My First Wife

I met her on Alcatraz. Her name was Nancy. To date, our marriage remains the most expensive hour of my life.

At the time, I was still what I now consider young and had just experienced the second major loss of my life, my old man, ‘Burt’. He owned a construction company that had seen its fair share of troubles over the decades. Our relationship was testy at times. I was considered soft because as a teenager I took a few acting classes and preferred a pen to a chisel, but in truth, mano y mano, Burt wasn’t up to much, and so I became useful whenever an angry client came by the house to settle up. I’d step in, turn on the water works in frantic despair, and wail pitifully until sympathy trumped vengeance.

In the year leading up to Burt’s death my mother passed away and an apartment complex he erected collapsed, killing one person. He received a suicide note from some poor bastard who lost everything as a result of the same incident. All these things add up, I guess.

Even though I hated construction, Burt left the company to me when he hammered his last nail. He was well known, and his picture was in all the papers when he passed, so, given that I knew nothing about the business – which projects were active, who worked there, how to get an outside line on the office phone – I hopped on the first flight out of town, drank most of the way and arrived in San Francisco out of my mind.

My limited knowledge of San Francisco told me that it was full of hills, hippies and homos. I could have shacked up anywhere given the inheritance, but ended up taking a room in some dive in the Tenderloin area. Even back then it was a shit-hole area. A lobotomized geriatric checked me in to my room and told me that breakfast was a noun before staring at me for a solid minute after I made the mistake of laughing.

A sourdough bowl of chowder later, my stomach begged me for something normal, so I knocked back a fifth of Night Train, grabbed a second bottle, then hopped on the boat to Alcatraz; figuring the water was the best place to be if I was going to hurl. Walking ‘The Rock’ is still a blur. All I really remember is hearing something about Capone getting syphilis before I was shaken back to consciousness on a cot in one of the cells. Nancy was standing over me.

The journey back to the mainland was excruciating. Nancy talked about her folks all the way. How her Mother always joked that she just needed a good man to complete her. How her Father said she was one in a million. How Maw and Paw told her that family occasions were never dull when she showed up. I listened for two reasons. One, I needed something to focus on so I could stay conscious until I reached the hotel. Two, she had a big pair of tits, and an ass as thick and round as a bus wheel that made up for her average at best looks.

Nancy was still there when I woke up. My clothes were clean and pressed, and there was a big, fat, bloody steak and a cold one on the bedside table. This woman had me down. I asked why she did it. She said she saw something in me, something she needed then leaned in and kissed my cheek. My shoulder brushed against her breast and I got a half lob on. Later she told me that she was leaving for Vegas. I’d slammed six beers by then and thought, “fuck it, I’ve got money, time and a semi with ambitions.”

Nancy listened to my sop story on the flight. She managed to bring booze onto the flight in a Coke bottle, so, as I got more and more wasted, I blabbed on and on. When I stopped talking she didn’t offer any advice, didn’t sympathize or ask how I felt, didn’t tell me everything would be okay – I may have been drunk, but the simple fact that she didn’t do any of these things made me think I loved her.

Nancy had to meet a business associate when we arrived, so we arranged to meet later at my hotel. I’d gotten rid of my emotional baggage and was feeling good, so I hit the strip hard. Somewhere in the middle of it all she returned. She laughed at how drunk I was, but not in a “you’re a disgrace” kind of way, more like a woman who liked to see her man enjoy himself, and could get into the spirit of it, and, man but she could put away the booze. I’d hit the jackpot. Four cocktails later, and after she told me she’d done a pole dancing class, I proposed to her.

In the middle of the night we got married in a fun little shit-hole where Elvis now worked. I took Nancy back to my hotel room and got down to business. Basic instincts operate in all men even when hammered drunk, so I figured I’d have emptied my nuts into her in about three minutes before crashing. However, despite my best efforts, something went wrong.

It started when her dress fell away from her body. I wasn’t confronted by heaving flesh, instead there was another layer of fabric tightly bound to her. I said, “what’s this?” Nancy said, “my spanks”. “Spanks?” “Yeah.” She turned away from me and started to remove it. The only way I can describe it is that it was a like fat suit, except a thin suit, so when she took it off everything that had been so shapely and tight suddenly sagged and fell loose. “Fuck”, I said.

There was a bra and panties embedded in rolls of fat, held together by skin that was anything but healthy looking. She removed the bra. Two things fell on to the floor from the bra. “What the fuck are they?” “My chicken fillets.” “Chicken fillets? What the fuck?” My dick sagged when she tugged at her hair and removed a whole mess of extensions. Thin, greasy hair that fell just beneath her earlobes remained. When she turned around, I did my best to smile but then I looked down and saw a bulge in her panties.

