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Five Dollars
2005-01-10 - 12:22 a.m.


before/after
strangely non-functional guestbook

I reached into my back pocket and found a wadded up, washed five dollar bill.� Found money.


I turned to Chris and showed him the five.


"Nothing like finding five dollars in your pocket."� I said.


Chris is my lab partner from school.� About 5'10, 5'11, maybe, blond haired, blue eyes.� Pale skin.� Thin.� His head has an odd curve like his brain is too large for his cranium, and could come bursting out at any moment.� Chris is a smart guy, talented with computers, quick wit, but has a bit of a past that includes a crystal meth habit and marrying a stripper.� The marriage didnt last, astonishingly enough, and might have hit the rocks when she told him that she used to be a hooker.� She told him this sometime on their wedding night.


We talked and shot pool.� More people showed up.� Rob and another Chris.� Rob is a friend from the Residential Treatment Center, a senior counselor that used to work for me.� Short, maybe five six with close cropped hair and blue eyes, not thin but not yet fat.� Rob has a bit of a past, that includes the navy, being blown in the Phillipenes by an elderly, no-toothed hooker, and continuous orgies with Chris.� I suppose he has a bit of a present, too, with an extended custody case with his pill popping ex wife, who has used their child together to bring any kind of accusation against Rob that one can imagine.� Chris is a redneck dipshit that I'd never met before, other than through Rob's stories, interestingly enough of five-somes and guy-guy-girl threesomes with Chris's then very pregnant girlfriend.� Later on in the night they were talking quite openly and loudly about going home and fucking Chris's girlfriend, much to the amusement of the rest of the bar.� As in,


"I let you fuck my girlfriend!"� Chris said.


"You're gonna' let me fuck her tonight, TOO!!!" Rob replied.


"YEAH!" Chris shouted.


"YEAH, YEAH!!" Rob replied.


And so on.


I suppose I should be more picky about the company I keep, but Im not a snob.� I tend to accept anyone that accepts me.� And after that, the amount of time tends to be dictated, usually,�by the quality of conversation.� Or if that person has a vagina.


Chris, Rob's friend, was a redneck, blonde head shaved up to the ears, then long on top, and ponytailed in back.� He was loud, obnoxious and obvious all night, picking Ted Nugent songs on the jukebox and being annoying. Blue eyes.


A guy in a black sweatshirt and his hot, 25 year old bisexual wife showed up.� She had a nice body and stimulated herself on his knee like a stripper would, flashing her cleavage at us and looking at my crotch whenever she talked to me.� He, his name was Chris, too, I think, got into a shouting match with the redneck and left, taking his submissive woman with him.� She was pretty, with long straight brown hair, brown eyes, pale skin and lugubrious moves.� Fine sense of humor and a decent pool shot, they livened up the evening.


Then two couples showed up, one stocky guy and another who looked strangely enough like he had been boughten at some trendy clothing store.� Not too good looking and terribly obvious in his moves, he put the blonde's feet to sleep.� She looked at me with unexpressive eyes.� I looked back.� They all recognized me from the poetry reading.�


And I got a lot of attention.� From her.� From the one girl with lugubrious moves.� From the waitress.� From a guy who smokes a pipe and has seen me play.� From a couple sitting with him.� If it wasn't one thing, it was another.� Some of it, a lot of it, probably, was due to my t-shirt.� I wore blue jeans, cuffed at the ankle, brown leather doc martens, my two ever present thumbrings, and a black, nice fitting t-shirt replete with orange stain from Kraft Macaroni-and-Cheese powder that reads "I Learned From Lesbians".� For some reason, that seems to stir everyone up, and they want to say something about it.


Which is fine.� I talk to everybody usually now that I dont smoke pot anymore as it is.� So why not.� Let your freak flag fly and see what makes the banner stand straight.� Or something.


Oh, and another Chris was there, the one kid that I can manage to say, according to him, that I had a profound impact upon from the Resedential Treatment Facility.� He bought everyone shots.� Except me.� Because I dont drink.


And we left, I said my goodbyes, Rob and Chris went to have their menage a trois, and Chris, my lab partner from school and I went to meet up with Mick, who was at a bar that had just changed hands trying to see if we could get a gig.� As I pulled up, he was singing Kareoke as an audition because Aaron, another member, or former member, of the band, got pussywhipped on his ex girlfriend, the one who fucked all his friends, then called him and laughed about it, did a major cocaine bender and never finished the demo album so we could get gigs, fucking us.� He's back at school in Florida after having taken a medical leave after trying to kill himself by slashing his wrists over this girl.� Mick sang well.� We examined the room, which I have partied at many a time, wherin we would play.� He was drunk and breathing all over me, which I dont like.� Mick is a good friend, but he's rather feral.� Stands about�6-2, 240 pounds, brown hair, blue eyes, stocky, wears a brown jacket and an old man's cap.� Like a cabbies cap or something that matches it in its shade of brown.� And jeans.� Always jeans.


And I say he's feral because, well, because of a lot of reasons.� Mick is the guy who will eat a pickle off of a bar table after its been sitting there for awhile.�


He told me this story once, after New Years, about how he gets obnoxious and lacks impulse control when he's sleep deprived.� He was at a McDonalds once when the counter help pissed him off.� So he went to the bathroom and shit on the floor in the stall.� Then he wiped his ass and wrote "Fuck YOU!" in his feces and stuck the toilet paper to the wall of the stall.� I cut him off when he started going into the consistency of his shit.� Some things, even I don't need to hear.


