The Skinhead

“The Skinhead” by Newamba Flamingo

Big Jim was a skinhead. I’m not sure if he was a racist, neo-nazi type skinhead, but he was a muscular white guy with a shaved head who always wore a bomber jacket and combat boots, so, at least to me and my friends, he was a skinhead.

Big Jim used to hang around our high school and fuck this freshman stoner chick. I don't know how old Big Jim was, but he was definitely a few years older than us.

My friend Eduardo, this skinny Mexican dude, had a crush on Big Jim's stoner chick. Whenever we’d get high, he’d always tell me how he wanted to smoke a joint while she rode his dick.

Eventually he got his chance to do just that. Over this three day weekend, at a small party at my house, while my parents were away, Eduardo showed up to my doorstep, drunk and alongside the stoner chick.

We three went up to my room and the stoner chick broke out a gigantic slab of hash and we all ripped bong hits off it. Around the third cycle of the bong, Eduardo and the stoner chick ripped off their clothes and started fucking, right in front of me, on my bed.

Now I'm sure I could have joined in, as I saw her eying me as they fucked. But I knew my friend had feelings for her, so I kept at bay and continued to smoke up on her hash.

The next day, my friend showed up to my house alone and told me how the stoner chick dumped him. How she all of a sudden didn't want to see him anymore.

He was hurt. I told him to forget about it, but he couldn't.

A few weeks later, there was this morning at school when a girl's purse went missing. Security searched everyone’s lockers, but it still didn’t turn up. An hour or so later someone left an anonymous post-it note on the stoner chick's desk saying: “I know you stole the purse, bitch!”

The stoner chick broke down crying, stormed out of class, and disappeared from school.

It was around lunchtime that she returned, riding shotgun in Big Jim’s car, and they drove slowly up to the parking lot across the street from school where we'd all eat and smoke cigarettes.

Pulling into the parking lot, she pointed Eduardo out to Big Jim and Big Jim parked and got out of his clunky late model Buick and strode straight up to him.

The two of them stared each other down. It looked like they were gonna fight. Which would have been bad for my friend, because Big Jim probably would have kicked the living shit out of him. But no punches were thrown.

After some initial posturing, Big Jim just started laughing and told my friend to forget about the whole thing. They shook hands and Big Jim invited Eduardo and me to come chill with him in the woods behind the parking lot and smoke some chronic shit he had.

Eduardo and I gladly accepted his offer and ditched afternoon classes to go with him. The stoner chick even joined us, too.

Big Jim smoked us all up and we laughed and talked and listened to Bob Marley on a boombox and had a good time. I thought everything was cool.

But afterward, at Eduardo’s house that evening, Eduardo started talking about how he wanted to kill Big Jim. He called up his cousin, a member of the Latin Kings street gang, and his cousin came over and they kicked around ideas of how to kill the “puto” as we smoked PCP and drank ghetto wine.

It turned out, though, that they'd never get the chance. About a week after the stare down and subsequent bong hit session, Big Jim got into an accident. A bad one.

He'd been taking acid and him and some friends went out “train surfing,” jumping down from bridges onto the roofs of trains and riding the trains to wherever.

Well, unfortunately for Big Jim, when he leaped down from a bridge, he didn't land on top of the train. Instead, he fell in between train carriages, and his left leg got caught in the machinery and ripped off his body.

Miraculously, he survived and was in the hospital for a while. A couple girls from our school visited him there and brought him coloring books and food.

However, the stoner chick didn’t join them. She didn’t even visit him in the hospital once. She stopped talking to him immediately after she’d heard the news.

I never saw Big Jim again. He didn’t come around our school anymore after his accident.

And Eduardo and his cousin, they never mentioned him again, either.

"Hot Dog Bitch" by Newamba Flamingo

When I was 15, my friend and I ran into this really hot girl on the street. My friend sort of knew her, but I didn't. A couple days later, he called and told me she wanted my phone number. So I gave it to him and he gave it to her.

The girl and I started talking. She lived down the street. Pretty soon we started seeing each other, going over to whomever's house was parent-free.

We'd listen to Cypress Hill, smoke weed out of her tiny glass pipe and then make out and fuck. She had amazing tits and gave the best handjobs and blowjobs ever.

I quickly fell in love w/her. She really was beautiful. Looked sort of like Angelina Jolie. Even though her teeth were kinda rotted from bulimia and she had a pacemaker because of some sort of heart defect, she was still so perfect to me.

However, I wasn't her only admirer. Found out later she'd been w/almost every guy in the greater Miami-Dade area. Same routine, too, smoking weed w/them and fucking.

I was hurt at this revelation. But I was still in love. So I called her and told her I loved her. Told her I wanted her to be my girlfriend. She turned me down, though, saying how she'd just gotten out of a relationship and only wanted to be friends right now.

We saw each other less and less after that. Then I started hearing other things about her. Bad things... Really bad things...

First, someone told me she had HIV, but I didn't believe it.

Then I heard that she'd been at some party and these crackheads she hung out w/ had tied her up in front of everyone, like 50 people, stripped her naked and poured maple syrup over her and licked it off her naked body.

They'd also fucked her with hot dogs, stuck two up her pussy at the same time, and she'd moaned and squirmed and apparently enjoyed the experience.

Shortly thereafter she became known around the city as the “Hot Dog Bitch.”

I'd laughed upon hearing the whole tale and joked about it w/friends. But underneath, behind my smile, it really burned me up, thinking of her on that table, at that party.

I couldn't bring myself to return her phone calls anymore or even say hello when I saw her in the neighborhood, and a little while later she moved to another part of Florida and I never saw or heard from her again.

Until 15 years later, when she found me on Facebook and wanted to be friends. In her request message, she said that through the fog of adolescence and drugs, she couldn't remember why we stopped talking but that she remembered really liking me.

I lied, and told her I couldn't remember why we stopped talking either. I accepted the request and every so often we chat online, usually about politics or traveling.

She's become quite an interesting person now. She lives far away, in the Pacific Northwest, deep in the forest, and has become a wine enthusiast, organic food grower, and vegetarian. She has lots of tattoos, reads tons of books, and is married with two young kids.

But, as much as she's grown and as long ago as those high school days were, whenever I see her profile pic, there’s really only one thing I think about.