I’ll never spare another dime for those filthy beasts. Those were the last words I ever heard Mama Precious Tuck speak. Then Uncle Tuck came across the room and smashed her upside the head with the cast iron shovel from the fireplace and rolled her inside the old rug that had lain on the floor of the parlor for five generations of Tucks. He used the shovel to strike the rolled up rug several more times where I guess he figured her head was. After that we took her out back and threw her in the bed of his pickup. He covered the rug with a tarp. He said come on. Uncle Tuck drank half of a fifth of Jim Beam on the short drive down to the chinchilla ranch. I sat in the truck and fiddled with the radio dial while he dragged the rug out. I watched him haul her across the lot and down to the pens. I rolled down the window to catch the breeze. Above the music from the radio I heard a lot of screaming and then Uncle Tuck came walking back up the hill with just the rug. He threw it in the truck and came over and got in the cab. He sat silently contemplating the view through the windshield, the barren weed strewn lot and down the hill the ramshackle structure he’d constructed to house the ranch. Did you feed her to the chinchillas, I asked. Weren’t expecting her to still be alive was all he said in answer. He reeked of liquor. And chinchilla cum.

sundays

Sunday night melted into oblivion around the fifth tumbler of chilled vodka. But what else are sunday nights good for? Perhaps you attended church services earlier in the day or perhaps you opted for turning your back on God and you spent the day lounging in the park (the park that He gave you by the way as you shit and piss on His name), regardless by the time the evening hour strikes there is little to do other than await the beginning of the work week. But that is you. That is not me. My sunday nights are my friday nights and so mayhem is called for. A mayhem that is allied by two days worth of stupid yuppies with newspapers and kindles tucked under arm smugly inspecting their fucking poached eggs. Alas, sunday night thrill seekers, our numbers are few. Who do you usually find out on Sunday nights in the bars? Alcoholics who can't let go of their weekend bender and other likeminded losers, lonely pedarists, and rogue ne'r do wells.

It used to be that sunday as a whole was a day of rest. Families came together on sundays to bond with their Lord, sing hymns and shout prayers and later gorge on home cooked meals served by black folk in uniform; belt straps were loosened and bonnets were unfastened. But then the blue laws were repealed and sunday family gatherings were guaranteed to dissolve into front yard granddaddy brawls and the inevitable brandishing of a firearm by sun down. We have lost a part of ourselves, people.

My great uncle cicero died on a sunday. He was approached by a rattlesnake but refused to cleave its head in two because it was the Lord"s day and the reptile took advantage of this pious man and struck uncle cicero twelve times til he was fat with the fatal venom. It was a terrible sight to witness. His face turned black and swelled; his tongue too grew to an abnormal size and hung out of his mouth like a slab of fatback. Before he expired he begged for water. They would not give it to him. It was too far to fetch a pail auntie coot said.

get that chinaman off my american back

I am not at all up on politics. I mean I follow things. But it seems trite. I know my place. Maybe thanks to modern devices I am granted access to information that had I lived a century ago would not have been privvy to me; regardless what does it matter? I embrace modernity. I don't want the responsibility of making a blip, but if I am aware...please. It is nice to know when the hangman is coming for you.

The bottom line is that you can talk all of the shit you want on us, being the United States of America. And therein lies the beauty. Free speech has survived. We saved it. We deserve the shit talk. We fucked up in some places. Most places. But that had little to do with the will of the people. In America you can go down to your closest street corner and you can rant dissent all the live long day.

Meanwhile those chinese bastards are feedin their babies mercury.

god bless the USA

You know, lo these many years ago when I first arrived at the Belvedere Estates I could barely lug a trunk of books and a soiled futon mattress up the steps into this place so how in the hell did the people who live above me manage to get a fucking piano up there last year?? Somehow they did. Do you know how I know this? Because daily I am tormented by the sounds of the contraption being banged upon. Perhaps if I had a Glenn Gould type up there blitzing through the Goldberg Variations I could live with it. Instead I'm stuck with deviant homosexuals who periodically can be heard sobbing and moaning followed ten minutes later by morose dirges played out on the ivories. Some afternoons it sounds as if there are several people up there laughing, tipping champagne flutes together, gathered around the piano belting out show tunes as if in a Noel Coward play.

I wouldn't say the music tortures me. But sometimes I like to take a nap in the midday. Just as I am about to drift off there will be a ferocious trouncing of the keys from above and I am jarred from beneath my snuggie. I suppose that I could go upstairs and complain, but I really haven't a leg to stand on when it comes to issues of bothersome neighborly distractions.

There have been times when I might have thought that the rest of the building was plotting against me. I suppose once upon a time there were regular bouts of long noisy nights but I think that the married life has cured me of that malady for the most part. Not to say that there is not a backslide now and again every few weeks. Living in the city is all about making compromises.

Let them tickle their ivories by day and I will have my nights of Bruce Springsteen's Jungleland at maximum volume.

There was a story in the building that circulated for a while about a summer afternoon when the relative calm of the foyer and halls were interrupted by a flailing screaming naked lady who ran out of the front door and up Belvedere Street. This being The Haight Ashbury one flipped out screaming naked hippie was no big cause for alarm but everyone in the building wondered from where did this woman come? It was a mystery to me until I finally realized that the time this streaking was supposed to have happened would have been when I was overseas visiting Steve and Derek in Korea. I had let my less than savory friend Glenn sublet my apartment while I was gone. I knew it had to have something to do with him. And he admitted to it without hesitation once I had a chance to ask him about it several years later.

He said that he had gotten off of work early and sat in my apartment and drank a bottle of wine. He wanted to have a drink so he went out and walked down Haight Street to Murio's Trophy Room. This is the kind of bar where you can wear a shirt with mustard stains down the front and not feel out of place. This bar smells like a million gallons of stale beer and the lost souls who sucked em down and pissed em out. Once ensconced in this bar Glen attached himself to some schizophrenic broad whom he was able to ply with cheap whisky. Somehow he managed to get her to come back to my apartment with him. I don't know maybe he told her he had a pony or something. Then the story gets vague and I'd rather not know anyway but I guess the woman was half crazy and homeless and Glenn tried to get romantic with her...although this doesn't explain the nudity...whatever. He ended up stiffing me on three months rent anyway.

Fun times. City Livin....

hesser

Marta's room is empty. Marta has moved out. Under duress. Her words. She accused me of not doing my share of the housework, of not paying my bills in a timely fashion, and of eating her expensive groceries from The Fancy Pantry when she wasn't looking. Guilty of all charges I confess. I have no patience for chores nor the build; I am unemployable, my finances are bust; and I am a remorseless glutton. I know these things to be facts so there is no illusions or spells being cast over me by an evil witch. It is simply my nature. None but a very few have the strength of will to change their given nature. Certainly, not the fuck I. We have very little time here to spend and I can't help but wonder if it is not better to accept the way nature shapes us rather than fritter away the hours and days laying fruitless siege after fruitless siege to our habits and passions however ill placed and disgusting they may be. Man cannot assail his nature with any success. It is a pointless study. But that is pure philosophy. The economics are that Marta has vacated her room. As to the charges that I have answered to, in my defense it should be recorded that Marta works at The Fancy Pantry and most of the grocery items that I ever pilfered from her shelves she had in fact absconded with herself. Not that a theft justifies a theft, but there are surely grades of guilt that are influenced by such information. Regardless the room must be rented or ruin will befall me.


Hesser fights his compulsions against my recommendations. He always has ever since I have known him which is a long fucking time. I am trying to think of a famous army that lost a lot of battles because I would like to make a comparison between the two. Hesser is a sloth much as I am. Hesser lives with his parents most of the time. Hesser is probably one of the fattest people I have ever seen. There are some fat people who when you look at them in pity you can think to yourself, what a shame he would be quite handsome otherwise. With Hesser this doesn't happen. He's just always sort of been this monster. But Hesser believes in miracles. He actually believes that by sheer force of will one day he will explode from the hulking horrible man shell within which he writhes and emerge anew from the wreckage which I can only imagine as looking like blown apart scattered piles of bacon and hamburgers and hotdogs mixed up with pizza crust, spaghetti, mashed potatoes, and candy bars.

