Modern Future

 Things have changed.  It has become dangerous to get around these days.  After the cars started to self-drive and the self-driving crash lawsuits became a cottage industry, few manufacturers were left.  You see, the autonomous cars killed so many people, and so frequently, that you essentially had no choice but to take a self-driving car to your destination.  "Better him than me," I muttered regularly to myself.

I used my phone to hail a self-driver to get to work.   I knew what I was in for.  When the car arrived, it was even worse that I thought.  A cumslicked Buick arrived, announcing itself mostly by its strong smell of feces and animalistic sex.  I opened the door and was immediately overcome.  I signaled "wait" on the ridehail app and scoured the gutter for a solution.  

In an instant I found it.  A pile of fresh dog shit, steaming in the winter cold.  I grabbed as much as I could in my shaky hands and packed my nostrils full.  This was the best solution for riding in the autonomous vehicles - the ridership uses them as whorehouses, bathrooms, heroin shooting galleries and worse.

"Drive! Drive!" I yelled to nobody in particular.  It was just me, and the machine, and the incredible amount of body fluid and excrement.  We only made it about two blocks before it ran over the first pedestrian.  It was an octogenarian, his walker and mangled body jamming up the wheel in the wheel well.  The system roared to life in a mechanical tone, "RIDER: CLEAR JAM.  LEFT FRONT WHEEL WELL."  I sighed and got the pry bar out of the vehicle's trunk.

Archimedes was purported to have said, "Give me a long enough lever and I could move the world."  Well, I wish I had a longer one.  I pried and bent that old sonofabitch out of there and put his battered body in the trunk.  Better him than me.  I used my phone to submit an accidental kill ticket, it was the 25th I had submitted in the past 20 days.  The dog shit in my nose was oozing down now and burning a little.  

As the vehicle began to speed up again, I began to wonder if the old man was really dead.  There was a thumping and muffled moaning noise coming from the trunk, but I had read a lot of Eastern European vampire literature and assumed it was just decomposition gas escaping the corpse.  That's usually what happens on these rides.  Besides, I was late for work.

When I arrived at the office, the building was closed again for regulatory inspection.  Fucking bureaucrats.  I sent the cumslicked Buick back to cruise and retriggered the ridehail app, hoping for an uneventful ride home.

Crete

My dad is the crankiest old fuck you will ever meet. He watches a lot of Greek TV news and seems to think it's a battle between him and the presenter where whoever shouts loudest about how fucked the Greek government is wins.  We've lived here for as long as I've been alive.  He loves to yell and he spends all day drinking American whiskey.  I've asked him about that because he always says USA is a place for faggots, but apparently that doesn't matter.  

The Greek government is fucked.  That is my reality.  Every day, we have to scream that the Greek government is so fucked and ultimately the screaming drowns out the TV no matter how loud it was in the first place. Whenever there is an election, my dad burns tires in the street.  Sometimes he burns 30 or 40 tires per night.  He just gets junkyard tires and pours gasoline all over them and lights them up.  The thick, black smoke is impossible to navigate.  Everybody for ten miles breathes in the acrid fumes.

Here in Crete, this is all normal.  The Greek government is fucked, and he loves to burn tires.  And the homosexuality.  Everybody from the USA is a homosexual.  Sometimes, when my father is screaming at the TV, he is so focused on that element of things that he can hardly debate the presenter about the Greek government and how fucked they are. When there's an argument in the Greek parliament, whoever loses, my dad and his friends go rape the guy.  Just constantly, they're forming a gang to go rape the politicians in the parliament and the Greek government is fucked.  

He gets so fucking drunk drinking the American whiskey that he hates and then he makes sausages.  Over and over.  More sausages.  Raccoon sausage.  Vulture sausage.  Any scavenger that he can find.  It's fucking disgusting and the color and smell of it as it cooks makes me throw up.  The texture is sandy, and grainy, and the meat is oily with brown and black spots probably from disease.  He eats it every day and is fine of course, and he slugs whiskey and pounds his fist on the table while he screams at the fucking Greeks and their shithole country.  