When she next spoke, she was a he. “You’ve got two options here, Chuck. One, you sign a few papers, we annul this and never see each other or speak about this again. Two, we consummate this relationship, and if you don’t think you can get hard, don’t worry, I can.” I thought about it and took option one. She, he, (s)he, she… fuck it, Nancy opened the door and in walked an amenable looking solicitor, her business associate, who had a bunch of legal documents ready. As he laid them out on the bed I muttered that I should have known better than to pick up a chick in San Francisco. Nancy uttered a knowing laugh.

We hadn’t met by chance. She tracked me to San Francisco after reading about my father’s death in the paper. This was a revenge mission. Her mother died in the apartment complex my father built that collapsed. Her father later committed suicide, lost without his wife, and too proud to go live with ‘Nancy’, his estranged, cross-dressing son.

I signed the papers without further question, but I’ll admit, even though I never wanted my Dad’s company, it fucking hurt when I put down the pen and realized that I’d given away everything my old man ever worked for, the place where I knew him best, where our relationship was least strained and where I felt close to him.

Nancy didn’t have that with her old man. Chemistry, hormones and whatever else separated them, and I guess in the end if this was the only way she would ever do right by her folks, then this was how it was going to be.

The next morning I woke up single again to the hangover from hell, with no prospects and no money. Nancy left me a one way ticket back home. I was already late for the flight. On the way to the airport my brain started to work again – it had been a while – and as the taxi pulled in at the set-down area I realized that the only reason I signed the papers is because I was afraid people I didn’t give a shit about would find out that I married a dude in Vegas. I hadn’t even stuck my dick in him, and who said he was really going to stick his in me? God damn it, I had no real reason to be ashamed.

In that moment I felt stupid. I took comfort in a cheap bottle. Nothing’s changed since then. The decline continues.

300 Miles South of Salt Lake City

Selina was standing outside my front door, pressing a shotgun against my chest. Barb, Barbrilla, was on her knees in front of me, undoing my flies. A camper van full of what looked like rednecks was parked by the curb and, inside it, some old bastard was filming the whole thing. Worst of all, my parole officer was coming to.

Selina’s tongue ran across her upper teeth as Barbrilla snapped what looked like a flying saucer-shaped department store security tag through my foreskin. I squealed until my voice gave out and the stars on the ragged flag over my door took flight then burst into a thousand more. Selina whispered in my ear – “miss me, baby?” Next thing I knew I was following the disappearing stars into darkness.

The day before I’d been released from county; broken record, I know. I got a year of hard time after some cop decided my driving wasn’t too hot when he found me completely hammered, mercilessly grinding the gears and revving the last living shit out of my Chevy, which was tipped upward and balancing precariously on the window ledge of a grocery store.

A new man, I’d returned to the world with a fresh perspective, a decision made to get a solid nine-to-five and I was gonna do all of this after I’d gotten myself a brew and blowjob. When you’re in the joint they do all they can to reform you, try to steer you in the right direction and some of that shit can stick, but what they don’t do, and should, is a frontal lobe lobotomy to stop creatures of impulse from taking the first dumb-ass step toward repeat offense.

Hot off the bus, I jogged down to the West Valley Motel and a couple of minutes later I was out back with a working girl trying to convince her I was good for the balance of the cash. Her bigger, burlier buddy – read pimp – wasn’t half the conversationalist she was, which is saying something. After taking the few dollars I had, he did the bulk of the talking with his fists. So, fresh from my first broken nose of the month, no biggie, the year in prison had more or less flattened it out anyway, I figured I should get some cash or things weren’t exactly going to go so smoothly.

I robbed the 7/11 just around the corner a few minutes later with a bag of dog shit. The CCTV wasn’t gonna have a hope of ID’ing me with the amount of lumps and blood on my face, and after taking one look at the little old lady cashier I knew she wasn’t gonna want a pile of dog shit in her mouth.

Admittedly it wasn’t my proudest moment, or my best robbery. My total haul amounted to $23.20 but I did grab a pack of Trojans on the way out and after jacking my load into one of them in an alley across the street, I figured I’d head home and see if anybody had been squatting in my shit-hole house.

Nobody. Even the rats and woodlice had abandoned it. The swelling had gotten worse on my face and my head was throbbing so I pulled a couple of floorboards and retrieved my hidden alcoholic stash, and so, ten minutes later, with a fifth and a fifth of vodka working its numbing fingers over my aching body, I passed out.