There is an Indian restaurant in town doing an excellent lunch buffet that Hesser and I are no longer allowed to attend. He is at fault more so than I it seems to me. On the other side of the street from there is a sandwich shop where we have found shelter and succor. From our seats in the window armed with bulging hoagies, salty fries, and tall sweating mugs of fountain soda we exchange rude gestures with the Hindi when they come out for smoke breaks across the way. Fucking dot heads. I ask you, when is a buffet not a buffet? When you secure for yourself every slice of naan that comes out of the oven for a forty-five minute stretch to the audible chagrin of a grousing mob of office drones and retarded housewives? When you upend a cauldron of goat doing battle with some wizened rail thin contemporary, but not disciple, of Gandhi over the last piece of tandoori chicken? Or is it when you have quaffed a urn of chai tea and then are denied use of the restroom and you wet yourself? It deserves inquiry. Two days after I realize that Marta is no longer living in the house I am sitting eating my hoagie and having the same discussion that I have with Hesser around this time every month. The First approaches. Whereas I am scrambling to lay my hands on the finances to forestall homelessness exasperated by the situation with Marta's empty room, Hesser is laying down the battle plans for yet another campaign against his generous gut. For if Hesser is anything, he is a man who puts his faith in cycles. He believes that dates and days are important. He must begin things at the beginning or else he reckons that he will descend into the gyre. Mondays are important. The first of the month is important. A Monday that falls on the first of a month is portentous. Of course this leads to many failures and setbacks as his reasoning naturally follows that if he is somehow trounced on that first day he must wait for the next cycle to arrive before he can launch anew his doomed warfare. In the interregnum all manner of degradations upon the land are encouraged and so it is that he retreats en mass roundly defeated time and again.

Marta has played her hand well. I was oblivious to her last remaining days in the house and I was oblivious to the fact that they were indeed her last remaining days. She planned her decampment, at some point ceasing to pick up my slack in the department of house chores. Once I found her note cataloging my crimes and announcing that she had in fact removed herself and her belongings I also came to the realization that the house was a filthy dump. The garbage had piled up almost to the rafters. She must have cringed those last days having to remain in such squalor in order to spring her plot. I applaude her for that. In that state there is no way I can show the house to any decent prespective roommates. She thinks that she has forced me into a position where I will have to take broom in hand and brandish dish rag. Methinks not.

Hesser has been talking for some time now about a new plan. He doesn't know what it is exactly. That's why, he explains, it is going to be new. And as I sit in deep contemplation of the joyous mastication of my hoagie in harmony with the salty mush of french fries and the syrupy surrender of soda flowing down my gullet, it dawns on me. I will rent the room to Hesser. I will make it a sort of prison. I will imprison him from himself. We will outfit the room with a mattress and nothing else. No, and a jump rope. We will seal the windows. We will install a tremendous lock on the outside of the door. The room has its own small water closet with a sink. A small trap through which food will be delivered can be cut into the base of the door. I call this room the diet chamber as I begin to sketch out my plan to Hesser. He listens thoughtfully as he crams his sandwich into his cavernous cake hole. See those Hindi over there, I ask him, they're laughing at you. In fact at that moment they are. Two of them. One is the waiter who'd refused me passage to the bathroom, the other is the cook who had screamed at Hesser. The cook wags his middle finger at us. Fucking curry stains. Let's show those assholes, I tell Hesser. His eyes glaze over for a moment, staring out the window and across the street at his gesticulating tormentors he begins to nod in assent his heavy head.

end part one

if you spill, don't just refill.

I ain't got much decorum but I got some. I may not be a fully functioning member of society but there are some of the meetings that I am allowed to attend. A few of my pins are firing. I know how to get dressed. Leaning towards just slipping into a moo moo these days or a emptied out pickle barrel but I can assure you my street moo and my street barrel are relatively clean. Now the way I was brought up, and I think this is true of most folks, it was just natural to change your shirt if say you poured a slurpee down your front or dropped a plate of spaghetti and meatballs on yourself. If you shit your pants or peed all over yourself switching to a new pair of britches was the order of the day. Into adulthood I somehow managed to cling to these articles of faith. But of late in the course of my meanderings around the city and especially it seems in the Market Street and 6th Street corridor environs there appears to be no such compunction for quite a large swath of individuals.

I was on MUNI yesterday. Prayers were recited and good luck charms were rubbed. And yet despite these precautions in the middle of the day the driver unloaded all of his passengers at the island on Market and Van Ness because it was his turn for a coffee break and there was no one waiting to assume the wheel. What the fuck is wrong with this city? Here's an idea. Bring a fucking thermos. I have no illusions about the field of bus drivery. It must suck to drive a bus in this decaying city. There are no smiley face Thomas the Train types chugging along through bucolic landscapes here. More often than not if you dare to let your defenses down for a moment to look out upon the passing city you'll just see some bum dropping his trousers and shitting on the sidewalk. Wave, sometimes they wave back. They always seem happy. You would be too if you had abandoned civility to the point that you had no qualms about crapping in front of your fellow citizenry. Imagine the sense of freedom. You gotta take a dump? Fuck it, take a dump. None of this looking for a toilet baloney. Toilet paper? Use your hand. Hell, the Islams do it. And we know what a meritous society they've managed to create. A culture in which a man can't shake another man's hand as an act of greeting or solidarity or promise or friendship without fear of getting the other's faeces on his hand is a culture that we need to mobilize our martial forces to destroy. Oh yeah, we already are. Nothing like witnessing a smiling hobo defecating next to your doorstep to set the tone of your day. However be warned sometimes those smiles just turn out to be rigor mortis and that's the final dump you see running like a babbling brook down your sidewalk. The homeless are a tricky crew.

So. Expelled from the bus I opted to walk a few blocks down Market to see what I could see. The people that I passed were of varying stations in life. Some of them looked normal. Of course most did not. And by normal I mean at least partially clothed and capable of walking a straight line. Most looked a bit long in the tooth. Some looked downtrodden. A lot of these people had stains all over their fronts, both the bums and the semi-normal folks. Taco drippings, dried globs of mustard, burnt sheens of ketchup, slobber, boogers, these fucking people were for the most part filthy. They didn't seem to care a wit.

I have encountered the same phenomena at the offices of the DMV. And in this instance the crowd was of a much higher calibre of citizen. You have to assume that most of them had the means to own a vehicle. They didn't have as many cankers on their faces as the 6th Street crowd. And yet they looked like shit. People were lounging around in their pajamas. A woman sitting in the chair next to me looked like she had rubbed green jello into her blouse on purpose. How could you not look down and say shit I need to change my shirt? Or at least cover yourself with a jacket. Not brazenly sit there like a hussy with filth all over your front.

Hey, I'm no saint. If you know me than you know it's no leap of faith to opine that I too soil myself sometimes. Sure I've dropped a meatball out of my mouth and onto my lapels. Sure I have poured gravy all down my front. I've dropped a chicken in my lap on more than one occasion. But I feel shame. I feel terrible shame and I rush to hide my shame stain. I don't parade around out in the open with it like a badge of honor. Look everyone look how disgusting I am!! Look what fell out of the trough and all over me while I was feeding!!! Jesus. I was once caught out in the avenues stained and without a clean shirt to change into. I had been quaffing soda and eating fried rice by the bucket on Clement Street at a greasy chop suey stand and I had a small stroke. A piece of Chinese sausage got stuck in my air hole for a moment and I had a stroke. A small one. I poured Mr. Pibb straight down my front. The rice I dumped on top of a little Chinese hobbit who was unlucky enough to be sitting next to me. Once they revived me I realized I was stained. I begged a trash bag from the proprietor and he gladly obliged I think mostly to get me on my way. I punched a hole at the bottom and pulled it over my head and wore the garbage bag home. Join society people. That's all I'm saying!! Peace be with you and yours.

thoughts gathered while ruminating on an old chicken shack

I am in the process of reading John T Edge's treatise Fried Chicken: An American Story. It is a riveting portrait of an American obsession, which is the submerging of various chicken parts into vats of roiling oils of various denomination. It is a simple story that Edge manages to muck up with his philosophical ramblings on race relations. Must we? Black people make the best fried chicken. That's not racism, that's just the truth. Most white people are straight out dumb when it comes to fried chicken. They demand the breast. The breast has been elevated to a far higher position than it deserves to be. It lacks flavor and is wont to dry out. Give me a thigh or a back any day of the week and I will go happily and sit out under yonder tree and gnaw on that bone. Which tree? The one out yonder on the lawn of the courthouse.

But Fried Chicken is not just an American story; it's not just a black and white story; it's not a tale of slavery; nor a tale of the proud southern white heritage that did no wrong other than to respect the opinion of a constitutionality which afforded states with rights. No, friends, it is a universal story. Evidence the latest issue of The Economist, in an article about the present state of fragile peace in Tibet their man in Lhasa points to a newly built restaurant on the very site where a year before Tibetan rioters destroyed the building. The new establishment is a fried chicken stand called Dico's. Some of the best fried chicken I have ever had was enjoyed in the lands of the yellow peoples. The people who know not our God. Once when roughing it in a Malaysian backwater I was sustained by the sighting of a giant glowing Colonel Sanders. He stood towering above the distant tree line, seeming to know that I was a kindred soul, a fellow southerner far flung from home and hearth, who would find succor in a three piece combo meal: a leg, a wing, a thigh, some kind of biscuit thing, a crappy side of instant mashed potatoes with a brown stain that was to represent gravy. And fell upon it I did with a beastly vigor before traveling on back into the sweltering night of jabbering Majumbos and clattering hansom cabs.

