Leprechaun Pu$$y N’ $hit

 

Flat on my back, I awoke to bass booming in the background, as if I were outside of a nightclub…

I yawned. Sat up in bed, and my nostrils widened at the strong scent of marijuana smoke. Then I stretched my arms and lost my breath, for a second, when I sighted a vista of floor-to-ceiling windows.

Outside, it was a golden morning, and I was awed by the postcard-perfect sea views. The azure ocean appearing like an exquisite pattern of ripples, sparkles, and small waves. Its waters moving like a massive blue sheet of shimmering satin.

Taking stock of the bed, too… It was nothing if not lavish, and I felt as if I were practically floating as I rolled from side to side and stretched my limbs out on the super-soft memory foam mattress… smooth, cream-colored silk sheets caressing my skin…

Then I wiped the sleep from my eyes and further panned my gaze around… This bedroom was palatial. Featured a vaulted ceiling that must have been 40 feet high. It was clean too. Not a speck of dust or dirt anywhere. And everything was white- white walls, white marble floors, white furniture. Everything sparkly, electric white.

All appeared shiny too. Almost to an exaggerated extent. Like an Instagram filter. The entire room brightening, practically blinding, making me squint my eyes as I continued scanning around the room, wondering where I was, where I’d woken up.

And who I was… Given the shock, I knew I wasn’t at home. But I didn’t know what or where home was.

I couldn’t even recall my name…

Though I couldn’t recall how I got here, a slideshow of images, flickering like an old PC, flitted through my mind: a long glass table, an electric scale… Me wearing blue latex gloves that made my fingers look like popsicles…

Then I had visions of driving, inching forward in heavy traffic while tapping at a phone affixed to a Hyundai’s dashboard.   

Then a hazy recollection of a house party. At an apartment with vintage movie posters papered over the walls. A din of chatter and someone with a jackhammer of a laugh. A Young Thug video, muted, playing on a wall-mounted flatscreen TV…

Following all that, somehow, I had woken up in this luxurious, high-rise residence.

I slid out of the bed’s silk sheets, ambled over the windows, which encased the entire room. I touched my forehead to the cool glass and saw only an infinite sheet of sea. I couldn’t spot a nightclub anywhere, or even a sliver of land. What if I was abducted by aliens, left on a water planet? But nowhere in the bedroom did I spot any space aliens, and the bass was sounding from all different directions, booming like distant fireworks.

Padding over to the bathroom, I found that it too was white. White as fresh milk. The bathroom equipped, decked out in white everything. White towels, white jacuzzi bathtub, toilet, sink. It was when I found myself facing the mirror atop the sink that I experienced the most unexpected.

Everything in the bathroom was white… Except for me.

Standing in the mirror was a young Black man, in white silk pajamas. A young Black man with face tattoos. An inverted crucifix between my eyebrows and a couplet of incomprehensible scribble across my left cheek.

Hold up, I thought… I knew that face. It was the famous rapper Shootah Sho. I was Shootah Sho! But how did I get from driving a Hyundai to being a world-renown rapper?

At this point, the previous night’s events slowly crept back into focus, clearing up like clouds after a storm.

I’d been smoking weed at a house party. One of my friends had brought a friend, and none of us had ever seen this guy. But there was something mysterious, intriguing about him.

He was like a celebrity. He had that “it” factor. Not only due to his swarthy, handsome looks; but charisma just oozed from him. He exuded a certain magnetism, and everyone in the apartment’s living room was drawn to him. Everyone at the party wanted to know him. Everyone asking him questions as he held court. And he had brilliant answers to any question. He cracked joke after joke, leaving everyone in stitches. He ripped unbelievably big bong hits and blew perfect smoke rings, smoke rings the size of donuts, as he regaled us with charming anecdotes, film trivia, and random quips. He appeared to know everything about anything. It was as if he were the human embodiment of Google, or powered by ChatGPT.  

Even his name caused a stir. “Satan.” Who the hell names their kid Satan? But no one could gather whether or not it was his real name because, just like ChatGPT, he was evasive in all his answers to personal questions. Not in a way that implied malfeasance, or condescension, but rather his was jocular. This Satan was a merry prankster.

But when I caught him in the kitchen later, annihilating a box of marijuana cookies (chewing loudly, too, with his mouth wide open) he appeared far heavier and older, the etched lines on his forehead far more visible; twin grooves on each cheek framing his mouth like parentheses. His wavy black hair, which had been neatly combed and shiny, now looked greasy, had been sculpted into two twin wet spikes. His long face had dimmed, too, shifted from jovial to subdued. Though his split-open eyes still appeared glittering, curiously restive….

