Wasted Lanza

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Glasgow Gidget

"Glasgow Gidget" by Newamba Flamingo

Glasgow Gidget lass she had a piss on the building society front anti automatic door didn't open @nytime that cold night, Glasgow Gidget, her Cradle of Filth, Glasgow Gidget her ghost in the fog, Glasgow Gidget her vomit on the street, Glasgow Gidget her broken fingers and cockroaches in the kitchen, Glasgow Gidget, her Royal Bank of Get to Fuck, Glasgow Gidget, fifty pence fuck all to Paisley, Glasgow Gidget, taking the piss, Glasgow Gidget, Glasgow Gidget, Glasgow Gidget in Shawlands on Segways wearing green hit the pavement pure drive-by boomerang attacks on Celtic supporters, Glasgow Gidget in Ibrox on skateboards wearing blue hit the pavement gyrating axe answer attacks on Rangers supporters, Glasgow Gidget cow knows where Maddy is, aye, Glasgow Gidget on pogosticks pipe bombs in confession booths, Glasgow Gidget the Gordon in Brown, Glasgow Gidget sees ya lochness monster locusts in every lorry cockpit, Glasgow Gidget spontaneous cricket bat outbursts, Glasgow Gidget, tuberculosis in the call centre, Glasgow Gidget, allah youse, Glasgow Gidget in wee hooses, Glasgow Gidget cannae ya cunts, Glasgow Gidget in a gondola on the River Clyde

In Response to the Pixies' "Ed is Dead"

"In response to the Pixies' 'Ed is Dead'" by Newamba Flamingo


Back in high school,
I had a friend named Ed

He had a long black pony tail
and big buckteeth...

Ed was always smiling...

We used to get high at lunchtime
huffing Glade, smoking pot
and popping percocet

One time we got drunk
and double-teamed a big titted ginger bitch with lots of freckles
in the handicapped bathroom of the school library

My ex-girlfriend Wendy said Ed'd fuck anything with two tits and a heartbeat

and Ed said he'd fuck his older half-sister if she'd let him...

Ed stole weed from his dad, who was also named Ed,
and Ed's 12 year old brother stole weed from him...

Ed liked run around the hallways between classes, yelling "slay the beast" in a British accent, making spastic motions with his arms, sometimes stopping to slap a random person upside the head

One time Ed was driving his parent's wood paneled station wagon, lip-syncing "Straight Outta Compton" by NWA, and he stopped at an intersection, rolled down his window and punched a bicyclist in the face for no apparent reason that I could reasonably gather...

Ed said he spent a summer vacation in New Mexico with his cousin Gabriel and that they shot at Devil Worshipers in the desert and that he thought they killed one

Ed said he wanted to shoot Marilyn Manson too...

(Please note that this Ed is not to be confused with another Ed I know, who had testicular cancer and had to have one of his testicles surgically removed. That Ed I studied Classical Chinese with at a training center in Taiwan and got a nasty case of giardia with in Tibet... BUT THIS IS NOT THAT ED.)

My friend from high school Ed was half Mexican and got jumped into the Eighteenth Street Gang by his cousin Juan

His cousin Juan tattooed 18th Street in Roman numerals on the inside of Ed's right ring finger with a sewing needle, cigarette lighter, and india ink

Juan went to jail, and when he was released, he knocked on Ed's window at 2am, wanting Ed to come with him to blow up some fool's car

But Ed didn't go...

I haven't talked to Ed since 2002

Last I heard of him, he was doing well

He got married, bought a townhouse and was working as a paralegal

I wonder if he still has that tattoo

The Great American Novel

"The Great American Novel" by Newamba Flamingo


I want to spend the next ten years writing the great American novel

and when I send it out to publishers
every single one will reject it
all with form rejection letters
instead of the sardonic
and/or personal criticism I'd prefer

I want to write the great American novel

and self-publish it online
to a password protected site
only I can see

I want to write the great American novel

and let my only friend read it
and she'll tell me how it would make a wonderful screenplay

The Rejected Writer

“The Rejected Writer” by Newamba Flamingo

Miles Chester’s stories and poems had been rejected by all the small press magazines he read. And every single response, every single rejection letter was a form letter. Never once did he get a personal response from the masses of editors he'd sent his work.

