I been here a year now; I’m pee shy and got gaydar. I leave the door open to let the smell out. I smoke Black & Milds, drink bottles of water, and bullshit with the regulars.
Sometimes a girl will walk by the john and recognize me.
“Aren’t you Rude Jude from The Jenny Jones Show?”
“Yeah, that’s right, how you doin’?”
“Why are you working in the bathroom?”
It’s a good question. I wonder it myself. I gotta pay rent somehow. The Jenny gig pays shit and ain’t steady enough to support me. I wanna save up to move to Cali cuz I got dreams to make happen. I’m gonna be in the movies.
When I tell people this, they doubt me. Chasing dreams is scary. And what do you do when you catch ’em? So now I keep my dreams to myself and I tell ’em rent and child support.
I gotta pay child support cuz Assia’s damn near five and I haven’t been around enough. Her mama says I ain’t shit. She’s right. I try not to think about it. I send in money and that’s it. But it haunts me. I dream about Assia sometimes, about her being old and not recognizing me. When I wake up my heart hurts.
On those days, I try not to look in the mirror. And maybe I get up and fry an egg and smoke on the porch and watch the cars drive by. I’ll call up my boys and go to the mall and forget about her.
I stay away for months. I feel so much shame, it’s hard to face her. When I finally man up and come by, no one wants me there. Assia ignores me and plays on the computer. I’m stuck talking to her mom. Even when we were fucking, we didn’t talk.
She was a booty call. We used to fuck at work, in the basement of McDonald’s. I’d wipe my dick off with a grill towel, then I’d go flip some more burgers and not say another word to her.
I hadn’t even seen her for six months before I found out she was pregnant. She left a voice mail on my pager.
“Jude, this is Tameka. I’m pregnant, call me.”
I’m in bed with my girlfriend Maria, and Maria is pregnant, too. We end up killing the baby and breaking up. And now she hates me.
I’m talking to my baby’s mama, and she’s giving me one-and two-word answers.
“So what’s up? How you been?”
“Fine.”
“All right, what you been up to?”
“Nothing much.”
“How’s the job goin’?”
“Fine.”
I make up an excuse to leave and kiss Assia goodbye. I drive to work feeling worse.
Now I’m in the bathroom trying to explain to some coked-out JAP why a man on TV is giving out mints for tips.
She’s still confused. She asks me, “So do you shine shoes, too?”
I force a smile and shake my head.
“No . . . I don’t.”
smile
ME AND MY OLD ROOMMATE chris are at some hot new BBQ joint in Williamsburg with Punk Rock Rusty. At first I was skeptical, ready to hate it. Everybody eating there had extreme beards and asymmetrical haircuts. I breathed through it. Hating these trendy motherfuckers is too easy; it’s like punching Munchkins. The bottom line is hipsters are people, too, just dumb people. And I gotta tell ya, I got the ribs and brisket, and the meat fell off the fucking bone.
I saw a girl there in a pink jumper getting a jug of beer from the bar. I fell in love. I do this every now and again. I’m like that James Blunt song where he sees a chick on the subway and writes about loving her, then she bails.
This one was pretty—not a knockout, but it wasn’t her features that got me. She got me with her smile. It was warm and kind and her eyes lit up when she spoke to people.
She smiled like she’d been loved as a child.
I wanted her to be my girlfriend. I wanted her to smile at me like that. I wanted her to wake up with me every morning and give me that smile in bed, and kiss me with her hair all messy before she brushed her teeth, before she hopped up to make tea and start her day.
And when I was being grumpy and difficult, I wanted her to smile and say, “Oh Jude, you’re being ridiculous.”
And melt my heart.
I wanted her to have my kids. I wanted to get her pregnant. She looked like she’d be a good mom with her kind eyes. But what do I know. I just finish my ribs and drink my whiskey like a cowboy.
She was in the doorway when we left. I had to speak.
I said, “Excuse me, miss. Don’t take this the wrong way, I’m not hitting on you, I don’t want nothing from you, I don’t even live out here. But lemme tell you, you are the most beautiful woman in this place. Just take that for what it’s worth.”
