Tales of Ordinary Madness Read Online Free PDF Page B

or Rain, something of the sort, and he’s always coming by with his sleeping bags and a sad story. He hits between Berkeley and New Orleans. Back and forth. Once every two months. And he writes bad, old-fashioned rondos. And it’s a fiver and/or a couple of bucks each time he hits (or as they like to say, “crashes”), plus whatever he eats and drinks. That’s all right, I’ve given away more money than I have cock, but these people have got to realize that I also have some trouble staying alive.
    So there’s Mad Jimmy and so there’s me.
    Or there’s Maxie. Maxie is going to shut off all the sewers in Los Angeles to help the Cause of the People. Well, it’s a damn nice gesture, you’ve got to admit that. But Maxie, buddy, I say, let me know when you are going to shut off all the sewers. I’m for the People. We’ve been friends a long time. I’ll leave town a weak early.
    What Maxie doesn’t realize is that Causes and Shit are different things. Starve me, but don’t cut off my shit and/or shit-disposal unit. I remember once my landlord left town on a nice two week vacation to Hawaii. Okay.
    The day after he left town, my toilet stopped. I had my own personal plunger, being very frightened of shit, but I plunged and plunged and it didn’t work. You know what that left me.
    So I called up my own personal friends, and I’m the type who doesn’t have too many personal friends, or if I have them, they don’t have toilets let alone telephones ... more often, they don’t have anything.
    So, I called the one or two who had toilets. They were very nice.
    â€œSure, Hank, you can shit at my place anytime!”
    I didn’t take up their invitations. Maybe it was the way they said it. So here was my landlord in Hawaii watching the hula girls, and those fucking turds just lay on top of the water and whirled around and looked at me.
    So each night I had to shit and then pluck the turds out of water, place them in wax paper and then into a brown paper bag and get into my car and drive around town looking for some place to toss them.
    So mostly, double-parked with the motor running, I’d just toss the god-damned turds over some wall, any wall. I tried to be non-prejudiced, but this one Home for the Aged seemed a particularly quiet place and I think I gave them my little brown bag of turds at least three times.
    Or sometimes I’d just be driving along and roll up the window and rather flick the turds out as one would, say, cigarette ashes or a couple of dozen burnt-out cigars.
    And speaking of shit, constipation has always been a greater fear to me than cancer. (We’ll get back to Mad Jimmy. Listen, I told you I write this way.) If I miss one day without shitting, I can’t go anywhere, do anything – I get so desperate when that happens that oftentimes I try to suck my own cock to unclog my system, to get things going again. And if you’ve ever tried to suck your own cock then you only know the terrible strain on the backbone, neckbone, every muscle, everything. You stroke the thing up as long as it will get then you really double up like some creature on a torture rack, legs way over your head and locked around the bedrungs, your asshole twitching like a dying sparrow in the frost, everything bent together around your great beer belly, all your muscle sheathes ripped to shit, and what hurts is that you don’t miss by a foot or two – you miss by an eighth of an inch – the end of your tongue and the tip of your cock that close, but it might as well be an eternity or forty miles. God, or whoever the hell, knew just what He was doing when He put us together.
    But back to the insane.
    Jimmy just dialed the same number over and over from one-thirty p.m. until six p.m. when I gave way. No, it was six-thirty p.m. when I gave way. What does it matter? So, after the 749th phone call, I allowed my robe to flop open, walked over