David Hurley 1978: David Hurley was born to loving parents in Dublin, Ireland.
1980: he broke up with his playschool sweetheart; the scars, they never heal. 1993: he took to drink.
2003: David graduated University with a BAI in Engineering. 2004: he travelled the world. 2006 to
Present: he is currently a God-fearing man and functioning alcoholic.
|
What d’you mean,
‘What's a saucepan?’ You takin' de piss, boy?
My feet stick to the floor; when I peel them free from the grime there's
the sound of tearing. It's dried blood, or puke, or piss, or something. The sludge of a thousand drunken
nights. Some feeling in my gut is telling me my bro’s first day in Home Economics isn't exactly destined
to be a great success. I ask him what he got his little heart set on making? After he tells me, I've got
no choice but to take pity on the little grunt and talk him through some of the basics. This is wasting
time that he could be using to go find Pops and get him to come pick my ass up, but it's pretty clear he
needs to be told where to find shit in the kitchen first, or he’ll rip that place apart:
he needs to be told where the dishes are,
the pasta sheets ( dey hidin’ at the back of the press),
tins of chopped tomatoes,
onions ( under de sink),
carrots ( jus' left of de onions),
broccoli, celery…
It’s a vegetarian lasagne, only with mince, he says.
The mince live in de freezer, ya little Schmuck.
… herbs,
the goddam Gary Rhodes recipe book,
garlic cloves,
the pestle and mortar …
The what? he says.
Warm brown stones dat be cold to the touch – dey a heat sink; smooth, heavy,
and dull; dey have a leaden purity, dey break tings up good.
Huh? he says.
De poundin' rocks – dey be fo' grindin' shit up: one dull stone club and
one rounded base, round like half a rock.
Where? he says.
De stone ting on the counter, ya Putz.
Oh, yeah. Kinda looks like an ancient joystick.
My brother, the paleontologist. Meshuganah.
On a more basic level, I gotta point out whereabouts the oven lives, and I
detail clearly the fancy bit of the recipe that his dumb ass should not – NOT – be attempting, if he's got
any sense.
The loud crashing of the pots in the background makes me hold the phone
away from my ear for a second – but not so far away that I don’t hear my sixteen-year-old angel of a
bro screaming Cunt at the falling pots, like they were out to get him.
Through this I keep my calming voice going – all soft and undulating.
I fight the urge to cuss him out, and I just keep right along explaining how this is gonna be really
easy; don't fret none, little bro. Soon the series of uh-huhs and yeps coming my way down
the curly black telephone cord is consoling me. I think he might even do okay with this. We go through
things, and I tell him he should ask me questions now about the bits he's already fogotten – I know there
are bits he's already fogotten. He asks and I tell. With this I am sure and certain that I'm leading my
capable little brother on the righteous path.
I am convinced that he just needs that gentle nudge in the right direction
and that with my guidance he'll be on the path to becoming a celebrity chef or some shit some day. You may
well say that becoming a celebrity chef isn't exactly greatness – you may well say that – but I say, it's
money and adulation, dickhead. And what the fuck more do you want? You get to a certain age and you're
gonna realise one thing: you’ll never have greatness.
Maybe one day he’ll recount this in his biography – the time his big
sister set him straight about cooking,
| "It’s just the tumour, impinging on parts of my brain, causing
pressure, changing behaviour, and destroying the filters I see the world through. Just like the Doc said
last week on my second last visit to his surgery. He says, we all have filters that colour how we see things:
girls want babies, and boys want to fuck around; but everyone needs love. " |
got his life set on the right path, you know? He'll be talking about how he was inspired by my easy knowledge
and practicality, my steady guiding hand: he should name that chapter 'Beginnings'; it should be a heartrending
tale of our bond.
Don't forget, find Pops and get him to pick my ass up or dey'll never bail me
outa here, ya little Schmuck.
Finishing up on my one phone call, I run back over things. I recap for the dumb
Schmuck – the sweet angel dumb Schmuck – I recall for him the shit he's gonna need for his lasagne, and how he's
gonna need it. Again he goes uh-huh followed by yeah, and I'm thinking: job done.
One last thing… he says.
I should be worried, but I'm not.
… what does celery look like?
The cold black plastic of the receiver hits the scuffed metal cradle of the phone
and I'm resolving never to talk to that little retard Schmuck – ever again. I'm beginning to think he’s not
the one to pin my dreams on.
