Grundish & Askew (3 page)

It is a recurring event. The hulking, tattooed, fur-faced ex-con standing on the street corner, earning minimum wage as a human billboard, holding down an honest job. And that minivan full of kids drives by and bombards him with rotting food products and verbal taunts. Sometimes they shout “loooo-zer” at him. Sometimes it is just loud laughing. It doesn’t matter on what street corner the advertising agency places him. It doesn’t matter if his arrow-sign is encouraging people to check out great housing bargains or two-for-one pizza deals. The minivan always tracks him down. Grundish often fantasizes about that van breaking down right in front of him; he can visualize himself snapping their skinny necks, one at a time, and leaving behind a pile of smirking, pimple-faced corpses.

For Grundish, every day is enough of a struggle without a hoard of punk teenagers mocking his lot in life. It’s not like when he was a kid Grundish aspired to stand on a street corner with an arrow-shaped sign, trying to entice the traffic to turn and check out condominiums which he himself could never afford. No, Grundish didn’t really aspire to anything as a youngster. Consequently, he found himself almost ready to turn thirty and working a job that the day-laborers turned up their noses at. But at least he wasn’t in prison.

“Don’t you just hate punk kids?” asks the unmistakable raspy voice behind Grundish. “I do. Hell, I’ll probably be supervising some of those delinquents one of these days. So how are you liking your job, anyway?”

Grundish slowly turns around, wiping the remnants of smashed apple on his pants. It is Miss Velda, his parole officer. Velda, a squat, sturdy lump of femininity, like a wrecking ball that broke off of its chain, is another of the festering boils on the ass of Grundish’s life. Not that she tries to give him problems. It’s just that she is always appearing behind him out of nowhere and commenting on his state of affairs. Always needing him to do a piss test. “Come on, I need you to go whiz for me,” she says, latching onto his solid, tattooed forearm and escorting him to the restroom of the Git-n-Go mart.

“Miss Velda, I ain’t on drug offender probation, so why do I have to keep taking these tests?” Grundish asks, feigning innocence as best he can. He will never fail a drug test with Ms. Velda. The cannabinoids in his blood and urine will never be detected by the field test. The THC and various illicit chemical compounds are a constant presence in his system, but, Grundish has an ace up his sleeve. Actually he always has a prosthetic penis (nicknamed Steve for no particular reason) tucked in his pants that is filled with clean urine and ready for the testing.
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Grundish never leaves the security of his trailer without Steve being filled with a fresh, clean, sample. The entire pack makes for an impressive frontal basket presentation.

Ironically, it was the fake schlong that caused Velda to start testing Grundish in the first place. The oversized bulge in the front of his pants caught her eye the first time she met with her charge. From that day forth, Velda regularly showed up requesting a sample. As per the Department of Corrections’ supposed regulations, Velda has to witness the actual sample presentation.

“Miss Velda, I’m really uncomfortable having to pee in front of you,” Grundish pleads as he unfurls the club-shaped and realistic looking phallus from his pants.

At the sight of what Velda believes to be a fresh slab of throbbing man-meat, Velda’s eyes glaze over and a shiver shoots down her spine, pausing in her loin briefly to spark the candle that brews the fondue in her panties. She stands awestruck, as always, at the veiny faux meat-club with its bulbous, purple-tinted head. Grundish’s practiced hands manipulate the prosthetic penis perfectly, draining the clean urine into the specimen cup and even shaking off the last couple of drops for a realistic effect.

From her shirt pocket Velda extracts an expired ketone testing strip (the only evidence of her all-protein diet years earlier). “Now hand me the cup, and leave that thing out,” she says, pointing the fraudulent strip at the fraudulent dong, “while I test the sample.” Her eyes, wide open, topped with a fuzzy unibrow, and locked on the dangling participle, never stray as she stirs the clean urine sample. “Well,” Miss Velda briefly glances at the test stick before resuming full dong-focus, “it looks like you’re clean, Mister. Good job. You can go ahead and put that thing away. Perhaps we should go somewhere so that we can discuss the terms of your probation and maybe...”

“Miss Velda,” Grundish interrupts, “I really have to get back to work. If I’m gone too long, my boss will can me. He knows that if I don’t have a job, then I can be violated on my parole. And he gives me a hard enough time about that. I don’t want any trouble. I just wanna get back to work.”