And why not? His cover letters were personal. He'd praise the magazine, mention specific pieces, writers he enjoyed. He'd address the editors by name and even request feedback. But none ever came. Always it was the same form letters. Over and over again.

Following each rejection, he'd drink vodka to dull the pain. Sometimes he'd snort bath salts and sit alone in his ground floor studio apartment, on the mattress on the floor, watching infomercials all night and listening to his next door neighbors, that young Mexican couple with the crying baby, scream and curse at each other in Spanish.

Rejections and noisy neighbors aside, Miles often had trouble sleeping at night. He'd stay awake, lying in bed, dreading waking up in the morning to go to his job at the call center, where his bosses timed his toilet breaks and he had to repeat the same scripted greetings and responses to the angry voices in his headset.

Miles was happiest when he was writing. And when he was writing, he was writing. He'd slave over his compositions tirelessly, in front of his computer screen, until the small hours, editing and inspecting every last word. Then he'd fire off submissions to as many places as he could and hope that maybe, just maybe, he'd get finally get published and earn his big break.

But the end results were always the same. Form rejection after form rejection. And the more and more he got, the more disillusioned he became. His dreams of being the next John Cheever, Chuck Palahniuk or Raymond Carver dissipated further with each letter.

Little by little, he started to hate all the magazines he previously liked. The cute authors with their sharp wit and incomprehensible allegory! Their stupid little stories nobody other than a pompous critic could enjoy! And those oh-so clever poets and their overly metaphorical poems that no one ever really understood but somehow found so brilliant...

After receiving four form letter rejections in one day, Miles stood naked in front of his mirror that night, tears streaming down his face, and his hatred toward the small press boiled into full blown rage.

His body began to shake as he thought about the dictionary abuse by some of these writers, especially the “clever” poets. Like how many people actually use words like “mellifluous” anyway?

Damn them and damn their narcissistic diatribes! What good was poetry and stories that made no sense!? It suddenly dawned on him that most of the bullshit he had read in small press magazines was merely smug attempts by worthless authors at making themselves look smart.

Damn them! Miles thought, slapping his bathroom mirror lightly. What about his genius? Why shouldn’t he be heard? Why was it that everyone else gets published? Damn them! Damn them all, Miles thought, as he slapped at his bathroom mirror harder and harder...

Damn them all with their academic, look at how great I am writing! Damn their worthless Pushcart nominations! Damn every writer and his or her pithy bio and those annoying lists of places they've been published! What a bunch of phonies! No wonder it’s the “small” press! No wonder nobody reads these magazines! They all suck!

Miles then realized he’d been now punching his bathroom mirror and that his right fist was covered in bloody glass shards.

Miles saw himself hyperventilating in the shattered mirror and decided it was time to exact revenge and concurrently move beyond the incestuous small press world and really get himself noticed.

He’d recently read online about a convention, a gathering of the small press, that'd be happening in a couple weeks, only an hour away from where he lived. There, nearly every editor from every magazine that'd rejected him would be in attendance. What's more, their pictures and names were up on the website.

His plan began to materialize. He would visit the convention, with an M16, and shoot as many people as possible and then himself. But beforehand, he'd send a compilation of his writings to news agencies, big magazines, publishing houses, and popular blogs. Finally, after completing his mission, he'd be heard!

It wasn't the first time he'd plotted a killing spree. He'd done so in high school, inspired by Columbine. He’d thought up a similar attack against the jocks who'd terrorized him and his friends, but his friend who'd planned it with him chickened out, so they didn't go through with it...

Miles always had a fixation on spree killers. Sometimes he didn't agree with their motives, but he respected their courage and how they were able to make themselves heard. When he wasn’t writing, he’d usually be spending hours online researching mass killings.

He particularly admired those who’d been able to kill more than 20. Anything under 20 kills he often wasn’t too impressed by, except for Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, due to their teamwork, charisma and meticulous planning. (He’d even signed an online petition demanding “the basement tapes” immediate public release…)

Though he didn’t care much for racists or politically motivated rampage killers like Baruch Goldstein, Dylann Roof, or Nidal Malik Hasan, probably his all-time favorite spree killer was Anders Breivik, due to his 77 kills, and use of both guns and explosives.