Me, like a Meshuganah on the phone, freezing my ass off in this cold fog-damp
hall with hard-boiled cop-eyes burning into me from all angles. Afterwards, I make to move back to my cell,
and I gotta peel my feet out of some mystery bodily fluid floor glue before I can take that first step. Me,
like a Putz, listening to my bro's crap for so long that now I got cramp in the crook of my elbow just from
holding the phone. Maybe they're right about me, maybe I am nuts.
What I'm not, though, is stupid. Before this it wasn’t looking like I was gonna
be talking up my latest 'whatever' on Oprah anytime soon: my memoirs; or a movie I been in; or a book about men
that be telling the down and dirty truth, ‘Unveiled Secrets’ I could call it; or some awful sad story about my
abuse. You know, shit like that. I ain’t never been abused, least not like they mean, but that shit sells right?
I mean, you might never have greatness, but you still need a goal. Money, adulation, pity. Whatever.
It's an embarrassing fucking ambition – still, it’s there in the back of my mind.
It makes me do embarrasing fucking things – things that stick forever at the back of my mind. Is the part of
my brain that's harbouring this dark wish is being fed by the same blood supply that’s feeding my tumour?
It would be poetic. I think of me, on TV with Oprah, being all nice, and then when she wipes away a tear
about some poignant shit I'm saying, I lean in to her and gesture – you know, all over-enthusiastic Tom
Cruise up close to her. Then, just when people are thinking what a character I am; what a fragile, exotic,
beautiful, pitiful thing... I plant the bone of my elbow in her face. Pow.
Even here, in this hall now, trying to peel myself away from this phone, I
can see her body fluids leak from her face as clear as day, and I just gotta laugh. The cops stare right
through my eyes and their blue highbeams light up the inside of my brain like a UV bulb. They don't like me
yapping and laughing on the phone with my bro, don't like it one bit.
Fuck 'em. They don't know. Truth is, Oprah's been telling me what to do for
too long now - she gives me stupid fucking ambitions. Ricki too. Shit, Oprah's best selling diet plan got
me so skinny, my sharpened elbow might even come out the other side of that bitch's face when I hit her.
Man, would I wail on her. Training has left my pounding fists smooth, heavy, and dull; they have a leaden
purity, they will break Ricki up good. Me, the pestle breaking her apart – that’s like a big stone thing.
And in the three seconds it would take before security neutralise de threat, I could put foward my well
thought out brain tumour defence: It's not me, it's de tumour. Well, what do you want, LA Law? I
got a brain tumour for Christ's sake, it's not as if I'm firing on all cylinders right now.
Thee stretch of floor between the body-fluid phone and my concrete cell
squeaks something awful. Strange how the vomit on my shoes lubricates my stride now instead of pinning
me down. Non-Newtonian fluids – you just can't trust 'em. I follow the yellow-brick road back to my
concrete box. My yellow-brick road – the line they got painted on the floor, the one you gotta follow to
get where you need to go without getting beat on. Makes me think of the land of Oz; makes me think of
the prison drama, Oz; makes me think of TV. Now I think about Oprah.
In an ideal world, I get to pound on Oprah, but we both know I just don’t
have that kind of wide-spread appeal right now. I'm just not hitting my demographic. If you make it
onto the Ricki Lake show, if, after some soft gooey emotional discharge with the audience, you beat her
to a pulp, you still wish it could have been Oprah. The nagging regret of it all. Another dream that
just didn't come out quite right. You can't get any bigger than Oprah. Big doesn't cover Oprah.
You'll never have greatness. The gesture is less grand if it's Rick, but for now we'll work with
what we've got.
The dried puke I picked up in the hall heats and melts with my walking.
It oils my path and I slide along my yellow-brick – nearly fall, but not quite. The blood proteins won't
reconstitute once they dry, so it ain't them that got my feet so slippy.
Before I was happy not to be directly involved in my talk-show host's demise.
Before, when I thought I had my own future, I just wanted hers to end through karma. The old me used to call
her a parasite and wish heart attacks on her fat ass – not any heart attack. Massive coronary.
Watching TV, I always used to wish the next frame would show Ricki's hand
jump to her chest, her clutching claw gripping at the stabbing pain inside her, just in the middle of a
heartfelt diatribe on how to love yourself even if you are a six-hundred pound husband beater who's sleeping
with your eight-hundred pound sisters’ junkie fiancé, and touching-up your kid on the side. Well, you
have to keep busy. Bang. Massive coronary.
