When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops

“Dum-dee-dee-da . . . Da-dum-da .. . Whoooaaa! What’s this? A scab! Hot shit, a scab! I love fuckin1 scabs. This is go

“Wait! Wait! Wait! (Picking at scalp) Wait just a minute. It’s not ready to come off yet! It’s immature, it’s still not ripe. It’s not ready for plucking. I’ll save this for Thursday! Thursday will be a good day. I only have half a day of work on Thursday. I’ll come home early, masturbate in the kitchen, wash the floor and then I’ll watch The Montel Williams Show. And while I do, I’ll pick off my scab. Oh boy, oh boy! I can’t wait to pick off my scab, this is go

THE WAITING GAME

So you wait. And you wait. And you wait, and you wait, and you wait. And you try not to knock it off by accident with the little plastic comb you bought in the vending machine at the Easy Livin’ Motel when you hooked up with the two skanky-lookin’ chicks who gave you the clap that night.

And now, finally, Thursday arrives. It’s harvest time! Harvest time on the top of your head. So you come home early, and you masturbate, but you do it in your sister’s bedroom just to give it a little extra thrill. Know what I mean? Then you shampoo the rug, and you watch The Montel Williams Show. Pretty interesting topic: “Women Who Take It up the Ass for Fifty Cents.” Not the best show he’s ever done, but you know something? Not bad, either!

And now it’s time. Time to go ger this little scab. But you want to proceed carefully. You want to pry this thing off slowly and evenly, around the perimeter of the scab, so that it lifts off all in one piece. You don’t want it to break into pieces. Who needs a fragmented scab? Not me. I don’t need parts that badly, I’m not that disturbed.

What you really want; what you really need; what you really must have is a complete, whole scab you can set down, study, make notes on and perhaps write a series of penetrating articles on for Scab Aficionado Magazine. Who knows? You might rise to the top of the scab world in a big hurry. It’s a small community and they need people at the top.

And so you proceed. With a single fingernail extendedalways choosing your best peeling and scraping nailyou find your way through the thicket of hair and locate the target. You make a careful, initial probe, and surprisingly, the prey yields easily, coming off all in one piece. And you lift it off carefully, through the hair, and position it on the tip of your picking finger.

And you look at the little thing, so pathetic there on your finger. Isolated, alone, out of its environment. And your heart begins to melt. So you take your new friend carefully between thumb and forefinger, and gently place it back on your head, setting it loose in the wild. And you feel the better man. You’re in harmony with your body.

Think of it as catch and release.

When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops

EUPHEMISMS: Broke, Nuts and On the Street

I GOT NO MONEY

While we in America have been busy creating politically correct euphemisms for old peoplethereby making their lives infinitely easierwe’ve also been working on our poor-people language problem. And we now have language that takes all the pain out of being poor. Having no money these days is easier than ever.

I can remember, when I was young, that poor people lived in slums. Not anymore. These days, the economically disadvantaged occupy substandard housing in the i

But as it turns out, many of these socially marginal people receive public assistanceonce known as welfare. Before that it was called being on relief, or being on the dole. And at that time, being on the dole was the worst thing you could say about a family: “They’re on the dole.” People were ashamed. It was tough to get a date if you were on the dole.

But public assistance! That sounds good. Who of us hasn’t benefited from some form of public assistance? Even huge businesses and agricultural interests receive public assistance. Ditto all the wealthiest taxpayers. So apparently, there is no shame attached to being on the dole after all.

I GOT NO HOME

In this country, about the only thing worse than having no money is having no place to live. And over the years, those with no place to live have had many different names: vagrants, tramps, hoboes, drifters and transients come to

mind. Which name applied to a person sometimes depended on his, his God, this is difficult to saylifestyle. There, it’s out.

But can having no place to live actually be a lifestyle? Well, it seems to me that if you’re going to use a questionable word like lifestyle at all, you should be forced to use it across the board. After all, if there’s a gay lifestylewhich I doubtand a suburban lifestylewhich seems more arguableit stands to reason there must be a homeless lifestyle. And even, one would assume, a.prison lifestyle.

Indeed, is it possible that those doomed souls in places like Buchenwald were actually enjoying a concentration-camp lifestyle? Jf they were, don’t tell their families; you’ll be misunderstood. And, taking this unfortunate word to its ultimate, logical extreme, I will not be surprised to someday see one of those spiritual mediums doing a TV show called Lifestyles of the Dead. (Incidentally, shouldn’t a group of mediums be called media? Just asking.)

Back to the subject: vagrants, tramps, hoboes, drifters and transients. Without using a dictionary (which in many cases is no help at all), here are the distinctions I picked up in years past by listening to how people used these words. The sense I got was: Vagrants simply had no money; tramps and hoboes had no money, but they moved around: drifters moved around, but occasionally worked for a while and then drifted on, whereas tramps and hoboes didn’t work at all. Well get to transients in a moment.

There’s one other distinction between tramps and hoboes that’s worth mentioning. The word tramp might also have been used to describe the young woman your son brought home. Rarely did anyone’s son bring home a hobo. Unless, of course, he was into the gay hobo lifestyle. Actually, there weren’t too many gay hoboes. That’s because if a hobo didn’t have a home, he certainly didn’t have a closet either to be in or to come out of. (Sudden thought: hobo rhymes with homo. Sorry.)

Another way to categorize this class of people was to call them transients. Sometimes, on skid row, where they had a lot of bums and winos (we’ll get to them in a minute), you’d see a cheap hotel with a sign that said TRANSIENTS WELCOME.

Transients were like drifters, except transients seemed to stay in cities, whereas drifters moved through small towns and rural areas. You had to move through those places, because they weren’t as tolerant as cities; they didn’t have signs that said DRIFTERS WELCOME. It was usually just the opposite. Ask Clint Eastwood. By the way, isn’t a hotel that says it welcomes transients a little like a restaurant that says it prefers people with stomachs? Just asking.

First cousin to a transient hotelwas a flophouse, a magnificently descriptive piece of language that has all but disappeared. (Just for the record, these days transient hotels are called limited service lodgings.) Several cuts above all these places were furnished rooms, these days known by the phrase SROs, short for single room occupancy.

So, staying on track here, we began this section with people who have no place to live, which brings us to today’s hot designation, the homeless, also known as street people. When I was a boy, we never heard those words; a dirty, drunk man on the street who wanted money was normally called a bum. Simple word, three letters, one syllable: bum. And a bum was usually also a wino. You know, a substance abuser. He had a chemical dependency. Little did we know.