Way Back

Way Back

Mark Coleman

Addictions that aren’t so much detriments as they are minor character flaws. More a bit of friendly fire than a shot aimed at Sumter. Some will paint you pictures of Irish coffee enemas, and harpoons that will launch out of the ocean when the tongue tickles the clitoris.

But they’re just so many poor man’s Bosch’s left to pick up the fragments of someone else’s stream of consciousness. Streams that flow into the Sappho urinal, or trickle down the back of a dumpster fetus. Aborted with the utmost sincerity in wadded tissue balls by the cockroach-ridden hampers.

Kitchen floors that look like D-Day due to how many virgins have been broken in on the counter. With their screams which have yet to be formed into demands. The tongues just beginning to learn the true value of a flicker. Dirty negligees, pink slips, and rejection letters. Panty raids at the pre-school. Tetherballs to the face, sending them howling to the nurse’s office with crooked noses and fattened lips. Oh, so and so and so. Wah, fucking, wah.

Make the school grounds look like the palatial stomping grounds of Vlad the Impaler. Cops aren’t around. Gun it. I want to hit this speed bump doing ninety. Hell to the shock. It’s about the euphoria. Everything in the cabin airborne. For a rushed eternity, it’s zero g.

Reach in and grab a Pocket Shot. Christ in High Heaven, that’s some low rent vodka. Crushing menthols in a coffee cup. The designated ashtray. Lean back and close the eyes against a Quaalude and another day at The Nightmare Grindstone. Change the line of work, and dampen the mattress with the help of some whore that will do anything.

Fire and brim. Preachers and poachers. Cauldrons and warts. Heartache and heart attack. It’s all the same, really. Trap addled souls and keep them like Chinese cricket. Lady Luck the coffer. Sell to the highest bidder or cash in at the ticket desk?

Yeah, let’s go with the Power Play. And the winning numbers are…. not yours. They’re making fun of you. Right to your face. It really gets your goat. So out the door, and through the lobby rippling as decadently as a rank Turkish bath. Sanitized smells. Ugly faces. Crippled and corpulent bodies. Overwhelming and nauseating. Stale as Grindhouse popcorn.

Hot dogs turning round and round. Some foreigner screaming at you because you ripped off the sign that read, “PAYING CUSTOMERS ONLY!” and went right on in. Throw the crumpled piece of paper in his face, and tell him to shove it up his nigger ass. He reaches under the counter, and you bolt. Just on the off chance.

One of those working class joints that’s been open since five or six in the morning. Pull out a pack of Tarot and read them leisurely at the bar.

“It’s right here in the cards that you owe me a drink. “

“Like Hell, I do.” Stern, severe, bloodshot eyes.

“Alright.” Pull a fistful of ones out of your pocket, and dump them on the bar. Start smoothing them out.

“A shot of well tequila and a Bitburger Drive, please.” Then explain how you’re trying to cut back. After about twenty rounds (more than half of which are charged to a nicked card), you stumble out. Spend ages swerving in and out of traffic, taking detours down alleys forgotten by all but society’s dregs. The crackhead vets wheeling impatiently up and down waiting to connect, alternately gnawing on their lips and cursing God down off His throne, the spade city kids packing their older brothers’ gats with half a register roll’s worth of history, dreaming of the day that they’ll finally be beat in, the drag queens with come and blood matted in their bobbed wigs, pulling on their skirts and reaching up under to yank at the panties that are strangling their cocks. And you? You’re just trying to find your way back.