Anyway, I'm writing this story because he died last week.  The old codger finally kicked.  He was 100 years old.  I thought for sure all the whiskey and raping and yelling and vile sausages would have killed him sooner.  I found a minotaur outfit in his stuff while I was cleaning out his house.  Surprisingly nice piece of kit for such a miserly old fuck.  If you want it, come by the house and you can have it. Follow the burning tires, it's just up the hill.

Gang Investigative Unit

The Gang Investigative Unit was housed in a ramshackle building downtown.  Built in the 50s, and spuriously maintained since then, the building exhibited nearly all the signs of urban decay.  A thick layer of car exhaust had blackened the ornate limestone exterior.  The façade had broken windows behind thick metal bars, serving to keep prisoners in, or maybe to keep observers out.  The paint throughout the building was yellowed from years of cigarette smoke and peeling off.  More importantly, the coffee tasted like shit.

Mike Donella was a tough cop, a detective and 30 year veteran of the force.  He remembered the bad old days.  Those were some real tough cops back then.  Nowadays, the cops were just baby-faced kids, test takers and pencil pushers mostly - chasing around these so-called "gangsters" who spend more time posting pictures of dime bags on their Facebook wall than committing actual crimes.  Back then you might end up with a hit on your whole family.  Nowadays a hit is something that happens to a webpage.

"Donella, You've got a perp interview in Interrogation 2," The Captain yelled from his office.

Donella's cheap suit struggled to contain his hulking frame as he lumbered into the interrogation room.  In the dimly lit room sat Ramos, a piece of shit nickel and dime drug dealer, if you could call selling 0.2 grams of marijuana to people being a drug dealer.  Ramos was of slight build, still wearing the same clothes he was arrested in last night.  He looked bedraggled after his night in the bullpen.

"The names Mike Donella," the detective boomed.  "And I'm going to make you talk today."

"What's it? 10 AM?  Plenty of hours left in this day, G-Man."  Ramos cracked a smile.

"G-man implies that you're a gangster.  You're no gangster.  You're a piece of shit!"

"Oh, ho - alright.  Make way for the shit-man!"

Before Ramos could finish laughing, Donella smashed his head into the heavy wooden table.  Ramos was out cold.

As he came to again, Ramos could see the massive cop in front of him again, adjusting his police belt.  Still groggy, he began to scream, "Ah, my ass! My asshole!  This guy tried to fuck me in my ass!"

A few minutes later the Captain came in.  The captain was an ugly, bald motherfucker.  He drank whiskey in his office and when that ran out he would drink cologne or hand sanitizer, whatever would keep the buzz going.  The Captain knew how to fail upwards, and through years of monumental fuck-ups had managed to be in charge of the entire squad of detectives at the Gang Investigative Unit.

"What the fuck is going on in here," the Captain demanded.

Ramos was hysterical and yelling at this point.  "This guy knocked me out and then he fucked me in the ass!"  Ramos pointed at Donella.

"Is this true, Donella?"  The Captain grimaced.

"It's all crap.  You know these guys, they'll say anything."

"So you didn't fuck him in the ass?"

"No.  I hypnotized him to think that I fucked him in the ass so that he would give up the information.  These guys, they do all this bullshit to act tough, to try to be a man.  If you take that away from them, they've got nothing.  They crack easy."

"Maybe your wife believes that kind of bullshit, Donella.  But I don't.  You're getting written up for this.  Your career is over!  Now get the fuck out of here!"

Donella, walked out of the room with his head down, defeated.

The Captain asked Ramos to tell him what happened with Donella.  As Ramos went on, describing the conversation and then the violent incident, the Captain took a container of shoe polish out of his coat and put it on the table.

"What's that for," Ramos asked.

"Well polished shoes are the key to success."

The Captain smiled wryly.

Donella was waiting outside as five or ten minutes passed.  Periodically a scream or a grunt would be heard loudly from inside the interrogation room.  Donella was fuming at the Captain at ending the interrogation on the bullshit abuse allegations from the drug dealer.  Donella balled his hands into fists and threw the door open.

