This is not that important. It just surprised me when I came to it, is all. You’re a boob, a boob for life, I realized one day. Oh, I got Stetsons, a Silverado doolie, ten years at ARMCO, played poker with Mickey Gilley, shit, and my girlfriends I don’t keep in a little black book but on candy wrappers flying around loose in the truck. One flies out, so what? More candy, more wrappers at the store. But one day, for no reason, or no reason I know it or can remember anything happening which it meant anything, I stopped at what I was doing and said, John Payne, you are a piece of crud. You are a common, long-term drut. Look at it.
It’s not like this upset me or anything, why would it? It’s part of the truth to what I’m saying. You can’t disturb a nobody with evidence he’s a nobody. A nobody is not disturbed by anything significant. It’s like trying to disturb a bum by yelling poor fuck at him. What’s new? he says. So when I said, John Payne, you final asshole, I just kept on riding. But the moment stuck. I began watching myself. I watched and proved I was an asshole.
This does not give you a really good feeling, unless you are drunk, which is when you do a good part of the proving.
I’ve been seeing things out of the corners of my eyes and feeling like I have worms since this piece-of-crud thing. It works like this. I’m in a ice house out Almeda, about to Alvin in fact, and I see this pretty cowboy type must work for Nolan Ryan’s ranch or something start to come up to me to ask for a light. That’s what I would have seen, before. But now it works like this: before he gets to me, before he even starts coming over, see, because I’m legged up in a strange bar thinking I’m a piece of shit and a out-of-work beer at three in the afternoon in a dump in Alvin it proves it, I see out the corner of my eye this guy put his hand in his pants and give a little wink to his buddies as he starts to come over. That’s enough, whatever it means, he may think I’m a fag, or he may be one himself, but he thinks you’re enough a piece of shit he can touch his dick and wink about you, only he don’t know that he is winking about a known piece of shit, and winking about a known piece of shit is a dangerous thing to do.
Using the mirror over the bar about like Annie Oakley shooting backwards, I spot his head and turn and slap him in the temple hard enough to get the paint to fall off a fender. He goes down. His buddies start to push back their chairs and I step one step up and they stop.
“What’s all the dick and grinning about, boys?”
On the floor says, “I cain’t see.”
“He cain’t see,” I tell the boys.
I walk out.
Outside it’s some kind of dream. There’s ten Hell’s Angel things running around a pickup in the highway like a Chinese fire drill, whatever that is. In the middle by the truck is a by-God muscle man out of Charles Atlas swinging chains. He’s whipping the bikers with their own motorcycle chains. He’s got all of the leather hogs bent over and whining where he’s stung them. He picks up a bike and drops it headfirst on the rakes. Standing there with a hot Bud, the only guy other than Tarzan not bent over and crying, I get the feeling we’re some kind of tag team. I drive off.
That’s how it works. Start out a piece of shit, slap some queerbait blind, watch a wrestling match in the middle of Almeda Road, drive home a piece of shit, spill the hot beer I forgot about all over the seat and my leg.
I didn’t always feel this way, who could afford to? When I was fifteen, my uncle, who was always kind of my real dad, gave me brand-new Stetson boots and a hundred-dollar bill on a street corner in Galveston and said spend it all and spend it all on whores. It was my birthday. I remember being afraid of the black whores and the ones with big tits, black or white, otherwise I was a ace. In those days a hundred dollars went a long way with ladies in Galveston. I got home very tired, a fifteen-year-old king with new boots and a wet dick.
That’s what you do with the world before you doubt yourself. You buy it, dress up in it, fuck it. Then, somehow, it starts fucking back. A Galveston whore you’d touch now costs the whole hundred dollars, for example, in other words. I don’t know. Today I would rather just talk to a girl on the street than fuck one, and I damn sure don’t want to talk to one. There’s no point. I need some kind of pills or something. There must be ways which it will get you out of feeling like this.
For a while I thought about having a baby. But Brillo Tucker thought this up about fifteen years ago, and two years ago his boy whips his ass. When I heard about that I refigured. I don’t need a boy whipping my ass, mine or anybody else’s. That would just about bind the tit. And they’ll do that, you know, because like I say they come out kings for a while. Then the crown slips and pretty soon the king can’t get a opera ticket, or something, I don’t know anything about kings.
This reminds me of playing poker with Mickey Gilley, stud. First he brings ten times as much money as anyone, sits down in new boots, creaking, and hums all his hit songs so nobody can think. He wins a hand, which it is rare, and makes this touchdown kind of move and comes down slowly and rakes the pot to his little pile. During the touchdown, we all look at this dry-cleaning tag stapled to the armpit of his vest. That’s the Pasadena crooner.
I was at ARMCO Steel for ten years, the largest integrated steel mill west of the Mississippi, a word we use having nothing to do with niggers for once. It means we could take ore and make it all the way to steel. Good steel. However, I admit that with everybody standing around eating candy bars in their new Levi’s, it cost more than Jap steel. I have never seen a Japanese eating a candy bar or dipping Skoal showing off his clothes. They wear lab coats, like they’re all dentists. We weren’t dentists.
We were, by 1980, out of a job, is what we were. It goes without saying it, that is life. They were some old-timers that just moped about it, and some middle-lifer types that had new jobs in seconds, and then us Young Turks that moped mad. We’d filler up and drive around all day bitching about the capitalist system, whatever that is, and counting ice houses. We discovered new things, like Foosball. Foosball was one of the big discoveries. Pool we knew about, shuffleboard we knew about, Star Wars pinball we knew about, but Foosball was a kick.
For a while we bitched as a club. We were on the ice-house frontier, Tent City bums with trucks. Then a truckload of us — not me, but come to think of it, Brillo Tucker was with them, which is perfect — get in it on the Southwest Freeway with a truckload of niggers and they all pull over outside the Post building and the niggers whip their ass. They’re masons or something, plumbers. A photographer at the Post sees it all and takes pictures. The next day a thousand ARMCO steel workers out of a job read about themselves whipped by employed niggers on the freeway. This lowered our sail. We got to be less of a club, quick. I don’t know what any of my buddies are doing now and I don’t care. ARMCO was ARMCO. It was along about in here I told my wife I was off to Beaumont for black chicks, and there could be a connection, but I doubt it.
As far as I can really tell, I’m still scared of them in the plain light of day. At a red light on Jensen Drive one day, a big one in a fur coat says to me, “Come here, sugar, I got something for you,” and opens her coat on a pair of purple hot pants and a yellow bra.