Between the snacks and the gas and the tolls on Eight-One I’m broke by Albany. Half-eaten pack of cookies and three-quarters-gone two-liter of Dew on the passenger seat mocking me, daring me to polish ‘em off but I try to ration ‘em the rest of the way. What little change I got left is gonna go to the last few tolls on Eighty-Seven, the fuckin’ nickel and dimers. The two-fer and the ice cream sandwiches and the chocolate covered pretzels and the two sacks of chips are snaking their way to my colon, pushing yesterday’s pancakes and burrito to the sphinctered goal line—I shudder at the thought of doin’ a dirt in a public shitter but no way I’m makin’ it all the way to Ma’s in Kingston before this anaconda makes a break for it. Fuck, I hate shittin’ in public. I always envied those guys could just drop trou and make a show of it, or shoot the shit with the guy in the stall next over, or shit in a holding cell like it was nobody’s business. You’d think I’d be the king of that shit. I ain’t exactly what you’d call “couth”—she was still around, Rocky’d tell ya ‘bout how I used to Dutch Oven her ass with the flannel sheets after a chili cook-off… but there’s just somethin’ about a public squat that brings out the shame in me, like doin’ the most basic and human of acts is something to apologize for. I guess it usually is, in most cases.

It’s been six years since I last talked to her and a little over seven since I seen her hangdog face, tears streamin’ down those grooves etched by decades of hardship and loss like her eyes were a couple of melting glaciers. She never had it easy, my Ma. Lost both her parents young and had to raise most of her brothers and sisters—there were six of ‘em, one for each year since we last spoke—with little to no help, workin’ two, three jobs at a time to make ends meet. But that was the world she knew; the East Coast, tough people molded by tough times, mean winters, humid dog day summers, hurricanes and schoolyard brawls. We put each other down, talk shit, yell and curse and spit and fistfight and worse over street corners and area codes and zip codes and broads and any other arbitrary shit you can think of. Sports teams; Yanks or the Mets (Yanks, you fucks), Jets or the Giants (Giants)—I know fellas who’ll put a dent in another guy’s dome with a tire iron, he says Gary Carter was a better backstop than Munson. Hell, I might… or might’ve, back when I gave a shit.

Now everything’s smaller, and more far away. Sports don’t much matter outside the Vegas line and what I can make off with when I’m flush, but lately I don’t even got the scratch to place a worthwhile bet. Shit, I don’t got the scratch for a scratch-off. Everything went and dried up on me. You know, they say the Sphinx is way fuckin’ older than they thought, now… that it has signs of water erosion, from heavy rains and shit like ten thousand years ago. Fuckin’ Egypt, it used to be all rainforest. Imagine that. Bountiful, full of life. My life’s like that, now… once full of vitality and promise and laughs and love but now a desert. Arid and empty. A place things go to die. It all dried up. No prospects, no friends, no nothing. No time. No energy. I don’t got it in me no more. None of the fight that made me All-City on the O-line, made me a bruiser you wanted on speed dial if some shit was goin’ down in the liquor store parking lot on a Saturday night. None of the charm that made hot, stacked broads with full-bodied tits and french vanilla asses actually dig me and wanna be around me, beer gut and gambling debts and cheap gold herringbones and piss-poor work ethic and all. I could always make ‘em laugh, and it worked. Not anymore though. Shit… now I can’t even make an audience laugh, and that’s supposed to be my fuckin’ job. It all went and passed me by. Life. Success. Giving a shit. All of it.

But I’m a has-been, like I said. Not a never-was, you sons of bitches. I did six spots on the Tonight Show, god damn it, and don’t you fuckin’ forget it. Three appearances on Letterman. I had an HBO special when I was twenty-four years old, just two years removed from drivin’ a forklift. I was shot out a cannon, burnin’ up like one of Kerouac’s roman candles and then I met Rocky and it was all gravy until she met her insidious friend “H,” and introduced me to the heartless bastard. Coke was a ride; drinks, all of it. That was fine. It all worked, hell… you could say it was an essential ingredient. But with the smack everything was a soft, tilting blur until eventually it all came to a screechin’ halt when I came home to find her in the ratty old recliner she called my “Bukowski chair,” eyes rolled up in the back of her head like they were searchin’ her brain for instructions on how to stay alive (and not finding ‘em). I called my buddy Hank, another comic who was known to chase the dragon, asked him what I should do. I was frantic. My heart was breakin’. He had me drag her to the bathtub, try to shock her back with cold water. Nothing worked. I called 911 and flushed the dope in case the cops came too and sat with her in the shower, soaked to the bone in the cold water in my Islanders jersey and blue jeans and socks and sneakers, cradlin’ her head in my lap until they got there and had to kick the door down ‘cause I forgot I’d locked it and I couldn’t hear nothin’ over the sound of the water running out of the faucet and the sobs out of my own face. Like I said before, took almost seven days for that shit to punch her ticket. Damn near seven days I sat by her side in the hospital, emptying all the vending machines, eating everything in sight. Orderin’ pizzas, guzzlin’ Big Gulps. Tryin’ the fill the hole she’d left, and my old man left, and then it was over and I don’t think I’ve been funny since.

