He doesn’t care to the point that when you want some more to drink, you have to get up and find him half the time.
I don’t care. Getting up and finding him gives me something to do.
And he’s a lot better than Gina, who talks your ear off about her husband, I don’t know his name. She only refers to him as “my husband.” Which is common among Youngstown women.
Gina is like twenty-two and her husband is like eighteen. I don’t know how that happened.
She probably had a dad who was a rolling stone, as people like to say, and now she wants a little boy to control. Which happens a lot in Youngstown.
I’ve never seen anyone in Youngstown get married for good reasons.
As psychologists and most anybody knows, people stay in relationships because they share the same value structure.
Most of the values I see that keep people “in love” are:
— drug addiction.
— mediocrity.
— inertness of thought.
— racism.
— laziness.
— lameness.
— self-loathing.
— violence.
— alcoholism.
— to control someone and be controlled by someone else.
— love of objects.
— pretending they are richer than they are.
— money.
Yeah, that’s marriage in Youngstown.
That’s Youngstown love, baby.
My parents’ values are in that group.
While I was at Denny’s I drank a hot tea.
I can’t drink coffee.
It makes me vomit.
I used to drink tons of it, you know, I would sit with my Kerouac book, drink coffee, and be cool.
For some reason I started vomiting every time I drank coffee.
So I don’t drink it anymore.
Now I drink hot tea.
No honey or lemons.
The hot water with a tea bag and two Sweet N’Low sugars.
People tell me all the time that Sweet N’Low gives people cancer, I don’t know about that and don’t really care.
I think the only reason I use Sweet N’Low instead of regular sugar is because back in the day when I started drinking coffee I wasn’t paying attention and just put the Sweet N’Low in and just got used to it over time, and now regular sugar doesn’t taste right.
I was reading a Steve Kostecke zine.
It was really good and fun to read.
While I was reading the Kostecke zine, a group of white trash people came in.
Two dirty-looking dudes with goatees, an overweight girl with bad skin, and this strange-looking chubby faced girl with HUGE blonde hair.
I wanted to fuck her; you could tell that without the HUGE blonde hair she was plain and almost ugly.
But with the huge blonde hair she looked hot.
It kind of didn’t look right on her.
She must have seen the hair on a rich girl in a magazine.
Denny’s has several customers that are there every night.
One person is this black old guy who wears a shitty green trench coat, a black hoodie, and he looks like hell on a stick.
He rarely ever speaks, and is always polite.
I once found him sleeping in the bathroom.
Another is this old German immigrant who doesn’t wash or comb his hair.
He wears blue jogging pants, never talks to anyone, and looks like he could kill you without thinking twice about it.
And he looks like hell on a stick.
One person is this young Arab kid; he looks like a dork, rarely ever speaks, and always looks like he is going to cry.
There is one more regular; I almost forgot about him because he sits in the non-smoking section.
He’s an older black man who wears thrift store clothing and carries a black leather bag with him.
He always sits in non-smoking.
Orders two cokes and a milkshake.
He usually takes something out of his bag and reads.
He also looks like hell on a stick.
I finished the Kostecke zine and left. There was nothing else to do there. And to stare into space at Denny’s is just demoralizing.
NOTE: This story was written in 2005. Since then, Steve Kostecke has died. RIP.
FIRST MEMORY
I was about four years old.
Tiny Monco.
I was alone in the bathtub.
My parents never helped me take a bath.
They didn’t care if I washed my hair or wiped my ass.
To this day, I’ve never gotten used to washing my hair.
I was lying in the bathtub playing around.
Poking at my pecker and licking the soap.
Then I started to hear these horrible noises coming from the living room.
It sounded like my dad was beating up my mom.
I got very scared.
I sat in the bathtub paralyzed.
Eventually I got the balls to get up and see if Daddy was killing Mommy.
I stepped out of the bathtub naked and crept to the living room.
My daddy was on top of my mommy’s back while she lay on the floor. He pumped her butt wildly.
Both of their pants were down.
My mother was screaming loudly.
I was horrified.
I ran back to the tub, got in, and stayed there.
Eventually, the screaming ended.
It looked like my father brutally beat my mother.
I was four and had no idea what sex was; I had no idea what they were doing.
I sat in the bathtub, hoping one of them would come in and tell me what I saw.
But they never did.
The weirdest thing of all is that my favorite sexual position is to have the girl lie on her stomach and for me to lie on top of her back and hump her butt.
THE STATE-FUNDED DENTIST
Getting my cavities filled at the state-funded dentist’s office went like this.
They called me in from the waiting room.
I went to the back. It was a big space with six open rooms. There were three dentists and four nurses there.
All the dentists and nurses were very young.
There was a five-year-old black kid screaming bloody murder in one of the little open rooms.
His mom was telling him to shut the fuck up and to take it like a man.
I sat down in one of the little rooms. One of the young dentists came over and sat by me. They have yet to tell me her name and she’s worked on my teeth four times. The nurse was a young female who went to one of the fifty local vocation schools that teach nursing.
The dentist never spoke to me.
Never asked my name.
What I do for a living.
How big my dick is.
Nothing.
Which I liked.
My last dentist wouldn’t stop asking me stupid questions about college, girlfriends, my brothers, all kinds of stupid shit.
The dentist didn’t give a fuck about me.
She began shooting Novocain into my mouth.
She shot a total of four to five shots.
That shocked me because my last dentist did no more than two. But I soon figured out why.
The dentist got her grinding tools and started pulverizing my teeth.
The teeth she was working on looked like hell.
They were brown.
Had parts chipped off.
You could see the cavities from fifteen feet away.
While she was grinding my teeth away.
The dentist and the nurse had a conversation about their uterine cancers.
The dentist had cancer last year but it was cured and the nurse was soon going to get a biopsy because she was suspected of having cancer.
The nurse had two kids and a husband and she was worried about that.
The dentist had a dog.
Usually in dentists’ offices, after every two minutes or so, the nurse gives you a cup of cold water to put in your mouth, swirl around, and spit out.