The Dirty South (Chapter 2)

Thursday

I didn’t wake up very quickly. My consciousness slowly rose to the surface as if I’d been down a deep well, clawing my way to the top.

My eyes aren’t crusted from sleep. They’re dry as a bone. I started moving them back and forth—moisturizing them with my eyelids.

My mouth was just as bad. It felt like I was breathing battery acid at first—then, pure filth. I started coughing from the stink before I heard the sloshing sounds. I was still in the bathtub. All I thought about was how pruney my hands were. At the time, it didn’t even cross my mind that I wasn’t in heaven or hell.

The stench was so incredibly bad. I opened my eyes to see the afternoon sun shining through my window. I also saw that the tub was filled with brown water. It was cold. It was also all of my waste.

I woke up covered in shit, vomit, piss, and even some blood.

I immediately threw up over the side of the tub, as if I were sparing myself. But nothing came out. I was dry heaving through my throat that felt like sandpaper and leather. It hurt like hell.

Everything seemed in a cooler contrast. It was as if I were looking through a different light spectrum. Everything seemed as if they were adjusted by remote to be a little bit duller in color. I figured it was an effect from drinking so much.

I pulled myself up from the edge of the tub and slid out like a newborn all covered in mommy juice. I was so exhausted that I just lay there. It was also the fact that I wasn’t looking forward to cleaning up that mess I had just emerged from. As I lay there, exhausted, the stink started coming from everywhere in waves.

I started to dry heave again. It felt like I was being choked by razor blades. I tried to curse, but nothing came out.

It was hard to stand up. My muscles hurt the more I moved. It felt like I was tearing myself apart from the inside out. I had to wash all this crap off. That also meant that I’d have to empty the tub.

I walked over to the cesspool of the worst things imaginable. I wished that I had vomit left inside me so that I could feel justified and get a pay off for the dry heaving.

I went to roll up my sleeve, forgetting that I was still naked. If I was going to do it, I might as well rip it off like a band-aid. I put my arm in there almost up to the armpit, feeling around for the plug. First thing is that it was really cold. I was half expecting it to be warm for some reason. It still hadn’t registered that this wasn’t fresh. The plug felt as if it was covered by mud at the bottom of a river. When I finally pulled it up, I fell to the floor out of pure exhaustion.

I needed some water. I flopped onto my stomach and half crawled my way to a walking position to get to the sink. I turned the knob and nothing came out. Again, I tried to curse, but nothing came out.

I had procrastinated on paying my water bill—again.

I didn’t want to track this shit throughout my apartment, so I stood on top of a shirt I had lying on the floor from when I came in here and waddled into the kitchen for a drink.

First clue not to do what I’m about to do: The fridge light is off.

I pulled out the gallon of milk and thought that my day was about to get better from the cool white quenching and filling liquid that was about to run through my body. It was watery in part and cottage-cheesy in others. It didn’t pour down my throat; it dumped over my mouth and chin. I dropped the whole gallon to the floor and spit out the rancid nastiness onto my countertops.

I had procrastinated on paying my power bill—again.

I had warm soda in there. But it couldn’t be bad.

The RC Cola felt like acid going down my throat. It burned all the way down. I clasped my neck as if I were choking. I felt utterly helpless. I started heaving for an instant before a slight wave of relief started flowing over my entire body. I finished off the can, wincing at the pain of the razorblades in my throat being awoken again.

I took a deep breath. I could feel my throat thanking me for some moisture. It felt like phlegm was being produced at super speed inside as my throat began to heal itself. I coughed up some and spit it into the kitchen sink.

I left the shit-encrusted shirt on the floor in the kitchen and went back into the bathroom to check out the progress of the drain.

The tub was drained of water, but it looked as if I had showered off from a mud bath in there. I turned the knob to get some water going to rinse out the mess. The water came out for about two seconds before it dried up.

Forgot: water bill.

“Mother fuck,” I breathed. My voice was raspy, but at least it was there.

I sat down on the floor. Now what? The answer had already popped into my head. I just didn’t want to do it.

I got up and headed into the bedroom. I pulled out my robe that I barely wore and wrapped it around me. It felt so nasty in hindsight, but things were beginning to not bother me at the time.

I opened up my drawers and put together an outfit of the first things I could find. I went back into the bathroom and pulled out two fresh towels- which just meant towels I hadn’t used in a week or so.

I headed outside.

Now for some real Cloak and Dagger shit.

I slowly went down the stairs, creeping along the steps to not cause any noises. There was a screen door at the base of the stairs. I stopped at the bottom step and looked through to see if anyone was around.