The door was pounding like a jack-hammer bouncing around in an echo chamber when I woke. I crawled to the door and wished I hadn’t opened it. My parole officer didn’t think the beat-down I’d managed to pick up or my barely intelligible state was quite as funny as I did and decided it was going in her report.

She started to ask me a whole bunch of questions I couldn’t answer, or understand, then started to quote the law as if that was gonna help, so when her head suddenly snapped forward and she toppled to the ground beside me I was initially relieved, that is until I looked up to see Selina standing in the doorway, a drop of my parole officer’s blood sliding off the butt of the shotgun in her hands.

It was a confusing moment in time for me… my balls were running for shelter and my dick was trying to get hard… then Barb said “heya there, Chuk, uh huh huh hee, I gotta gift for ya”. Selina leveled the shotgun with my chest. Barb dropped to her knees and clamped my cock. I blacked out.

I woke in absolute agony. I’d pissed myself, that is, into and onto myself and through my open wound, and experienced a pain so severe that the thought of passing large gall stones was a luxury I couldn’t afford myself. Selina, her mind drifting further out onto the reservation by the second, explained that my new junk jewelry was the only way she could protect me from the ‘frequency’ – which made a ton of sense.

She introduced the rednecks as her family. Most had the mental capacity of a peanut if they were lucky, and I’m pretty sure I’d seen some of them on America’s Most Wanted over the years. I still can’t piece together how Selina had emerged as a result of two or more of them bumping uglies… Barb kinda made sense, but Selina was a ten, even if she was a few sandwiches short of a picnic. This fact became more obvious the more she spoke about why they had picked me up and what they were planning.

Selina said that three hundred miles south of Salt Lake City some guy had proof of extra-terrestrial life. For only six hundred bucks he would give her the location of a UFO hiding beneath the Earth’s crust, which had been transmitting an undetectable frequency that was responsible for global warming, the sole purpose of which was an attempt to slow cook the human race and have them ready to consume when the alien overlords arrive.

Naturally when we met this prophesier of doom he greeted us by pissing on our legs and rolling around in his own feces. I was the only one who found this troubling and wasn’t surprised when I was the only one who recognized the location of the UFO. Five hundred miles further south by south-east lay our destination… the city of Roswell, New Mexico.

According to this deluded space cadet, the UFO was in a highly fortified base protected by aliens who dressed in US army uniforms. Selina naively asked him how they should proceed, to which his response was, “with extreme force”, as he handed each of them an ‘alien ray-gun’. These were rusty gun barrels wrapped in tin foil, sellotaped to plastic statuettes of Jesus Christ which were subbing in for the missing grips.

Back on the road, Selina revealed that she had been following me since I was released from jail and had witnessed my 7/11 gig, after which she decided I was a thief of some skill and would be the perfect candidate to join their gang and steal the weapons they required for the attack from a high security gun shop. Hence my abduction. She then handed me my ‘weapon’ and I realized just how much I had impressed her, because clearly I was about to try to take down a gun shop armed only with a bag of shit.

I don’t know which was worse, the five-mile journey to the gun shop thinking about the hail of lead that was likely about to fly toward me, or being stuck in the back of the camper van having to listen to the old bastard saying, “U-fo”, “now we go u-fo?”, “I see U-fo!”, “when is u-fo?”.

I prayed that we would find an angry alien race characterized by a complete lack of sympathy for stupidity as the camper pulled in outside the gun shop, the sight of which quickly returned me to my natural place among the semi-sane of the world. I settled for Gramps’s head being blown apart by .44 Magnum fire within the next few minutes as I walked through the doors. The odds were stacked in favor of that outcome and I found it difficult to hold onto my little plastic bag of shit as sweat began to pour out of me.

As I stepped inside the owner handed a jacked up looking overgrown teen lunatic a pump-action shotgun then said, “take him out back to the range there, Jeb, let him give her a whirl.” Jeb, a backward, dangerous looking man-beast led the way and they disappeared out back. Then the owner noticed my mashed in face and the doubt about whether he was just encouraging another nut vanished and was replaced by suspicion as I tried to look like a casual gun shopper.

I noticed that the security tags on the hunting jackets were the exact same as the one weighting down my masculine gland and, in my rattled state, I figured it would be a good way to start-up conversation. “Excuse me, sir”, I said as I put the bag of shit on the counter. He frowned then his face creased in disgust. “I was hoping you could help me.” The second I reached for my crotch he tasered me in the neck.