But forgive me. I digress. Scholarship is a wonderful thing, Innit? Reading Edge's Fried Chicken put me in the mind to ponder the fierce regionalism that often accompanies particular foodstuffs. In North Carolina to this day people feud about which type of BBQ should represent the state. I land on the vinegar side of the debate and I will patronize Stamey's until the day they pull the cold hard hushpuppy from my dead fist. It is interesting to note that no other state's style is even bothered a mention. Memphis BBQ, bugger off. Texas BBQ, no thank you. But once again, BBQ is hardly an American monopoly. There is many a late night after the bars have called for the last round that I will load the missus into a cab and make a beeline for the avenues where you can generally stand on any corner and throw a rock and hit a Korean BBQ joint. I am much enamored by this country's supping traditions. Fill me up with firewater and I will throw just about anything on the grill. Tripe, chicken hearts, horse flesh, turkey beaks, pig ears, it's all there for the plunder. Next time I intend on eating a goat.

The Koreans know a thing or two about pickles, too. I do believe that my grandfather would have loved cabbage kimchee. He was a great eater of spicy things. He especially loved the spicy peppers that my grandmother pickled every spring and summer. They came from his garden. Every year until the day he died my grandfather planted a garden. It got smaller over the years, but in my earliest memories it consumed his entire backyard, an acre or so that rolled down a lush green hill to a brambling wood that bordered the property. In the autumn and winter it lay fallow. In the spring he planted rigorously and by summer there were rows of tomato plants, runner beans, squashes, and watermelons. He worked in it in the hours between coming home from his job at the Pfizer plant and sunset. It seemed like in the high summer it was still light out at nine in the evening. It would have cooled off by then and we would sit in the dusk at the picnic table and drink sun tea and when I was young I would chase fireflies and catch them in a jar and make a lantern. It just seemed natural to me that in the summer we picked tomatoes and corn and beans and chili peppers from the garden and what we didn't eat or give away my grandmother and great aunt pickled or canned.

Chow-chow is a decidedly southern recipe of mixed pickled vegetables sometimes spicy, sometimes not, but it has echoes of the orient in its origin evidenced in the name which seems to mimic how a besotted redneck might suppose the Chinese tongue or such to sound. My grandfather liked it spiced with jalapenos and he ate it out of the jar with a spoon. Every family has a different chow-chow recipe. Ours had okra, beans, peppers, tomatoes, and white corn. My grandparents have passed away now. The house was sold last year. The garden is gone, but I wouldn't be surprised if one of these days we came across a box of my grandmother's canned chow-chow stored somewhere in my dad's attic. I have these type of food memories sometimes late at night when I am sitting alone in the dark eating sweet sixteen powdered donuts toying with the idea of abandoning gluttony.

Which brings me finally to what I had hoped to write about tonight: the ubiquitous donut shop. The donut shop is a fixture in cultures around the world. More often than not, serving customers twenty-four hours a day, the local donut shop is a bastion of marginal characters and working class joes most days of the week and especially in the odd fellow hours. In America, Sunday mornings before and after church meetings are a different matter. In Greensboro Krispy-Kreme reigned supreme for many years. I have fond memories of having a glass of milk and a glazed donut at the counter before my mother whisked me off to church on Sunday mornings. We saw the same faces every week in their sunday school clothes. They might not be going to our church but they were going to church somewhere. Delicious morsels of dough and lard and pasteurized cow juice churned in my belly as I listened to my Sunday school teacher promise eternal life after death. Not something that has ever sounded really attractive to me, even back then. During one lesson I raised my hand to ask if we would still be able to sleep once we were in heaven. I was beaten. Later the pastor took my mother aside and asked her to keep an eye on me.

The Krispy-Kreme donut shop on Battleground Avenue was also a donut factory. From the counter you could look through a huge glass window and watch the white frocked workers manning their stations as donut batter was squirted into a coursing river of hot oil, they bobbed along like little inner tubes as they cooked before being deposited onto a conveyor belt which ran the length of the window. The travelling donuts were sprayed with glaze or topped with chocolate frosting, checked for quality, double checked for purity of form, and then lovingly either transferred into cartons festooned with the Krispy-Kreme logo to be shipped to local grocers or brought immediately still piping hot and pillowy to the front display box where they were pounced upon by the general populace. The Krispy-Kreme purist never strayed from the traditional donut ring glazed with sugar. Most likely it was paired with a cup of coffee or a glass of milk. Over the years Krispy-Kreme expanded into specialty donuts. My mom loved the lemon filled. I did, too. But my truest passion was the Bavarian cream filled donut. Man, that was something good. And yet most of the time mom came home with the classic dozen glazed. It was the healthy thing to do.

Dunkin Donuts celebrates its 60th birthday today. I am not sure exactly when Dunkin came to Greensboro to challenge the local darling Krispy-Kreme, but I am sure that there was such an outlet on Battleground Road sometime before my mother sold the family manse on Robinhood Drive and moved us out into the swinging seventies County of Guilford. I don't see how they survived. Greensboro residents were fiercely loyal to Krispy-Kreme. But survive it did and over the years when I had occasion to pass the dunkin donut shop the parking lot was usually full. If you have such a mind you may remember the seminal Dunkin Donut commercial on television which portrayed a loyal donut baker making his way to work in the wee hours before dawn with the motto: "Time to make the donuts."

Many were won over by this humorous TV ad, but not I. I continued to frequent The staid Krispy -Kreme store that was not as flashy and modern looking as the Dunkin Donuts down the road a few miles. Dunkin Donuts had scads of different donuts. Krispy-Kreme maintained the selection that they had offered for years and by god that was the fucking right thing to do. I never caught on to the ritual of church, but to this day I cherish the ritual of having milk and donuts before actually going to the pain in the ass church.

When I finally did go into the Dunkin Donuts shop on Battleground I was with Bernie, we were wandering the streets in the middle of the night, and we were high as shit on acid. That was not atypical. I don't even know why we went in there. I couldn't even see straight. I didn't need a donut. I needed a shot of Thorazine. The counter lady had downs syndrome. Or we had a collective hallucination. I have never been sure which one it was. She freaked us out. We never ordered anything. We got up and ran from the building. A couple of cops were sitting in their car in the parking lot sipping coffee. They didn't even bother with us, recognizing that we were mere buffoons out larking about without parental supervision. I guess since we didn't have a car they figured the only damage we could do would be to ourselves.

I have since embraced Dunkin Donuts. Why? Because Krispy-Kreme betrayed us. Krispy-Kreme went on the road in the eighties and nineties. It became an overnight sensation. When a krispy-Kreme outlet opened on Rodeo Drive in LA the line to get in stretched around the block. At some point some executive decided that the old Krispy-Kreme original stores looked outmoded and old fashioned. Some fucking jackass signed the order to destroy the old stores and in their place rebuild crappy fast food style buildings with drive-thru windows so you could get your donuts without getting out of your car. The bastards!!!!! They tore down the donut factory and the viewing window and they turned Krispy-Kreme into a shitty plastic corporate entity. I recently read that they are on the verge of bankruptcy. That's fucking typical. The suits were in such a hurry to get to the top of the world that they forgot their past. Dicks.

Nowadays I am philosophical about the rise and fall of Krispy-Kreme. I drink Dunkin Donuts Dark Roast Coffee and on the rare occasion that I actually want a donut, I go to Happy Donut. It too is open all hours of the night. And the Chinese own it. They make a good donut. They're partially made of card board but at least they seem to be lead free. Skip the glass of milk.

FTP (fuck that place)

I left work tonight so fucking frustrated that I just have to try to write it out of my system if I am going to get any peace. Join me if you care to. When I was a young man and I embarked upon a career as a dishwasher I had the opportunity to work in the dish room of a little seafood shack that sat not too far from the train tracks on a road that was called Spring Garden. In that dish room there was a small window. That window did not look outside. It was a conduit to the kitchen which was on the other side of the wall and without warning sizzling hot spent pans would come hurling through to clatter into the dish sink. There was furious activity on the other side of that wall and I was curious to see what was going on but of course if I didn't move fast enough one of the cooks might hit me in the face with a saute pan.



I started by cleaning potatoes and wrapping them in foil. I cleaned shrimp ass. I scrubbed mussels and pulled out their beards. I followed a recipe to make a vat of cole slaw. Finally one night I was trained on the fryer/steamer station. By the end of the night I was coated in grease and hushpuppy batter. I discovered, as did some of the women I consorted with, that standing in front of a steamer for six hours steaming oysters and clams did terrible things to a man. I stunk like a Briny crack whore.