I could hear the noises of a few kids playing, but that was it. They sounded a good ways off, too.

I opened up the door slowly and slid out from behind. It slammed shut behind me. I cursed at myself under my breath. My brain can be like Swiss cheese when it comes to remembering stuff all the damn time. It drives me insane.

I crept around the building to where there was an alleyway that the other tenants parked their cars. There had to be a faucet out there for them to wash their cars with.

There were three women sitting at the bus stop around the corner but across the street. They didn’t even glance in my direction. In case I had the chance to sleep with any of them, I was lucky they didn’t see me.

I ran around the corner with my flip flops creating a smacking noise with every step. I really didn’t think this thing out fully.

There it was. As if a light were shining down from heaven on it: the faucet.

Now how do I shower all this crap off with all those ladies standing out there? They’d have a perfect view of my greasy white ass standing naked in the sun. I had to wait for them to get on the bus.

I sat there between two junked up cars waiting. When it came, I ran over to the hose and turned it on. The water was hot as hell at first, but eventually cooled to freezing-ass cold. I started gulping down as much water as I could before my stomach started to protest.

After one more check to see that no one was coming, I pulled my robe off and started to rinse my entire body off. The bar of soap that I had was hard as hell to hold on to. More than once I had to bend down to pick it up and remove some gravel from it.

Now I could truly feel all the filth that was on me. It was like some sort of thick mucus that covered me from head to toe. My ass crack felt as if it was a well full of sludge. My pubic hairs had little flakes and chunks of crap caught in them. Every now and then I’d hear a big something slop to the pavement and I didn’t want to look. I had crap coming from places I didn’t even know crap could hide.

After a good five minutes of scrubbing and full-blast showering, I turned off the hose and started to dry myself off. The first towel I had intended to do the majority of the drying and the second to get what’s left, but the first towel kept coming up with brown streaks from the places I had missed.

I’m a generally lazy person. It would have taken too long to sneak back upstairs and repeat the process.

The sun was high in the sky and helped with the drying process, though. I pulled on my clothes that felt cool to my skin—like a massage with cotton. I balled up my robe and tossed it into a garbage can with the lid off. I think I just left the first towel on the ground. Knowing my city, it’s probably still there.

Well, it’s Saturday, so I know that I can’t get my stuff turned on until Monday. I couldn’t handle going back in that place quite yet. I had had enough trauma for one day. But this was just the beginning.

Sharky’s Pizza should give me a rest for now. It’s well over ten blocks away, though.

The humidity is a bitch in the South. It was very common for me to bring a change of clothes to work—knowing that ten feet from my front door, I would begin to sweat. At least I’d have something to change into once I got there.

I still felt dirty. Not just from waking up in my own shit, piss, vomit, and blood—but I was also covered in pure sweat not even a block from my apartment.

When I reached the alley I always stared, looking for another freak show courtesy of my homeless friend. He wasn’t there. Something else was, though.

Down the alley was the faint outline of a man. He was kind of in a light blue trim—like an aura or something. Was it a ghost? It was pacing, whatever it was. I could only see him from his waist up. Gave me the heebie-jeebies.

I rubbed my eyes and cleaned my glasses real quick with my shirt. When I put them back on, he was staring back at me. Fear grabbed hold of me and started to crawl in through my chest. I couldn’t move. I was petrified with terror as this thing started making its way toward me.

He looked pissed, too.

I started to run once my legs began to listen. It reminded me of growing up as a boy and being chased by one of the neighbors’ dogs. You knew that as soon as you slowed down, that dog was going to whup your ass.

Even though I was running for my very life, I could only do it for so long. Adrenaline or no, I was in poor shape to be attempting a marathon. I started trotting, almost tripping over my feet, until I finally got back down to a walk without falling over. I began walking backward, hands on my hips, wheezing for air. It was gone.

I knew it wasn’t a hallucination. I had always been iffy when it came to ghosts and goblins up until that moment. I had seen what I had seen. As soon as I started thinking about at some point I’d have to head back that way, it gave me a stomach ache. Not the kind where you’re hungry—more like when you knew nothing solid was going to come out the next time you took a dump.

My hands dropped to my sides as I walked to the curb and sat down, leaning back against a “No Parking” sign. I needed something to quench my thirst. My throat had barely begun its road to recovery from this morning.

I had to have sat there for fifteen minutes, contemplating what in hell I had just been chased by. It didn’t take long before I was dreaming about a nice barbeque sandwich washed down with some sweet tea—no lemon. But that’s not what I got.

The hair on my neck and arms began to stand up. Was he back? I looked up and saw three Hispanic men approaching me from across the street. I immediately knew this was not going to be good.

