A wise old man once told me never pay full price for late pizza. You know who said that? Ill give you a hint it wasnt a wise old man it was a teenager, a teenage mutant ninja turtle i believe his name was michael and from what i hear he is a party dude. Another wise man once told me “always pee before you leave the bar” that old wise man wasnt old he was the same as as jesus when they beat his ass to death. That wise old man was curtis valentine. The new york city record holder for piss tickets and one of only two people to be banned from met life stadium for life, the other is willie joe namath. I dont know how he always got a ticket for peeing in public cause his dick was as black as night but the cops could spot it. He always got caught, so he always took a pee before he left the bar.
Now that i’m a wise old man id like a saying of my own and for the purposes of this little gem id like it to be “dont drink beer at the closest bar to your house”. Makes sense right? No. it doesnt. It isnt a pearl of wisdom. Dont pee before you leave the bar is genius. And you can replace bar with anything. Always pee before you leave the zoo. Dont drink beer at the closest bar to your house is a personal rule of mine and i break it all the time just to see what will happen.
I buy my house, i get a dog hes australian and there is a bar called the melbourne down the street and for a couple weekends in a row he was being really good and he was like “hey dad lets go for a walkabout down to the melbourne! (the melbourne is the closest bar to the house) melbourne thats where my people are from. If youre with me youll be alright, dad. Its not like the bar is called sydney who would name a bar after sydney cunts? Its the melbourne its gonna be titts.”(yes i talk to my aussie all day long in an australian accent…we go on walkabouts, when he has to have a shit we go out back…you get it) So i’m tired of hearing him bitch and complain so i take him to the melbourne. The bartender was a twat but she or maybe he or maybe them told me the bar was dingo friendly so we went. We were having a ball then i went to the outback for a smoko. And i asked archie if he wanted to come he said “no dad im gonna stay and watch me mates play billiards could i have a dolla for the tokies?”. I said alright run along then. And then i went out and i wasnt even halfway done with my cig, i got a bad feeling, and i came in and i dont see archie. And all of the bar patrons are looking at their beers and the dude or whatever that was tending bar was looking at its phone. I investigate further yep no dog! I calmly ask the bartender where my dog is. it said oh pancakes took him out for a walk. I said who the fuck is pancakes, you know what forget it, can you call pancakes and tell them to bring my son back please. She did and as soon as pancakes came back and put the leash in my hand i screamed in her face and called her a cunt and not the way my australian son archie uses it. Then the creature serving drinks says alright thats it your out of here. So i did what i always do when i get kicked out of a bar for no reason. I wrote a zero in the tip line and broke some shit. The only thing near me was a pint glass so i pushed it off the bar. No oxygen breathing bar keepers were harmed. I didnt throw it at anyone, i pushed it off the bar. (My homie lil half dead was there. he saw it so all of you bastards you wanna say i threw it at that emaciated dolphin person behind the bar can suck a bag of dicks) I got my dog back i got kicked out for calling a cunt a cunt and i laughed at the locals who escorted me out with their fists balled up and their chests puffed out. Good job boys i hope you had a good long crank on your hog after that adrenaline testosterone cocktail.
Everyone in that bar is complicit in stealing my dog. The bartender, the mouth breathing locals, the starman, you know who you are.(who does that? Gets a sleeve of black stars. Two kinds of people maybe three…the first is a tasteless bore with the imagination of a person on life support, and the other two are neo nazis and former juggalos who want to cover their embarrassing tattoos from a past life. hatchet men or swastikas? Which is it starman? We want answers. The people want to know…oh wait this just in. no. we are getting reports that no one gives a fuck about arrogant half brained bartenders in omaha nebraska.)
As far as i’m concerned they were all in on it. If you were in my shoes you’d feel the same way. Im pretty sure its still punishable by death to steal a mans dog in the nebraska territory. So you are lucky all you got was some broken dishes.