She looked taken aback at first and then she smiled at me, with her mouth and with her eyes. And it felt as good as I thought it would. I walked away wishing I would’ve said something more. Something clever, something heartfelt, maybe ask to call her. But I didn’t. I said what I said and now it’s off to see Brad in Bushwick. It’s the new Williamsburg.
The bar was on Knickerbocker and Troutman. The block reminded me of seventies New York in the movies, with the people on the stoops and the girls in their little shorts popping bubble gum talking to the guys hanging out the window.
Cars drove by with their Puerto Rican flags and loud music. They had Puerto Rican flags everywhere, on the porches, on the roofs, all over. I saw a motherfucker walking down the street with a flag tied around his neck like a cape, on a Wednesday.
I’m laughing with Chris, saying they might as well have been white flags, it’s over for ’em. Cuz if I’m in your neighborhood coming for specialty cocktails and a twenty-dollar burger, you might as well give up.
The white people are coming, and where we go, death and destruction follow. Death, destruction, and carrot-apple-ginger juice. I give ’em five or ten more years and then it’s a wrap for Bushwick as we know it.
After a few hours we head home, the gypsy cab drops Chris off and I go up to Midtown for a couple more drinks.
It’s damn near three, I’m heading back to Chris’s. The streets are empty, just me and the garbage trucks. I see couples staggering out of the bars together, hand in hand. All these couples out here, what do they got that I don’t got?
The cabbie’s gunning it down 5th Ave. We pass the whore house I used to go to when I lived out here. I feel that ping in my chest. I almost tell him to stop, let me out, but I don’t. We drive on by.
I tell myself, I don’t need that in my life. The cramped room, fucking some Korean whore laid out on a towel. She’s fake moaning her way through it, stinking up the joint with her kimchi breath – trying to get me to cum fast. Don’t worry sweetheart, I will. I don’t last long with hookers, and when I’m cumming, I look in their eyes and hope they smile. They never do.
karma chameleon
I WAS WITH ROSS THE other day. He tells me it turns out Karma Patel, the billionaire heiress, Harvard grad, cancer patient he hooked me up with a few months back, ended up being a little teenager named Lauren.
I figured as much. I knew she was lying the minute Ross told me that in the year knowing her through Facebook, he had never actually met her. And when I pressed her to meet, something always came up.
But I figured all of this out days—and many phone conversations—after our first introduction. I had been speaking to her like she was a dear friend of one of my oldest friends, honestly and candidly.
Ross had cosigned for a bullshit girl.
We turned Hardy Boys, Ross and I, trying to crack the case. But every lie we caught her in would turn into a bigger, more elaborate lie.
“Oh you’re gonna be here at six?”
Five o’clock she’s in a car wreck.
“Where?”
“Santa Monica.”
“The street or the city?”
“Both.”
“Where by?”
“Can’t remember, the brain cancer pills cloud the memory.”
“That’s awful. Which hospital you at? I’m coming to see you.”
“Just got out, heading home.”
�
��That’s even better, I’ll check on you there.”
“No you can’t, chemo in the morning.”
“Great, I’ll take you and hold your hand the whole time through. Okay?”
“Okay.”
Five in the morning, emergency brain surgery.
And so on.
Why would a normal person take time out of their busy life to entertain this obvious bullshit? Well, in Ross’s case he had a year’s worth of correspondence put into this and he wanted some answers. Me, I’m not normal, I’m abnormal, I’m a fucking nut. I do weird shit. I was mad I got duped, I felt my trust had been violated, and I just wanted to catch her in the act. Call her out, ask her why.
I wanted to be like, “Exhibit A, people do not get metal plates put in their head from brain cancer! Exhibit B, there were no said Karma Patels brought into any hospital in Los Angeles on said date! Exhibit C, the land deed to 662 Maryland Drive is under the name of Bob Jones and not to any Patell!!! I got just one question for you, Karm. . . . Stop crying, Karm, it’s okay. I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed. Just answer me this. . . . Why’d ya do it, Karm? Why’d ya do it?”