Night after night as I worked on the line in the kitchen I became more and more in touch with what this whole job is really about. Time. The flow of it. And the zen idea of the masterless master of mastication. There is really nothing to cooking that is difficult. With a repertoire of about two dozen basic concepts you can work wonders. But when you put yourself in the situation of having to replicate those few basic concepts in a constantly changing order with an ever changing inventory of ingredients repetitively hopefully perfectly under the looming taskmaster of the unforgiving clock, you have trespassed into the realm of the line cook. A hideous beast, some might say.



Hopefully in the chaos of your night, you are still directing the current of the rapids. Hopefully you are the master without a master. Hopefully you are the clock. You are the pendulum inside of the clock. Everything in the kitchen up to the moment that the waitress puts in the first ticket of service is Prep. Mad prep. In every corner, on every surface, with every hand on deck. The more preparation you can get done before the service starts the better off you are going to be. If you do not have your mise en place you are going to sink like a fucking rock to the bottom of the blackest sea.



One of my worst experiences as a line cook ever happened at Delucchi (I could say that sentence more than once). The morning of New Year's Day 2001. I had gotten myself involved with this ridiculous place a few weeks earlier by jumping ship from the Pasta P. Both of the chefs at Delucchi had turned out to be complete lunatics. Complete wrecks. They both had horrific drinking problems and they were crooks. Let me say that I am not without flaw. On that new years eve I went out and got shitfaced with one of the chefs. I probably drank a bottle of tequila myself. This may sound ass backwards but one of the things that was fueling my drinking that night was my nervousness at having been assigned to cook breakfast the next day. I had made it clear to both of the chefs that I was not versed in egg cooking but they had waved it off like it was no problem. I was two hours late to work the next morning. I had been scheduled to come in at seven and work with one of the chefs to prepare for breakfast. I was smashed. I was seeing double. I had shit in my pants. My mouth was full of vomit. There was no preparation done. Not even a single egg cracked. He was in no better condition than me. He had arrived on time but he hadn't done jack shit. As soon as he saw me, he shook his fist at me and split. He just left. The waitstaff opened the doors and people began to flow in.



And then the terror began.



One of the most depressing things about business being slow at Delucchi is that you lose your sense of timing on a busy line. Of course one of the most shitty things about Delucchi is that when it is in fact busy the kitchen gets slaughtered with tickets because the line is not big enough to accommodate the volume of orders. You try to tell this to some people and they look right through you. They give you the zombie eye. Because they don't really care do they? They just want to get the shit out of their hands as fast as possible and fuck the kitchen.



But anyway back to being slow. It has been painfully slow. It has been "shitting money" slow. Actually today turned out to be a good day. I got in early and poked around in the walk in for a while and then I made a batch of minestrone that came out really nice. I ate some eggs with kale and chicken breast and then I went out to the line and cut the saute cook early and took over his position. And then for four hours I cooked. I finished up the breakfast service and hummed right along with lunch. Tickets flowed in and tickets flowed out. It is a very spiritual inner place. Being at one with the line. I may scream an obscenity now and then but it is all zen. I also set up my mise for the dinner menu because at that point I was feeling a good buzz from working nonstop for four hours in front of the machine at my station and I planned to cook into the night.



Dinner began. I was at the helm. We were making some nice food. It was steady. We started getting some business. I liked that. I had everything timed out perfectly. I was just rolling along putting out tickets, building my pans, slamming them in the oven, firing my stove. There was a slight rush. Of course two tickets of parties of six came up at the same time along with three deuces and a four top. I started timing it all out in my mind as I began to build my sauces and instruct the expediter what I needed. All six eyes on the stove were firing. I looked back at the line of tickets one more time and felt like I had it all together. I put myself into auto glide and started bringing it all together. I was the clock. It was a beautiful thing.



Then for some reason the expediter moved over to the four burner and fired up some pans. At first I thought he was taking the initiative to get a few of my sauces going for me. Ok, whatever, I'm thinking, but dude don't throw me off my timing. And then I realize that he has fired everything. I'm like, what the fuck are you doing you idiot!!!?? It was so smooth. I was the clock. I had the tickets planned out down to the second. I don't know what the fuck the guy was thinking but it fucked everything up. The food came up pell mell, half ass, completely off time. I was so fucking pissed. What the fuck. I am supposed to be the leader of this brigade of buffoons. Lord, deliver me!!!



I need a white guy.



Thanks, I feel a little better now.

Richie rides again

"where can a man get a goddamn hamburger in this town?!"
"well I reckon they'd rustle you up one down at Mr. Mcdonald's."
"where's that?"
"go on down the road a bit from here and when you start smelling horse shit so bad you can't hardly stand it that's where the stables will be and Mr. Mcdonald's is right next door."
"thank you gentlemen."
"sure partner."

Five minutes pass in silence.

"did you see that fellar, Henry?"
"mmm-hmmm."
"darned if he weren't the smallest little fancy fellar I ever seen in these parts."
"mmm-hmmm."
"had him a six shooter, he did."
"mmm-hmmm."
"said he was looking for a hamburger."
"mmm-hmmm."
"curious little fellar."
"mmm-hmmm."

Richie frockmor steps from behind a stack of bales of hay. The two old coots look surprised. the fat one swallows his plug of tobacco. The one behind the counter pushes his hat back on his head and whistles.

"you like to scare the bejesus out of me!"
"what did you call me sir?"
"do what? where did you come from?"
" you take me for a fool sir. i concealed myself behind these bales of hay and listened to your heartless banter. now answer me, what name did you call?"
"you're right easy to miss i reckon."
"oh, so you think so, shopkeeper?"
"i thought you was looking for a hamburger mister."
"what did you call me? i demand it!"
"what did I call you?"
"what did you call me, you dick sucking old toad!"
"my lord."
"i'll eat your heart for a hamburger!"
"my lord, my lord, I meant no harm little fellar!"

The little stranger wrestles his six shooter from its holster and empties four bullets into the old coot. He slumps against the counter and then collapses behind it. The fat one gets up and tries to run out. Richie Frockmor takes aim at his back and puts two slugs through where he calculates the old man's ticker to be. He must be right, the fat one falls forward on his face like a stone. On his way out Richie wipes his boot off on the side of the dead man's face. He mounts his horse with some difficulty and points the beast down the road towards what he already recognizes as the stench of horse excrement.

Crow Wood part one

The first thing Cletus and Hester Jackson ever knew about the Crow Wood was that there was rumored a feller that lived in there somewhere who brewed a fine pure shine. They were juvenile deliquents when the verification of this rumor became their charge and pursue it like noble knights of some kingly table they did. Neither of them had a car because they came from dirt poor families who lived in shacks out on Tobacco Road but they both owned mopeds upon which they poured much affection and attention. They were not aware of the painful truth that being seen zipping about town and country on a souped up moped, a moped obviously tended to with pride, did nothing for their image which they imagined to be that of a couple of tough guys. They were most often referred to as clowns. By everyone.


It was Fat Randy Buttcheeks who had gotten the boys started on the fable of Crow Wood. You see the two young men had been experimenting with altering their perceptions of things. They had started by sniffing glue and drinking Windex. Now, all kids do this so let's not be too hard on the boys. When they came to the conclusion that they wanted to try some alcohol they naturally went to Fat Randy's Pantry on Route Seven and asked Fat Randy Buttcheeks to sell them a bottle of Apple Jack. He refused the request on the grounds that the boys were not of age to purchase such an item. Cletus looked at Hester Jackson. Hester Jackson stared back at Cletus. They asked Fat Randy Buttcheeks how they were going to try out getting drunk if he wasn't going to sell them some Apple Jack. He looked carefully around him to make sure it was just him and the boys in the store at that moment and satisfied that he was safe he intoned: "Moonshine."


For five dollars Fat Randy Buttcheeks had given them a map. And what he explained to them that map proposed to guide them to was the domain of a country feller who was legendary for his crafted homemade spirit and went by the unusual name of Injun Deacon. Cletus observed: "People in these parts do have such strange things they want to be called." It was a brief philosophical moment that nobody noticed. Buttcheeks said: "Now boys," and he looked from one to the other, "the only warning that I must accompany with this valuable piece of information is that the region of which I speak is in the Crow Wood." Cletus and Hester Jackson shrugged. His solemn caveat had fallen on ignorant ears. Buttcheeks sputtered: "Hell, you mean you two dumbasses don't even know about Crow Wood?" Again the boys seemed perplexed and finally Hester Jackson spoke up: "We ain't neither of us ever heard of this Crow Wood place Mister Buttcheeks." The fat old grocery clerk chuckled.