I just had a eureka moment. I have my saying. My wise old man saying. If you are getting kicked out of a bar for no reason (and you better be right. like i was. i mean a whole barroom of people better have as clear as day conspired to kidnap your furry son,) break something on the way out. It needs some work. If you are getting kicked outta the bar for no reason break something on the way out. Ah still needs work. Fuck it i just got some jordans in the mail. Lets see what we got,,, daaaam that orange pops. Shiiiiit man these are fucking NUBUCK. noooooo
Washington was the first state i lived in that had an open carry gun law. Then nevada and now nebraska. My friend chelsea and i were sitting in my studio at the black dot in olympia washington when she told me that. We immediately walked to a bodega and got some tall boys. I walked outside and immediately cracked open my beer and started to drink it. The clerk came out side and told me i couldnt do that. We started to walk back up puget and i said to chelsea
Whats the matter? Aren’t you going to have some beer?
She said no i dont want to get a ticket.
I said dont worry if the cops stop us, let me do the talking.
What are you going to tell them?
I told her i was going to pretend i thought that open carry gun laws were actually some kind of alcohol law. Something to the effect of i thought i could “ open carry” this beer as long as it was in a brown bag.
She asked if we went to the store to get beers just so i could make this joke.
I said yes. And she cracked her beer and started drinking.
This epiphany was in the summer of 2016 and it is now the summer of 2023 and i have never hesitated to drink a beer in public (in an open carry state) and since then i havent even had a cop look at me sideways. If you fart side ways in florida or texas the cops will show up with a granjury and have you under the jail in a matter of days. Im out here for the better part of a decade drinking beer on public property that good god fearing tax payers sprung for and i cant even get a frown out of a cop.
In fact the only person who has ever done any thing about my drinking in public was an overzealous security guard at a bar in Omaha. I scooped a beer i was drinking at a bar up the street. I was drinking it and walking by the bar she worked at. She was in side. She came outside. She snatched the beer from me. I laughed called her a super cop told her to relax and grabbed for my beer. She mushed my head up against a plate glass window. Then someone walked from the bar with a phone to their ear and and say
“Now hes trying to assault her.”
I couldnt believe that i had already been battered and that the table got turned to me being the villain this fast. I was truly in shock that a situation could escalate that quickly. Even for me and the situations i find myself in. like the great bramble bush road trip of 2013.
Why did this large woman even care if i was walking by the bar where she worked with an open beer? Why? What concern of hers is it?
Answer: everyone in Omaha is a nosey, dry snitch. Well, not everyone. But the people you wouldnt suspect to be snitches, are. The hipsters punk rockers metalheads skaters artist type here are as square as a box of apple jacks and twice as green. This place is so buttoned up and conservative the liberals dont even know how conservative they are.
I have been visiting omaha since the summer of 2011. Why?
Yep. nebraska women. Some of the biggest bootied, big breasted, biggest harted woman on the planet, and i love them. Not just one. I gotta love them all. In that time i have experienced some strange behavior from the locals. Ive been beaten up kicked out of bars had dozens of rumors started about me and my reasons for coming here. Had women rope me into love triangles. They love that one this is a town of cheaters. Ive had my dog archie stolen and then got 86d from the bar after throwing what i thought was a justified fit.
The second time someone tried to steal my dog i was with my buddy Peanut at the nifty bar. His coke dealer is sitting to my right and Peanut is to her right. A disheveled woman (by disheveled woman i mean crack head. Remember im ellis jones. I know a crack head when i see one) walked in and came straight up to the coke dealer and said hey im thirsty could i try your drink. The coke deal said sure and handed the disheveled woman he pink drink. The woman took a gulp and spit it on the floor of the bar.
Yes. this moron let a crackhead drink from her glass and then th crackhead spit it on the ground. Inside. Just being clear. Then old crack tits lunges. Literally lunges at me and says i wanna try yours and tried to grab my pint. Shocking i know.
After everything settled. I kept harping about how strange that was even for me. Im ellis jones ive seen people wipe cocaine on their gums from a tenderloin bathroom floor. And so even for me this is weird. Then female bartender looked at me angrily and said its not weird its women supporting women and if you dont like it you can leave. So i did exactly what you expect i laughed in her face. She pointed to the door stamped her foot and told me to get out. I said let me finish my beer. she said no. now. Before i could take a swig of beer she was behind me choking me out and trying to drag me out. At the same time some denver cunt came and unhooked archie from his leash and hheaded for the door. I demanded she give my dog back and she told me i was a terrible dog owner. Why? For pointing out how strange this situation was?