I used to wish for her swollen fingers to be gripping her chest, and her
face to contort with inhuman tightness; used to pray for her to drop the mike, and for her bulk to collapse
toward the floor. I was wanting her to roll down the steps of her studio – falling hard; the camera
capturing her pleading eyes as panic grips her soul, if she's got one. I used to be needing her to see
the great nothingness coming to envelope her. That was what I wanted to be watching on my daytime TV:
her punishment pixelated on my screen.
She had to know the meaninglessness of her existence – just hers – and
she had to regret the things she’d done. Worse, she had to regret the things she had not done: the things
she'd been afraid to do. She had to regret allowing fear to close her mind. She had to regret her blinkered
assurance on every moral point. If, at the end of all of that, as she's rolling, if she could crush the
blind orphan in the front row, that, that would be ideal. And if you listen real close, the quiet that
fills the room, it comes just after the last muted thud of her pulse.
I wanted all of this for her, like I wanted none of it for me.
That’s how I used to think. How sick was that? I’ve changed now, honest.
I was being very passive before. But I just kept watching, and soon after that, I saw that they were right,
Oprah and Ricki.
I grew up.
Slipping and sliding along my yellow-brick road back to my cell, I am much
more pro-active in my approach these days. I see things differently now: this time I'm there. Involved.
I'm a guest. I'm talking. This is conflict. This is character development.
I've already set the tone with talk of my weight issue and the abuse. I've already blown them away with my
tumour story. Then I hit them with, Jees’ Ricki, somehow I jus’ feel empty an’ lost. I reckon at
this point I let a tear escape my left eye, burn down my cheek, and turn one tiny piece of Ricki’s couch
a darker blue. I crank it up. I really reach out. An’ I be watchin’ you on TV sometimes Ricki, an’ you
know so much about life an’ love, an’ right an’ wrong...
here, I lean in a little more, and Ricki, she pulls understanding pity-face #3
..., an’ I jus' be thinkin’, Ricki...
That noise you here, the one that punctuates my unfinished sentence, is me
planting the bone of my elbow hard in the middle of Ricki's grade three pity-face. The heavy clicks and
thuds that follow are my meat and bones tenderising hers – my dark ambition coming true.
It's not me, it's de tumour.
* * *
It’s just the tumour, impinging on parts of my brain, causing pressure,
changing behaviour, and destroying the filters I see the world through. Just like the Doc said last week
on my second last visit to his surgery. He says, we all have filters that colour how we see things: girls
want babies, and boys want to fuck around; but everyone needs love. They used to think that it was your
childhood, he says, but now they think it's your DNA. How fat you get, if you like drink or drugs too much;
how happy you are, how sad you are; when you get Cancer, if you beat Cancer, if Cancer kills you – all of it,
your DNA. He kinda chuckles a little and says, The intellectual light of science has brought us all back
to believing in fate.
I stare straight ahead and say, Deoxyribonucleic acid, in automatic
voice. I say it in my old voice. I say it just right.
The Doc squeeze his face into a lemon looking thing when I say this, like I
shouldn’t know what the letters stand for. What a Meshuganah this doctor is. Then he says this tumour is
why I'm mixing up my dialects, why I cuss, and talk the mixways I do sometimes; why I get a rage on so
easily, for no good reason at all.
He's all understanding like this, but he seems like he loosing concentration,
and he shakes his head and squints his eyes. He look me straight in the face, laughs a bit too much and says,
It 's just plain strange, isn’t it? He stares at me, vacant, like I have the answer. He says,
you gotta admit, it's no way for a well educated boy like you to be talking and that's for sure.
It takes some silence before he remembers himself, and embarrassed then, and sorry, he goes quiet for a
time and his eyes avoid mine.
He says, Oprah Winfrey is the cause of these rage attacks; the scans will
show that. He says how the police should be more understanding. Then he says, But you’ve got to
understand: they don’t know you have this problem, I mean, you might just be nuts. The last words
out of his mouth before he sees the scans.
The doctor told me once about other documented cases of this syndrome he'd
been reading about. Some Scandinavian bitch in World War Two had some self-same similar thing happen to her.
He said, her voice went all funny the whole time – not like my in and out. He said, some shrapnel hit her
in an air raid, and then she's talking like some German bitch, only she's never been to Germany. He says,
in Norway, in 1941 that made her one unpopular girl. Boys stopped calling around. The Friday night slot
in her diary became harder to fill. He says, it's like that for me, only instead of shrapnel, I got me
my tumour, and I'm talking like some crazy 50-year-old Jamaican Jew bitch from New Orleans. Good thing
we're not at war with New Orleans, eh? He said and laughed like that was some Saturday Night Live shit.