Armed with their map the two boys left the store and went out to their mopeds in the parking lot. Fat Randy Buttcheeks watched them go, thinking to himself that that could well be the last time he would ever see those two morons. He had decided to spare them the details about the sinister nature of Crow Wood, about the stories of talking walking crow men who terrorized the isolated country folk. It was true that not many around those parts knew the stories, they were only whisperings occasionally exchanged between farmers. If there is such a thing, he'd thought to himself as he watched Cletus and Hester Jackson get on their motor scooters and peel out down the road, those two baffoons will be knee deep in it by sun fall.


Cletus had studied the map and taken the lead. They had been making good time for about half an hour. It was odd, he figured, that although he and Hester Jackson had zipped up and down the county roads of Turnip Town and Belvedere County lord knows how many times he found that he had made a turn and then another turn and then another turn and for some time had been speeding down a two lane blacktop that he didn't rightly know. He signalled for them to pull over to the side of the road. From his satchel he pulled out a flask of Windex and took a swig. He handed it off to Hester Jackson and pulled out the map again. He walked a piece down the asphalt and came to a number stenciled in the dust. It matched the map. "Yep." He said to himself and pointed for Hester's sake off into the distance down the road: "Crow Wood should just be a piece down that way according to this." He waved the map absently. Ambling back over to the spot where Hestor Jackson stood next to their machines admiring them lovingly, Cletus too took a long caressing look at the two mopeds and then signaled towards the open road. It beckoned to them. They revved up their mopeds and started off again. Neither one thought to ask the other who might have been out there stenciling random numbers on the side of the road that just happened to correspond with the map ole Buttcheeks had sold them. Cletus gave Hester a thumbs up.



They shot along the road following the broken center line as it dipped and curved through the oddly foreign landscape. At times Cletus would slow down and fall in next to the roaring moped that Hestor Jackson was perched atop and offer him a slug from the flask of Windex. In this brotherly fashion the two nimrods came to the entrance into Crow Wood.

Listening to Big Black's Racer X

Tonight was my last night on FaceBook. I'm not sure whether or not all of my loyal readers know this or not but earlier this evening I was accused of placing anti-semitic slogans on my FaceBook page. I was notified by FaceBook Control that my account was being suspended. I was not given a trial. If there was one, it was one of those..what do you call them...kangaroo courts. Let me tell you straight away: that it is all lies. Lies perpetrated by a zionist conspiracy that predates the illuminati by...well, some time...some good time.

I said something tonight like "fuck the Jews."

It was reported in the left wing media totally out of context.

And shame on them for that.

This hapless entry created a firestorm across the blogosphere and within mere hours I became an enemy of the Judaic People. My house was firebombed. Angry jewish youth fresh from a reading of Where The Wild Things are by Morie Sendak at the San Francisco Hebrew Center congregated on my street... There were shouts. Some insults. Some threats of violence. I wanted to get a bag of pork skins and a forty but these assholes hampered any move along those lines. I ended up having to order in Chinese food. I gave them the wrong address so when the driver called me from downstairs I bribed him into going around the corner and getting me a pack of Dorals, a two liter of Dr. Pepper, and a fifth of Bacardi. He called me again, I could hear in the background shouting maniacs. I said, circle the block. He did. I told him to park around the corner and bum rush the shit in. He did. I ended up dipping an American Spirit Cigarette in Robitussin and smokin that shittchZaaaaa with him as a pay off. Chill. Chill. He was a zombie when he left. Chasin the 'Tuss.

But you know. Honestly. I'm from the United States of America. And I'm a Christian. Just like we're supposed to fucking be last time I checked!!! And it galls me that we give shelter and succor to a nation that crucified our lord. But that is not even the worst of it. Somehow. Fucking God knows how. We have let the Moors set up camp right in our midst. Talk about being a flap of skin between an asshole and a set of nuts.

Thanksgiving is upon us once again. This one is a stretch this year. Thank you oh Lord for letting the Jihadists set up their missle launching pads next to our day care centers.

The funny thing is when we first got here to get rid of the natives we sold them booze, they got fucked up and we gave them the shaft. So when is the last time you were in the tenderloin at a liquor store owned by anything but a Mohammist? Suprise Honkey!!!

Religion is shit. It fouls up everything. I officially take a dump on it.

Not only that. I long for the good old days. When it was just The Whites and the coloreds.

Let's all pray for peace and togetherness this year....

the lesson

Two things I have done from two-story windows and both times these things were done at parties. The first thing is I peed on someones head from a second story window and the second is I fell out of a second story window. In the first instance I had to leave the party out the back door immediately. In the case of the fall, it was a Halloween costume party, and I was dressed as one of The Beatles. I was Ringo. Luckily I landed in some bushes, but it still knocked the wind out of me. I was ministered to by a bevy of lovely lasses. Actually, not.

What is with this phrase: "You learned your lesson." It is always spoken in a pejorative sense. People say it after you have inflicted some kind of misfortune on yourself. Misfortune is the lesson. The lesson is always that you can't do something. No one says: "Well son, you learned your lesson." if you have memorized all of the multiplication tables. They'd be well within their rights but they never would. A lesson is an instruction by which you gain some knowledge, but when someone whips out the "you learned your lesson" idiom you know that whatever the instruction was, it weren't no fun.

For a few months now I have been subscribing to the OED online and not really getting my money's worth. I didn't know the password for awhile. But today I am back in the hallowed virtual halls of the learned lexicon and I have poured over the entry for "lesson" and I am quite satisfied with myself. Not for having gained any forward knowledge or for having imparted some new information to you dear reader but just for the simple reason that I used my subscription!!! A lesson can also be a rebuke. A lesson can be a piece of scripture read to give moral compass to our actions. Above all a lesson is something to be studied on, to contemplate over, to assess with the compartments of the mind, that storming fatty honeycomb that rides behind our brow.

I never learned much from the scriptures. The "thous shalt nots" were more invitation to debauch than they were restrictive. The Church was an old noble ramshackled structure with many rooms and winding halls and sub basements. The deacons smoked cigarettes out the back door of the kitchen while the black ladies fried chicken and scooped heaping mounds of corn bread batter onto sheet pans. They were all good Baptists. On Sunday nights they came together and joined in hymn and celebration of the master, the celestial host of hosts. Crows rested on the church steeple, big black crows, big enough to carry a baby away in the clutches of their cobalt beaks. It was during Sunday service as I was playing hookey in the parking lot that I saw one of those crows snatch up a child and carry it away. It carried that child up into the clouds and then when it was done with its play, when it had grown bored with the manchild it had pinched, the crow released the baby and it fell from the sky.


I told the Pastor and the people what I had seen, but they didn't believe me. The deacons gathered around me and behind them the congregation stood. The child's broken body lay smashed and unmoving. The pastor pointed to a rock that he had seen me throw down as he approached. It was stained with sticky cherry colored blood. I described to them how I had wrestled with another crow that had lighted on the fallen body of the child and pecked at its eye and how I had grabbed up that rock and smashed the vermin crow with it and saved the child's other eye for verily indeed the terrible bird had succeeded in tearing out that one eye and swallowing it whole like a grape. But they told me there were no crows. No crows on the steeple. No crows anywhere. They told me what I had seen perched up there on the roof was demons, devils, hellions, the legion of God's enemies. I gnashed my teeth at the sun that day.

When they got me to the hospital they x-rayed my innards and sure enough there was an eyeball travelling down through the viaducts and tubes. When they tested the blood from the rock it was determined to be human and not of avian origin. I was a murderer, they said. No crow had stolen the child, the demons had tricked me. It was I who had lured the youngster away from the flock and in reward had bashed his brains out with a rock and gnawed his eyeball out of its socket and lunched on it. I was led to a cell.

The Pastor came to visit me. He sat across from me in my cell. He stared at me. I noticed the intensity of his stare, that his eyes had become sharp black beads. It was very quiet in the cell. As I sat there returning his stare not unfriendly I came to realize that he was a crow disguised as a Pastor. His breast was unusually plump and I caught a glimpse of the black mat of feather rustling beneath his vestments. It was so quiet. The Pastor's face began to crack. What seemed like the beginning of a smile became a jagged tear and the hard black bone of a beak crawled out. When the crow had torn his wings free of its human clothing, flesh and fabric, it sat solemnly facing me. It would tax me one of my eyeballs I was told and without further hesitation the bird pounced on me and latched onto my eyeball. We struggled, the bird and I. But just then a sheriff came into the cell to announce lunchtime and seeing the giant bird atop me pulled his revolver from its holster and fired a volley of shots at the beast. The crow toppled over me and to the floor dead with my severed eyeball gripped in its mouth. Half blind and in terrible pain I collapsed.