As he wiped weed cookie crumbs away from his mouth with his forearm, I noticed how darkly hairy he was and that his legs appeared too slim and stubby for his chunky torso, making him look sort of like a goat.

I could have sworn I’d seen Satan before wearing a tuxedo, with a cape, like almost a Dracula Halloween-type costume. But in the kitchen he wore tattered blue jeans and a black T-shirt with AC/DC, with the lightning slash, embossed in red lettering across the chest. I noticed he wore no shoes and had feet so small and gnarled they appeared as hooves.

Satan, his expression plaintive, neglected any niceties or salutations. Instead, upon my entrance into the kitchen, he asked me, directly, in a robotic voice, what I’d be if I could be anything.

I told Satan I’d be a world-famous MC. A gangsta rapper. That that was my childhood dream. Satan’s countenance brightened as I told him about my early memories, as a Boy Scout, watching DMX videos… Memorizing DMX’s lyrics, mirroring DMX’s movements in front of the television… Doing D’s signature pit bull barks and shit…

A smiling Satan, his eyes shining like sunshine over snow, then handed me a minty-smelling marijuana cookie.

I guess he’d granted my wish. Maybe all those fire and brimstone preachers were wrong. Maybe Satan isn’t such a bad guy…

Now I was living my dream. The bathroom I stood in was probably bigger than any apartment or room I’d ever rented. I was living the life. I was in an episode of MTV’s Cribs. Sauntering out of the bathroom, I started walking like a pimp. I was on my way to kick it in the condo’s living room, where I estimated there would be fresh bottles of lean, candy bowls full of Xans and Percs, towering pyramids of cash and marijuana, and like 20 naked bitches, all of them spread eagle or bent over, all of them just waiting to have wild sex with me.

My bedroom’s door looked made of steel. Submarine-silver, it was heavy as a firewall and pulling it open felt like playing tug-of-war. Catching my breath, I saw the rest of the condo was just as spectacular. An infinite space adorned in Rothko-style paintings, sleek furniture, identical white décor.

Panoramic, floor-to-ceiling windows featuring fabulous sea views further encased the entire abode, and the distant bump of bass continued to reverberate from various directions… The stink of cannabis steady growing stronger… Oddly, though, the condo’s other rooms were all uncomfortably hot, and I couldn’t locate a thermostat anywhere…

Oddly as well, prowling about the massive space, I happened upon no other people. No naked bitches. No posse. No one drinking lean or forty-ounces. No one smoking blunts. No stacks of cash. In Shootah’s videos, there were always stacks of cash, fancy cars, hordes of gun-toting homies and naked or near-naked ratchet bitches bouncing, aiming and bobbling their butts everywhere. So I was perplexed, wondering where all my money, homies, and butt-shaking bitches in thongs were at.

A loud knock then erupted from the front doorway, and I was expecting to open the door to discover a whole cheerleading squad, a whole gaggle of smiling, twerking bitches. Maybe the twerking bitches would be petite beauties holding moneybags. Be like one of my favorite Shootah songs, “Leprechaun Pussy n’ $hit.” 

I also hoped the twerking bitches might know how to operate the a/c, as I was dripping with sweat…

But when I pulled open the massive, submarine-silver, 10-foot-tall front door, which, too, was heavy as a firewall, the loud bass in the background suddenly ceased, the odor of cannabis completely vanished, and a blast of cold air pushed me a step backward. Filling the doorway stood a scowling pair of late middle-aged, mustached policemen in uniform. Both smelled of coffee. Both had dark rings under their glowing eyes.

“Sir, are you … ?” one of the mustaches asked, in a gravelly, cigarette-smoker’s voice. But I didn’t know the name and shook my head, shrugged.

“Sir, are you Shootah Sho?” the other raspy-voiced mustache asked, his wet breath stinking of stomach acid.

But I was mute, unable to speak. Words just wouldn’t form. My tongue stuck to my teeth. The policemen then handed me a warrant. At first, the tiny black words on the document’s white pages looked like lines of crawling ants. But then the document came into focus. It detailed numerous charges under the RICO Act, a number of felonious crimes, and the possibility of life imprisonment.

As the policemen patted me down, clicked a pair of cold metal cuffs on my wrists, read me my rights, I began to tell them about my meeting with Satan.

