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When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops

Карлин Джордж (EN)

By the way, it should be pointed out that bum might also have been used to describe the young man your daughter brought home. Many’s the bum who didn’t pass muster with Dad. I wonder how many of those bums the daughters brought home wound up marrying the tramps the sons brought home? That might explain all those homeless children.

But the word homeless is useless. It’s messy, it’s inaccurate, it’s not descrip-

tive. It attempts to cover too many things: poverty, alcoholism, drug addiction, schizophrenia, no place to live and begging on the street.

Homeless should mean only one thing: no home. No place to live. Many of these people who beg on the street actually have places to live. I had one guy tell me he needed money to buy tires for his van. I gave him a dollar; I considered him both honest and enterprising.

The first word I remember for these people was bag ladies. I don’t know why men were left out of this; I never heard anyone say bag men. I guess that’s because a bag man is a different thing. A bag man is someone who delivers bribes or illegal gambling money. Probably, in today’s evasive, dishonest, politically correct language, they’d be called bag persons. In my opinion, the closest we’re ever going to get to a good descriptive name for these lovable grimy folks is street people.

And by the way, isn’t it ironic that shopping bags (and shopping carts) symbols of plentyshould be the objects most preferred by people who have nothing at all? I guess if you have nothing, you need something to carry it around in. Especially if you’re crazy.

WILD AND CRAZY GUYS

That’s what a lot of these street people are, you know. They’re crazy. I avoid terms like mentally disturbedand emotionally impaired. You can’t let the politically correct language police dictate the way you express yourself. I prefer plain language: crazy, insane, nuts. “The whole world is crazy, and many of its inhabitants are insane. Or am I just nuts?” And for the most part, we humans do enjoy being colorful and creative when describing the condition of someone who’s crazy. Here are a few descriptions of craziness that I enjoy:

One wheel in the sand.

Seat back not in the full, upright position.

Not playing with a full bag of jacks.

Doesn ‘t have both feet in the end zone. ‘ Lives out where the buses don’t run.

‘ The cheese fell off his cracker a long time ago.

His factory his still open, but it’s makin’ something else.

Here’s an odd one: His squeegee doesn V go all the way to the bottom of the pail. I think you have to have some serious time-management problems to be sitting around thinking up stuff like that. But there you are. This next one sounds really good, but I confess I don’t quite understand it: He belongs in a cotton box. For some reason it sounds exactly right, though, doesn’t it?

And if you’re going to be irreverent about describing crazy people, you can’t get soft when it comes to describing the places we keep them. Or used to keep them. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan decided the best place to keep them was on the streets, which actually makes a lot of sense, because the streets are nothing more than a slightly larger, open-air asylum, anyway.

But around the turn of the nineteenth century, many states had places called institutions for the feebleminded. That name seemed too long for some people, so instead they referred to them as madhouses. “They took him to the madhouse. Boy, was he mad.” Then these places became insane asylums, mental homes, mental institutions and, finally, psychiatric facilities.

I have three personal favorites. I always liked the hoo-hoo hotel. To me, that says it all. Here’s another one that’s not bad: the puzzle factory. It has a certain class to it, doesn’t it? But if you prefer a gender approach, you really can’t beat the enchanted kingdom. “They took him away to the enchanted kingdom.” And guess how they took him there? The twinkymobile. Now that’s descriptive language.

A TOAST TO THE CLASSICS

When I see a symphony orchestra, a hundred or so people playing some incredibly difficult piece of music in complete and perfect unison as if they were a single organism, I remind myself that each one of them started the day in a different kitchen. A hundred different musicians in a hundred different kitchens, scattered across the city. And sometimes I find myself wondering how many of them had eggs that morning and how many chose cereal. I try to guess whether the percentage of muffin eaters is greater among the strings or the brass section. I ponder whether or not the percussionists drink a lot of coffee, whereas, perhaps, the piccolo players lean more toward flavored teas. I don’t know why these thoughts come to me. But they sure fill the time between scherzos.

FUCK YOU, FATHER, FOR YOU HAVE SINNED

Catholic kids are stupid; they don’t know how to handle a pedophile priest. Here’s what you do: First of all, you don’t get all scared and do whatever he tells you. Who wants to get sucked off by a forty-three-year-old clergyman with beard stubble? Not me. Instead, what you do is kick him in the nuts. You kick him squarely in the nuts, and you get the fuck out of there as fast as you can, and you go tell somebody right away; you tell as many grown-up people as you canone of them is bound to believe you.

That’s what you do. You don’t wait thirty years. You kick the priest in the nuts and say, “Fuck you, Father, I don’t do that shit. Try Jimmy Fogarty, I heard he blew the choirmaster.” And you’re out the door. And don’t forget to take your rosary. On second thought, leave the rosary. A lot of good it did you in the first place.

THREE SHORT STORIES THE VELVET HAT

She wore a velvet hat. She walked down the steps slowly, as if each one were a significant achievement. Her arm, bent severely at the elbow, pi

NOT MARTHA STEWART

GARNISH

The man in the tweed hat stood by a tree, rolling a half-dried snot between his thumb and forefinger. Moments later, the snot now completely dry, he strolled casually past a sidewalk cafe and gently flicked it into a young lady’s lemonade.

. . FINISH YOUR SENTENCES?