I was vindicated that day in the cell of child murder. It was never explained how I had managed to eat an eyeball but it was obvious that it had been the work of the devil. A gang of ruffians burned the church down saying that it was an outpost of Satan. Most of the deacons became avowed atheists. The Black ladies went on to open a successful southern themed restaurant called Miss Dilly's. And me? When I was released from the jail hospital some weeks of recuperation after the surgery that sewed shut my empty eye hole I was met by another angry mob like the one that had burned down the church. They lifted me up over their heads and carried me out to the highway on the limits of the city. I was forced to jump onto the back of the first truck that passed with a warning from the townfolk never to show my rotten face in that area again.



I went to live in what they came to call Crow Wood and from there many dark and strange things were said to take place so that no good christian ever ventured near.

wedge o lard

Have you ever noticed, and I'm sure you have, that some people like to drink their morning coffee in a gargantuan mug that requires two hands to lift and can later in the day double as a soup bowl or even a handy portable bidet? Not me, I drink my morning cup of java (usually Dunkin Donuts dark roast) in a dainty white porcelain cup engraved with a wonderful illustration of a hen. That's just how I roll.



And speaking of rolling, it's been a long gruelling recovery since I rolled my ankle outside of Specks a month and a half ago. Even at that moment as I laid on my back kicking my legs out like a upturned bug, looking up at the curious faces of passing pedestrians, I knew that I had done some serious damage. I groaned. Sparks, my drinking companion for the evening, who also happened to be imbibing on my dime that night, had a terror struck look on his face when he saw me go down. It was not so much that he was concerned about my health, methinks, as it was the dawning realization that his beer ticket had just taken a nose dive. I knew that I had very little time before I would be immobilized in pain. Calculating my chances, we dashed into the bar for a shot and a beer and then I limped out to a taxi and did the heroic thing: I went home. Forlorn and penniless, a dejected Sparks wandered back up to his flop house digs where he ate hormel chili cold from the can and watched the knife guy on the home shopping network. In the emergency room the next morning they x-rayed my foot, ascertained that it was not broken but badly sprained, outfitted me with a orthopedic boot, and sent me on my way with crutches...and twenty Vicodin. I had a physicians note that excused me from work for a week. From the hospital I made landfall on the couch about an hour later armed with my pills, my boot, my ice pack, and a cheeseburger, fries, and large fountain soda from the BurgerMeister. I had plans to write a historical novel during my down time on the couch, instead I managed to watch a lot of television, eat a lot of greasy Chinese delivery, drool a good bit, and lay in a drug induced stupor in my own filth surrounded by cast off takeout cartons and empty two liter soda bottles. I was like that dragon in The Hobbit, all laid out and bad ass on my pile of succor. It was a truly blissful time aside from the pain. The vicodin does strange things to the mind. Strange wonderful things.



Surprisingly there was intense pain and a month a half later there is still pain albeit not as alarming. I don't know if I am one of those persons who is more sensitive to pain or not. I believe the medical term is pussy. I'd like to think that I am a pretty tough customer. I can tell you this: I will not back down in the face of a serious life threatening hangover and if it looks like there is too much food on a plate I will still go for it. Pain is not something that you can share with someone. It is a private hell that others care not to hear about it or acknowledge for fear that they will get some themselves from somewhere. But as each day goes by it becomes less painful to stand on my feet in the kitchen for eight or nine hours and my ankle is not as swollen as it was before. I think my foot is a little bit crooked now but it may be my imagination. This is a lesson learned. Not really.

turkey leg the sequel

As he told it, when John-O worked in the kitchen at Rosa Linda's in Myrtle Beach the restaurant closed for a week so that the entire staff could go to The Dead shows in Virginia. They partied like monsters and after it was all over drove straight back and went immediately to work. That was one of the stories that I heard him tell often. John Hopkins was an ex-navy man. And like an old navy salt, he was a teller of stories. Unfortunately there were only about twelve of them. John Hopkins was something of an enigma. Originally from New York. Adopted. An obscure childhood. Details were vague as to how he had managed to end up at his sister's house in Greensboro. He had a history of drinking that may have contributed to this decamp from Myrtle Beach. He gave off the impression of being somewhat wounded, damaged. The last place you would expect to see him was at a dead show. But the idea of it was the kind of thing that made you curious about the guy.


I was the newbie at Bert's and a lowly dishwasher to boot. On my first day when John-O barked an order at me I assumed he had some authority in the kitchen and so I tasked myself to his demands. It took me about a day to realized that he was the goat of the kitchen. He was hunchbacked, tubby, stained, and not altogether fresh of scent. After that I ignored him when he told me to do something, it seemed like everyone else did. From my post in the dish room I would hear Mary, the chef, screaming at him in the kitchen about something he'd fucked up. Sometimes he would audibly groan as he was being lambasted. I remember one night he got it particularly bad for some slight of duty, later when I carried a load of dishes over to the hot line he was standing at his station red faced and muttering under his breath. He would bitch about Mary out loud often but as soon as she stepped into the kitchen he usually made himself scarce. She routinely swore that she was going to fire him. If a sauce could be broken, he broke it. If a recipe could be misread, he misread it. John-O dropped shit; spilled shit; slipped in his spills; fell on his ass; knocked over stacks of plates; and just basically earned the taunts of his fellow staffers on a daily basis.

I wish that I could claim that I took the noble path and befriended John-O while defending him from the insults and complaints of our comrades in industry. Befriend him I certainly did. But not even a St. Francis could have restrained from taking a shot at this guy now and then. He was a constant source of amusement. Despite all of his foibles and character flaws there was something lovable about John-O. He was a nice guy, he was just a goof ball. He wasn't an idiot, he just had really really bad luck. He was annoying, at times. He could be incredibly inept at his job which is probably why he never made it beyond the fry/steamer station. Yet, he manned that steamer with pride and there were times in the middle of a Friday night rush when we were buried in tickets and everything bordered on collapse and chaos that he would take wing and soar and save the line. Granted it was a rare night but I swear I recall soaring. The Fryer was his nemesis, his darling and yet his cruel master. At the end of a busy night, covered in hush puppy batter and reeking of steamed clams, standing at his station like a gunner rooted at his battery in the aftermath of a blitzkrieg, it was his responsibility to empty the oil from the cookers, scrape out all of the accumulated fried random matter, and filter the oil back into the fryer vats. It sometimes happened, more often than it ever should have, that he would forget to seal the release spigot at the base of the equipment. He would hoist up the heavy drum of filtered oil and begin to pour. Someone would scream his name in alarm. It was like the screaming of the damned. Wild-eyed, he would blunder forward realizing that he had done it again, blindly lamely fumbling for the salvation from himself that he so desperately needed. Gallons of oil would spill through the tank of the fryer and onto the floor before he could manage to seal the valve. It created a fucking mess and an extra hours worth of cleaning. Ok, maybe he was an idiot.

Yes, befriend him I did, but I also eventually took the lead in tormenting him. He made it so easy. And remember my philosophy on life: you'd better start making fun of someone else weaker and keep the people laughing or they may take a second look at you. It was natural to caricature him. Paul Durham, our bartender, and I took this to an art level. Perhaps this reveals our own sicknesses and faults but over drinks and the accoutrement's of drinks we would sit for hours and regale one another in full John-O character, weaving together all of the twelve stories that we heard him tell about his adventures in the navy and beyond. Rosa Linda's in Myrtle Beach was a recurring motif. The fabled road trip to the dead shows was canonical John-O. We developed a John-O voice that we fell into at any given moment. Whatever dialogue you were about to embark upon it had to be predicated by a long guttural groan. This was the groan that we so often heard John-O using in the kitchen. His groan was textural. His groan was layered. It spoke volumes.. When you captured the essence of that groan, you had the key to the John-O character. The groan could signal so many things. Usually pain and humiliation, of course. But there was so much more it could mean. He used it invariably before the retelling of any story and in this context the groan became authoritative and fraternal. Sometimes the groan was ruminative, philosophical. In mimicry we eventually interpreted the groan to mean "I am a complete moron and what I am about to tell you should be completely discounted as the ravings of a lunatic." Because that of course was the subtext to everything that John-O said and did.

I worked with John-O for years. I was promoted into the kitchen eventually and then progressed along the line until I was at the saute station. John-O and I worked side by side. I would have drinks with him at the end of our shift at the bar. He sometimes showed up at the after work parties and got drunk and made a fool of himself. Vomiting and falling were two of the tricks that he relied heavily on. Of course I have since added these to my own repertoire. I spent a lot of time around John-O. I knew a lot about him, but I also knew that there was a lot I didn't know. He was a Navy guy, that sort of wayward soul synonymous with the sea and its ports since the dawn of the maritime. He was Billy Budd with a beer gut and Halitosis. He'd run a ground in Greensboro. Sure sometimes I wanted to kill him, but other times I wanted to give him a hug and tell him to hang in there, he wasn't doing so bad. He was though, doing bad. He drank prodigious amounts of canned beer. He lived about two blocks from the restaurant. He didn't own a car. He had few social contacts and no chance with the ladies. He rode the bus if he had to get anywhere and if you have ever tried to catch or even ride a bus in Greensboro you know how truly bizarre and unsettling this experience can be. In truth he didn't go far from the little cluster of shops and bars where Bert's sat. On his days off as I was on my way into work I would see him strolling down the sidewalk somewhat lopsidedly, unshaven, toting a six pack in a brown bag. He was probably going home to sit in his bachelor's room, drink beer, and fantasize about bashing Mary's head in with a mallet.