It was then my stomach sank, and I wondered just who Satan really was…

"Super Bowl Loser"

 

“Super Bowl Loser”

 

I was so frigging scared I thought I might die. Anyone who tells you they weren’t scared or nervous, anxious before playing the Super Bowl, they’re full of crap. Everyone on the team was amped up. Our mouths were dry. Our hearts were pumping. I must have pissed 5 times before we hit the field. It was the biggest game of my damn life, everything I’d dreamed of since I was a little kid.

I didn’t sleep a wink the night before. I was running on fumes. It was pure adrenaline and passion. I was just so amped up…

But once I hit the field, it became another game. However, the hits were harder. A lot harder. The intensity was certainly higher, super-charged, really, but the game was no longer an idea, no longer a fear; it was a game. It was the game I knew well, every movement, every formation, everything was inside me, in a physical, damn near spiritual language. I was a cog in the team machine. And we were in motion. We were grinding, and I was pushing and moving as my body had for years.

Until the final drive. That was something else. I’d never been so excited in my life. The rush returned. My mouth was filled with salt. My mouth was like a damn desert, it was so dry.

And I felt alive, so goddamn alive! There was a divine power running through me, a feeling like some sort of superhuman strength, like when a mother can lift a 10,000-pound car to save her baby. This is how I felt. I think I could have picked up a semitruck and thrown it across an ocean. That was the energy I had. That was the voltage thumping and surging through me. A force of God was pumping through my veins.

I remember trotting onto the field after that long Super Bowl commercial timeout. I remember my eyes were squeezed to slits. In the huddle, I was shaking, I was so fricking amped! The crowd noise was deafening. I can still hear its hiss, like an airplane engine, I can hear it; it’s blurry, but I hear it. Goddammit, when I have the flashbacks, when I have the dreams, I hear… I hear the hiss...

We were playing in the Georgia Dome, and usually, for Falcons games, that place was quiet as a library, aside from when they pump in fake crowd noise, but for this game, this noise was real, and running like a power saw in my ears. This was the damn Super Bowl, and on that final drive, my ears were in pain. Dammit, I’m not lying, I think my eardrums were ready to bleed.

We were fighting, pushing and scrapping, charging our way down the field. I wasn’t letting their sack specialist DE have any piece of my QB. I was pancaking his bitch ass like nobody’s business. They talk about the NFL being a “family game,” but, let me tell you, the stuff that’s said on that field would make a nun faint.

And, dammit, you should have heard the trash talk in that game. Their superstar DE, goddamn, he was cussing, talking the worst trash talk I think I’d ever heard. He was talking about my mother. He was talking about my ugly horse face. He was calling me a fag and a bitch and a honky chickenshit motherfucker and everything under the sun.

He was one to talk. He was one ugly sumbitch. A teen wolf looking motherfucker, looking exactly like Michael J. Fox in that shitty 80s movie. The dude looked like a fucking werewolf, with his big buckteeth. I think he really was a goddamn werewolf. He was one mean man, a tenacious competitor. Hell, I hated the shit-talker but respected his game. He was fierce.

But I kept him in check. I pushed him off on every play. I was a wall, I was a man of steel, I was a barbed wire fence, I was standing taller than a wall surrounding a prison or an army base, dammit. I was Fort Knox.

Dammit, fucking dammit, I felt invincible that whole game. I didn’t allow a single sack. We scored 28 points. 28 points. It should have been enough. It should have been...

My senses were so heightened that game, that day. I’d played football my whole life, but I never really noticed the stink of the game. I’d never noticed the smell of piss, shit, vomit, sweat, farts, blood, any of those, probably because I’d be so super-focused on the game. But in that game, especially that final drive, my nostrils were flaring, burning with smells…

We were neck and neck the whole contest. Then they kicked a 52-yard field goal, right after the two-minute warning, and seized the lead.

Then… that last drive. It was magical, like it was in slow motion. We clawed down the field. Our QB was throwing bullets. He was throwing daggers. Precision passes. It was surgical. He was Tom Brady. He was Joe Montana. He was cold-blooded, sweating buckets of ice water. He was stoic. Methodical. Moving us like soldiers. Inching us forward, inching us forward, yard after hard-earned yard.

I was feeling it. I was tasting the champagne. It was that storybook ending. We were going to Disneyland. We were fucking going to Disneyland, I kept ensuring myself. It was my mantra… 

Then the last play, from the 15-yard line. Shotgun formation. Then the snap. Then the throw. The catch and the dive. The receiver wrestled down, the receiver reaching out his long wiry arm, touching the ball toward the goal line. From my vantage point, I thought he made it, I jumped up and roared. I thought we were going to goddamn Disneyland. I was there. I was on a float in a parade. I was in fucking Disneyland!

