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| Don't Forget To Pay For That Donut! |
It was like they were calling to each other, back and forth in turn. One could almost reach out and touch their grandiose plans of having the Modesto Airport District completely dominated by fowl at the crack of the true dawn. A rooster revolution of sorts. Plotted through their hidden language.
I was so impressed with them, that I have decided to forego any rants that I would care to indulge regarding the avian flu and weak county interventions for personal aviaries of fowl. I will let these brave birds have their hope. Unless the economy doesn’t turn around, at which point I may be charged with chicken rustling.
Yet in the morning, seeing lush fields of chickens starting about their foraging day is just so invigorating on my slight trek to the start of my day. Especially when they are in the street and I start chasing them to and fro across the road. One really has to be aware of traffic when…chicken spotting.
Walking through chalk lines, some real - some imagined, I would think that others like myself would care to take comfort in the luxurious safety of good scenery.
So that in the midst of a dozen, obviously robustly large roosters planning some sort of a…coo - a master plan, if you will, of domination.
Just the energy of being within that interchange, while some guy that lives in what appears to be an RV has an exploding bonfire going in a burning barrel. A different scent every night, or should I say, “every wee morning”.
On some of these wee mornings, he incinerate particles board. Bonfire fuel acquired by chopped up furniture abandoned in another lot made vacant by Strand/Depot(2) type developer arson.
The formaldehyde fills my senses like Testers model glue in a plastic bag. At any moment I begin picturing myself writhing and twirling, while lying perpendicular to and abutted to the gutter of the sidewalk surrounding the county park.
Only the menthol provides any relief. And the coffee.(3)
Coffee acquired at the Vietnamese refuge camp, we are now not suppose to talk about or advertise for. I suppose something came over the wire. Of course all of this information comes from Chin. The one that says I eat like a cat. The one with that birth mark that looks just like a tattoo one would get for killing someone in a Vietnamese prison.
The same tattoo that she didn’t want to talk about anymore(4), not more than just a few morning ago(5) she dared point to it and made some vague reference to the hard life that she endured, trapped in a Vietnamese prison. But one knows that she is safe now in the confines of a Vietnamese refugee camp disguised as the Ye Olde Donute Shoppe.
It’s not a refuge for everyone though. That was finally decided when the latrine was redone in tile and the very best in bathroom fixtures. It must be part of the Asianic cultural reaction to disrespect from a community that completely thrashed the bathroom to the point of necessitating it’s complete replacement. Everything.
“Pollo.” She whispered.(6) “I go into bathroom today and people have sex in there.”
“What? Seriously? That’s horrible. I keep telling you. Just don’t let anybody use it. They can go to Jack in the Box.”, I replied, six years ago. That was before the re-model.
And a year or so after someone committed suicide in the Jack in the Box bathroom. Now they have to “buzz” you in.
Today, on any shift, they refuse no one. Most of the time they don’t have to, since the bathroom is occupied by families shooting up heroin they acquired from just around the corner. It’s so heart warming to see a mother pushing a stroller, accompanied by her older offspring - scurrying into the Jack in the Box bathroom to inject herself with heroin and nod out in a bathroom stall for an hour or so.
“Um, can you buzz me in?”
“Sure, go right ahead.”
That was the same family that approached every single one us, one morning - pimping out her oldest child to panhandle change for his mother’s heroin fix.
“Hey can I use your bathroom? I need to change my baby.” The zombie mother asked Chin.
“You want to use the bathroom? OK. You can use the bathroom. I will go and unlock it for you and you can go use the bathroom.”, Chin chipped into the undead whore of heroin and mother of three.
“SSSS - hey!”, I side whispered to the Mother Teresa of Vietnam.
“What what what is it?”
“Don’t let them use the bathroom.” I silently said, yet ever so sternly, while vigorously shaking my head back and forth.
“Pollo! She needs to change the baby. You can’t expect her to go Jack in the Box. That too far.”
And with that, it was not long until loud knocks were to be heard.
“Hey! What you do in my bathroom?! You need get out now! Pollo. Man. You were right. Why I not listen to you.”, Chin said to me, her hair unusually ratted out as though it had been styled that way, when in reality, it was from the sheer stress of the entire family having locked themselves in the bathroom for nearly five whole minutes now.
“Just give her a few more minutes to finish shooting up and she might be easier to get out.”, I said, as though I were giving report to a general regarding enemy troop alignment.
“Shoot up?! What you mean Pollo?!”
“Nothing. Nothing. Here, I’ll take care of it.”
And with that I was once more overcome by an air of exaggerated over bearing maniacal role play as I cast the family into the cold dampness of the street.
“And stay there….bitch.”
Coming back into my Morelia(7) fold, I am able to fill in half a dozen people with the situation’s past, present and probable future in less than 30 seconds. After all, I have to get to work. I can’t just sit here all day talking about some junky mother shooting up with her kids watching locked up in a bathroom of a Vietnamese Refugee Camp overtaken by Mexicans. Even the Vietnamese refugees have to adapt.
It’s the perfect backdrop for my budding Spanish - Vietnamese refugees aggressively trying to keep dozens of Mexicans at bay with dirty Mexican words screamed with Vietnamese accents. It’s really special when Chin starts waving around her Babe Ruth slugger and threatening to kill everyone if they don’t provide her with enough session money for a Black Oak Casino(8) weekend.
1. For the lone traveler through the internet that may have no interest here….this is a private article. Be gone with you - NOW! To feather dust.
2. Two Modesto, California historical monuments that didn’t have to pass the giggle test of any landmark preservation laws, state or federal due to arson by local developers.
3. Coffee so good, it deserves to be my hook lead in. Keep reading.
4. When they, “arrested the man and the girl”.
5. Or more.
6. Like, “psssst”.
7. A group of approximately 36 rotating Mexican friends, all quickly claiming to be born within an eagles nest at the very top of the tallest mountain in Morelia, Mexico.
8. Actually, it was at Jackson Rancheria Casino that I was accused of eating like a cat. At a buffet, it was. And upon further recollection, it was actually her husband that accused me of that, after seeing my self-made sampler plate with only 3 items from the entire buffet. That’s right. He had to drive us back in my van to the David Bowie’s Low album that night.
Copyright 2012 Robert Stanford all rights reserved.