One thing I will always remember about John-O was the time that he gave me a six pack of my favorite beer at the time for my birthday. Coors Lite. Not a big deal I suppose but I remember that he bought the six pack and walked all the way over to my house on Cedar Street to give it to me. Not the house on the corner that got condemned but further down the block where I lived later. It was August of course and a hot day. We sat out on my balcony and drank the beer and then he left and walked back to go to work at Bert's. John-O. That was a gesture of friendship that I really appreciated. I would like to be able to say that after that I became his protector but it wouldn't be true. It was a part of the dynamic of our relationship.

One day John-O came into work and asked to speak to Mary in the office. Later she came back in the kitchen looking worried. John-O came into the kitchen too and we all started prepping for dinner as usual. After work we found out that John-O had gone to the doctor for some reason and in the course of the exam it was discovered that he had cancer. The Bad kind. Lymphoma. He would have to immediately start chemotherapy. All of the cooks and kitchen guys were quiet. That was a quiet night, we all sat staring into our drinks. And we all drank hard that night.

The days passed. John-O had insisted that he still wanted to work as much as possible. We were a small restaurant. We were a family of a type and even though we treated John-O like shit, we cared about him. He kept coming to work though not as often and for not as long. He looked tired. All of the waitresses began to pour love and affection on him. It was funny. He loved it. Whereas at one time they would have been in the window of his station spewing spit and venom on him looking for a particular order now they were giving him hugs and back rubs. Even Brad, the lead line cook from Mississippi, who was constantly disgusted with John-O, would never again let him take up a broom or mop. I never heard him raise his voice to John-O again either. Eveyln, our expediter and baker, a notorious sour puss at times, brought him cookies.

One afternoon Mary came into the kitchen and you could tell that she had been in tears. She told us that John-O wouldn't be coming back to work anymore. I think some people started crying. Brad and Evelyn and I went out back to the cook's alley and smoked. Brad said something like "Damn. John-O." about a hundred times. After that Mary took up a crusade and she coordinated with John-O's sister so that he never wanted for anything. Everyone visited him. He was seldom alone. People took him to and from the hospital. I think during this time he also reconnected with his sister and her family and that they poured so much love into his life that he was happy. I confess it was hard for me to visit John-O. He was not going to win the fight. I only went over to his house a few times. I brought beer. I would like to think that he drank one but I can't remember, most likely I drank them all and just sat there and tried to think what to say. The day came that we got the news that John-O had died. It was sad, but it was over. John-O had fought and suffered with dignity. For all of his schleppings and shenanigans, in the end he had been brave in the face of death. In the end run, he took full advantage of all of the attention and affection being rained down on him as well he deserved to and surrounded by the people he loved and who loved him he gave up this mortal coil.

John-O passed away and things at Bert's were never quite the same again. Other cooks were hired to replace him and they came and went. Most of them were delinquents. The consistency on the line of the four of us: Brad, Evelyn, myself, and John-O was lost forever. Without John-O and his hijinks the kitchen was less fun. A few months later, running from my own demons, I left Greensboro for Topsail Island and after that to Oregon and then here to California. I talk with Paul Durham sporadically twenty years later but even now when I answer the phone if on the other end I hear the mimicry of a familiar groan I know exactly who is calling and I answer in kind with my own responding impression.

RIP John-O

turkey leg

Yeah, so people were like do your blog...we love your blog...
and cheers that you are doing your bullshit blog...

I need some meat though.

The business, the restaurant business, it is such a succulent bone.

I remember when I first got into it, where I was, what I was doing, and who got me into it.

I was working at Pace Warehouse, one of those Sam's type places, in Greensboro, at Guilford College road where it bisects market street, out by the church's chicken, stocking shelves at six in the morning. At times they had me driving a cherry picker even though I was not authorized to and I was high. On the weed. I ate my lunches with a rastafarian named Zebedia. We smoked more pot on our lunch break. One afternoon after lunch they tried to make him drive a cherry picker and he ran it into a dock. He just laughed, but they threatened me with either being at the top of the cherry picker or driving it...so I always drove. I devised a hiding place in the stock shelves where it was safe to smoke pot. They tried to make me put a stereo sound system shelf thing-a-ma-jig together but I couldn't do it. the instructions were ridiculous. I just fell asleep in the middle of the aisle but they didn't fire me, they told me to get some rest and report for duty the next morning...I'm telling you when they found me I was laying sprawled in the floor of the warehouse snoring. this is where America went wrong. They should have put their laundry money in socks and beat me to death.

I went home. At the time I was living with Jennifer Donahue and Steven Eigeman on Friendly Ave across the street from that fucking Hester's day care. It was a great house. There was a breeze. We had a back yard. Our backyard connected to all of the other back yards on the block by way of an old two track dirt lane that meandered behind the properties. I liked that back alley. that's what it was, an old alley. Dogs and cats would run around back there.

I was tired of that bullshit warehouse job. They were going to fire me anyway. I had served my purpose, the holidays were over. Zebedia had vanished. I was working with a bunch of redneck assholes. Jennifer was a line cook. When I could no longer afford to pay rent she forced me to get a job where she was working. She told me that there was a dishwashing job open at a new restaurant that she had started cooking at called Bert's Seafood Grille....yeah even at that point when she said it I knew it had an extra "e" on the end. I started working for Mary and Drew Lacklen scrubbing pots...as they say. I guess I was eighteen. Jennifer quit about a week after I started. It didn't have anything to do with me.

I was scrubbing pots, running the dish machine, eating scraps off of the plates, washing potatoes, and peeling carrots and I was blissfully happy. One day that asked me if I wanted to come over into the kitchen and work the fryer because the fry guy was on a bender and it didn't look like he was coming back...even though he was only down the block at a local bar...so I started doing it. Making French fries, hush puppies, and operating the steamer steaming shellfish. And then I started getting all of my miscreant friends jobs in the dishroom.

If you ever get to work on a restaurant line and you get into it, then you can probably understand how one gets hooked on it. Only a few losers fall for it. I did. I fought against it for a while, but it is the only thing I know....I think I love it.

The first team was Brad Hendrix, Evelyn Ruth, and Johnathan Hopkins. Brad was lead saute, Evelyn was grill and expeditor, and John-O rustled up the fries.

And so I lived my days.....

Mary was the chef. She was the driving force. The recipes were her's. If she was in the kitchen you really had to put your nose to the grindstone. We would come in at one or two in the afternoon and prep like motherfuckers up until the very last minute before five and then as soon as Mary left the kitchen to change the menu on the chalk board in the dining room we would bail out the back door and smoke a cigarette and take pinch hits. In the dining room at the stroke of the hour, Drew would unlock the door and the people would cascade in. Within fifeteen minutes we would be inundated with tickets, completely slammed, yelling, throwing shit on the grill, slamming steamer doors, dropping fry baskets into molten oil, lining up plates, garnishing plates, preparing the sauces, putting everything together so that it all came out at once, this with that, and that with this...tickets came in, tickets went out, everything just hummed, and you sweated and were drenched and your mind had to race to keep track of everything, and the slighest misstep would send the whole shebang into the crapper, but the rush coursed along and you would look up from having just walked in from your five o'clock smoke and it would be nine o'clock.....



that was the life...

And then John-o got cancer.....

and died.

For the love of oatmeal

Having a blog is a big responsibility. So is having kids. I don't have any kids. What makes you thing I will take care of a blog? When I had pets I either killed them or let them go. All of this information is in the public domain and yet recently as I was leaving my building on the Belvedere lane I was pelted with dried dog turds from a passing car. Moments later my cell phone rang and a electronically scrambled voice warned me to resume my blog or I would get worse than dog turds thrown at me in the coming days. Spurned readers.

It's easy to get up in the morning if you know that a steaming bowl of steel cut oatmeal is just around the corner. I have become addicted to this stuff. If you suffer from Chronic Shitting and Farting Syndrome (CSFS) like I do, start eating oatmeal everyday like a horse and you will soon reap the benefits of a solid stool mass that will exit from your crap chute like a duckling passing on gossamer wings. There's no mistaking the heart healthy bounty that is a churning pot of oats even if you do whisk in a half stick of butter before serving up that good stuff.