I could tell you a dozen stories about how these lunatics just like creating a dramatic situation where there doesnt need to be one. Like the bartender who came out to the patio to angrily confront me about giving my dog beer. Which he would have been right to be up set about. If i were actually giving my dog beer. But i wasnt. One of these corny nebraskers (nebrasker is a person from nebraska) went in to the bar and told this clown that i was feeding archie beer. And he came out side like he wanted to fight me. I asked him
So someone came in there and told you that?
He said yea
I said and you believed them?
He said yea.
I did what i always do i laughed in his face.
I dont know what it is about me but sometimes just the sight of me pisses these nerds off. My thereapist told me its cause i remind them they are losers. And i dont want to believe her but i kinda do. I mean look that one road trip with my 323 and i saw more things and lived more life that these small town hipsters will in thirty years.
It aint all bad. After all that clown bar tender got me a new round of funding for this here book. When my investors saw that they cut a check and again the women.
Did you see that? I had to work Archie in there . He’s the best friend I’ve ever had. Watching him get electrocuted was tuff. And then I tried to crate train him. And he broke all his incisor teeth off trying to break free, to get to me. So now he is with me all the time which means I have to lie a lot and say he is a service animal. Which he is. For real. Cause I’m not lying nor would I ever lie about that. I have found though that if you walk anywhere with sunglasses on and a dog with a service vest people don’t really ask questions anyway. It’s like going to the airport drunk. Don’t risk getting arrested or sent home. Put on a mask, get a cane from the drug store, do your best “tiny Tim” impression on the way to the ticket counter. And ask for priority and cruise through security like a war hero. Might sound scummy but I feel like I’m doing everyone at the airport a favor. Who is to say what a service dog is or isn’t anyway? People are nicer to me when I have archie. He’s happy he’s with me and having him around keeps me balanced and pretty much makes being too impulsive impossible. So really he’s a public service dog. You dont want old ellis jones running around town like a whiskey drinking werewolf, living my best life to the beat of a classical concerto all my own. There was a time probably long ago when people had tiny horses as service animals. Imagine that? I don’t care how small it is, it probably still eats like a horse. Could you imagine all the tiny emotional support horseshit everywhere? It would be stacked up head high. All i’m trying to do is take the friendliest, most well behaved dog everywhere with me. It’s not a big ask. A big ask would be having a south pacific robber crab as a service animal. That could be a big problem for society as a whole. I seen one of them crabs climb a coconut tree and climb down with three coconuts. And he already had one made up into a pina colada. He looked me right in the eye on his way back to the ocean. Now that’s a service animal. You could train one to get you beers, steal wallets, pass your number to a pretty lady. The possibilities truly are endless.
Isnt that a typical dog owner thing to do? Go off on a rant about their dog when they are supposed to be writing a book? Anyway i forgot that a couple years ago i wrote a few thousand words about nebraska so lets go check it out.
Nebrasker.
People, some people, love to talk about other people’s business, sharing and snickering over information they have no business talking about or even knowing about. They are a cousin to a snitch. Maybe not the exact same species of rat. But if they will tell you someone else’s personal information, they’d tell yours to anyone and everyone. I believe that kind of person would talk to the cops under light interrogation. Don’t believe me? Stick your finger in that hole and see if something bites it. Your “best friend” would be down at the police station singing like a humpback whale if the right circumstances should prevail. I try to avoid the type. There is no winning. You can tell the truth. That would be bad. You can tell them what you think they want to hear. Or you can tell them what they want to tell other people. Disinformation. If you can’t avoid interacting with these personality junkies. Start a ridiculous rumor about yourself and watch it spread like wildfire. Then you know where it came from and anyone that has heard that story about you is part of the problem and cant be trusted.