I fell into a crazed dizzy nightmare and tried to keep up with the room as it spun around my head. The owner tried to drag me toward the door when, suddenly, it slammed into him. He screamed, “JEB!” The rednecks rushed in, all carrying their alien ray guns. Selina and Barb weren’t far behind. Then, the door to the back room opened and overgrown teen with the pump-action shotgun raced out, racked his new toy and opened up.

The rednecks, all stunned by the noise, stood still and exploded one by one like retarded piñatas, much to the joy of the deluded solider of fortune. Selina dragged Barb to the ground just outside the door and one look told me that a crumb of sense had found its way into her head. Shotgun Psycho had turned his attention to me when the old guy fired the taser at him.

It wasn’t enough to put him down and with the barrel pointing directly at my face, and his finger about to squeeze the trigger, Jeb came to the rescue and wrapped a steel shovel around his head. Selina and Barb were gone in a trail of dust. The hunt for UFOs was officially over.

Once things calmed I cut a deal with the owner and Jeb. They would remove the security tag from my penis and I in exchange would not prosecute them for tasering me and placing my life in danger without just cause, seeing I didn’t even have a weapon, was clearly in need of medical care and was carrying a bag of shit which was obviously a cry for help. I’d even back up their story that a bunch of lunatic rednecks carrying guns burst in and they were left with no choice. They thought about it for a second then Jeb set about wiping the security cams.

After I’d done my duty I hit the road, thumb out praying for a lift that’d take me anywhere that resembled civilization. Two hours in my face had proven itself a major deterrent. Night closed in, masking my fucked up features and finally a pick-up tooted its horn and slowed to a stop. Wearily, I thanked the driver as I opened the passenger door. Of course Selina and Barb were the occupants.

Selina said she was sorry, that she’d made a mistake and that they were about to start off, start fresh on the straight and narrow. “Baby, your family are dead”, I said, “doesn’t that bother you?” She shook her head and smiled that beautiful bat-shit mad smile and said, “you and Barb are all the family I need, Chuk.”

I had one last act of stupidity left in me, so I got in, and as she drove us off into the darkness I somehow felt at home.

Guess I’m just a sucker for romance.

Desert Death Rattle

It was gone when I woke. She’d taken it. There was no doubt in my mind. I stumbled out of the cot, legs still working their way back into sensation. My head was pounding and I was numb from the waist down, that is until I pulled on my slacks, wrenched the zipper and tore a landing strip off the shaft of my still erect prick. My legacy, my name, my next two weeks were fucked, and catching the bitch wasn’t going to be easy.

The engine rattled a strained growl as it barreled down the highway. The desert sun was hot as hell, crossing lizards popped beneath the rubber and bugs kamikazied into my windshield. All this ending life and impending death didn’t cost me a thought, all that was on my mind was the box. All I hoped was that she hadn’t undone the leather belt that held it together. All I knew was my crotch was warm with blood and I hadn’t yet taken the time to piss out the last bottle of dollar wine. I prayed I was still limber enough to bend around the stream and save myself the sting, but with God in absentia and my middle aged legs shriveling under the weight of time, win or lose pain was on the horizon.

Then I saw saw a flicker just ahead. Was it a mirage? And if it wasn’t, was it even her? I jammed my foot down hard on the gas and soon realized it was. The taillights were broken, one on each side, just like I’d left them. The rusted silver side panel jarring against the sun bleached red of the rest of the machine. That blonde hair trailing in the breeze off a head so fuck-me-now beautiful even the man in hell would be tempted to ignore the conniving glint in her gold digging eyes and take a dip. I decided to play it cool. This time she wouldn’t get the drop on me. I eased off and followed until she stopped at gas station then pulled in the other side of the cashier building, grabbed the tire iron and carefully negotiated the side wall.

The cashier was a dope in his late teens, drooling over the counter at her tits like a sloped fucking yak as he handed her a pack of cigarettes. She’d probably already done enough to convince him to say “on the house ma’am”. I convinced myself this was the case as she kissed him on the cheek then collected a pack of chips from a low shelf. He was good as dead the way that short red skirt was bobbing and weaving off her hips and didn’t even notice when she collected a bottle of suds from the fridge on the way out. I don’t know what made me madder, the fact that she was getting away with it again, or that I’d fallen for the same routine twice already and was still watching her in action instead of taking it.