It's not that lucky a break really, if you think about it, I mean, we're a neutral country – Civil war
and terrorism will do us fine. I don't bother to point out that, broadly speaking, the convention is
to go to war with countries rather than cities. Putz. You know what I do say to him?
I say, Oi weh.
I gave my tumour a name, so it would know I don’t mean it no harm, so it
doesn’t be getting all scared and on edge and start fixing to go do some real damage. I'm not dumb:
friends close, enemies closer, you know?
So I call my tumour Oprah Winfrey.
My tumour is not black, like Oprah. It is canary yellow like, eh... a
canary, I guess. Saying that out loud now makes me picture canaries as nothing but little flying tumours.
But that’s not right either because Oprah, if you ever see my head cracked open and look at her close, would
look like nothing but weird scrambled eggs. Amazing what you can learn from the medical journals in the
doctor's waiting room.
| "Take a look and what do you see: a two-hundred and forty-eight
pound Irish man talking like he's a crazy ass, Yiddish speaking Jamaican bitch; a man with an imaginary
brain tumour named Oprah; a man who thinks he’s a skinny whisp of a girl – a girly girl." |
I sit down when I reach my cell, the bars close in on me and the steady
hum of the traffic polluting the air fills my ears through the barred window. It reminds me of an old
life. Time. Time barrels on and, on a whim, eats those things we once thought so permanent. Time
probably wasn't even hungry. Probably just did it because it could. Time – the bulemic destroyer of
all things.
Man I love my car. Did I ever tell you that? I must have. And this
morning, when that no good punk cut me up, it made Oprah so mad. This guy, he gets out of his car,
saying crazy things, screaming things that make no sense. But when I caught that fuck, whoee,
did I wail on him! Man, I was cooking. Hit him so hard my wrist clicks now all the time, something
important broke, I guess; kept hitting him so hard the cartilage in his nose pushed into his face – caved
in like he had leprosy. Like I say, hitting so hard like that made my wrist hurt, so then I had to
use my elbow. Damn if that isn’t an awkward way to hit someone. After a time, he got limp and floppy.
I got tired. That’s when I stopped. Not bad for a girl. I get angry just thinking about it
though – but that's Oprah’s fault.
The guy, not only did he dent my Ford, but he costs me a wrist and my best
white blouse. I could say, when people ask me, that it was tie-dyed, but tie-dye and blood spatter, they
don’t much look alike. Don’t need no CSI serologist to figure that one out. Hey, could you imagine some
police get at that blouse of mine with that luminol shit they use? Man, I'd light up like a Christmas
tree. I'd glow like some Ukranian fuck straight from Chernobyl. Please address all future correspondence
to Reactor Four, Chernobyl Neuclear Power Plant, Pripyat, Ukraine. Then though, I guess the cancer be in
my thyroid, not my brain...
In the end, it’s the police who pick me up – arrest me, I guess you’d call it.
They mustn’t be teaching a tumour course in cop school cause they just arrest me flat out. Don't even give
me time to get my well structured brain tumour defence out of my mouth. They tenderize me pretty hard too.
They using words like sick, fuck, tranny, and psycho in between kicks. You think they
have a licence for that? Did you ever hear such horrible words? How can some people be so full of hate?
Don't they ever watch daytime TV?
I guess the cops think it was just plain dangerous how fast I had to
drive to catch that Putz. One-hundred and forty through Rathmines, up to one-eighty on Camden street,
down to a dead stop just as we hit George's street traffic. But they can't pin any of what followed on
me, I was justified. He cut me up. I was just driving behind him. When I get close, in that rear view
mirror, I catch that he got this crazy “help-me” screaming face on – like I’m the one with the problem.
Then, from nowhere, he slams that shiney red penis car of his bang into reverse, and cuts up my Ford.
Cuts her up like she's a piece of shit. That made Oprah so so mad. Man, I loved that car. I told you
that, right? I must have. He get out and gets to running; shouting blue murder all the while. The
no good punk be fucking up my car, my wrist, and my blouse too. I hit him so hard....
* * *
Like I say, once I got here, I rang my retard Schmuck brother.
One phone call – gee thanks mista Po-lice.
He's 16 and he's telling me I'm crazy. I need this shit like I need a hole
in the head. What I need is for him to get off the damn phone and tell Pops to pick me up, but he's asking
me for baking tips. He says to tell him where to find what he needs in the kitchen. If I need to take a
minute to arrange my thoughts on the process of lasagne preparation he sees it as an opportunity to go
over the same tired shit about me being a guy, not a girl:
How the fuck could you be a girl? he says.