Eddy is one of those diet snitches. Spends most of his morning at a sidewalk cafe greeting familiar faces and then dishing to anyone with ears what he thinks they should know about the passing person. It’s disgusting. I’m a filthy dope dealer. My lifestyle could make a billy goat puke but I would never sit around like a gossiping gabby and whisper behind someone’s back.
i hold these truths to be self evident. some people look at me and misinterpret me. some people hear me speak and misunderstand me. some people who know me, tell me they don’t get me. some people who love me don’t really seem to like me. its these reasons that i hold the city of omaha close to my heart, for we are both beautiful when seen in the right light. located on the soggy shores of “the big muddy” or “the river of misery” as early settlers called it. as far west as you can go in iowa and as far east as nebraska will be. a wicked city built on the backs of foreign and domestic hopefuls, live stock and bootleggers. Rampant with seam squirrels and river rats.
Nebraska. or nebrasker as i like to call it.“land of corn and honey” legend has it a couple of plumbers got the bright idea to name their company “aksarben”. clever right? that shit caught on like wildfire. CPAs, dog groomers, restaurants all adopted the whimsical misnomer. the slogan for the state used to be “the good life” and it is a great place to live if you like the brutal cold mixed with texas heat and a splash of florida humidity. The states motto since been changed to “its not for everyone”. could just be me but i think some folks could read a racist undertone in that one. after all omaha the state’s largest city is one of the most segregated cities i’ve ever seen, after hanging around there it doesn’t appear to be an accident. the north side is a mix of irish catholic and african american, south omaha is predominantly hispanic, with a large italian community and the west side is mostly white, go past 108th and you are in what i call cracker country.
little known fact…Nebraska is actually the only state still considered a territory…i told geary that and he said really? I said no, that’s a lie. Nebraska did reject statehood in 1866 but later in 1867 president Andrew Johnson vetoed the decision making “aksarben” our beloved 37th state. I can say without question this place has the most powerful magic mushrooms known to mankind. “there are many secrets in the cow patties”
The first time I blew through omaha was a little over a decade ago. just for a night. it was a boring fucking night too. The local hometown hero emo band was playing and literally every bar was missing everyone under 25. We found a place in Benson where you could smoke inside,we hung out with old timers and played keno and shuffleboard. hit another bar with a big old beer garden, the only person in there was a tall metal head. He was air drumming and smoking weed out of a metal pipe. He asked if we smoked. I said yea he threw the metal pipe at me and we smoked. living in california you quickly become a weed snob, but this guy had some fire ass nugs. We bullshitted and drank and smoked. He sold me some amazing cocaine and at the end of the night he laced me with some shrooms. We went back to the house we were crashing at, passed out, had coffee in the morning, talked to our host about omaha and then hit the road.
the first time i ever heard of omaha was about twenty years ago. i was taking a shit. i read a little blurb in a music magazine that said a lot of indie artists like to live there because it so cheap. they can work a part time gig and go on tour a couple of times a year and still have plenty of free time for activities. this appealed to me. ive always tried to do the least amount of work to get the most amount of money to have the most free time to work on creative stuff. i havent always been so great at the money making part, but as they say a penny saved is a penny earned, and as they say in nebrasker “i wouldnt spare a hot red cent to watch a piss ant eat a bail of hay on a sunday.”
When you think about Nebraska do you think of fred astaire, gabrielle union, marlon brando,warren buffett, nick nolte, hilary swank, gerald ford, or nikko jenkins? What do you think of when you think of nebraska? corn? overalls? flat earth? whatever you landed on is the wrong answer! The correct answer is, you don’t think of nebraska. no one thinks about it unless they have a reason to and there is never a reason to think of nebraska
About five years after my first visit I had gotten news geary was living in a small town about twenty minutes south of omaha. I had been couch surfing up and down the west coast for about two years when he invited me to come out and hang for a bit.
I grabbed a couple of ounces of weed from my favorite pot store in the mission and I headed out to the bus station. Eddy was still in San Francisco and gave me a retro cassette recorder so I could work on some music out there. The ride took two days and was otherwise uneventful. Geary was renting a huge house that cost less than a room in a junky hotel in frisco. We caught up with each other then Geary and I got good and drunk and had a little bit of a brotherly argument but all was good for a few days. Then one night I’m sitting in the basement smoking some weed and I hear what sounds like a faint moaning. I pause the TV, the moaning stops. I turn the TV back on, and I think I hear the moaning again. At this point I’m not sure if I’m just really stoned and hearing shit that isn’t there. I pause the TV again, as plain as day I can hear geary moan my name so I head up stairs to see what’s going on. Geary is curled up on the floor of his bedroom and sweating and moaning for me to call nine one one. I was like, are you sure? That’s an expensive ride to the hospital. I got him up and put him on the bed and then raided his medicine cabinet. I found some old percs he had gotten from a previous surgery. i asked him do you wanna pop a perc and wait and see if the pain goes away. he caught his breath and took the pill. before the pill could kick in the abdominal pain came back. and he was like call the meat wagon! not now, but right now!