I bucked up and slid into the passenger seat just as the car pulled away. She wasn’t even shocked, just looked at me like another bump in the road she had to run over. But at least with the tire iron I had her attention. I asked where the box was. She didn’t have it any more, she’d stashed it somewhere safe and if I wanted it I was going to have to do something for her. I asked what, considering I had a tool worthy of trying my hand at dentistry in my grip. Naturally she used the tools at her disposal but the second her hand contacted my crotch I yelped like a scolded pup. Most people would retract, but she knew the score and spun the wheel into off-road terrain and dug in. The car filled with dust and in the blinding pain of confusion and with gravel adding to the problem I suddenly realized I was alone.

The trunk creaked open, a shotgun was racked and a deafening boom of buck pelted my door and shattered the window. I crawled over, knocked it into drive and revved hard. Dust sprayed everywhere. I couldn’t see her. BOOM! This time the back window exploded into pieces. I sliced my hand open on the seat debris then out of nowhere there was clarity and a drop into a drainage ditch. Two teeth hung from my mouth from a long, thick glob of blood then parted company with me once and for all. I shoved the door open and toppled out. The sun vanished as she stood above me then cracked the butt of the gun into my forehead. All I hoped was that when I woke I wasn’t tied to a cactus getting gang-banged by a bunch of vultures.

Consciousness came before sight. I figured I was in the trunk of a car, which had to mean that she had an accomplice. Just then the car slowed to a stop. Two people got out and I waited until their footsteps had cleared earshot. After some more kicking sunlight washed over me and when my retinas had adjusted I clambered out. We were at a junk yard, a lost and forgotten wasteland filled with every trash and crap-mobile since the forties. I saw her disappear into the hut set in the center of it all a couple of hundred yards away. They were going to sell the box – had to be why they were in such an isolated dump. I was fucked, then, realized the car was the heap I’d driven to the gas station, I grabbed the spare key from the glove box, started it up and turned to face the road. “Get far away” ricocheted inside my skull but then something came over me. Maybe it was pride, or self loathing at my cowardice, or just that plain old nasty instinct that usually put me in that position, but as I looked in the rearview I knew that I couldn’t just let her get away with it.

My brain started working around two seconds before I plowed the car into the shack, but by then it was too late and when the dust settled I’d slammed some fat guy I didn’t know into a spike on the wall and was face to face with the shotgun, in her hands. She told me to get out. She was teary eyed, it looked like genuine sorrow but it might have been rage, I wasn’t sure. As I got out I stumbled on something rubbery and only after I found equilibrium again did I notice the gas station cashier’s head sticking out from under the chassis. It was rage. I took another shotgun butt in the nose, it broke, and given the number of previous breaks I knew that after this I was going to resemble some sort of a retarded puffin for whatever number of days I had left. She didn’t like that notion, though and as she racked the gun one last time I knew I was seconds from oblivion.

SNAP. All out. SLAP. Knocked out. I caught her before she fell. Bad a bitch as she was it would have been a crime to let that body bruise. I tied her hands to the wheel then looked for the box. She came to after five or so minutes and laughed in my face. This wasn’t a sale, this was a negotiation. The box was not here. The money was not here. There was nothing here except two dead men one hot broad and a retarded puffin. I’d killed the only party interested this side of the Grand Canyon and her partner in crime, the only one who could safely retrieve the box without drawing unnecessary attention. She was out of friends and I was out of luck so against my better judgement, which I’d last seen the night I turned twenty one, I teamed up with her one last time.

The gas station was quiet at night. The passing trade was slow. Then the night cashier came into view, resembling an aggression repressed MMA fighter, which was just perfect. She was about to take him down all by her lonesome, one bat of the eyelids and a long deep breath and he would be in the back toilet working her for all she was worth, but then the law rolled in. They questioned Mister MMA, showed him a photo or two, then pointed at the CCTV. Someone was looking for the goober I’d crushed back at the junk yard, and the only person of interest on those tapes was my red hot passenger. It was only a matter of time before they searched the place and found his locker. It was all or nothing time, so I headed for the back toilet window.

Once inside I could hear them bantering away out front. The muscle bound freak manning the desk was doing a wonderful job of not making the cops’ job easy, simply because he had the mental capacity of a grape and was getting pissed at the questioning.

“Go in back and get the God-damn feed from today”.

“Fuck you, pig – make me”

“I’ll get it myself.”

“Not on my watch, mother fucker.”

“Get outta my way, dummy.”

SLAP. SLAP. SLAP. I couldn’t help but look. MMA and the two cops were fighting full tilt. I found the locker, nabbed the box and got out the window without any of them noticing a thing. Everything was golden, all I had to do was get around the corner, back in the car and drop over the horizon before the next squad car arrived and I was made. The only problem was that the car was gone. Bitch.

