the neighborhood

The other day I was outside having a smoke taking a break from doing my laundry. I’m watching all that was going on around me when I noticed this cat hanging out near the bus stop.

It turned out to be this guy I’ve been seeing around since the early nineties who I knew to be a true idiot. I’m just saying that if there was such a thing as a poster boy for the stupid assholes of the world, this cat would be it.

And there he stood walking around with of all things a guitar hanging off his shoulder. I thought about dropping back and heading back inside the laundry but I was too late, stupid spotted me.

He runs up like I was some long lost buddy and the first thing that falls from his mouth is can he have a smoke. At the same time this other cat from the neighborhood steps out of the laundry and Stupid seems to know him too.

Stupid then goes into this spiel that he’s going to Europe with his band and wants me to be his bodyguard. Then he switches gears and commences to tell us that he came into money but lost it all.

It seems that Stupid’s grandmother died sometime back and left his stupid ass a huge sum of money. But being stupid he found that between staying drunk and high, smoking crack and buying gear for his “band”, he was able to burn thru over sixty-grand in less then a year. And now all he has to show for it is the guitar slung over his shoulder.

The thing that struck me was that this dumb bastard actually seemed proud of what he had accomplished. I couldn’t help but think back to the last time I had seen this cat. It was some years ago and I was hanging at the Hurricane watching this band load in.

Stupid and one of his equally stupid friends were walking past the door when one of em yelled the word nigger into the bar. Now since I was the only black person in sight I stepped outside to ask em who they were talking too.

As I stepped from the dark of the bar into the sun Stupid screamed that he didn’t know it was me and dropped to his knees and actually started wringing his hands and groveling. Whilst his stupid friend peed his pants and fell to the ground and curled into a fetus position.

I figured the ass kicking wasn’t worth the thirty seconds that it would take out of my life and I went back inside, which is exactly what I did now. Hell, I had more important things to do like fold up underwear then hear anymore of Stupid’s shit.


"and the monkey flipped the switch"