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.