Puttin’ someone you love in the ground is a strange thing. The people who come out for it, everyone tryin’ to take ownership of the day like she was theirs and theirs alone. She was no one’s, that girl. Not even mine. She was the sky’s and the sun’s and the moon’s, and then she was the dirt’s. Her mother blamed me, like I was the one to get her hooked and not the other way around. I didn’t have the heart to tell her otherwise, just stood there and took it when she hit me, punching and slapping me in the chest and shoulders and then the face until her brother Jamie, a kid I always thought was all right, took her down the hall by the wrists and I went into a bathroom of the funeral home and finished the job for her. I punched myself in the face as hard as I could six or seven times until it felt like my jaw was off its hinges and I spit blood at my own ugly fucking loser face in the mirror and I asked her why she’d done it and why she had to leave me and I asked God what I did to deserve to lose people I loved. First my pop, now my Rocky. My dog Yogi when I was a kid (after Berra, not that stupid fuckin’ picnic basket boostin’ bear, ya silly bitch). But fuck. I guess that’s life, ain’t it? Just a parade of people, coming and going, no rhyme or reason or promises to be made or kept. Jesus Christ, this is morose. Sorry. Guess that’s just where your mind goes when you’re drivin’ to see your Ma for the first time since the Yanks won the Series to tell her you got cancer and it ain’t lookin’ good. Fuck. I’m gonna shut up now and just drive for a while if you don’t mind… but first I reach down and swipe a couple cookies outta the crinkling cellophane container and wash ‘em down with a swig of jungle juice and for a good sixty seconds all is right in the world.

* * *

Twenty minutes later the cookies and the soda are gone and now there’s a cold, hard diagonal rain drumming on the hood and the roof and windshield of the car and my shitty old wiper blades are making that god awful sound they make when they start to go—you know the one, that rubber harpy scream that comes with each tortured swipe—but they push enough of the rain away that I can make out a car on the side of the road and some poor schmuck down on his hands and knees fumbling with a small spare donut tire in the downpour. It’s a Camry, maybe a year or two newer than this old shitbox beater of mine. I pass him but I end up stopping a little ways up. I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s the guilt of the gorging, or maybe I’m just trying to wash away the pathetic fuckin’ pity party I was just throwin’ myself back there or, most likely, helping this asshole out’s gonna buy me an extra ten or twenty minutes before I have to park in that driveway and walk that walk and ring that doorbell and then see that war torn face of my Ma’s, and that look she’s gonna give me when she sees the unrecognizable gray in my temples, the third chin, the ratty old shoes and sad sack clothes and the desperation in my eyes. Yeah… let’s back that up a minute.

So I put the car in reverse and back up until I’m right in front of him and empty the bottle of Dew before stepping out into the icicle rain. Motherfucker it’s cold. What the fuck am I even doing? I’m no “good person.” I fucking hate people. I even hate kids—yeah, they might be all “innocent” now, but it’s only a matter of time before the little shits grow up to cut you off in traffic or make you wait in line at the bank or leave their fucking shopping carts wading out there in the lot… so in the name of economy I just cut to the chase and hate the little shits now. Plus they’re just creepy. Especially little boys. Little girls at least kinda closely resemble what they will become. They’re just like little chicks without tits or pubes yet. But boys… little boys are fuckin’ grotesque, man. Seriously. They are nothing like the monsters they become. They go from basically these high-pitched cherubic little girls with “outies” to disgusting, gangly, pimply, voice-cracking freaks and that’s just a fucking pre-game to the big fucking werewolf transformation. Boys to men, the Super Bowl of puberty. I mean, that shit starts early I guess, what with the changing of the teeth and whatnot. How disgusting is that shit? It’s like something out of a goddamn Cronenberg movie, and we dress it all up with fairy visits and shit so we don’t vomit every time we look at our kids. But yeah, men… look at a little boy and then imagine the big, deep voiced, hairy-knuckled and ass-cracked monstrosity he is destined to become unless he’s lucky and gets like Patch Adams kid cancer or some shit. Going around with this foul rock hard cock and cum-heavy balls and empty head, drooling over ring card girls and his teenaged daughter’s friends. What a goddamn freak show. What a curse, to be a man. To have to be brave, to have to provide. There was some sociology cunt who went on Stern years back, and I remember her detailing how she dressed up like a man for like months on end in some weird social experiment she did, and found it was a hell of alot easier to be a woman after all. Sure, you make seventy cents on the dollar, if that shit’s even true—I know a lot more unemployed men than broads these days, since the only fucking jobs left in this Godforsaken country anymore are clerical pencil-pushing insurance company bullshit—but anyway. Yeah. This batty sociology broad found that, as a man, you can’t make eye contact with another fella on the street without it being some stupid fucking physical primate challenge, you gotta be ready to fight all the time. And broads bellyache over catcalls? Take a fuckin’ compliment, Shoshana. Chicks wonder why we’re crazy, and violent, and break a door jamb once in awhile? It’s fight-or-flight for us, noon and night sweetheart. Try that shit on for size. Not to mention, nobody holds a fuckin’ door open for us or lets us go ahead of them in the supermarket checkout when we only got a six pack and they’ve got a cart full of shit to ring up, and to top it all off we never get off with a fucking warning by batting our lashes when some pig pulls us over because our fuckin’ tail light’s out. And don’t even get me started on the goddamn so-called “courting process.” Men face a kind of daily rejection women couldn’t fucking fathom. So yeah, ladies… cry me the fuckin’ Hudson.