But when the refs waved it off... But when the refs shook their heads, when they shook their heads and slashed their arms, when the confetti fell and THEIR side ran hooting and jumping and dancing onto the field. I stood in disbelief for a couple minutes. I was thinking there had to be more time, one more play, just one play, just one more play, dammit, that’s all we needed.

I was frozen in shock for a couple minutes. My body seized up. Then the humiliation hit me, crashing over me like a wave of shit, like somebody had scooped out shit-water from a toilet and dumped it over my head.

Goddammit, we lost the Super Bowl. We lost the fucking Super Bowl. We’re the biggest losers in America. We’re the biggest losers in the world. Everyone, even people who don’t watch football, saw us lose. Everyone was at their Super Bowl parties, sitting on their couches, eating potato chips, drinking beers and pointing at us. Everyone was laughing at us.

We lost. We were fucking losers. We disappointed everyone. We’d have to go back to our city as losers. There would be no parade for us, only an empty, cold airport. There would be no afterparty, just a depressing hotel room. There’d be no champagne, no chummy interviews with the press. No fucking trip to Disneyland...

Dammit, the way the media guys in the locker room were speaking to us, sad faced and solemn, really, it was… as if we were at a funeral...  

The locker room after the game, it was dismal. You could hear a pin drop. Barely anyone said a word. A couple guys cried. The whole world saw us lose the Super Bowl. We were losers and we all knew it. Every dream I’d had as a kid, growing up, playing football, it was to win the Super Bowl, to hoist that shiny silver Lombardi Trophy, to kiss that trophy. And here we were, in the game, fighting and scraping until the last minute, but we just couldn’t get it done.

We were losers.

I can’t imagine how horrible and soul-crushing it must have been to be on those Buffalo Bills teams that lost 4 straight Super Bowls. I don’t know how those guys were able to show their faces in public again after that. Honestly, just losing one had me thinking of checking into the witness protection program or disappearing to a deserted island in the Pacific. I was so ashamed.  

My old man told me there is no second place. Only a first to lose. He’d never played in the NFL, but he played D1 college ball at Army. When I made the NFL, I thought, “at least I’ve done something HE never did.” I felt so proud. When we made it to the Super Bowl, I thought I’d wear my sparkly Super Bowl ring to every Christmas party, and then… maybe then… then... he’d be proud of me.

Just once, I’d like to have seen him smile. The man never smiled. Never. Not even on holidays. Weddings. Nothing. He’d never once congratulated me. Not when I played D1 ball, not when I got drafted, nothing. It pushed me to be better, and I won’t whine or anything and I love him all the same… But it’s just… that I looked up to him, playing ball. I looked up to him, when I was a kid. I mean, dammit, he was a colonel in the US Army. My dad was a bona fide hero. He was my hero.  

And I’d thought of him patting me on the back, hugging me during our victory party. It’d have made him proud… It’d have made him smile… He could’ve bragged about it to his buddies at the VFW, shown them my Super Bowl ring…

But no. I lost the game. I was a loser.

I couldn’t look my old man in the eyes afterward. And I never got a second chance at a Super Bowl. I never got back to the big game.

Not that I could really face my Pops, even before that game. But after that, dammit, I never could really talk to him, not even when he was on his deathbed.

Dammit, I made millions. I was an all-pro. I played 16 years in the NFL. But the only time I got to the big game, I lost. Losing that Super Bowl, being the biggest loser, having to face my old man, my family, after that game, having to explain to my children that we lost, that was the worst moment of my life. That was far worse than losing my money.

Goddammit, we let everyone down. And I have to live with that. I lost my pride with that Super Bowl. I will never have a second chance. That game, that drive will haunt me forever.

That game… The noise, the crowd hiss… That sea of camera lights flashing… Me, shoving forward, beads of hot sweat burning my eyes as I was looking up over the rows of helmets and knots of padded bodies… Me, seeing our guy twisting on the turf, stretching his arm to the white chalk of the goal line, and then… the whistles, the fireworks, the reckoning, knowing our guy came up just inches, dammit, just inches short, that… that wakes me up in the middle of the night... It fucking haunts me.

I only watched that game tape once, during the offseason following the Super Bowl. Otherwise, I don’t ever want to see video of it. Not like I need to, anyway, since it often creeps back, runs on a loop, in my mind.

When I flashback to that Super Bowl, that’s pretty much the only time, really, these days, I think much about football. I don’t even watch the Super Bowl anymore, unless I go to a party…  

My wife’s been talking about this haunting crap. I don’t believe in it. I believe in real ghosts. The past. Traumatic memories and lost opportunities… The ghost of Super Bowl past. The ghost of lingering disappointment and lost pride. Those, dammit. Those are my ghosts.