I ran off into the desert, knowing that if I was caught with it that’d put me down for everything and clear her slate. I made it as far as the Canyon just before dawn. I stank and vultures were circling overhead by noon. A tour bus had pulled in a few hundred yards ahead. I couldn’t risk exposing them to it, fuck that, letting anyone near enough to swipe it so I decided to climb down into the red rock and hide it. I didn’t get far before my sense were crippled with fear but luck was on my side and I stashed it in a crevice. The markers were decent, a flagpole, a wood cabin and a memorial plaque for some dead guys who went down the canyon river in row boats back in the day. I was choosing a forth when I saw her.

Taser in hand, approaching at pace, she jabbed it into my side, knocking me to the ground.  I scrambled to stay clear of the edge. This time she wasn’t letting me get any sort of a second chance and kicked me in the face. I gripped pathetically at the earth as I slipped over the side. Then I felt the pain. She dropped her stiletto hard, stabbing it through the bones in my hand and pinning me to the wall. Some of the tourists noticed the activity and unsurprisingly started to take photos and video as gravity conspired with her stiletto against me and began to tear a slow line through the tendons, inching me closer to death by the second. She looked at me, didn’t have to say anything by way of stating the obvious. I nodded. She dropped the taser, reached down and took my free hand. Dumb broad. I fucked her into the canyon and climbed to safety.

The stiletto came in handy. I managed to latch onto the leather belt around the box and drag it up as distant sirens rang out. I had no choice left but open it. Fuck the fortune it was worth, fuck the loss, fuck the death it had brought by my hands – if I was going to walk, this was the only way. I crawled under some shrubs, unclasped the belt and wrapped it around my hands. The latch broke apart on contact. I sat there for a moment, listening to the rush of footsteps on approach. The words I picked up indicated that the cops knew what I had. They were cordoning off the area. The flesh on my fingers slipped between the lid and the bulk then prized it open. The last thing I remember is the blinding light.

I woke in the desert, close to the highway, the box lying empty by my hand. A tour bus was pulling away. The windows were blacked out. I sat up, scanned the horizon until I saw the flashing blue lights way out in the distance. It’s value was gone, she was gone and I was back at square one again. I sat by the highway until sunset when I began to slump. Maybe it was the dehydration setting in, but the last time I looked the belt was clasped tight around the box and a car was on approach. The driver’s blonde hair was trailing in the breeze.

James Bond Cat Turns Bachelor Pad into Piss Pot

Cats get my goat. First off they’re conceited, wicked, sly-eyed bastards whose purpose on this planet seems only to kill the odd mouse and cadge food off every sad son-of-a-bitch who thinks an act of generosity will earn them some feline affection.  In the wake of feeding, cats are more likely to slice open your scrotum with their razor sharp claws and then playfully knock your bloody dangling balls against each other just to cause any additional amount of pain in order to punish your neediness and total dependence on a life form that hasn’t learned to walk on two legs, or grow opposable thumbs, as your primary source of love. Second, their aloof nature reminds me of the French.

It’s no wonder that ancient Egyptians worshipped them as gods. I guarantee you that some pharaoh was doling out whippings, or overseeing the administration of a good torturing in front of his subjects until he reached over to pet his cat and was subsequently hissed and scratched at. The subsequent sight of a pharaoh dripping blood made the retarded, superstitious types within the populous see the cat as some all powerful being. The truth being that the little fucker was probably in the middle of one of it’s countless butt-licking routines and didn’t appreciate the disturbance.

It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that cats brought down that civilization, or were the true reason that the black death spread in Europe. I wouldn’t blink twice if I was told that cats were behind the Kennedy assassination or were responsible for global warming. In a nutshell, I’m not a fan, and if you haven’t got that at this point then you’re probably a cat, purring away proudly to yourself right now.

A friend begged me to look after his cat the other day because he was heading to LA to talk at a screenwriting convention. His cat is a bigger celebrity than I am; it has been in countless movies including a James Bond, it understands multiple commands in three different languages, has it’s own stylist and does it’s own stunts; it can also lick it’s own balls which comes in handy in the industry when the sycophants aren’t around. So, naturally I was predisposed to not liking the little prick. Any animal whose success ridicules my lack thereof, who eats better than I do on any given day, and who earns more in a year than I do in a decade is not considered a welcome house guest, but my buddy was desperate, promised me a half decent wedge of cash and that he would pass one of my scripts on to his agent who is a relatively influential industry gatekeeper. I figured the long term payoff would be worth the short term hassle. I was wrong.

On arrival, the fat, bewhiskered fuck ran free into my home as if it were his own and disappeared up the stairs while my buddy, who might as well be the cat’s bitch, handed over it’s luggage and recited instructions.

