African Safari
We were all a bunch of fuck ups.
Most of our time was spent smoking weed, playing video games, and putting our dicks in any slut who’d let us.
The majority of us didn’t finish high school, but some did or got their GED and went to community college, like a dude I grew up with, my big homie Kevin.
Kevin was a bodybuilder and street entrepreneur. He started off selling small bits of weed to friends and classmates and moved up to moving ounces and keys of coke and became a real life “Dopeman” like his favorite NWA song.
He got himself a used Benz and a townhouse near the local community college, and it became the party house, stoner central.
It started off mostly just longhairs on couches and love-seats in the living room doing bong hits, but as more and more coke came around, the people, like the drugs, got increasingly hardcore.
Like this fat, bushy mustache face cop from Palm Beach that Kevin bought most of his coke and weed from.
The cop’d come by with these Little Haiti street thugs, and sell various contraband, often automatic firearms, out of the kitchen, to other roughneck types.
But the most fucked up person to turn up had to be Ben, who had moved into one of the bedrooms.
Ben had a presence to him that sent a chill over the stoners. Whenever he’d enter the living room during bong hit sessions, everyone would just get quiet and uncomfortable.
Maybe it was his look, his eczema covered face and hands and his long black trench coats, even in the dog days of summer.
Or maybe his work. Ben was a mortician, and if you went into his room, it was like entering death.
He kept the AC in there blasting to frigid levels, and there were satanic, thrash and black metal posters all over the walls. Cannibal Corpse. Cradle of Filth. Anal Cunt.
He’d sit by his TV and computer (which were both always on) watching horror and snuff films, mass killer and serial killer documentaries and raw footage of car accidents, natural disasters, and plane crashes.
Most didn’t go in his room, nor mention their disdain of Ben to Kevin. Probably because they bought their substances from Kevin and Kevin and Ben were tight. Kevin would always call Ben “his boy” and talk about “all the shit he did for me.”
Ben didn’t leave the townhouse much, except for work, so everyone was shocked when he brought home a girl, Stella, who lived with him in the house, from the day she arrived.
Stella was petite, with a small head and boyish bowl haircut. She’d an assortment of facial piercings, big blue bug eyes and bad teeth, but, surprisingly enough, she had a decent body.
She’d walk around the house wearing only a long t-shirt and most everyone caught a glimpse of her juicy thighs and hairy pussy at some point or another.
And, as Ben got worse with the coke and hardly ever left his room, even for work, Stella started to fuck everyone, all the stoners, the cop, the roughneck street thugs, and Kevin too, though he tried to pass it off, saying how he was drunk and she’d “left her shirt on the whole time” and it “just was a couple minutes.”
She was certainly a unique person, that Stella. No one knew how she met Ben or why exactly she was with him. Maybe it was because she was also into death. Really into death. That’s all she talked about. Death. What happens when you die, ghosts, murders, psychic mediums, reincarnation, all that shit.
She only listened to hip hop, but only to rappers who were dead.
Biggie, Big L, Big Pun, Tupac, Eazy E. Nothing new, like Kanye, Pitbull or something, saying how she’d wait until he died, because then “you could truly understand him.”
Things around the house took a turn for the worse when Kevin got some PCP from this short stocky Cuban with shifty eyes and a speech impediment (who, of course, also fucked Stella).
That PCP had a really bad effect on everyone, but most of all Ben and Stella, who’d both taken quite a liking to it.
Now chain-smoking cigarettes, and having lost a lot of weight, Ben began to emerge from his room and had somehow come into possession of a baby pig. The pig would shit all over the house and he and Stella would walk around, cradling it like a baby, singing lullabies to it.
The whole house stank a musty combination of pig shit and cigarette smoke.
Worse yet, Ben would frequently interrupt bong circles, in hysterics, brandishing his Nazi paratrooper knife, threatening to cut off one of his fingers for one reason or another, although he was talked down fairly easily by fake sympathy and bong hits.
Kevin and the stoners who lived on his living room couches tired of Ben and a council convened and decreed he be kicked out of the house.
Ben left the house balling his eyes out, taking the baby pig with him, but Stella stayed.
A couple weeks later, vice cops and a SWAT team raided. Stella broke down crying and turned state.
Kevin took the heat for everything and spent $20,000 in cash on a lawyer who helped him avoid jail time with house arrest, probation, fines, and community service.
The lawyer was able to get some evidence thrown out on a technicality but had told Kevin his case was tough and that he could have gotten him off easier if he’d just raped a 10 year old girl or something like that.
Kevin was convinced Ben snitched him out and drunkenly talked of hiring someone to shoot him. Then he talked of hiring someone to beat him up with a baseball bat in the parking lot outside his job at the funeral home.
Later he claimed he’d pay an ex-hooker with HIV (who he’d met at an NA meeting) to fuck Ben without a condom.
Kevin’s troubles didn’t end. He had a botched dental operation that resulted in his jaw having chronic, debilitating pain. He tried unsuccessfully to sue the dentist.
He called me one night at 3 am from a pay phone in Key West and said he planned on buying a bulletproof vest and body armor and storming into the dentist’s office with an AK, or at least picketing out front with a big sign, telling everyone what the dentist did to him, but, ultimately, didn’t do either.
He’d moved back in with his folks, but they kicked him out as he kept accusing his sister for the diabetes he’d developed and of poisoning his food.
He then got an online TEFL degree and found a job teaching English in Madagascar.
I received a Facebook message from him a year ago saying he was in Kenya, mostly staying inside his compound, though occasionally going out on safaris.