God damn, anyway, now I’m out here in the freezing fucking driving rain and I says to the guy as he fiddles with a blown out donut mini-spare:

“You need a hand, pal? Looks like you’re crapped out here.”

“Yeah, dude. This fuckin’ thing, thought I could make it home on it, but—hey, I know you from somewhere?”

“Who, me? Nah, I just got one of those faces. You know, ‘fat everyman.’”

“Nah, dude I know you. I seen you somewheres. I seen you on fuckin’ TV! Yeah, that’s it. You’re that comedian, you’re from around here, right?”

“Yeah, yeah, you got me. Guilty as charged.”

“What’s your name again, man? You’re a funny motherfucker.”

“Artie.”

“Yeah! Artie what?”

“Artie Steller.”

“Steller! Artie Steller! Fuck yeah, that’s you man! I remember you! My homeboy had one of your CDs, man. That shit was fucking hilarious. We used to get blazed and listen to that shit on repeat. I remember that one bit you had, about the body hair. That shit made me want to wax everything, man. How’d that one go?”

Oh, Christ I hate this part of it. I think about just turning away and walking back to my car immediately. Just take off and leave this dumb donut-riding fuck out here in the cold and drive the last twenty-five minutes or so to Ma’s house and get out of these wet clothes and take a hot shower and take that shit that crawled back up to God knows where since I was denying it an exit the last thirty miles—but this dunderhead said something that piqued my interest:

“So, you still smoke?”

“What? Huh—you mean weed?”

“Yeah. Said you and your homeboy used to get blazed and listen.” I give him the nod, all conspiratorial-like. “You holdin’?”

“...Maybe.”

“Well look, buddy. If you didn’t notice I got the same ride as you basically. Oh-three Camry. And I got a full-sized spare in my trunk. Hows about I let you borrow it, you gimme your number and I’ll call you in a week or two to get it back when you got a real replacement.”

“Whoa. Dude. You’d do that for me?”

“Assumin’ you break me off a piece of whatever it is you got to smoke and never call me fucking ‘dude’ again, sure. Why the fuck not.”

“Fuckin’ deal, man.”

We make our way over to my trunk and I open it and push aside all of the merch to get to the spare. Mister Donut’s looking over it all, I catch his eyes falling on a CD copy of ‘Thundercunt’ there with the t-shirts and fridge magnets and other shitty who cares me-themed tchochkes that have been gathering dust in here for months. I don’t even trot this shit out at shows anymore… wasn’t exactly flyin’ off the shelves lately and it’s one last thing to pack up when I get outta Dodge.

“Dude. That’s the one! Thundercunt!”

I shoot him a cross look.

“I mean, uh... dude no bueno, right. But seriously, bro, how about you autograph one of those CDs for me?”

“Am I missing something here, fella? What kinda Tom Sawyer whitewashing apple trading horseshit is this? Who’s doing who the fucking favor here? You want an autographed copy, you gotta pay like anyone else. Twenty for the CD, thirty-five if you want my John Hancock on it.”

“Twenty bucks? I could get it on Amazon for like four dollars. Come on man…”

“Fine. Twenty total. And I’m still giving you a tire loaner, you Jew bastard.”

“I’m Irish, bro.”

“Coulda fooled me.”