“Give him one of these salmon steaks every day, three of these pills, make sure he has plenty of Evian water, comb his fur with this brush, give him plenty of affection and positive reinforcement about his image and, oh yeah, here’s the cat nip”.

“What the fuck is that?”

“That’s where he shits and pisses, Chukk. He’s been a bit loose in the bowel lately. We’re trying to shed a few pounds for a commercial so you might need to clean it fairly regularly.”

“You’re joking?”

“I wish. Listen, I gotta run. ‘Preciate it, buddy. See ya in a few days.”

The instant the door closed I heard a sound that reminded me of an exorcism I attended a few years back. It was coming from the bedroom. Pure horror set in as my eyes took in a sight worse than anything I’d ever seen before. There he was, James Bond Cat, squatting while simultaneously dragging himself across the middle of my king size bed, pinching off a gynormous shit which was easily the length of an adult boa constrictor. My immediate reaction was to introduce my size eleven loafer to that fucker’s butt by force. This was of course a mistake and ruined a perfectly good pair of shoes, although the brown imprint left behind looked like some sort of abstract painting of a dirty bomb explosion.

In my despair I neglected to take care of business and string him up while I had the chance but by the time logical thought returned it was too late and he had already escaped. I ran downstairs to find my sofa shredded, my best gentleman’s magazines flittered and my banzai overturned. Revenge was on the cards so I took the salmon steaks, his pills, cat nip, the lot and booted it out the back door. Movie cat was going to leave my house on my terms, that is with a tail heavily matted in shit and starved down to the requisite weight for his commercial.

My next move was surprisingly logical. I decided it was best to hunt by eliminating rooms one by one, shutting them off and narrowing the arena of conflict down to as small a space as possible. The plan was undone almost immediately; James Bond Cat was one step ahead. I’m not entirely sure if it’s just Evian my buddy was giving this fur-ball or if he was dosing it with battery acid to burn off it’s excess weight, because when I stepped into the kitchen a squirt of piss blasted me in the eyes that was so hot I thought I had been permanently blinded. He had taken up a strategically brilliant position, primed himself on a shelf, waited on me to walk in and then fired off a shot of nuclear urine on sight of his target.

It took two hours for ocular function to return to normal. In this time my feline adversary had rifled through my cabinets eating anything it took a fancy to and then took to pissing and vomiting up hair-balls all over the house. My haven, my bachelor pad, had been transformed into a steaming, post plague infection zone that smelled like the grey hairs on Satan’s nut-sack after a month without showering.

Sadly, it became evident that I was no match for this cunning bastard and so in my darkest hour I left my home in search of hope and a savior. After a solid day of thinking about it I finally figured out a way to overcome my home invader and headed off down to the dog pound with a crusty ten dollar bill and a bloody steak. I went from pen to pen looking for the most abused, vicious, bedraggled canine and finally settled on Penny, a German Shepherd with an eye that said “fuck me over and I’ll tear out your throat”.

In the car on the way over there I explained the situation to Penny, that my house, which would thereafter also be her house was under attack by a spoiled cat and that I needed the cat neutralized and alive. I gave full permission to run riot if necessary; the house was in need of a complete overhaul already. I looked in Penny’s eyes and knew that she understood. I fed her the steak, and promised her another one every week on completion of the mission. I opened the front door, cracked open a beer and waited.

Ten minutes of furious battle later and all became silent. The war zone was almost impassable, remnants of my life pre-cat glimpsed through the rubble. I found Penny in the bathroom, standing alert, scratched, soaked in sweat. James Bond Cat, nowhere to be seen. “Where is he, girl?” Penny glanced up at me with one of those oh so clever looks and only then did I notice the toilet lid down and one paw holding it in place. I secured the room and then lifted the lid. James Bond Cat was alive and well, no major wounds to speak of, shaken and stirred, cowering in the toilet bowl. I felt like flushing the fucker but thought about opposable thumbs and that I was the better species here and instead took the moral high ground.

Penny, who I’ve since renamed Moneypenny for obvious reasons, acted as prison guard to James Bond Cat for the rest of his stay and made sure that he got plenty of exercise by being chased around the back yard at least three times a day, depending on how good a mood I was in. Cat nip and cleaning never became an issue, simply because the fucker was usually shitting himself while on the run, and, he behaved when indoors from that point on because he was too fucking exhausted to do anything else.