I was playing that conversation out in my head as I drove over to 662 Maryland Drive, got out of the car, and entered the gated property. But while I was in the backyard, peering into the window of a sitting room completely abandoned save for a cardboard box (a light rain drizzling on my head), it dawned on me: Maybe I was taking this a bit far. Maybe there is no “why.” Maybe some people are just assholes. And maybe I was turning nutty once again.
Growing up, at least once every year, I’d just snap. I’d hold shit together all year long, then something would set me off and I’d get arrested or fight the police or fight my principal, or get expelled or have some nervous breakdown.
And as I was losing it, I’d know in my head I was doing something extremely dumb. But I’d just keep going, because I had to. I couldn’t help myself. I had to see it through.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned coping mechanisms to deal with stress, like jogging and breathing and doing drugs and shit like that, and these episodes have since waned.
Standing there in this stranger’s backyard, on that fresh-laid sod, peeping into a window that wasn’t mine, it hit me. I was a cunt hair away from one of these episodes. I stopped. I looked around the backyard at the half-dug pool, at the shovels lying in the mud, at the rain-soaked plywood on the ground next to it.
I stopped and said out loud, “Jude, you’ve lost it again.”
I then walked away from that house, from out their backyard, out the gate, got in my car, and drove to the V Cut cigar lounge for a cup of tea. I blocked all her calls and never attempted to contact her again. I was back to normal.
Later that week, Ross told me he saw on Facebook that she died of brain cancer. I guess the emergency brain surgery couldn’t save her.
Rest in peace.
We didn’t really speak on her till months later, at the Tar Pit over whiskey.
Ross is smiling. He’s like, “Judo, I gotta tell you something.”
“Yeah? What?”
He goes into this whole story about Karma and how she got busted lying by some Canadian rapper; she pulled the same shit on him and he got a private investigator and Ross reached out to the dude. “. . . and then, they tracked her down to her house in Maine or Vermont somewhere. Peep this: turns out, she was just some little teenage girl named Lauren getting over on all these rappers. Case closed.”
I’m shaking my head. I say, “Hell naw. She was a teenager? That British accent had her sounding old as hell. She sounded like the BBC and shit.”
Ross is like, “Young as hell, Judo. A teen. A baby.”
I say, “I was on the phone with her a bunch. I phone-sexed her. I phone-sexed a fucking fifteen-year-old? Goddamn.”
He says, “Yup, probably, I don’t know how old she was. She was a teenager, that’s all I know.”
“Where she from again?”
“I don’t know, Vermont or something.”
I say, “A motherfuckin’ teenager.”
Ross is like, “Yeah . . . you phone-sexed a child, Judo.”
He’s laughin’.
I’m still shaking my head. “Goddamn. Now that I think of it, she did cuss a lot for going to Harvard.”
“You ain’t bust, though, did you?”
“Huh?”
“With the phone sex, you ain’t cum right?”
“Naw, naw, I faked that shit. I ain’t cum. I acted like I did; just trying to get her to bust so I could go to bed.”
He’s like, “You’re good then.”
We’re quiet for a second. I say, “I wonder if she faked cumming, too. She lied about everything else.” I look at Ross; he takes a drink. “She prolly faked that shit. That little lying motherfucker.” I take a drink. I say, “Ross if I couldn’t even get a fifteen-year-old off with my phone sex game, I just don’t know what I would do.”
I crack a smile. I’m just kidding . . . kind of.
willie
THE ITEMS IN MY SHOPPING cart are the following: one leek, one large carrot, a cucumber, one Chinese eggplant, condoms, lube, maxi-pads, toilet paper, and wet wipes. I impulse-buy some energy drinks at the checkout and head to the crib to wash up. I just finished yoga.
The porn chick on the show today is a little white girl with a big round ass and a large black following. We’re playing a game called “Guess What’s in Me.” I’m on the mike trying to be clever and put condoms and lube on the vegetables at the same time. It’s not easy. I shove the lubed-up veggies into her pussy one at a time and work them around for a bit. She’s blindfolded and has an industrial-strength vibrator on her clit.