At number two was Seung Hui Cho for his high kill count and how badass it was that he’d chain-locked the exit doors to prevent “those spoiled brats'” escape, and that he’d sent an awesome video manifesto to the media, which Miles had watched over 100 times on YouTube.

He also quite liked Adam Lanza and felt Lanza didn’t get the respect he deserved among mass killers. Lanza was a writer and a student of mass killings, even editing Wikipedia pages and keeping a massive mass killer spreadsheet. Miles admired that and admired Lanza’s choice of targeting an elementary school, knowing it’d generate more press.

Rounding out his top ten were Martin Bryant, the perpetrator of the Port Arthur massacre; George Hennard of the Luby’s Cafeteria massacre; James Huberty of the McDonald’s massacre (enjoy your Happy Meal, motherfuckers! he’d always think while watching news footage of that one); the “DC Snipers” John Allen Muhamad and Lee Boyd Malvo; Woo Bum-kon, the kooky South Korean policeman; and Charles Whitman of the University of Texas shootings.

He also kinda liked T.J. Lane for his antics in the courtroom, especially the riff to his victims’ families about jerking off with the hand that killed their sons. What a laugh riot! And he loved Jiverly Wong's confession letter: "I am Jiverly Wong shooting the people..." That always cracked him up. He gave Robert Hawkins style points, too, even though he'd only killed 8 people...

Miles decided their way of making history would be his way. So he went to the gun store and bought a fully automatic assault rifle and plenty of ammo. Then he went to the army surplus store and bought some combat boots and fatigues.

When he got home, he found the movie "Taxi Driver" playing on cable. After watching it, he took a piss and stared into his reflection in the bends of his bloodied, shattered bathroom mirror and decided to shave his head into a mohawk, like the movie's protagonist, Travis Bickle.

Then he listened to Pantera's "Vulgar Display of Power" on his phone and tried to sleep, but couldn't, so he read "Catcher in the Rye" and thought about Mark David Chapman and wrote a quick poem about how Chapman should have shot Yoko, too, and sent the poem off as a submission to "Poetry Magazine", "The New York Quarterly", the "New Yorker" and even Yoko's publicist just for shits and giggles.

The next day Miles quit his job and spent the couple weeks before the convention preparing, putting together manuscripts of his writing, doing push-ups in his apartment and target practice at a local shooting range.

He repeated his routine of watching "Taxi Driver", listening to Pantera, and reading "Catcher in the Rye" every night. Every night he'd also write a poem about a different spree killer.

Finally the big day came. He was so amped up the night before that he only slept for an hour or so and when he woke up, he had a touch of vertigo, but, while taking his morning shower, he felt a tranquility and sense of calm he’d never had before.

After dressing up in his army fatigues, he grabbed his supplies, and headed out the door. Before getting into his car, he put on a pair of aviator sunglasses and dropped several packages of manuscripts into a mailbox.

He peeled out of his building's parking lot and drove to the convention. On the way there, he maintained the speed limit, listened to Pantera, and thought excitedly about how a movie might be made about him and his writings and wondered which directors and actors would be involved.

The convention was to be held at a hotel downtown. But when he arrived to the hotel lobby, carrying a duffel bag, the young lady at the reception desk eyed him curiously.

She asked him if she could help him and he asked her where the convention was. She warily pointed him to a conference room down the hall. Without responding to her, he turned and began to walk in its direction.

As he neared the room, he noticed there were only middle aged men hanging around outside the conference room's doors. They all had on three piece suits and a lot of them had slicked back hair. None of them looked like writers or the pictures of editors he saw on the website.

As he drew closer, a couple of the middle aged men went inside and, from behind where they'd been standing, he saw a sign that read: “Rich Dad, Poor Dad.”

Dejected, he thought for a second of carrying out his plan, going in there and opening fire, but he decided against it. Instead, he went back to his car and drove home.

When he got home, he logged onto the Internet and tried to check the convention page, but when he typed the address, all it brought up was a blank window, containing an Error 404 “Page Not Found” message.

The Warlock who STOLE my SOUL

“The Warlock who STOLE my SOUL” by Newamba Flamingo

The TV in my bedroom suddenly came on around 3AM. I’d been asleep. It’d woken me up.

I wiped my eyes, sat up in bed, and on the screen I saw the warlock. He was hanging upside down from the leg of a flying helicopter and told me telepathically that he’d decided to steal my soul. Then the TV flicked off.