The Captain came out of the interrogation room, his pants unbuttoned.  His face was red and blotchy, and covered in shoe polish.

"What the fuck happened?"  Donella demanded to know.

The Captain stared back like he was looking through a window.  Finger streaks of shoe polish formed black tiger stripes all over his furrowed face.  Still catching his breath, the Captain said calmly, "I hypnotized him to believe that there was a guy with shoe polish all over his face, fucking him in the ass."

Ramos was still inside screaming.

Donella closed the door to Interrogation 2, went to the kitchen and poured himself a shitty coffee.

Red Sauce

Giuseppe Agresta arrived in the United States with big dreams of making it in America.  He'd wanted this ever since he was a little kid growing up in the old country. Giuseppe was 50 now, with a wife and two teenage sons that he hoped to bring over from Italy when his business took off.

Giuseppe was a chef and restaurateur.  For the past 30 years he had toiled away in the sweltering kitchens in Calabria, Southern Italy.  He spent long summer days over the coal-fired ovens, and long winter nights smoking homemade cigarettes made from crudely cut tobacco rolled with newspaper.  Those were called giornales, something that was, and still is very popular throughout Italy but especially in the Southern Peninsula.

Giuseppe set up shop in New York City, renting a modest but very expensive storefront downtown.  He spared no expense renovating and getting the finest hand-made Calabrian furniture, perfect gold wall sconces, tables made from refurbished wine and balsamic vinegar barrels, and beautiful kiln-forged white tile.  Everything as it should be, authentic Italian and true to his dream.

He grew his own organic tomatoes and herbs in the backyard garden, and milled his own flour to just the perfect consistency for his coal-fired pizza oven.  Giuseppe hired top-notch line cooks and waiters and was ready for his opening day.

"30 years in the making, this day," Giuseppe thought, as he lit up a giornale rolled out of the NY Times travel section.  The American newspapers smoked differently, smoldering and dropping flakes of still burning paper onto the sidewalk in front of Giuseppe's Fine Italian Restaurant.  The Italian chef was unfazed.

Opening night was a huge success, with the restaurant operating at capacity and all the diners lauding the pizzas, appetizers and entrées.  Giuseppe spent the night at the ovens and over the grill, making sure each and every dish that went out to the dining room was up to the highest standard of fine Italian dining.  And the dishes were phenomenal.

The next day, Giuseppe received a call from Italy.  It was his oldest son, a boy of 15 who was rapidly becoming a man.  Giuseppe gushed to his son about how good everything in America was going, about the restaurant and his attention to detail, about how many covers they had sold on opening night.  Giuseppe poured himself a Chianti in a stemless glass, sipping the wine as he told his son of his great accomplishment.  "Pop," his son interjected, "I read a review on Yelp of the new restaurant.  it says, 'Just another rowdy shithole with mediocre pizza.  One star.' "

Giuseppe hung up the phone.  He went to his computer and looked up the review.  'Just another rowdy shithole with mediocre pizza.  One star.'

He slugged the Chianti, rolled another giornale, turned off the lights, and smoked in the darkness.

The Tantric Rapist

Being a line cook in a Chinese restaurant has its perks.  Nobody speaks English in any conversational capacity, so you get left alone.  The dishes are for the most part simple to make.  Scorching hot wok, add pigs feet, cock's combs, weird toenails and gloppy sauce.  Cook 3 minutes while agitating.  Most days (and nights for that matter), that would be the whole shift.  Occasionally the cooking would be punctuated by bouts of yelling in Chinese.  Maybe Mandarin, maybe Cantonese.  Maybe it was nonsense depending on how much Shao Xing cooking wine that the owner had drank that morning.

The décor in the restaurant was pretty typical:  Chinese dragons, cheap gold wallpaper, that cat that waves his paw at you.  One thing did stand out though.  A huge, golden-framed picture of him.  His eyes seared their way into your soul.  He was the rapist who would never come.