“Well, get back to it then, Mister,” she says, swatting him gently on the rump as he starts for the door. Grundish pauses, and in that nanosecond he ponders the shit he puts up with—the kids in the van, the shitty job, strapping on a synthetic penis and a bag of someone else’s urine everyday, sexual harassment from Velda, and then the thought of returning to prison—and he decides to keep walking. He can’t go back to prison. That is a promise he made to himself.
And a man ain’t nothing if he can’t at least keep his promises
, Grundish thinks. Swallowing down a gulletful of humility, Grundish clenches his teeth and walks out the door, back to his minimum wage human-directional career. As Grundish returns to his thankless and meaningless work, Miss Velda stays behind in the restroom. She slips her middle finger in and out of the sweaty fat folds she calls a vagina and fantasizes about the molded hunk of silicone strapped to Grundish’s crotch.

Grundish and Askew arrive at their trailer at the same time, both carrying the tired slouch of the beaten down. Grundish with a twelve pack of Milwaukee’s Best. Askew with a cold supreme pizza left over from a prank order. Two nobodies settling in for a dinner of warm beer and cold pizza.

“You should’a seen her face,” Grundish tells his friend, relating the incident with Miss Velda. “Practically drooling and quivering. It was like a dog eyeing a thick, greasy pork chop. I swear I should just fuck her and get it over with. Maybe I can get my supervision early-terminated. I could just plug up my nose, close my eyes and pretend she’s your sister.”

“You should give it a try,” Askew agrees, ignoring the sister comment. He pops the top on his beer can. “She’s a
volumptuous
piece of ass. You could do worse. She’s got big plump titties.” He wedges a hand under the worn elastic band of his underwear and ponders the situation. “Yeah, but she’d probably be disappointed with that little bitty thing you got between your legs. She’s used to seeing that monster thick-dick you keep pulling out in front of her. And then you show her what you really got,” he shrugs, “hell, she’s
libel
to just go ahead and violate your parole right then and there. Then again, you ain’t been laid in a while and you wouldn’t have that much time to finish off your sentence.”

“Why are you always doing that?” Grundish asks and pops the top on his beer, releasing an ooze of warm foam down the side of the can.

“Doing what?”

“Agreeing with me in one breath, and then disagreeing with me in the next, and then changing course again? It drives me fucking bat-shit sometimes. Can’t you just give me a straight answer for once?”

“It’s called the
di-electric
process,” explains Askew. “Point and counterpoint.
Ying
and yang compete until eventually the true answer becomes apparent. The answer is usually somewhere in between the original points of view. So there you have it.”

“Well the
dialectric
process sucks balls. There you have it.” Opening the pizza box on the floor in front of him, Grundish extracts a piece, groans, and slaps it back down. “Aw fuck! Olives again. You know I can’t stand that shit. Even if I pluck them off, the olive juice has already soaked in and tainted the entire pizza. The whole damn thing tastes like rotten vegetables.” He throws the pizza back in the box and eats his beer for dinner.

Grabbing a piece of the pie for himself, picking off the olives, and taking a huge bite, Askew agrees through a mouthful of masticated pizza, “I know, it’s pretty nasty. That taste don’t go away. But then again, I do kind of like it, too. What’s up with you tonight? You’re being quite the whiny little bitch.”

“I don’t know. I’m just getting tired of the shit. I’m getting tired of the Fuckers.”

“The Fuckers?” Askew asks, ingurgitating the greater part of the pizza slice in one gulp, and finishes the question with a raise of his eyebrows.

“Yeah. The Fuckers,” answers Grundish. “The people that shit on me everyday. The punks who throw fruit
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at me while I’m working my lousy job. Miss Velda eyeballing my fake dick. And did I tell you about my boss?”

“That fucker? What’s his name again?”

“Exactly. That fucker. He is one of them – the Fuckers. And his name is Hayman.” Grundish sneers. “He keeps telling me that I’m not enthusiastic enough with my arrow sign. He wants me to dance around and wave and smile at people. He’d probably like it if I wore those faggy short-shorts like him, too. Shit, for minimum wage I’m not gonna do anything other than stand there and be a sign post. He actually tried to give me lessons on how to spin my arrow and dance around. I was this far,” he holds up his thumb and index finger exactly one centimeter apart, “from stabbing him in the face with my arrow. I don’t know if I can stand to have this shit heaped on me everyday. Do you understand what I’m saying about the Fuckers?” Grundish crushes his aluminum can and throws it toward the kitchen area of the trailer. The can bounces off of the counter and lands beside a macramé framed picture of Askew’s great aunt on top of a broken black and white television set.