I went back to sleep, thinking it was probably just a dream. But when I woke up, everything seemed askew.

First off, the walls in my apartment were painted hot pink, instead of the white they’d been before. And all the furniture was in different places.

And, as I stepped into the kitchen, all the pots and pans and dishes were scattered about, lying everywhere, like someone’d thrown them around.

I flicked on the coffee maker, the one possessed by the ghost of Charles Bukowski, and instead of brewing my coffee, it just made a hacking, wheezing sound and shut off.

Opening my refrigerator, one of the handguns I keep in there rang like a cell phone. I picked it up, stuck the barrel to my ear and answered. It was the warlock.

“Stole your soul, bitch!!” he taunted.

Politely I asked if I could have it back. But the warlock dodged the question entirely and went on to tell me that he was writing a musical about the Italian mafia. He said how it would star current and former mobsters, dancing and singing, and that it would be performed in public places, spontaneously, rather than in theaters.

I again asked if I could have my soul back. Sounding frustrated, he sighed and told me to come down to the art gallery, if I really wanted it. Then he hung up.

I put on a leotard, cowboy boots and hat and stole the rabbi next door’s pet ostrich and rode it down to the art gallery. When I got there, I tied the ostrich to a parking meter and saw Snooki and The Situation from that show “Jersey Shore” standing outside.

They had handheld video cameras and were shoving them into random people’s faces, shouting expletives, and making jokes about car bombs.

I ran past them, into the gallery. Inside was a narrow corridor that led to a dark, cavernous room.

In the room were a group of Sikhs, in turbans, sitting in a circle around a smart phone, which dangled by a USB cable from the ceiling. On the smart phone’s screen was looped video of masked terrorists on monkey bars and headless obese people on American streets. The Sikhs were humming some sort of mantra and staring at the phone’s screen.

Then my cell phone vibrated. It was a text from the warlock, asking: “Find it yet?”

“No” I typed back.

“Come to Dr. Walker’s office. It’s down the block.” He replied.

So I left the gallery. On my way out I saw Snooki and The Situation, lying dead on the sidewalk, bloody gunshot wounds pockmarking their bodies.

A man dressed as Ronald McDonald stood over them, thrusting his pelvis and filming the corpses with a handheld camera.

We made eye contact and he put his finger to his lips and made a shushing sound.

I continued down the street and arrived at a public bathroom. On the men’s door was “Dr. Walker DDS” spray painted in red letters. I walked in and saw the warlock handcuffed to a urinal. A hairy chested man wearing only a surgical mask, flip flops, and hot pink miniskirt was probing the warlock’s mouth with a switchblade.

From somewhere in the background, I could hear Guns N Roses' “Mr. Brownstone” playing softly.

The miniskirt man turned to me, pulled down his surgical mask, hacked and spit out a tiny key. The man looked exactly like Chuck Norris. I think it was Chuck Norris.

The Chuck Norris asked me, in German, if I’d seen Godzilla, last time I was in Tokyo. I shook my head.

At this Chuck Norris was angered and yelled, still in German, how Godzilla must have been there, and how could I miss him, swatting down planes, stomping on yellow people, and kicking over buildings?

I continued to shake my head and Chuck Norris shook his head back at me, sardonically, and proceeded to carve a large inverted crucifix into his stomach with the switchblade, laughing as he did so.

A window in the corner then shattered and a bunch of Japanese schoolgirls climbed in through it and rushed into one of the stalls, carrying Happy Meals and giggling.

Chuck Norris broke wind, stuck his hands down his miniskirt, fished around his crotch with the switchblade, and sliced off his penis. Then he flung the penis out the broken window and went into the stall w/the Japanese schoolgirls, slammed the door shut and started banging on the closed door and shrieking.

I turned to the warlock. Blood streamed down his mouth, to his neck and chest. Breaking into tears, he asked me solemnly if I really wanted my soul back. I told him yes. He asked me to free him, and, picking up the key Chuck Norris had spit to the floor, I did.

The warlock wiped at his bloody mouth with his shirtsleeve and unzipped his fanny pack. From it, he produced a Ronald McDonald voodoo doll with a dead wasp scotch-taped to its face and extended the doll to me.

Then he bowed his head and whimpered: “He won’t leave me alone.”

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.