* * *

“I think about shit. Weird shit. I can’t help it. When I was in school, I used to just sit around looking at things and people and thinking about anything but what the teacher wanted me to be thinking about. I had this Social Studies teacher, Mrs. Handy. Well, I ain’t sure what kinda steroid-pumped pork this woman was eating, but Mrs. Handy might as well’ve been Mister Handy, because this broad had an honest to God, thick enough to Rollie Fingers that shit mustache. It was a straight up man-stache. Mrs. Handy was two pinches of wax and a twist of her thumbs away from being Mrs. Handlebar, if you get my drift. Anyway, I used to fixate on this goddamn caterpillar crawling across her lip, and it got me to thinking about how fuckin’ weird hair is. Isn’t it though? What’s weirder than hair? We got it growin’ out our armpits, our heads and faces and arms and backs. Our nutsacks and pussies. Little hairs in our ears, our lungs. Fuckin’ rhino horns and fingernails, all made out of the same shit. Hair is disgusting. And hair is one of the reasons biological lifeforms are so fucking gross. But we look past it, because it’s us. It’s that ego I was talkin’ about earlier. It’s everywhere. Hair’s not gross because we’re covered in it. Can you imagine though—imagine if inanimate shit grew hair. What if everything grew hair. How horrific would the world be? Imagine you come home from work, and your fuckin’ house has a five o’clock shadow on it. How time consuming would that shit be? You think mowin’ the lawn every couple weeks is bad. Your buddies call you up, “Hey Art—let’s go, we got tickets to the big game. Tailgate city!” Sorry bro, I gotta stay home and shave my kitchen.”

That’s enough—I turn the radio off as this donut-riding jagoff (who I now know is named Ken, which of course came unsolicited cause I could give a rat’s ass) rolls a joint with some weed he crumbled on the CD. Reminds me of the old days, after Rocky died, alone and doing lines off my own stupid ugly fucking face. Full of heartache and loss and enough self-loathing to sink a cruise liner. He finally finishes and hands me the joint and I light it and prime it with a few puffs and let it take me over.

“Why’d you turn it off, man? I love that shit!”

“Because I fucking hate my own voice. And it’s not even funny.”

“I think it’s funny, man. It’s like, whattaya call it—”observational” humor, right?”

“Sure. Whatever.”

I hand him the joint and he takes a couple puffs, holds the smoke in before blowing it out in a massive column and we hotbox the car and watch and listen to the rain pelting its metal and glass like a thousand little rhythmless drummers. My voice wasn’t exactly the same as the one that was just coming through the speakers though. That guy was younger, hopeful. Less distorted by reality; his voice was not yet ravaged by untold pizzas and smokes and the coke-drips and fucking sodas and the swallowing of all the hard, jagged pills life has to offer. What a fucking dope. I hate him, but not so much as I hate what he’s become.

“So, about that autograph.”

“Gimme the twenty,” I say as I take a Sharpie out of the glove box. He opens his wallet, closes it, proceeds to dig through his pockets and produce a measly wad of bills he unfolds to reveal are two crumpled ones and a five.

“Yeah. This is like all I got on me.”

I sigh and snatch them out of his fucking hand and wet my fingers on my tongue and pinch out the joint and pocket it.

“Fucking Irish Jew.”

* * *

I watch Ken changing the tire through the rearview as I pull away from the road and my heart’s pounding from the weed. Used to be that it calmed me, opened up my mind to creative ideas and a little bit of what some hippie fuck new age walking disaster might call “oneness” or some such shit—and it still does—but now it takes about twenty minutes of “is my fat ass finally having that four alarm heart attack” before I get there. I breathe in a four count and out an eight count and turn on sports talk radio and ignore it until I find I’m pulling off on that old all-too-familiar exit for Kingston and soon I’m navigating her despondent streets in the rain that just won’t let up and then I’m there, on our old street, and there’s her mailbox and her Chevy in the carport and I pull in behind it and kill the engine.

How do I say these words to her? I mean, I guess I already did on the phone, but to her face… how am I gonna look her in the eyes when I do it? She deserves that much. Christ, she deserves better is what she deserves. But it is what it is. I don’t see any other way to do it from here on out.

I get out of the car. I slow-walk through the rain like a death row inmate on his way to the gas chamber or the chair and as I step onto the porch and reach for the doorbell the door opens and there she is, my Ma. Her hair’s gone completely gray, and she’s a little fatter than before and gravity’s been doing what he does for the last seven years or so. Her face looks longer than before, and as soon as she lays eyes on me they erupt with tears and I can’t help but wonder if it’s a lifetime of tears and not gravity that pulled her face down like that.

“Hey Ma.”

“Oh, My Aturro.”

I can’t bring myself to touch on it. Not now. Not unless she takes it there first. Mercifully, she lets me off the hook.

“You don’t have to say anything, son. It’s okay.”

I look her square in her brimming, red-rimmed eyes and take a deep breath and, despite what prudence might call for, say that which needs to be said now more than anything:

“Ma... you mind? I’ve hadda take a shit since New Baltimore.”

Next Chapter: Chapter Three