“Yeah, I get it.” Askew starts in on another piece of pizza and Grundish opens another beer. “Did I tell you about the Buttwynns?”

“The butt winds? I got your butt winds,” Grundish smiles and squeezes off a moist, reverberating bottom burp.

“No, the Buttwynns,” Askew shakes his head in disgust, flaring his nostrils at the olfactory assault. “I deliver two or three pizzas to their house every week. I’m always on time. The order is always right. Do you know what that fucker gives me for a tip?”

“Is his name really Buttwynn?” Grundish laughs.

“Yeah, it’s Buttwynn. The fucker even has it on his vanity license plate – Buttwynn. But you’re losing track of my story. Pay attention. Here’s the thick of the plot: guess what he gives me for a tip every time?”

“I don’t know, maybe a dollar,” ventures Grundish.

“Hell, I wish,” says Askew. “He gives me a quarter tip every time. The prick is the furthest house out on the delivery route, he always gets his shit on time, always, and he insults me with that tip. Acts like he just shit out a gold nugget and is doing me a favor when he places that quarter in my hand. And it’s always really warm, like he’s been squashing his fat mitt around it, not really wanting to hand it over to me. I’d rather he didn’t even tip me, the bastard.”

“Well, why don’t you tell him you don’t want his measly quarter next time?” Grundish asks.

“No way, man. I’m not giving up my quarter.”

“Well, why don’t you spit on his pizza, or throw a couple of pubes on it? Do something to teach the fucker, ya know?”

“Yeah, maybe,” Askew agrees.

“I mean, shit, I’d like to start striking out at the Fuckers. Fighting for the little people. The people like us. Maybe I should. Whatta ya think?” Grundish chugs the remainder of his cheap beer and feels the warm happies that only alcohol brings him.

“Yeah, maybe that’s a good idea,” Askew agrees and polishes off his beer. “Or maybe not. I don’t know. I could see you going overboard. Taking things too far. Maybe it’s not a good idea. But then again...”

“There you go again!” Grundish loses patience with his best friend. “Maybe. Maybe not. But on the other hand and yet again, maybe. I think you may be one of the Fuckers too.”

“Well,” Askew averts his eyes, “I do hate to be a fucker. But I’ve got some bad news that I have to share with you.”

“Oh, sweet baby Jesus! What now?”

“It’s my Aunt Turleen. Things have taken a bad turn for her?”

“That crazy little old lady?” Grundish smiles. “She’s funny. I like the way she repeats everything she says. I like to give her wine and watch her get all wacky.”

“She ain’t crazy. She just gots
oldtimers
disease. So she forgets stuff sometimes and has bouts of
demention
.”

“Well, what’s the problem? Does she have to get her other lung removed? Is she dying?”

“No. I think she’s gonna live forever,” answers Askew. “The problem is...I think she’s going to have to live with us.”

•  •  •

Turleen Rundle never was one for lasting relationships. In fact, her great-nephew Leroy Jenkem Askew wasn’t really sure exactly what relationships linked him to his great aunt. For that matter, neither was the rest of the Askew family. Turleen was always around, though, and as best as any of the Askews could determine, she and Uncle Hank were both somehow related to them. Turleen was more of a parent to Askew than his biological mother or father. And Askew loved Turleen more than anybody else in his family.

Due to a fondness for hand-rolled filterless cigarettes, Turleen had one lung subtracted from her bodily equation at the age of eighty-five. Weakened and in need of recuperation, Turleen was unable to take care of herself and had to be institutionalized in the Emiction Lakes Nursing Home. At first Turleen enjoyed the company of the other patients at the home. Upon arriving at the facility, she formed a women’s bowling team with other emphysema sufferers and named the team the Pink Puffers due to their frequent bouts of spastic hyperventilation that was necessary to maintain sufficient oxygen levels. There also was no shortage of gentlemen callers for Turleen or the Pink Puffers, as she and her lady friends had a reputation in the community for having a certain slackness in their morals.