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"New Money"

 

New Money:

 

Susan slumps in the passenger seat, her face glued to her phone. But she can’t focus on her Facebook feed. Instead, her mind drifts and shifts, like a remote control clicking through television channels. Then she fixates, ruminating on the couple’s recent life, their dire change in circumstances…

They’d been rich. They’d been “new money.”

They’d bought an ostentatious, 10,000 square-foot mansion. The sprawling property had previously belonged to a movie star and had vaulted ceilings, teak double doors, bulbous white fixtures, crystal chandeliers, bay windows, multiple fireplaces, and infinite rows of rooms, rooms fitted in oak paneling, oak bookshelves, and an arcade with pool tables and video games, and a luxurious fitness center with a jacuzzi, sauna, free weights, fitness machines, spin bikes, treadmills, plus an indoor pool and an outdoor pool- both of which Susan had decorated with exotic plants and Hawaiian, tropical décor...

Of course, they’d bought the place back when Jim was playing football, when those 6, 7, 8 figure NFL checks were rolling in and their bank balance was constantly elongating… Now, though, that the NFL cash had dried up, everything was different…

Susan’s mind is racing; she is outwardly detached and taciturn. But inside, she is burning. She’s spinning, psychically, riddled in time scabs. She’s writing lists of lamentations.

She’s considering the anomaly, the career of a pro athlete... The gift and the tragedy... How in most professions, one’s 40s, 50s are prime-earning years. But for pro athletes, very few continue to even play, let alone enjoy big paydays, far into their 30s... For most athletes, their late teens, 20s to early 30s are the windows of opportunity, their chance to amass a fortune, possibly accumulate generational wealth…   

For professional athletes, there’s only now or never, a window in time that opens ever so briefly... And Jim had seized upon it. Everything had come together, for a time, everything was ideal.

Jim and Susan’s situation, initially, was perfect. He was an all-pro and collected hefty checks. But, because of the anonymity of his position, because he wore a helmet, because he wasn’t the one scoring touchdowns, hardly anyone in the general public knew him. and the couple could go wherever they pleased… Unlike the team’s star quarterback, or even their coach, who weren’t able to appear in public without causing a mob scene or being hounded by journalists.  

Every so often Jim would be recognized due to the handful of print ads, endorsements he’d done for a local “Big and Tall” clothing chain. Sometimes a person in a car next to him in traffic might gape and point, perhaps yell, “Hey, you’re that guy!”

And there’d been a handful of times when he’d be stopped, asked for autographs or photo ops, often by young, aspiring offensive lineman from high school or college. But that wasn’t too often. Generally, there weren’t many folks among the public who could even pick his face out of a police lineup.

And that suited Jim and Susan just fine.

Jim had told her, that as an offensive lineman, people usually only talked about him if he’d let up a sack or blew a coverage. The best offensive linemen are anonymous, they’re those you don’t hear of, he’d said… And given his outstanding performances, his prowess on the field, how he’d batter away defensive lineman and linebackers, very few outside the game’s analysts, coaches and players, die-hard fans, knew his name.

Jim and Susan could go most anywhere, in anonymity, and only receive occasional stares that were more due to Susan’s fetching, cheerleader looks or the sheer immensity of Jim’s hulking, monstrous physique, the eyes of passersby shifting upwards as he’d tower imposingly over crowds, almost like Godzilla...

Jim really is an enormous creature, a giant of a man, standing at 6’7. And he was nearly 330 pounds of muscle and fat, back in his playing days. Post-retirement, though, he’s slimmed down to a leaner 270, comprised largely of muscle and thick heavy bones...

Following retirement, he stopped eating like a machine, cut back heavily from the 8,000 calories per day he’d consumed while playing.

Back when he was playing, Susan jokingly called him a “human garbage disposal,” due to his proclivity to consume, pretty much eviscerate food. The man was practically always eating. Though it wasn’t due to gluttony. To be an NFL offensive lineman means one has to maintain, and at times even increase his weight.  

Jim’s usual daily diet would include: a breakfast of six scrambled eggs, 6 strips of bacon, 8 ounces of red meat, a bowl of chopped apples, a bowl of oatmeal, and three waffles, pancakes or bagels slathered in butter; lunches were 8-10 ounces of meat, two or three servings of rice or slices of toasted bread, and some fruits and vegetables; dinners were 16-20 ounces of meat, two more servings of rice or maybe pasta and two servings of vegetables.