About a year before a guy I was selling dope with in north beach got smacked with a pool ball in a sock. when he went to the hospital the people who took him didn’t tell the doctors that he was jacked up on coke. whatever the docs gave him fucking killed him when it mixed with the blow in his veins. So when I called the ambulance I made sure to tell them that I had given Geary an opioid for his pain. an opioid he was prescribed. This was a bad idea. They treated him like a dope fiend the whole time he was in there. they didn’t take the abdominal pain seriously. They just thought he was kicking junk. He sat in that hospital for five days with no pain meds while getting treated like a criminal the whole time. They didn’t figure out what was wrong with him till he saw his primary care doc the day after he got out. his gallbladder was basically rotten and was on the verge of putting him in toxic shock. The next day he was going into surgery in the same hospital. not a word from the ER staff. not an apology. not any accountability whatsoever. I’ve always hated doctors as much as the police and this isn’t helping. I stuck around Omaha a couple more weeks while Geary recovered. started taking cabs up to midtown to drink at this bar called sisters. i thought it was like a femme bar if you know what i mean. but it was just a homey kind of a dive. dive isn’t really a nice word for a bar like this. It was like a punk bar at night and an old man happy hour watch the news and or game shows while it’s still light outside, kind of place. Sisters was owned by a nice couple, Lana and terry. Terry was the king of old man jokes. The day I met him he told me… did you know pigeons die after sex? i said no i didnt know that. he said the one i fucked last night is just a pile of feathers and cum right now. lana was always very suspicious of me. asking me too many questions about what i did for work and why i was in town. i spent a couple weeks skateboarding some of the best hills ive ever seen, drinking at sisters and helping geary around the house. when he was all better he went to the doctor to get some kinda scan and as luck would have it they found a mass on his right kidney. doc said they could go in an get a sample of the mass to see if it was the big C. and if it was they’d have to take half of his kidney and if it isn’t C then that is that. geary thought about it and decided to just have them take half the kidney. he didn’t want to do two more surgeries. so just cut the fucker out. it ended up not being cancer
I had just gotten my book deal and I was flush with cash so I found a month to month apartment over off park avenue and decided to stay for a while while Geary recovered from his second surgery. I figured I would stay for the winter and get some writing done then head back out west for the summer.
I started hooking up with this younger woman. she was really sweet and fucking stupid hot, and she had those orgasms where her whole body tightened up and convulsed and her pussy would spit my dick out. She didnt have great hygeine because her puss rarely smelled nice and had a very acidic taste to it. she had this strange smell in her hair. I couldn’t figure out what it was. she would come over smoke a bunch of pot fuck me and leave. The first time she spent the night I had the gnarliest nightmare.
she was a cannibal. she had a basement with a tile trough in the middle. she had a man in a large bird cage and her and her partner would cut pieces off of the victim cauterize the wound cook the meat and as they ate the flesh they were naked and they hung their asses over the trough. they would eat the flesh and shit uncontrollably into the trough. They kept eating and kept shitting. I woke up. that smell in her hair was all in my fucking nose. That smell was all I could smell in the dream. that cannibal shit basement smelled just like that. I didn’t talk to her for a while. I was out drinking in Dundee one night and hit her up. She lived close to the bar. It was a dead night. I was drunk and didn’t want to get a cab.when i walked in her house I got hit in the face with that smell. It was the cat box. I’m not exaggerating when I say it was a mountain of cat shit in the litter box. The smell was so powerful I was starting to get high. I forced her to clean it. I held the trash bag while she scooped. this lady let the cats walk on the counter and shit. it was fucked up.