I was awoken by birdsong this morning. It was artificial but none the less I was reminded of this thing called nature which surrounds us. I have had a love affair and a fascination with birds since my youth. I was attacked by a black cloud of angry crows as I frolicked in a fallow field when I was six years old. The birds actually picked me up and carried me several miles before dropping me into a lake. A whiskered wise old catfish aided me to the shore. As he paused to give me a chance to catch my breath and thank him I found a rock in the underbrush and smashed his head in. We ate fried catfish for dinner that night. The next day the sun failed to rise. As it turned out the whiskered wise old catfish had been the manifestation of our lord come to the earth one last time to see if there were any kind and gentle people left. What he found was a psychotic pack of birds attacking a small human child and when he had gone to help the small child he had had his brains knocked out. So the next day from his throne, looking knackered, where he had managed to return after going through the uncomfortable transmogrification of being murdered, dragged across hill and dale, gutted, cooked and eaten as a fish and then having to make his way up through the spiritual zones, he shut the whole shit show down. He turned the sun off and shut down the heavens. He pulled a colossol sized rock from space and threw it at the earth. He nailed it. Needless to say this created pandemonium among the humans. Confused, they fell upon one another and in short time managed to wipe themselves out. Satisfied that the earth was in ruin he turned his attention to another dirt clod floating in the galactic muck.

I don't know who this guy is but I respect his ambition. Please note the neat pile of pickle spears piled atop the burger. Nice touch.

the trouble with soda pop

Soda pop is the most disgusting thing on the face of the planet. And I love it. Water is a pain in the ass to drink. Soda pop is a party that goes down your gullet gleefully at full throttle. Water is, I don't know, so, hmmm, so medieval. Modernity truly began when pop was created. Back in the good old days a bottle of pop was a treat to be enjoyed on a special occasion. A soda was something one had when they came to town on the weekend. I am old enough to have fond memories of my mother taking me to downtown Greensboro where a soda fountain still operated in an old drug store on Elm Street. I would climb up on one of the battered leather cushioned stools at the ancient gilded counter and watch as an elderly pharmacist in his drab pharmacist's smock mixed a spoonful of cola syrup with ice cubes in a tall chilled glass and then poured frothing soda from the elaborate brass fountain spigot over the top. I think it was the quaint antiquity of the process that captivated me even at that early age. I could have been no older than twenty or twenty-one. I would spin on my stool and in a flash suck down my soda, then mother and I would go shopping for bloomers.

But coca-cola would never have become king cola and all of the ensuing lesser aristocracy of the soda world would never have come into being if having a soda had remained relegated to the domain of the special treat. Soda set about conquering the globe. Today what was once an rare indulgence has become a daily ritual for soda addicts the world over. We just can't get enough. Soda pop is the number one consumed product in the United States. Perhaps this would not be such a bad thing if not for all of the sugar packed into pop. Soda pop is fast being identified as the one of the culprits of the exploding obesity epidemic sweepin the nation and reliable information points to the fact that if the average soda drinker were to cut the evil nectar from his or her diet within a year they would be ten pounds lighter. Fuck that, I'll take the ten. Actually no, I'll save my ten for fried chicken and burritos.



Bag it, give me twenty....twenty-five...thirty...

The advent of High Fructose Corn Syrup in the seventies and eighties has not helped matters. For a myriad of reasons soda bottlers flocked to it. I did a little reading up on our corn friend and suffice to say it's a pretty complicated business involving murky vats of chemicals, verdant spawning bacteria, and shadowy agri-empires like Archer Daniels Midland (these are the guys who usually underwrite conservative talk shows and have crowned themselves "supermarket to the world"). Despite a recent ad campaign to answer the negative backlash that shows young, healthy, and most importantly, skinny, couples frolicking about in bucolic settings casually chatting about High Fructose Corn Syrup, it just ain't so. Suffice to say this stuff might as well be milk from the devil's tit. Somewhere in the commandments or Leviticus, God should have forbidden its use. He didn't. He fucked up. What's its appeal? It's cheaper than sugar; it transports easier (tankers are criss-crossing the nation as I write); and it extends the shelf life of everything from twinkies to Heinz Ketchup into the next millenium. The shit even creeps up in Oro-wheat's line of "whole grain" breads (the bastards). It is ubiquitous. In 1980 America used three million small tons of HFCS (not sure what a small ton is, I think I will start using this terminology when referring to my own personal weight), but by 1995 that amount had increased to eight million small tons consumed a year. Today we eat more High Fructose Corn Syrup than good old fashioned sugar. Listen when scientist feed this shit to rats they explode into corpulent jackie gleasonesque rodents who expire prematurely from raging diabetes.

Where did this all begin??!!

Soda pop, known as a soft drink to differentiate itself from hard drinks which contain alcohol (let's give a big cheer to these also) is a relatively new invention, but humankind's collective taste for sweet flavorful beverage is as old as, well, pooping. Beverage scholars and soda historians point to the ancient near east as one possible origin of the soft drink where found documents show that early towel heads mixed dates with piss water to share with their nomadic ass buddies on the Afghan steppes. Interestingly enough there are also parallels in the early Christian world where some Coptic records of gnosticism seem to open the door to the possibility that Jesus could also turn water not only into wine but also into what today we call Mountain Dew.

The history of soda is actually quite fascinating and to the young scholars out there who I am sure read this journal let me say that it is a field of academics that offers uncharted vistas for intellectual exploration and an inviting niche of study that could last a lifetime burrowed away in some crap ass community college basement.

Check it: as early as the seventeenth century Parisian street vendors were hawking a drink flavored with lemonade and honey that they also marketed as perfume when the mid- summer stench of proto-euro trash hair pit and ass became unbearable, but it wasn't until the creation of carbonated water by Jason Priestly (yes, in fact distant ancestor of acclaimed brilliant television star of same name) in 1767 that the seeds of the pop revolution were sewn. Priestly, in his ground breaking treatise "I impregnated water with fixed air", was an overnight sensation not only with the scientific community but with the salon lounging libertine crowd as well for his racy passages of elemental intercourse. In the words of this long rambling philosophical and scientific rumination on life and romance he also described how he first discovered that mixing water with carbon dioxide produced a drink pleasing to the taste. Alas his scientific acumen did not triumph over his more sullied urges for fame, fortune, and cooze. Priestly never again published in the academic journals of his day. His lab was destroyed by a band of vicious children in route to a belated crusade that would see them all raped and dismembered (of course at the time they didn't know that evidenced by the fact that eyewitnesses recount them singing joyous hymns as they smashed Priestly's apparatus). After the ruin, he frequented the theatre, lived in a chamber pot above a cat house, and took opium with hollow eyed chinamen. He died prematurely from asphyxiation when he slipped off of the rim of a vat of beer with a belt around his neck attached to the ceiling and his pants down to his shanks. They say he screamed out a whore's name just before his neck snapped and his eyeballs exploded out of his head and sank into the churning gyre of suds.

But I digress. History is a fascinating subject. The first soda fountains in the United States began to appear in the early 1800's mostly in pharmacies where, much like the pharmacist of my experience in Greensboro, chemists would experiment with mixing herbs and flavors with carbonated waters to titillate the tastes of their customers. They used such varied components as birch bark and dandelions, even an occasional mouse turd made its way into their concoctions with no ill effect. Perhaps soda would have remained a fixture of the chemist or the ice cream shop had it not been for inventive capitalists who devised a way to bottle the gaseous liquid. At the dawn of the twentieth century the first patent was issued for a glass bottle producing factory and the soda industry took off: within a few years production rose from 1400 bottles a day to 58,000. By the 1920's Americans were taking home six packs of soda and availing themselves of vending machines that sold soft drinks. John Dillinger endorsed Coca-Cola. World War Two actually arose over a dispute about soda pop. Korea, Vietnam, Iraq: soda. The great Society was not so much about civil rights as it was about one particular weekend when Lyndon Johnson drove his pickup truck down to colored town and handed out free bottles of coca-cola and menthol cigarettes. Of course, they didn't appreciate it. Who? You know who. The Blacks.

But where does that leave us? With trouble. Plain and simple. Sure, we can dream of a Utopian society where everyone is fat as shit and keeling over by age thirty of heart disease and diabetes; where cruel social conventions are turned on their heads and skinny people are harassed and beaten in the streets and yoga studios and cardio-gyms are firebombed; where happy rotund couples and their lard ass offspring picnic beside lakes of Dr. Pepper sprawling on filthy mattresses littered with chicken bones and crumpled chip bags, eschewing all forms of physical activities including self sufficient breathing; but can we realistically hope for such a day? You know, I can't really answer that question right now. In fact I see from my window that the mexican cleaning girls have arrived at the neighbor's house across the courtyard and it is time for me to remove my clothing so I must be going.....