Then there’d be snacks throughout the day, like granola bars, and a protein shake that Jim would combine with another shake of chopped bananas and ice cream.

Once accustomed to such dietary regimens, it shouldn’t be a surprise that retired offensive linemen often experience weight issues. But Jim had gladly cut back on his caloric intake, saying he’d considered it a chore to eat so prolifically.

He’d also happily stopped lifting weights, saying he hated the smell of the gym and the sound of the clanking iron bars and dumbbells.

Just as well, perhaps. His light exercise, swimming in the pool, was probably better, since Jim had been plagued by injuries, physical ailments, three knee surgeries, chronic back problems, and perpetually sore joints that had only gotten worse following his retirement, at age 38.

Mornings were the worst, physically, for Jim. He’d limp and groan, struggle to unroot himself from bed. There’d been a time when he’d wake up and vivaciously swing his legs off the bed, but nowadays he slowly maneuvers his limbs like heavy objects elevated by a forklift.

Some days were worse than others. But, every day, getting out of bed was a definite challenge. Every morning. Every morning, he’d wake up with a look of exasperation, a pained gaze, his humungous full-moon face looking like sleep had been punching at his unconscious rather than rejuvenating him.

He’d let out low grunts, hot sighs, and fight his way to his feet, then walk, hunched over, like an old man, to the bathroom to gather himself.

Then, throughout the day, Jim would be afflicted by throbbing headaches, when even the slightest sound appeared to be blaring into his ear with the volume of an air horn. He’d clench his teeth, press his eyes shut and stroke his head in an attempt to soothe the tenderness in his scalp, the tightening sensation in his skull.

Sometimes he’d wear bulky, softball-sized noise-cancelling headphones, and listen to meditation music or white noise. He’d sit in his recliner, trembling, with his feet kicked up, those big earphones clamped on. He’d grimace as he’d hang his head low, close his eyes, purse his lips, and wait for the pain to pass, like he was on a turbulent plane, flying through a violent thunderstorm.   

The headaches gave him photophobia, too, and Susan often saw him draw the curtains closed in daytime, dim lights at night.

He’d take various pills, pills he’d begun, been prescribed during his playing days. Pain pills, mostly Oxycodone. Susan never asked about it, like how many he was taking, partially because, at least to her, it seemed like he had it under control- but also because she didn’t know how to broach the subject.

However, neither the injuries, the headaches, nor the pills were his biggest issue following retirement. His biggest issue was the deep-rooted depression fogging in, gripping him, post-retirement… His overwhelming loss of identity. He missed his teammates, the camaraderie, the banter in the locker room. For the first time since he was 6 years old, he was without a football team. He was without his second family. He was without his regimen, routines, game tapes and game prep, and his calendar was blank, with no dates circled...

It was obvious to her that he felt listless and empty and was experiencing a profound lack of purpose.

Susan’s mind clicks, recalls years ago, as he lay in a hospital bed, stitched up, following a knee surgery. She’d gently floated the idea of retirement, and he’d responded to her by glaring, his eyes dripping with venom. Then he’d proclaimed emphatically that he never wanted to quit, that he’d play forever if he could.

She’d never forgotten that, seeing this colossus of a man in insufferable pain, a man who’d already earned millions, yet he wanted to keep bashing away, buffeting his body. And for what? The adrenaline? The adulation of the crowds? His teammates? She couldn’t understand it. She knew he’d only retire, quit playing when he was ready. She didn’t feel like there was anything she could say to convince him otherwise...    

Finally, of course, Jim succumbed to time’s teeth and his accumulated injuries. He was aware that Father Time is undefeated and after deciding to hang up his cleats, he was initially content. But when he really did walk away from the game, it hit him hard as a ton of bricks. Susan had never seen him so blue. She did her best to be the good wife, the soothing sounding board. She encouraged him to do like others in his situation, guys who’d wanted to stay around the game, and go into coaching, or do broadcasting.

But neither was for him. And he knew it. He didn’t have the patience to coach. He didn’t have the eloquence to be a broadcaster.

So, for a few dark months, he wasn’t sure what to do. He was catatonic much of the time, perched in his recliner, watching ESPN, guzzling beers.

That’s part of why he ultimately decided to go into business, she figured. To be part of something. To feel the rush. The adrenaline. To join the chase, the hunt. To get the juices flowing.

Sadly, though, his entrepreneurial ambitions didn’t pan out. His company, which was started to consult, guide aspiring athletes, failed, and a few real estate, land development deals tanked. His investments in high-growth stocks and corporate bonds flopped too...