She’s spot-on, she knows her veggies. I fuck her with the Chinese eggplant till she cums. Listeners love this shit, the phones are going crazy. I don’t even get hard. It’s just a job.
Porn’s ruined for me. Ignorance is bliss. Sometimes lies are better than the truth. When they listen, they’re thinking about her cumming, I’m thinking about herpes. I’m thinking about big dicks pounding dry pussies and fake moans.
We sit in awkward silence and wait for the song to finish to go back on the air. Not much to say after you just threw some vegetables up a stranger. She tells me she used to watch me on Jenny Jones. I tell her that’s cool. She tells me her friends never heard of me. We take calls. I thank her. She’s sweet. Show’s over. I’m off to bus tables.
It’s what I do for fun. I’m Andy Kaufman. When people I meet find out I bus, they think I’m poor. “Radio doesn’t pay well? It’s tough to make ends meet, huh?”
I wish I could let it slide, but I tell ’em, “I do well, I’m just slumming it.”
It’s a joke. Some laugh; others don’t. They think I’m talking down. I came up doing this shit. My mom was the help, I’ll make those jokes.
My real job is to sit in a box by myself talking shit. It’s nice to be around people and move. I ain’t slumming it.
I know this chick, a Harvard lawyer who fucks Mexican busboys to feel part of the struggle. I hate that bitch. She’s slumming it. Yeah, I wanna fuck immigrants, too, but it’s more about the movement of their ass in them sweatpants walking down Vermont, pushing a stroller. Their willingness to let you cum in ’em speaks to the inner caveman in me. Fuck the struggle; they can keep their fucking struggle.
I’m driving to work down Pico checking out a Mexican chick walking, baby in hand, one in the stroller, a tamale away from being overweight, ass swinging. I’m listening to Willie Nelson in the car, like my dad used to do. He’d bang around town in the maroon Chevette, smoking Kools, singing along with Willie, You were always on my mind. You were always on my mind. Take a drag, blow that shit out.
They put him in the loony bin around that time. Him and my mom are arguing, phone rings, it’s the guy she’s seeing, she takes the call. Pop goes bananas, he’s hollering, breaking shit. Cuts his hand open on a busted jar. It’s long and deep, he’s bleedin
g everywhere. Drives himself to the hospital for stitches and they admit him.
I’m on the porch sharpening Popsicle sticks, staring at my dad’s blood on the concrete as he rushes off.
Days go by. I ask my mom where my dad is.
“He’s sick. He’s not feeling well.”
We go to the hospital to see him. We’re outside in the visiting area by the pull-up bar with the wood chips. He’s sitting at the picnic table, somber. He looks like a man who just lost.
He told us about the rape years later, when I was ten or twelve. We were going to my Nonnie’s in the Buick and he laid it on us. Rachel and I were playing in the bathtub when it happened. They were still married but she wouldn’t fuck him anymore; she said she wanted to be faithful to Darryl. So he put a knife to her throat and raped her.
He said he did it for love, said the knife wasn’t that big, said he was drinking and drugging. Said he got crazy when she started seeing that other guy, his head just broke. He said he lost it.
Well, that cleared things up. That’s why Mom showed up to Nonnie’s that day trying to take us from him. That’s why Grandpa slapped him in the face. That’s why she wouldn’t let him in the house anymore and he’d always try to come in anyway.
Knife wasn’t that big, he said; it was more symbolic.
The very next breath, he’d say, “Look at this, we’re alone, she did this to us! She broke up our family. Ya all I got left; all we got is each otha! We gotta be good to each otha.”
And he’d clutch the steering wheel, sobbing, and we’d nod and comfort him.
And when I was in the car with my mom, I’d say, “Mom, why’d you break up our family? Why’d you do this to us?” She’d never say anything bad about my dad and I’d just stay on her till I saw tears fall from her eyes and something in me liked that.
He joined AA to get her back, said it was the alcohol that made him act that way. Didn’t work. He ended up just fucking the rehab chicks. No one was buying it anyway; it takes commitment to be a drunk and he lacks that. He’s no drunk, he’s just crazy.
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