One night me and her were at the grocery store getting some stuff to cook dinner with. some weird looking dude seemed to be following us around but i’m pretty paranoid so i didn’t pay him too much mind. Then as we were checking out he walked up with this deranged look in his eyes and he says “hey” and pushed a shopping cart at us but it was wonky so instead of going straight it took a hard right turn into a soda cooler and broke the glass. i didn’t think anything of that, some former lover i assumed. It was pretty funny but I never thought anything would come from it. The night before Thanksgiving it had just snowed. I was fiddling with my keys and BAM I got hit with something upside my head. i threw a couple blocks but this masked man fucked me up. I woke up in the snow and my dog was barking in my ear. if he hadn’t been there i would be dead. I found my glasses, grabbed my dog and headed down the street where I had seen a hospital on the way to the library. I got to the hospital and it’s not a hospital. It’s a psych ward. So I see another across the street. It’s a veterans hospital and no, being a “veteran of these streets’ ‘ won’t get you through the door. the fucking cops rolled up on me while i was leaving. the security guards called them. they pulled up hot thinking i was just creating a disturbance. when i took my hat and glasses off they could see i was lumped up pretty bad. They called an ambulance and took my dog to geary. The same cops showed up at the hospital and wanted to know who beat me up. now assuming it wasnt the dude from the grocery store it could have been anyone of the sketchy mother fuckers in the neighborhood. I told the cops I didn’t see them and even if I did, I wouldn’t tell them. “how do you expect us to help then?” you see what kind of hood i live in. you know i can’t tell you guys anything, i asked what would you do if you were in my position? the cop said ” id probably move” i promptly told both of them to fuck each other and they left. the next day i got ACAB tattooed on my right hand.
I kept fucking the cat lady. and any other woman i could, as ive been known to do. i didn’t really have any male friends at that time. id see this geologist dude out and around town but he had his nose fixed at a permanent 45 degree angle. i almost bought him some oats and a step ladder so he could feed his high horse. terry and lana introduced me to a small skater dude that hung around sisters they called him peanut cause of his size. we drank and skate a handful of times, but he had a half brain dead girl friend that treated him like shit he was all hung up on so we didn’t spend too much time together.
I got a lot of music recorded and I wrote a shitload. I wanted to move to a weed legal state but was over California so I started thinking maybe Seattle or portland. I took a trip out that way with eddy and my book money wasnt gonna last out there. Both were too expensive. We stopped for lunch in Olympia on our way back to Seattle from portland. I saw a for rent sign in a big black apartment building. I called the number, viewed the apartment and rented it. That night I made it with the woman who ran the building. I went back to omaha and packed up.
dundee looks like a norman rockwell painting in the winter. happy hollow is a magic place. the whole city is beautiful when it’s over grown in mid summer. the houses are beautiful. omaha is a pretty, safe, cheap place with interesting people and things to do. i knew id be back i just didn’t know when. it was a bit of a culture shock for me. i’ve spent most of my time on this earth hanging around the coasts. mid westerners are a different breed.
They drink. i mean they fucking driiiiiiink. The first few weeks out there everyone loved to tell me Omaha was ranked number one in drunkest cities in america. I wasn’t buying that. the lower east side of Manhattan is covered in vomit every Friday and Saturday night. even the rats are drunk. There is no way Omaha compares to even just alphabet city let alone all of NYC. I looked it up. it’s purely a rumor.
football. They love cornhusker football. I’ve always thought of football as a dumb person’s sport. I’m not saying 100% of people who watch football are stupid, but 100% of stupid people watch football. I wonder what percent of those people are corn huskers fans? the original name of that team was the “bug eaters” how cool was that? i might actually be a fan if they had kept that name. what the fuck is a corn husker? it was a shock to me to see scholars, hipsters, skaters, metal heads, gangsters, farmers, you name it, screaming furiously at a televised football game.
karaoke. I like karaoke in a bar that is intended for karaoke. that’s it. There is no reason to have a karaoke night in a regular bar just because it’s tuesday.
I think the strangest thing about Omaha is, I’ve never lived anywhere where people aren’t excited to be there. countless times i’ve heard people end a rant about omaha with “oh omaha” and a sigh. in vegas, california, nyc, even florida. the majority of people are psyched on being there and the enthusiasm can be infectious. not in omaha. everyone i encountered seems to have this black cloud over their heads just on account of they are there and not somewhere else.