There was still a barely seven figure bank account and a couple six figure checks owed to him by his last team. There was the NFL pension, too. But none of this would be enough to finance the lavish lifestyle they’d grown accustomed to. So he went all in on an incipient project, though he wouldn’t elaborate on its details…

Susan watches herself, at the kitchen table, the trophy wife, in the trophy house. But her shine, her sparkle is darkening. Her head hung low, her gaze is glued to the purplish-red cabernet in her wine glass and she’s nervously rocking the glass back and forth in choked mini-movements.

“It’ll be a big thing,” he assures her, as he confesses to selling the house, in part to raise capital for the venture. Seeing her face crinkled in sadness and angst, the giant rises to his battle-worn legs, lumbers over to her and kisses her forehead, attempting to assuage her worries, before he limps off to bed…

Susan knows the score. She knows he is pushing all his chips to the table. All THEIR chips to the table. He is investing the last of his football earnings as well as their equity in the house.

She hates it. In her opinion, it is a reckless move. He is basically ripping out the kitchen sink and throwing it wildly. But as she gulps down a sharp swig of red wine, she quiets those horrible voices, those demons of doubt. She hopes her hunch is wrong. She can only have faith. Hope. At this point, all she can do is hope and wish for the best. 

Susan feels like a voyeur. She can only watch her ghost of recency, watch the hot tears streaming down her flushed cheeks, as she is sitting alone, at the kitchen table. Staring at herself staring at the white marble floor, the gravity of her situation once again sinks in, the weight of it like an anchor dropping in the sea...  

Then she is back in her body. She is fused. She is one. She is blinking away the tears, wiping her face with her forearm. She is distraught. But she again realizes there is nothing she can do, aside from just hope for the best. For him, her, but most of all, for their kids. She worries, for the first time, ever, about the kids’ futures. For years, she had been able to give her kids anything they wanted. Her credit cards were her favorite parenting tool. Money, she felt, could solve any problem. Satisfy any need. 

She’d always felt like a genie in a bottle, able to grant any wish, able to provide whatever the kids needed or wanted. The money made her feel like she was a superhero...

But now, for the first time in years, she feels… human. Pathetically so. For the first time in years, she is actually concerned about money. And it is such a horrible feeling. Such a punch in the gut…

Snapping back to the present, Susan pans her gaze toward Jim, who is shaking his head, leaning to the left side of the driver’s seat, mumbling curse words at traffic. Susan then thinks of other athletes, famous people who’d blown multi-million-dollar fortunes: MC Hammer, Vin Baker, Antoine Walker, Vince Young.

Jim clicks the stereo to near full blast, pumping up the DMX jam, “Ruff Ryders’ Anthem,” bopping his head to the beat, copying DMX’s dog growls…

Susan tilts her head, scoffs, purses her lips. Then she swings her gaze, watches herself in the rearview mirror. Morose, her spirits sink, and she wonders… How could anyone ever respect a person who lost THAT much money? Why should their kids ever listen to them again? Why wouldn’t their children hate them? God knows how much she was starting to hate herself…

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With All The Slimy Bases Covered A Review of : Tales From A French Envelope (Catfish McDaris & Craig Scott) By: Frankie Metro

… If money is an iguana eating a jackalope, as Catfish Mcdaris suggests in the short prose piece: Jackalope Condoms, then free books are either named Ana or Jack, and have furry horns sprouting from their scaley spines. Allow me first off, to thank Craig Scott for the new bundle of joy I received in the mail today. Children like this live in the French Envelope Catfish & Craig left out to dry in the deserts of the Independent Press Community.

Warning: Don’t approach this book looking for new spiritual landscapes or cognitive plateaus. Instead, floss your gums regularly, start now if you have to, and be open to a series of prods and pokes.

As you progress, there is a pungent smell of burning meat, or a burning sensation, possibly in the pubic zone if you’re that type of person, that follows you around the house, even after you put the book down. Sometimes the meat is sweetly rancid:

Deep & Deeper
(C.M.)

“The Commanche was fanning that burning meat and chanting. Before long I felt this strange sensation. You know how your hemmorhoids burn, after too many hot peppers? That’s about as close as I can come to an explanation…”

Sometimes the burning is painfully familiar:

Fuck You
(C.S.)

I’m a suicide.
You’re my letter.

You don’t care for responsibility.
You never inform the authorities
of my death.
You meet some douchebag in a bar and
elope to Vegas.

My bones mail you
my middle finger.

Catfish McDaris’ poem:

Willy Gets Chilly

is like a stash of retrospection, finally discovered bobbing along in the reservoir of your toilet, or a dopemine rush that’s justified, tried and true.