Then he gets to telling me he doesn’t care anymore, he's sick of this shit.
He says he just came up with the plan as a joke, just something you say. Nobody actually does those things.
Besides, he's got this ‘Home Ec’ thing and he needs my help no matter what sex I think I am. Anyway, he says,
girls are good cooks so, if I want, I can stay a girl for this phone call for all he care. But still if
I slow up even for second, he's all:
Don’t you remember the day you changed?
Don’t you remember the day you took that stupid plan too far?
Don't you remember when we lost you?
I am a real girl, I say. I'm not a puppet anymore – Pinocchio, after
the adventure. Look at me – too skinny and too pretty to be a guy. That makes him laugh his ass off.
Little putz. Anyway, he's just jealous. He just plain doesn't have what it takes to implement the plan,
not like I do. Hell, he's probably forgot half the shit we did together in the name of the plan.
He's telling me numbers, saying I must weigh like two-hundred and fifty pounds,
... and how could you not with all those battered Mars Bars you get delivered – DELIVERED, you lazy
fuck – from down the chippy, while you sit on that chair, and eat, and watch TV, and eat...
Things are getting patchy in my mind right about now, and I tell him, I
may be big, but I am beautiful – and all woman too, honey.
I gotta admit sometimes Oprah messes with the way I see shit, like I say.
I get mixed up about what's real and what's not. So maybe I ain't so skinny. So what? I did the damn
diet, I should be skinny.
According to him, I do nothing but draw the dole, and sit on my ass all
day watching TV, don’t I remember? According to him, two months ago it’s like someone flicks a switch: I
must’ve ground up too many of those pills in my cocoa and watched too much TV all at one time, because it
doesn’t look like I coming back from this trip.
I just gotta tell it like it is. It's not my pills – they help the day pass.
And TV is fine – it kills time too, and time isn't anybody's friend. He is right about one thing though.
It isn't even other people or 'the world' that does things to you. Hell, it isn't even Oprah or
Ricki – it's us. It's our bad choices.
Our weakness.
Our laziness.
Our cowardice.
Our fear.
Worse, it’s that we can't live with this failure of ours any longer,
and we're angry. But he's sixteen – still an individual.
Who's we? He says.
He doesn't wait for an answer. My bro, he's still got his eye on
the prize. Now he's full of uh-huh and yeps again before asking, Anyway, how can I be sure the
lasagne won't come out too dry?
All through my one phone call, my feet were sticking to the piss on the
floor, the cops was looking over at me on the phone from behind their desk with their hard-boiled eyes
x-raying right through me, and my no good brain was having trouble paying attention to my bro's lasagne
problems. How the cops looked over was just the same as how the doctor was looking at me this morning
in his surgery – my last visit – before he holds up that x-ray and says, There's no tumour.
After that call, after all that slip-sliding my way back along my yellow-brick
to my concrete box, after the traffic blowing at me from the road, after all that, just as I turn to sit
my beautiful ass in a cell with NO TV – what the fuck is that shit? NO TV! – I loose my footing, the
puke-lube superglides my feet from the floor and I feel suspended, floating, for an instant before I go
down, cracking my head against the concrete slab of the bed on the way. Motherfucker.
All because my single chromosome of a bro is busy baking some kinda meat cake.
How am I suppose to remember my guidance, my direction, my purpose? I
mean yeah, Ricki's as fat as shit, and sure sometimes she made me so mad, but she showed me it's okay
to be morbidly obese and sexy. Ricki Lake is my moral compass now. She's not the cause, not the real
cause – we covered that – but she's close enough. Close enough, that if you squint your eyes, she looks
like the problem. For now, that's a better direction for my anger than some True-North pointing compass
pointing right back in my pitiful face. So she's gotta be stopped. Know your enemy, that’s all. And
I gotta be able to see my enemy to know her, right?
Where’s my damn TV, Mr. Po-lice?
The doctor in his beige office, looking at the scan, he said some stupid shit.
I’m healthy, he says – well, maybe not “healthy”, but not dying of a tumour. What the fuck am I playing at,
he says. You can see the same scared something now in the faces of the police. It's not nice.
Stupid fuck must have graduated from some punk ass medical school because I
know, plain as day, that Oprah is in my head. He tries telling me that a joke is a joke, and to cut the crap.
He says, come on now, and he's rubbing his eyes, and looking all tired and used up. Looking at
me like dad used to when I'd let him down.