The other half of the folks I met were catty like lunch table bullies. lotta social enforcement mechanisms at play in that town. Not a lot of new people with different thoughts and unique perspectives make their way there and even the ones who do settle there, are often iced out by the clicky cafeteria culture flying around. I’ve never been subjected to that. I dropped out of high school for this exact reason. so to encounter it as heavy at 29 i was taken back. i’ve taken to calling them emotional inbreds. Seattle freeze, eat your heart out. get ready for the omaha ice out.
i went to olympia for a year, lots of trips up and down the west coast, got a lot of writing and recording music done and i fucked a lot of women with harry armpits. About a month before my lease was up geary called me from New York and told me about his new hustle and invited me to stay with him for a while so I went. I stuck around New York for a year or two.
I reconnected with the cat lady while I was in New york. She came out for a visit at the end of the trip. We decided we were going to “give it another shot”. I had no intention of dating her for serious. I just wanted cheap rent. If you can’t tell after reading these books I go pretty hard on the party…i was worn out being in Brooklyn again. that place doesn’t say no to you. you wanna party 24/7 and fuck everything with a pulse? New York City is the place to be and you dont ever have to stop. you have to tell new york no. it doesn’t tell you no. so after two years of saying yes i needed to say no to new york for now. The cat lady bought me a plane ticket back to omaha and let me stay with her til I found another month to month on park ave. That is actually being too nice to her. She has borderline personality disorder and came home from work one day nine days after I moved in and told me I needed to go. I grabbed my backpack and headed toward the door and on my way out I called her a psycho and she pushed me from behind.
2018 and 17 were hard years for me. I was lost in a wave of grief. My brother eddy died by the hands of some bullies. They beat him to death. Essentially because he was an annoying drunk. I didn’t know it but this would begin a few years’ journey across the usa where I made sure every bully I encountered got the smoke they were looking for. I payed horribly for it, i got the shit kicked outta me from coney island to compton.
I left New York on a borrowed ticket, got kicked out by the cat lady and landed in the bristol apartments on Park avenue in omaha in just under two weeks. I didnt go to Omaha because I was broke down and destitute. I was planning on making this my process for the remainder of my five year book deal.”binge working” as patrick odell would put it. Id go do research for my book in the warm months and i would go to omaha when the weather got cold to lock myself inside to stay focused.
The bristol apartments is or was the dirtiest place i have ever lived hands down. Now i have lived in SRO apartments for the last 20 years from saint petersburg florida to san francisco. Back to new york and in texas and portland too. Ive seen the Cadillac of the single room occupancy at the basque hotel and ive seen a realm of hell styled to look like a spanish colonial early pre urban apartment. The bristol. I took one look at this place and i said all this space for 400 bucks? You got it. Geary joked about the bird shit on the window sill and that it was stupid to move from a shithole in brooklyn to a brooklyn style shit hole in omaha. But to me the place was inspiring. Park avenue was inspiring. Its right off the free way. If you go to the gas station you are that guy going to the gas station in a city that you only stopped to get gas in. You ever see that guy? In holbrook arizona or long branch new jersey? walking home with a cold one in his hand and five pack in his bag. That guy. I just wanted to be that guy after the years i had just endured in brooklyn. Fun but draining. And i did just that. I hung out with cat lady. She never fully got rid of the cat piss smell or stinky pussy but she was hot and sucked a mean dick and was hekka funny. Also wasnt clingy. Obviously. And we fucked when the other one wanted to. It was nice. I spent all day every day for that whole winter either at the library writing or at the local rec center either in the gymnasium playing basket ball or in the weight room working out a shoulder injury. I would drink beer at an irish bar on leavenworth and watch womens volley ball with the old guys. Then after a few months dozens of music recordings and hundreds of pages written i got bored. I needed to really cut loose. I also had a budget now for a pilot. So i needed to think of the most cost effective city where i can stay on budget for my pilot and spend the months there researching my book. So with out giving too much away, i landed in Las Vegas. It would be a low cost oif living, low cost of production, and a great source of material for my book. And it was all of those things. But the pilot didnt get picked up. I was there for three months we were in production for one, end to end. The first and last months in vegas were some of the gnarliest of my life. And if youd like to read about them i wrote another book “future drugs and other sciences.”