Creepy Uncle Willy was the last resort,
but my parents had to go to a funeral,
getting into my pajamas, I noticed girlie
books in the bathroom, I was soon
walking the monkey, Uncle Willy yelled

You naughty boy, now I’m going to spank you…

Blood exploded from his nose & his eyeballs
rolled white like hard boiled eggs, the cops
came & called my folks…

Everyone’s heard the creepy Uncle story; some have written the creepy Uncle poem; (C.M.) exorcises the creepy Uncle demons:

…the preacher asked if anyone
wanted to say a few words, I stood & said
he was right, it did hurt him more than me.


Page 43’s poem:

Godzilla Doesn’t Play Butler
(C.M.)

makes the completely ludicrous seem completely feasible, and not only that but also tactfully orchestrated:

I took off all my
clothes & stroked
my lizard until it
resembled Godzilla
stomping Tokyo

Walking into the living
room I set the cake
on the coffee table
I heard a woman
say “Damn”

I asked “Anyone
want meat with
their cake?” a few
hands went up…

while Catfish’s: Tiger Skin Blues is a place where the only difference between magic squirrels and tree rats is the size of your twig & berries:

“Cruz’s heart was broken into a million pieces. Her tears could’ve filled the Gulf of México. Antonio couldn’t survive on ordinary cat food; he hit his eighth life quick. Cruz had him made into a rug and there she slept, until she died of boredom and a lonely heart.”

Ah, Southwest Catfish Cassady & The Bob Dylan Pig Truck Blues…Catfish seems to always be in a race with death; not the death of the body, but the death of the self-image, immersing himself in pig shit and hot sauce on occassion, and hauling ass to Tucumcari or bust.


Taking Down The Shakedown
(C.M.)

is vigilante justice/México City standoffs on public transit/bagmen/cold earth/a hot day/and no supervision:

The México City pickpockets
worked the luxury buses in
wolf packs, razor blades
concealed between fingers

Swift dips of eagle talons
into purses & wallets,
handing off to second men
the watchers ever vigilant…

On page 55, you find that

There’s No Cure For True Love
(C.M.)

and this is an adverse reaction to domestication; an unspayed, unneutered, ill-tempered jackalope, with two hyper-active sex organs, who cares nothing about the topic:

“You ask what would reduce a man to such worm like behavior? Did she have beauty, intelligence, a great body, a pleasant personality? No, an emphatic no, to any of those good qualities. She was a cunt in every sense of the word. She squandered his hard earned money, cheated with every man stupid enough to screw her. She had body odor and bad breath…”

When you’re finally:

Face To Face

with his contribution to this book, the color coated, hairy flavored slime trail it’s left on your tongue is hard to describe, but in the company of Catfish, you find out Jeffrey Dahmer’s been standing across the page, and you’ve traveled just a stanza or one paragraph too far down a dark alley.
* * *

You turn the corner, and Craig Scott’s portion starts off like a free dance at the strip-bar, followed by a private show wth no panties or bra.

The poem:

Bachelor Party Guidelines

reads as a continuously revised string of advice, completely unheeded of course, but unabashedly acknowledged all the same:

You can impregnate,
but make sure it doesn’t
come to term.

You can bring it to term,
but don’t claim it
as your own.

You can claim it as your own,
but don’t spend any time
with it…


The Other
(C.S.)

is a full scale model of the late Todd Moore in drag, a hairy kneed poem with silk stockings and a .38 Snub-Nose…holy, ripped, ready for action:

Don
was too
busy
staring
at Petal’s
tits
to notice
her pulling
the 38
snub
out from
under
the pillow.
One was
half
the size of
the other.
Her nipples
got hard
when she
shot him
in the
balls

Craig seems to pry his characters from the steel reinforced confines of oversized tuna cans in some instances; cans containing wet pink flesh, cans with serrated chew marks on the label, cans with chunks of stem cells… chaotic, suck-fucking hybrids that blame their idle hands, which never fully developed.

He sleeps with would-be assassins when The End is near:

“My left eye feels like a balloon filling with water. We fight and fuck and ignore the cat vomit in the bed…”

giving them the choice of either the crow’s nest or the wet spot in the bed.

By the time you’re left with the question:

Why
(pg. 156)

she is the only answer you have left:

why is it
she’s had tits since 12
known how to suck a dick since 13
how to eat pussy since 9…

why is it
you haven’t known her forever
but yet you have

She is tucked neatly at the slimy base of a French Envelope. There is still time to save her, before the glue really dries…