anything and it would take him an hour to drink a 12 oz. beer. Harold was the one in charge of all the sculptures around the house, all the junk. He collected it off highways and railroad tracks on nightly excursions.
On the loveseat sat the obese Jerry, 543 pounds, also a fag by default. He would eat sticks of butter and whole cartons of eggs, drink cooking oil by the bottle, raw hamburger. His main fetish was dogs. He would often kidnap neighborhood dogs and shave them, then suck them off, jack them off, give them rimjobs or fuck them up the ass. All over him were scars from dogbites, crescent shaped scars, some bigger than others. Harold liked being fat, ugly and queer. It was the ultimate fuck you to the society that said you had to marry a woman and have two children and a minivan. Harold would often bring home young hustlers with the hopes that he could fuck them or get a blowjob, but it usually ended up with them kicking his ass or pissing on him and running away. The guy’s voice made you cringe. He was a five-year-old trapped in a 33-year-old’s body.
Fifth guy was a real psycho. Black guy, named Antonio, sounds Italian but what the fuck do I know. Crack smoker, the fucker sat there smoking crack while waiting for the bloody heroin syringe to be handed his way. Balled, pot belly, always his shirt off, he kept his bitch sleeping upstairs, an old woman who looked like she had flipped millions of burgers in her heyday. Had aids already and knew it but just got pleasure from inflicting the disease on a bunch of white drug-using punks. Went to jail a couple of times for beating up children on their way to school and stealing their lunches. Left them all broken and left for dead. He would often walk around the streets sometimes, smoking crack and flipping his pistol around on his right hand with the hopes that someone would fuck with him or say anything to him, but no one ever did. Not even the police and they patrolled the area from time to time. Sometimes he would shoot a cigarette or a cigar out of someone’s mouth who was walking by. When his crack ran out he would retire to the house and drink 40 oz. bottles of king cobra until he passed out, they were cheap. The guy was on welfare, but he knew how to make quality crack. Welcome to the community sir.
The final fuckup was Mike. The guy had two sons and an unwed wife and would often sit in the shithouse here, drinking fifths of Jack. Sometimes he would bring his television but most of the time he wouldn’t, and if people there didn’t want to watch whatever ballgame was on he’d promptly pack up and leave the place for his home. He smoked pot so he could be accepted in the black community, but drank about two fifths of Jack before he left the house for his own home. No one knew why he spent his time with us, he seemed like a square guy. Shit, he even coached his son’s fucking little league team and was concerned with whether they won or lost. Was like all he talked about. But the fucker was aloof, no one knew his position, whether he was a wannabe cop or a child molester. The point was that he stepped up and dished out the cash for the pot. And of course, everyone there wanted it. Sometimes we’d have to shove it in their faces but they took it in the end. And shit, this sad motherfucker has taken hits off Antonio’s crackpipe just to be in the scene. A goddamn baseball fan doing hard drugs. Just doesn’t make sense to me.
The last guy’s name was Wade if I didn’t mention it before and he was a writer and on welfare in addition to his huge paycheck as were all the guys aforementioned in this document. All writers, all on welfare or creating their income by illegal means. All of them had dreams of making it big, writers like Bukowski, rich and on a constant vacation. They would sit there in their stupors and write poems and short stories and think about how rich that shit was going to make them soon. Hopefully this kept them asleep at night, so they wouldn’t go out and fuck with the children that live around here.
A few more things I’d like to mention, as we go on, is that in one of the rooms upstairs, the broken bathroom, shattered lid and bowl, a man sits, Raymond, cutting himself with a single razorblade and watching the blood with fascination while jacking off, flow down the drain. He has a problem with drinking whole bottles of cherry-flavored cough syrup, which he does one after another. Afterwards, when his body is numb, he cuts himself, and bad. He’s cut his cock off, his ears off, his nose off, one of his eyes is missing, and his wrists are badly gashed, he’s inches away from death. He stinks, like a dead skunk on the highway. Also a writer. The bitch lies in an adjoining room, smoking her crack and waiting for her man to arrive. She’ll eat chips, or premade subs, shit they sell at gas stations. she’s to old to know the difference. But she sits and wait for him, her master, to get drugs, and to get fucked and beaten. She always harbored black eyes, scars, gashes. No telling when she’s finally going to kick off and die from all the abuse.
