End of Road

He'd lived with two Puerto Rican fags for 8 months. The Vicodin prescription had run out long before the pain. Cow Milk Blues had faded Polaroids of decks and stair bannisters he built when Reagan was president. He was grasping to dreams of pretty roadies in dirty bathrooms, panties pulled down to their knees, he was rock hard and could fuck all night. Now he had to hunt for his shriveled cock when he went to release the pressure on his cancerous prostate.

"62 years old, and working for a fucking nigger wage." he said with his head crooked to one side to relieve pressure on his spine.

He could play a song on the $10 plywood guitar, Milk Cow Blues and other songs he likes to say he wrote. "Jimmy Buffett stole this song from me when I was in Key West," he'd say before playing Margaritaville. The nut on his Korean plywood guitar was the wrong size so he shimmed it with a piece of plastic he found in the backyard. It didn't stay in tune but he could fake it. His hearing was so bad that intonation didn't matter. And then there were the screws in his leg. The damn titanium leg that he thought was funny when he mentioned it at first. He been beaten after trying to play the hero in an alley where a girl was getting raped.

"Hey, leave that girl alone," was all he had said and the hero's reward was a busted leg and a broken jaw. He woke up under a police horse. The police even tried to pin the rape on him. Why not? When it rains it pours. Like the time he was coming home from a day wrestling with locust thorn trees, bleeding, tired, looking pissed, trying to maneuver his bike to the liquor store. Three federal marshals lock their assault rifle sights on him.

"Get on the ground!"

He matched the description of a man running wild in the neighborhood with a gun.

He fell as ordered and in falling his chainsaw dropped with an awful sound to the pavement...never to work again.

Bunch of bullshit. $8 an hour at his age? Doing Mexican labor? For what? He was broken, working for pain pills.

"The doctors think I'm a junkie and I tell them, 'Hey, I'm not looking to get off. I hurt."

When it rains it pours and though the country was gasping in the middle of a deadly killing drought, Cow Milk was soaking wet with bad news. Couldn't catch a break. He could bet on the 1924 Yankees and they'd lose by a run in the bottom of the ninth.

"These fingers," he said showing the stubs on his right hand, were burned off by caustic acid...in the wrong bottle.

And the worst part was trying to sleep on the crooked mattress. If he didn't take an overdose of pain pills then he couldn't even fall asleep. He was tired but the pain of relaxation, the release of tension on his torn ligaments, took hours to subside.

"40 years of carpentry. I could build you a deck or a staircase. Now look. Fighting for dollars with the Mexicans. It's a race to the bottom."

He rubbed the protruding screws in his tibia and tried to lick a few more drops from his 16oz can of Natty Light beer.

The football came back on and he started to snore.
"Did I ever tell you about these stubs on my finger," he asked, delirious.
Oggy shook his head and out of the corner of his eye saw the redheaded Puerto Rican fag standing elegantly at the doorway to Cow Milk's room, smoking a cigarette like he was modeling cancerous cool. The fag locked eyes with Oggy so Oggy's eyes darted nervously from side to side. The fag licked his lips and then looked at the bathroom without turning his head. Then he looked back at Oggy...the fag quickly lifted his eyebrows, "???"

Oggy laughed, waking up Cow Milk.
"I guess it's time to go home," said Oggy as he bent over to get out of the squat kids chair Cow Milk had found in the trash. Oggy felt his fat roll under his polyester disco shirt.
"Oggy," asked Cow Milk, "I hate to ask but can you lend me a couple bucks. Anything'll help."
Oggy gave Cow Milk a ten dollar bill then stumbled into the dark, almost falling off the decaying front porch. A mutt Chihuahua with a limp barked at him.
"Chula!" yelled the fag, and the dog was quiet.
The fag stood in the shadows with his legs spread like a French whore airing out her cunt in the cool Paris air after a busy night.*
Oggy found his moped and ran down the sidewalk until the engine turned over. He got on and immediately hit a pot hole that jarred his aching spine. He went the wrong way down a dead end street and almost hit the barrier of trash and a chain link fence separating the neighborhood from the golf course.
Where now?

*why I write