As they approached, it got even worse. Their skin looked beyond dry. It looked like the dry riverbeds you see on the Discovery Channel with the huge cracks flaking off from the floor. Between the cracks in their faces, it was pure solid black. I obviously knew something was wrong, but I could sense that these three were beyond old.

I had no clue what was going on. It was the Twilight Zone.

I started to stand up to do what, I don’t know. They were making a B-line for me. What the hell did I do? Did I still have shit on me?

The one in the middle punched me in the face. It felt like someone hit me with a baseball bat. I thought my face was on fire, it hurt so bad. Stars and darkness flashed before my eyes as I hit the “No Parking” sign. It bent from the sheer force I hit it with. My back felt as if a huge gash had been cut into me where the sign and I had collided. Lord knows where my glasses went.

My mouth felt as if it were sweating as it filled up with blood from seemingly everywhere. Another one picked me up by my hair—yet more pain—and punched me in the stomach. It was as if I felt my internal organs' positions for the first time in my life. The pain shot like lightning over my entire body. Blood that I was saving to be oxygenated shot out of my mouth and began to pour out of me like thick syrup onto the sidewalk. All that crossed my mind at the time was that I hoped I hadn’t gotten any on one of them. I would have hated to have gotten them even more pissed off than they already were.

I lay on my side on the pavement covering my head—giving in to my fate. It was sure that they weren’t going to stop until I was dead.

I hadn’t cried like that since I got rejected for a date by Candice Myers my senior year.

Another one of them picked me up by my throat. His arm felt as if it were made of pure steel. He held me up in the air with little effort, inspecting me. My hands were simply on his, trying to give me some support to avoid being choked to death.

He started cursing at me—what language, I didn’t know. His voice sounded like he was talking with gravel in his mouth. His teeth were decayed and gray. His eyes were a pale white. Even though he had no pupils, I could tell he was looking right in my eyes. He was really pissed off at me. I had no clue what in the world I had done wrong. I started to think back to all the things I could have done to piss these guys off. My final conclusion was that the devil himself had personally sent some of his cronies to take me down into hell.

I was terrified. First, the ghost of whoever started chasing me, then I run into this? What the hell was going on?

Just as the air in me started to freak out with no place to go, he dropped me. He didn’t let me go, he dropped me. I fell to the ground and started to gulp the air that I was kept from only moments ago. My throat was bearing the brunt of my anguish that day.

I looked up to see what they were doing now. They were getting their asses kicked. A man I couldn’t make out due to lack of glasses was beating all three of them mercilessly. He seemed bright, almost as if he were glowing.

I spit out a wad of nastiness that apparently my body no longer needed. Besides running to the hospital, I now wanted to shit for an hour. Since I needed to go there anyway, I imagined that it would have been OK to just take a crap in my pants right there and then.

My tongue hurt like hell as I had probably bit it while getting beat to death. It began to probe my mouth feeling for missing or loose teeth. Bingo. Found one. My front left tooth. As if my chances of getting laid weren’t bad enough. Now they were non-existent. Add to the fact that I was probably going to die from internal bleeding, and you’ve got the worst day of my natural life.

One of the men flew a good fifteen feet before landing, chin first, on the street. Another fell to the ground, clutching his stomach as blood started to pour from his mouth. At least I thought it was blood at first. It was thick and black—like crude oil. The last one left was somehow remaining on his feet, but still completely getting his ass torn apart. My new best friend was straight out of Mortal Kombat with the flurry of relentless punishment he was unleashing on this man. I started to feel guilty for some reason.

Now the endorphins in my body began to go away and the pain in my mouth started to remind me that something was wrong. My jaw and face were literally throbbing with every beat of my heart. I swear I could hear the blood rushing through my veins my head started to hurt so bad. It was almost as if my body was starting to feel safe and decided to get out of survival mode.

The last one standing eventually crumpled to the ground like a lifeless husk. He was dead. I just saw my first dead body. He was alive only two seconds ago.

Now the crying began again. My mouth quivering and my chin scrunched up with blood and tears covering my entire face. I had no control over what my body was doing. I didn’t even want to cry, but apparently I had no say in the matter.

The stranger immediately turned and sprinted toward the man in front of me still clutching his stomach. He got a soccer kick to the face. My God that had to hurt. I look back to this day as that being the most beautiful kick to the face witnessed by Man. After being kicked in the face, the man turned onto his back. My hero sat down on his chest and began beating him in the face as if he were a punching bag. His back to me, and the fact he was only eight feet away, I could now see he was shirtless. Once I saw his army pants, I knew he was the homeless man I saw fighting thin air the day before.