I slapped my buddy with a hefty bill for damages and repairs when he returned. He told me to meet him at the end of the rainbow to collect, so I countered with a right and left hook, blackening his eyes. Then I took a slash on the front seat of his car and managed to get Moneypenny to shit all over his back seat. We’re about square as I figure it but he’s not been in touch since to confirm this.

How Not To Fight for Your Life

I recently participated in a fight-to-the-death styled competition. With the rent looming and an ever increasing debt the only two things to my name that anyone really cared about, I figured I had nothing to lose. Besides, when that’s all you’ve got you’re in pretty decent shape to knock ten colors of shit out of anyone. Thing is I’ve never been much of a fighter. Sure, I’d been in a few scrapes and predatorily attacked some homeless men for kicks, but as I committed my John Hancock to the flimsy looking contract I realized that in a fight-to-the-death competition the opposition are likely well equipped for battle, and also have just as much to lose. Fuck it, I thought, you only live once and it’s good to try new things.

This post has been two weeks or so in the writing, simply because my hands are fucked beyond belief and half of the time the damage done to my brain sends signals to the wrong nerves, and so, for example, the desire to press the ‘A’ button can very easily result in my doctor getting a kick in the balls as he checks my chart. I’ve managed to land more shots and do more injury to the hospital staff since I was admitted than I did in the entire tournament, which had a particular bent to it that I wasn’t entirely aware of at the time of signing up.

I was brought to a house in the hills, blindfolded and led down a corridor with a selection of doors. I was then told that an opponent was behind each one and I would have to ‘do battle’ against three to be awarded the title ‘he who shall continue living his shitty life’ and get the $200 prize money. $200? Something was off. The poster outside the 7-11 had clearly stated a $50 entry fee and a winner takes all $1,000 grand prize. I queried this and was told that overheads, admin costs, charitable donations and the cleaning bill had to be factored in. The logic was sound on their part and I started to do the math on how far two hundred bucks was going to carry me.

Opponent one revealed the particular twist that this tournament boasted. I entered the room only to be faced with a chair made out of teak wood. The red L.E.D. of an old fashioned CCTV camera was blinking high up in one corner of the room and a voice blaring through a cacophony of feedback on the busted, old intercom said that in no more than two strikes was I to render the object before me useless or I would be beaten with it until a member of their staff called ‘the score settler’ had achieved the same result. I asked how that qualified this as a fight-to-the-death tournament. All the cunt on the intercom said back to me was that the printer had made a mistake and the wrong posters were put up – it was in actuality a fight-to-stay-alive tournament, which to me still sounded like the potential for death was there, except the odds were now totally loaded against me. Bad enough the prize money was down, it suddenly had become clear that I wasn’t even going to get a chance to beat the piss out of some stranger – I was the stranger.

The teak chair didn’t give at all, not even a creak out of it. I might as well have been trying to break water; not like a pregnant woman fit to burst, I mean literally ‘break’ water. Then some big, masked fucker trudged in, who I pegged as the score settler, and, panting, out of breath from my feeble effort, I watched as he picked up the chair and hit me so hard that I was momentarily transported to a tunnel of white light where all of my ancestors and dead relatives were standing looking at me, shaking their heads and chanting, “seriously, you stupid fuck?” Someone then turned out the white light and I was back scrambling about in my own blood and knew I was probably in trouble.

As you’ve correctly guessed by now, the other two rooms were no different and it seemed my desperation to cause harm to someone else, just so I could feel good about myself, had backfired and brought me considerable pain. Words cannot describe the pain and violence which followed, so I’ll spare you, and my struggling fingers, the attempt. All I’ll say is I don’t believe in karma or that ‘do unto others’ lark, but for some reason that’s all that was bouncing between the two neurons that were still operational as I came to. Through the blood in my ears I could hear what sounded like a bunch of frat boys watching repeat footage of my endurance test, at which point the penny dropped and the legitimacy of said tournament became clear. I probably should have seen it coming.

After feeling made its unwelcome return in the form of agonizing pain I was forced to look on the bright side and told myself, so what if those bastards laughed and chugged beers and so what if they go on to upload that shit to the internet and make a bunch of money off it? That doesn’t count for shit long term because I know that I showed those fuckers what a real man was made of, and I know that I was the only man who could hold his head up high as he dragged himself out of there with $200 of their hard earned cash in his back pocket. Remember, having paid fifty bucks to enter I left there having quadrupled my money! I guess there are some men you just can’t keep down, and now I’m one of them, even if I’m pissing blood and look like a fucking microwaved jellyfish. Renewed and replenished with this new confidence, and a justified sense of manliness, I’m hell bent on returning for revenge some day, but for now I’ve a colostomy bag that needs emptying.