And what gets me is that, he isn't even happy for me, he's angry. His
ticket into some medical journal just went up in smoke, I guess. No cigars with the boys. No brandy
by the fire and hearty congratulations. No peer review. No recognition. He's so angry, he says
straight out that I'm not a fucking girl either, that Jack is a boy’s name, that girls don’t come with
shoulders like mine, and to stop wasting his goddam time; to cop the fuck on for God's sake. I
just knew he was a Jesus freak.
After a silence, he's puffing out his checks like he's the wind, and he's
saying how he just plain isn’t qualified for shit like this. He's mumbling some shit to himself about
medicine being a mistake, how he should have used his skilled hands to be a painter instead. Eyes wide,
his head shaking; wrinkling and unwrinkling his forehead, he totally believes that there's no tumour.
Like I can’t feel Oprah plain as day in my head, growin'.
You know she's telling me all the time how to live my life now? She's
got me acting like some touchy-feeley ass girly-girl half the time. But it’s all some kinda act, cause
man when she gets mad, you know you gonna pay. She gets vicious mean. Sometimes I for real don't approve
of what she does. I get to thinking on this, and how things have been going funny for me, of late; how
this doctor doesn’t even believe me. Man that makes me so mad I get to chasing that son of a bitch around
that office. And hell, if he doesn’t get to running. He runs all the way out of the office and out to his
shiney red cock-helmet of a dokka car, and he wrestles with the keys in his shaking fingers. He wrestles
with the door too, before he gets to driving just about as fast as can be out of the car park. With his
head start, it's just plain dangerous how fast I gotta drive to catch that fuck.
Lying in this cell, I feel the sticky wetness of blood matting my hair
into clumps. Lots of blood. I can't feel my legs. My head is getting dizzy. I feel light. I hear
Oprah calling to me. She has given me so much. Since she came things have become so very clear: in
this world, passivity is the real sickness. Having an opinion and acting on it, even if it's wrong,
that's what gets you places. I will be proactive from now on, Miss Oprah.
I try to call for help, but the cops mustn't hear me because nobody
comes. The cell door is thick, heavy, metal. My blood is pooling about me. I can see it flow slowly
toward the door. I'll be fine. I'll just wait till somebody sees it come out the other side. Plenty
of time to think. I'll be fine.
My bro has been telling me that I've finally lost it, when really I
finally figured IT out. My poor deluded bro thinks that I'm all the way like those bitches now. He
thinks I've become the very thing I hate. But that just isn’t so. He thinks that I took our plan too
far and now the wrong part of it came true. But that just goes to show:
I got them so good fooled, even family can’t read what’s true.
That's just how it has to be if this plan is gonna work, if I'm finally
not going to be afraid anymore; if I'm finally going to do something worthwhile.
Take a look and what do you see: a two-hundred and forty-eight pound
Irish man talking like he's a crazy ass, Yiddish speaking Jamaican bitch; a man with an imaginary
brain tumour named Oprah; a man who thinks he’s a skinny whisp of a girl – a girly girl? Is that
what you see? I might even be in a wheelchair now too – nothing says 'book deal' quite like tragic
incapacitation at the hands of brutal oppressors. The only way this could be better is if my blood
transfusion is improperly screened and some blood-borne pathogens sneak through. Oprah could do
with some company.
Can you imagine how easy it's going to be for me to get on one of
those damn shows now? They are going to eat this shit up. Getting onto Ricki will be easy.
Hell, you gotta admit, I’m so fucked up even Oprah is possible now. And then, whoee am I gonna
wail on them! Man I’ll be cooking. Maybe it's not too late. Maybe even greatness awaits.
Anyway, my bro is such a Schmendrick. Where does he get off saying
I can’t pass for a pretty little thing? Like his brain is something to rely on for matters of fact.
Hell, he doesn't even remember how far we went just to make sure we stood out in our Oprah
Winfrey/Ricki Lake human trash marketplace; what we did in case the brain tumor gig wasn't
enough – there are some pretty sick people out there and we gotta compete. He doesn't recall
our ace-in-the-hole – what Oprah is gonna term “inappropriate touching”. He should try, there's
a book deal in that for him if he wants it.
The mind is a strange thing, ain't it?
It's just plain crazy what it will dream up to keep you going. It's
plain crazy what it will suppress. Ain't that right, bro? My bro and his shithole of a memory. The
shit he doesn't remember would fill a book, I swear. Anyway, how is he supposed to know if I look
like a pretty girl or not? Goddam, he's so dumb, he doesn’t even know what celery looks like.
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