The body beneath him was now lifeless. Once it was official that this guy was dead, my man jerked his head to the last one alive that had landed chin first at the beginning of the fight. I just lay there, clutching my stomach with one hand and my neck with the other. When I put my head down onto the pavement, my glasses stabbed me in the side of the head. With a shaking hand, I put them back on to my slippery face. Now all I could do was watch.

The future dead man was trying to run away. The homeless man ran fast as hell after him. Using a parked car as a springboard, he leapt after the last one and tackled him. From what I could barely see between two other cars, he was ramming the man’s head into the pavement. He saved my life. But did I really want these guys dead?

It was pretty horrifying to watch this level of brutality. I was a virgin to it after all. I now gave up holding my head off the ground and it hit the sidewalk harder than I had expected.

“Ow,” I whined. Besides the sounds of me crying, it was the first thing I had said this entire encounter.

I realized as soon as it happened that I was being a little dramatic. With what little strength I did have, I could have at least stopped my head from bouncing off the ground. I would have been content to lay there staring at the sidewalk. But now I had the added satisfaction of my entire head hurting.

“You all right, Bo?” the homeless man squatted in front of me, blocking the sun from my eyes. I squinted up at him. Despite him being black from the sun directly behind him, he was still glowing.

“They knocked out my tooth,” I told him. Thank God I didn’t say something stupid like, “Are you an angel?” or “Yes, thanks to you.”

He jabbed a thumb against my lip and lifted it to see which one I was now missing. Go ahead. I know you saved my life just now, but damn. Having some intelligence despite my brain sloshing around inside my head, I kept those thoughts to myself.

He put a hand into one of my armpits and lifted me up onto my butt.

“Be right back,” he told me and I watched him go to each body, check their shoe size to his own—none matched—then empty out the wallets of his victims. I finally got a good look at him. He had brown hair that was in a thick greasy mullet that ran just past his shoulder blades. His facial hair was almost a beard his stubble was so bad. His skin looked like leather—the sun beat it so bad. His eyes told a different story to the one I had just witnessed. He was a kind man. He was utterly vicious to my three attackers, but this man saved my life.

“You robbing them?” I asked him with a new lisp.

“Kinda, I guess,” he was walking back to me with a body over his shoulder.

“Thanks for saving me.”

“Yeah, man,” he shook his head. “You’d a done the same fer me.”

I knew that I wouldn’t have. I would have done my best to make sure that they wouldn’t have seen me and acted like I didn’t see them and just kept walking. I felt like such a coward just then.

“What’d I do to piss them off so bad?” I was watching him put the three bodies into a pile on top of one another.

He looked up at me like I had just asked why the sky was blue. “You serious?” he scratched his mullet. “You know they don’t like our kind, right? Shit.”

Our kind immediately defined as “white people” in my head at the time.

“Can you help me, Bo?” he was picking up one of the bodies.

“Sure,” I was about to touch a dead body. I agreed before the realization set in.

“There’s a dumpster right over here, he nodded his head in a direction. I saw no dumpster. But if anyone knows where trash is, I was sure it would be this guy.

He had one body over his shoulder while he was casually dragging the other by the leg. It looked out of place how strong he was. Were the bodies deceptively light? I walked over to my body. His face wasn’t there. A matted black hole of teeth, bone, and what was supposed to be blood was all that was left.

I puked up a mixture of hose water and hot RC Cola onto the ground. It burned twice as bad the second time in my throat. The smell of the corpse had just a hint of dead dog on the side of the road. Maybe he needed longer to fully become a mass of stink. I didn’t need to puke anymore, but I pretended that I did so that my new homeless friend would do all the work.

“You OK, Bo?’ he asked again and put a hand on my shoulder and then rubbed my back as if I were a six year old with a tummy ache. If I were a homophobe, I probably would have had a different reaction. “Don’t worry, man, I’ll take care of it,” he said and he did. This guy didn’t look half as strong as he actually was. These men had to have been 200 pounds apiece. I sat back down onto the sidewalk.

Again, I felt like shit. Not from puking, but from the fact that I was a coward—plain and simple. It was starting to make me even sicker than I already was. If felt like a giant not in my stomach. It was a separate pain from the punch I took to it.

“What’s your name, man?” the homeless guy was back. He put out a hand that I thought was for me to shake. I took it and he pulled me to my feet with no effort.

“Eugene. You?” I used the palm of my hand to block the sun from my eyes.

“I’m Carl,” he pulled out a handful of cash. “Them boys had like sixty bucks on ‘em and I’m starving.”