Shrooms Tofu and Snap Pea Stirfry

Visions of MSG
staring into a bathroom mirror
scales on my skin
Do you think I could be a lizardman (like Obama)
thanks General Tso

Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Hund

Raul woke up on a Wednesday, with a legendary hangover.  His massive German Shepherd was licking his face.  Raul got up off the floor and looked around his wrecked apartment.  He walked over to the kitchen sink.  The counters were covered in empty pizza boxes, and both empty liquor and pill bottles.  The dog stared at Raul.  Raul slowly filled a vodka bottle 2/3 of the way with water and pressed it to his lips.  The tap water had a strong sulfur taste, and combined with the alcoholic aroma of the old liquor bottle, it took all of Raul's concentration to not throw up.  Raul poured some kibble into the dog's bowl.  The German Shepherd pawed at the bowl, disinterested.  Raul put his hand on the dog's gigantic head, petting it lightly.

His landline telephone rang, interrupting the silence.  Raul tossed a handful of multicolored pills into his mouth, chewing them up as he answered.

"Hello?"
"It's Joe.  You sound funny,  what's the matter with you?"
"Nothing," Raul responded, marblemouthedly as he crunched up the pills between his yellowed, rotten teeth.
"Alright.  You wanna grab some beers?  Meet me at the bar by your place."
"Sure," Raul said, the tone of his voice wavering between enthusiasm and trepidation.

Raul was still in the clothes he wore yesterday.  He grabbed his keys, adjusted his dick in his jeans and left the apartment.  The walk to the bar was about 10 minutes, but Raul knew that he could make it in 5 if he went through the alleyway between the new condominium construction site and the old canal warehouse.  The alleyway stunk like trash and like the thick, black water that just barely flowed through the canal, but it was safe enough during the day that he had no qualms about using the shortcut.  His hangover would thank him once he got that first drink down, and the sooner the better.

Raul staggered into the bar.  His clothes were haggard and he was trembling, maybe from delirium tremens, or the pills he had eaten earlier, or both.  The bartender poured him a beer before he sat down.  Joe was already there, four empty shotglasses lined up in front of him.  Joe slammed a handful of crumpled bills down onto the bar and held up 4 fingers.  The bartender silently took the money and poured them each 2 shots of whiskey.  Joe looked better than usual.  Raul couldn't quite place it at first but then it hit him: Joe was wearing clean clothes.

"Job interview today?"
"Huh?"
"What's with the clothes," Raul asked.
"Ah, nothin'."

They drank the shots.  The two continued making small talk and repeating the ritual of slamming down the money and guzzling the liquor.  The alcohol binge and banter session went on until closing time without much event.  Closing time came.  The two men, now broke and drunk, staggered out into the street.  They planned to keep drinking at Raul's shithole apartment.  It was a dark night, illuminated only by the subdued shining of the waning moon.

The two drunks shuffled through the dimly lit alleyway.  Raul slurred nonsense and Joe nodded understandingly.  About midway through the alley, Joe stopped to urinate on a dumpster.  He leaned precariously, like a man standing in a canoe, and emptied nearly quart of urine onto the side of the dumpster.  That's when they saw him.

A shirtless man in cut-off jeans threw the top of the dumpster open and leaped out.    His hulking frame was covered in white supremacist tattoos.  Even in the darkness, the drunks could make a Schutzstaffel iron eagle across his chest. The shirtless man furrowed his brow, deeply folding the big swastika tattooed on his forehead.

"Suck my dick you motherfucker," the Nazi yelled.

And just like that, Joe sucked the Nazi's dick.  Raul was perplexed.  Joe wasn't gay.  The guy didn't even have a gun.  He didn't hit him or do anything.  And here's Joe, sucking the guy's dick like it's the dick sucking olympics.  The Nazi was grunting now and thrusting away while gripping Joe's head.  Raul walked away in disbelief, back to his apartment.

About 15 minutes later, Joe showed up. His new clothes were torn and soiled. Raul let him in, staring at him wide-eyed.

Before Raul could say anything, the giant German Shepherd traipsed over to them.

"Suck my dick you motherfucker," the dog said with confidence.

And Joe sucked the German Shepherd's dog dick, with gusto, right there in the filthy apartment.