And, pehaps unsurprisingly, it wasn't his only story of public shitting or fecal misques.� He told me some story about how he got paranoid when smoking weed as a teenager for some reason, took a shit in a building under construction, then wiped his ass with the blueprints for the place.� Which is really repulsive when you think about the poor asshole who has to come into both situations and deal with that, especially the blueprints, day after day after day after day...it could really make you have no faith in humankind.


Then again, they probably thought a bum did it.� And they'd probably be right.� Mick will either make it successful, and die a rock-and-roll death, be homeless and drunk, or die bizzarrely.� Makes for a good musician, and we write good songs.� Sometimes I just feel like a piece of driftwood floating about in the suck-tide of humanity.� But, often enough, I'm a good little piece of driftwood...


So we find Mick, end up leaving after Kareoke totalle degenerates and go to a younger kareoke bar and people watched for awhile.� When I walked in, with my knee length blue jacket with blue fur around the collar flowing behind me, untangling my black scarf, two girls stagger up to me, decent looking, one hanging onto the other for support.� She locked onto me.� I gave her the thumbs up.


"Come here."� she said, breathlessly.


I was already standing right beside her.�


"What?"� I asked.


"Come here."� she said again.


So I leaned in and she kissed me on the cheek.� I rubbed her side.


"Awwww, thanks, sweetie." I said.� And eventually they left.


The barmaid came up to me.� Blond, petite.� Very thin, very attractive girl in a tight half-shirt.� Blue eyes.� "I like your shirt." she said.


"Thanks, I like yours, too."


I mentioned to Chris as we sat that I recognized a guy from high-school.� Borderline retard, I think he's been a nightly regular at that bar since he graduated.� He tried to wrestle once, and I beat him so badly he pissed himself.�� We used to get him to buy for us.� One time we asked him to buy...


"Hey, Dougie, you buy for us?"� my friend asked.


"No man, I ain't got no cash."� he replied.�


And so on.� In wrestling we used to do this thing called "the ape olympics", which consisted of running to a wall and back in a series of strange manners, the team broken up into several groups competing.� You know, bear walk to the wall and back, grapevine to the wall and back, wheel barrow to the wall and back.� Dougie got to do the reverse crabwalk.� Dougie was born with deformed wrist bones or something.� This caused him huge amounts of pain.� He stepped it the slowest I've ever seen, SCREAMING the whole way, even after we all told him he could stop.� Then we started cheering him on.� Or I did.� I saw it as a triumph of the human spirit.


The coach was laughing so hard he nearly cried.� Husky man, blue eyed, brown haired, straight dopish haircut.� Dickbroom moustache, special ed teacher. "Gentleman, these are memories you will keep and have when you are older." he said.� I'd bet a year's salary that I'm the only fucker that remembers that.


Dougie is short, dirty, and fat.� Fucked up bent brown glasses.� Brown eyes, but I'm only guessing.� Messed up hair.� Looks exactly the same as he did in high-school.� White with brown striped-check button down shirt.� Beige pants.� Retarded, or borderline retarded.�


I mention that I went to highschool with him, and Chris calls him over.


"Don't..."� I said.


"Hey.� HEY!� HEY GUY!� COME OVER HERE!� DO YOU KNOW THIS GUY!"� Chris said, pointing at me.


"asshole," I muttered under my breath.


Dougie sidles up.� Not sure if he recognized me or not.


"Hey man."


"Hey, Dougie."


There was a pause.� He stood there and stared down at me, foot on the chair in front of me.


"So....how are you?"� I asked.


"I'm still up to the same old thing." he replied.


Another long pause.


"What are you up to?" he asked.


"Oh, you know, the same-old, same-old." I replied, turning to chris,"Dougie used to buy for us when we were in high-school."


Dougie nodded sagely then sat down.� Nobody said anything to him.


He sat for a long time, and the conversation died at the table.�


"I didnt think he'd STAY." Chris muttered to me behind his hand.


"Maybe next time you'll listen to me."� I said.


"Yeah, you owe me one."


"I will collect.� You won't know when, but I will."


And dougie sat some more.� Eventually he got up and stood behind me, looming over me.� People moved away from our table at that point.� Security came over to him.


"You gotta' leave."� he said.


"Why?" Dougie responded.


"You puked on a table."


"Allright, give me a minute."


I ended up leaving before Dougie.� I tried to talk Mick into doing Kareoke, but he got into some sort of disagreement with the kareoke guy.� So we left.


As we walked out, we passed another bar with big glass windows, the two oclock unlucky ones on their cellphones making booty calls or trying to find after-hours.


"Wouldnt it be great to moon those people?"� Chris said.


"How much is it worth to ya'?"� Mick asked.


"Five dollars."� Chris retorted.


"Okay." Mick said, and promptly undid his jeans, dropped trou and pressed his fat, hairy white ass against the big bay windows enthusiastically and repeatedly. "YEAH! YEAH! YEAH!" he shouted, then scurried off into the night.


I ran a few steps, then stopped. Why am I running, I didnt do anything.


Mick came out of the shadows in the still night.


"Nobody's coming, Mick.� Nobody cares."� I said.


"Where's my five dollars?"� Mick crowed.


I turned to Chris.� "You owe me two-fifty." I said.


I pulled the wadded up, washed five dollar bill out of my pocket and gave it to him.�


Karma, I guess.



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