"You don't have any hair, so how do you keep your head on straight?" I sat in the far end booth of greasily lit White Castle with the displeasure you have when you get your pubic hair caught in meat grinder. I like to call this specific displeasure Carlos. His glazed over eyes and lack of expression were nothing new, but they were as annoying as the day I met him. "So? How do you keep it straight? Your head, I mean." He had asked me this every day for what had seemed like years, but in all actuality it'd only been a half hour. The rancid smell of stream grilled onions drifting across the table with every syllable burned the hair right out of my nostrils. I had no response to his question and I never would have had one. Not in a million years would I have one and he knew this. To him, asking this question was like a caged monkey with a button that pumps him full of morphine at his desire. I was just hoping he'd end up dead like our simian counterpart. I emerged from that grease cocoon into the grimy summer stench. Every article of clothing stuck to me like a dying fetus clings to life. Carlos stuck even closer. His incessant badgering died under that summer sun along with every other living thing around us. We wandered the death valley of a parking lot, looking for my car for five and a half years or a few minutes. Much like this story, there was nowhere left to go and nothing left to say. The next 10 years were a blur for me. Or had it only been 2 days? The only thing I really know is that things were blurry for a while and Carlos was no longer with us. Was that retarded mexican nothing more than a figment of my imagination or did he really die that night in Birmingham? His name was never in the obituaries, but that doesn't explain very much. Carlos would never be important enough to be recognized and especially in print. As for me, I ended up on the internet. That's how I can share this piece of shrapnel lodged in my memory. It's just an uncomfortable fragment of a story that I can't get out of my brain. Current Location: Asleep
Current Mood:  groggy
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