Jim Beam's was a most tragic case. At first he had been so enveloped in work that he was neglecting his son, who became more and more alienated everyday and took to wandering around in the streets at night and bumming cigarettes. Jim drank Jim Beam heavily, hence his name, about a half gallon a day, and his job was so goddamn stressful no one expected him to live past 35. Eventually he had to go to Germany, for whatever petty yuppie reason, and decided to leave off his son with his father, whom he didn't know was a schizophrenic that actually believed he was a surviving SS officer. The guy had SS duds, and a pearl-plated .45 stashed in a shoebox under his bed. On his bedroom wall was a framed poster of Van Gogh's "Wheatfield with Crows." With a terse conversation and some pleasantries, Jim left his son Randy at the house with the maniac. Nobody was the wiser. It started with the man showing the kid pornographic magazines and his own twisted diaries, which he read to him about bedtime. In a week's time, grandpa's first check had come from Jim and he was on heroin again. When the kid gets home from school, he searches every room. Nobody. He goes into his grandpa's bedroom and there he stands, giving the Nazi salute in full uniform, pistol resting on the bedside table. "Son, stand over here, I will show you the courage of the Fuehrer!" Hands shaking, Randy timidly wanders in front of his grandpa, who picks up the pistol. "SIG HEIL!" he shrieks and shoots himself in the temple. Birds fly from the high-growing reeds outside and blood splatters all over the Van Gogh. He falls at the kid's feet, who looks down, picks up the pistol, and emotionlessly tosses it on the bed, leaving the room. He sits downstairs, wondering what to do, six years old. He started walking the streets again, and before the mail piled up too high or anybody noticed the kid, he stood over his dead grandfather's body staring at the Van Gogh, holding the pistol to his chest, just how his grandpa had done about a week ago. The gun goes off, and he's mortally wounded. Jim didn't find out until his business venture was over. He actually stumbled upon the whole scene first. In his mind he was too busy to call, but never to busy too send a check, always without a letter. He crumbled. He lost his job, got lost in booze, and started hanging out with a fence named Trunk who was paying for his hooch because he was sympathetic to his plight. One morning they sat there, and thieves walked in and out selling Trunk random shit, jewelry, car stereos, watches. Trunk actually had a cash register in his house for his illegal fencing activities. They were getting trashed when some guy walks in and offers to teach them how to cook LSD in exchange for a place to stay. They were so trashed they took him up on it and he informed them on how, even leaving a handwritten guidebook before passing out in a closet. They were tripping now, not to mention trashed, drunk and still drinking. Trunk gets up and goes to the bathroom. "You can have that guidebook, I can't handle this shit!" Jim cracks open a beer and washes down a shot. He hears crashing in the bathroom. Trunk comes out and says "OOOOOOOH!", all the time clutching his liver, "I JUST PISSED IN THE SINK!" Jim Beam slams down the rest of the beer and crushes it on his forehead. His eyes open to notice a Vietnam-era grenade sitting on the coffee table. "How much for the grenade?" he asks in clear drunken bravado. About an hour later Jim Beam is walking down a country road tripping his ass off and stoned cold drunk. He stumbles into a farmstead and crashes through a cornfield like Van Gogh during a psychotic break and his body slams into a chicken coup that erupts with jocular clucks and feathers swaying downward in the still air. "Ah, fuck this," he spits in a heavy miasma, pulls the pin off the grenade and flings it into the chicken coup. It explodes and the chickens have a brief shriek. Blood splatters all over Jim as the coup collapses on itself and then feathers float down and attach themselves to the blood dripping down his sweat-soaked clothing. A farmer watches all this, a pistol and a phone in hand. Jim looks and him and says, "What did I do?"
When Jim got out of county for vandalism and cruelty to animals he was a full-blown acidhead and acid dealer. His favorite acid pastime was painting and rearranging his home. After he sold off all the product he cooked up he would trip himself and paint his walls. He would rearrange his family pictures, turn them upside down, sideways, diagonal, and paint the fronts of them. He would paint his walls, little sections at a time and then repaint over portions of those sections with different colors. He would put all his lamps in one corner and turn them all on after spray-painting the light bulbs. He'd paint the floors then walk over them with bare feet and leave painted footprints all over the painted floors all over the place. All his mirrors had nails pounded into them. You could only make out your reflection in them in certain places. Some had railroad spikes. Sometimes he would climb up on ladders and paint his ceilings, and the paint would drip down and mix with the paint blotches on the floor. Of course he's fucked on acid this whole time. He would save all the bones from his meals in small coffins that he would purchase from the morgue, claiming his child had just died of crib death. Those were all in the basement with a dirt floor no doubt. In no time he had a home that would make Ed Gein run for the hills, ripping his flesh suit off and crying for his mother.