One night there was an earth quake and the chandelier swung and every thing. I read that it started in LA. i knew a woman there so i texted her to see if she was ok. She said she was and that she hadnt thought about me in a while. We caught up quick and the next day she invited me to come see her in long beach. A day after that i was drinking at the downtown lounge in las vegas waiting for a greyhound. I spent the summer in long beach with her. Stupid in love. and we, like many summer flings, didnt make it through into cuffing season. So faced with staying at a boarding house at seventh and cherry i decided to take the remainder of my money back to omaha and make it last the winter and get this book finished for the dead line 3-11-2020.
I was back in omaha in time for halloween 2019. Again the cat lady let me stay for a few days and then came home and demanded i leave and i did and this time i got a month to month on the east side of dundee. At the california hills estates. I loved this place it was 300 feet from a liquor store attached to a poor peoples grocery store. You know the good cheap ones.
I was video chatting with my therapist one day and i was expressing some anxiety about my salary coming to an end for book research and that i didnt know what i was gonna do if the book didnt do well. See, i had a kill fee worked into my contract so the best case scenario they publish the book and its a huge success and we make billions and im the next who ever the last rich author was. But is now. I is he. Second best scenario is they kill the book and i get a balloon payment for the kill fee. And believe me i only wanted one of those to happen. But in the mean time getting down to the end of th 5 year deal i didnt know what i would do if the worst case scenario happed they publishe the book and it flops. Then im the guy who wrote a piece of shit and now bags groceries. Or worse. Pushing a cart. Under a freeway. So my therapist suggested getting a part time job that would be what im qualified to work if i lost everything and my life totally sucked. So i got a job working retail.
In this time i was not seeing the crazy cat lady as i was pretty sure she had fully lost her mind. I was playing the field around the dundee bars. I met a nice strawberry blonde woman on an internet dating app. She was cool. She was smart. She had a weird notebook with things taped and glued in it just like mine. I thought she was nice. I thought we might go back to my place at the california hills estates and fuck. I for sure thought we would have a second date. I came back from the bathroom and she said “hey im gonna go…” i said what? Did i do something wrong?” she said “ no, i just think we are on different paths in life and i think it would be a bad idea to go any further…but, i have a friend. She is in one of the photos on my profile, she is a lot of fun, i guarantee you two will have some fun. So if its ok with you i will pass your number along.” i for obvious reasons did not believe her. So i asked if we could let the offer stand while i had a cigarette. She allowed it. I of course said hand the number off. Her friend was a babe. Untill i met her and her teeth were all weird like a bottle nose dolphin. However a nice caboose and bright head lights goes a long way so i allowed it. Until the second date when i realised no one was driving. The first date was the exact same one. She had one date in her. You sprinkle the most vanilla sex ive ever had and i had to cut turf.
Working retail is the biggest joke in the history of the planet earth. But i think i got what my therapist was getting at. It is the most pathetic group of adult children emploring reality tv game show tactics to real life. Where they will throw one another under the bus and ruin one anothers lives in order to get a 40 cent an hour raise.
My book was due on the eleventh of march 2020 the same day donald j trump declare a state of emergency for the corona virus pandemic…blah blah blah. Now here i am five years a slave to this fucking irratic work schedule and now the day im supposed to get free. The whole fucking planet shuts down and i have to watch the next three years of you tube of people basically getting to work on themselves and jump into whatever they want freely. I was int hat world for five years. Longer if you count the years of development that came before that. So i did what many red blooded americans did. I cut up some old t shirts so i could wipe my ass. And i pour up some box wine. And gotr to fucking off. And the firsrt six months of covid were epic. Roatrips skate boarding swimming in lakes.
I truly dont remember writing any of that but i did. But i guess since i dont remember it. What ever i wrote is none of my business. So i didnt read it or proof it.
Going forward im going to be dropping some very very rough drafts of some fiction i was working on. I burned my self out on a scifi novel i lost the rights to in a bad contract negotiation. So im done with the boring old rules of writing. Im doing this shit my way but just for the sake of filling some pages check these out
