UNTIL THE LAST DROP

There across the kitchen, funny man leaned on the refrigerator. Had a beard curling out his pale face. It was messy like husk, but underneath, surely funny man had corn for laughs and sugar for some kind of love. After all, he talked with his wife, some short Korean lady. Of course, the glass blurred the image of funny man Wallace to me as it had since the day he placed me on this fiberwood kitchen counter. Some square feet of yellow tile separated us. Us… Oh, this riot of a man would be the one to consume me!


Grinded down from natural grains: corn, wheat, and rye and twelve years in the barrel distilling, and here funny man would consume what’s left of me. But there’s ways Kentucky Whiskey can eat back at a man’s brain, till he don’t shave, or work, or love, or drive, or walk a straight line, and it can chew on them wits until the man goes to brush his teeth or wash his hands and he lifts his pupils and, through that rectangle in need of Windex centering his reflection, he beholds the image of that which he thought himself to be consuming, consuming him. Or the whiskey can pull his little fuckin twelve year old Saturn, I heard him talking about, in front of a goddamn semi. Surely someone warned him before, and surely he told himself something like it’s worth the joy he gets throwing his head back with whiskey in his mouth till his guard rolls down and the air blows through his hair like wind.


His image sunk closer to me like a man moving to the window after catching the eye of his investigator, but the glass distorted away his nose. With a move closer, I saw his nose, though, a wide bastard of a sneezer that needed a shave. I think his wife went to bed. He seized me by the neck and twisted my plastic lid, cracking the seal. Now I saw him, well. He wore reddish-brown shades, even at night. Glasses the same color as me. Ah, he poured me in a glass that fit his palm and then dropped rocks into my pool for his pleasure. He got me mixed with ice, and then I and the ice streamed down his throat and I into his blood. Most of me in the bottle, some in the bloodstream, I saw the world in sepia: the kitchen, the cabinets; his sunglasses colored them all the same as my liquid.


Ah, the joy of slipping into a woman’s or a man’s memories and into their collective unconscious. I of course prefer the woman since she has a bit less tolerance, but this particular man is weak enough to really fuck with. Their sub-conscience is my favorite part; it’s where you see things they’ll never know and cause them not to remember the things they do. Here, I saw his grandfather of generations back, a small English boy in a sailor suit dress and with pigtail hair. He had a Victorian mother lifting up the hem of her dress and chasing him through the apple stands of the market. She really wanted badly to castrate this lad. With his mother determined to put a high pitch in that boy's vocals in order to put him on the opera stage, it’s a wonder funny many even made it to this earth. But here funny man stood in some real existence to be proud of. He was both of his ancestors, the boy in the dress and the Victorian mother. He wanted the stage like the mom and he rushed away from it like the boy. And some balls that boy in the sailor suit dress must've been proud to have spared, for all he did with them was run from the stage.


Swimming in the blood and soul of this man, I felt some Irish tramping about, too; though his family didn’t pass that down to him. Make no mistake, Mr. Jameson, himself, owned a few more street corners inside this man than me, on this night. This fool was kicked out the bar some hours earlier, delighting in the Irish whiskey. The part of me still in the bottle picked up a blurry glimpse of him stumbling about the same four or five tiles of kitchen floor, singing Sinatra, “My Way,” like a fool. But this part of me that swam through his blood saw a guilt colored in sepia of a blonde woman in a dim lit room separated from him by the buffed up bar counter shine.


“Sweetheart, even, the bar tender on the shift ahead of me told me not to serve you, and now—” the skinny blonde said.


“Kassie, I’m not driving.”


Her face surrendered a stance she’d surely been proud of, “Ok, but your friend looks perfectly fine, he better take care of you.”


“The last thing I want is to make you feel forced. I just want the drink, if I may, a last one. If I may…”


“Look, Wallace! I already told you I’m not comfortable serving you, and you’re not respecting me as your bar tender! You just keep pushing! It’s only two a’ clock and you’re already drunk! Two a clock, Wallace! If I weren’t a woman you wouldn’t be—


“Kassie…”


“It’s true! You and your sexist jokes.”


I felt this man’s heart whipped. And it’d been whipped before. Still, a bar tender depends on tips and she’ll call a fella “sweetheart and baby,” kind of like a hooker does. Here she is calling him “Wallace.” With the courtesy put-ons of this so called relationship shed to the last piece of fabric, Kassie bared it all, including that she didn’t care for his humor, either. A tear rolled underneath his glasses. He said “Kassie,” cause he’d seen her with a goal of getting tips by having something to shoot the shit with the drunks with, villainize others. Drunk enough to walk stiff, but sober enough only to hold on to his last dignity, he walked out Vino’s before Vino, the local Italian hero, emerged to take the role opposite of him. It’s funny the way that goes, as soon as they have a person playing villain, any of those drunks at any minute could turn their behavior in for a white steed and could come galloping at him with a lance.


But in this man’s—Wallace’s— blood I saw not just a villain made by the bar, but a true villain made by his doings. He’s a funny man, after all, and funny men make jokes and jokes infest the morality of those joked about. The racist ones. The homophobic ones. The religious ones. The sexist ones. He’d told a many of them and they infested like a hoard of bed bugs. Yeah, the folks laugh but on their pillow when they think about it, the jokes with all their legs crawl in their skin and humiliate them, anger them, make them question motives of funny men who spew bugs from their mouths into their beds. Cause who knows the motives behind a joke aside the joker? And dwelling in that man’s DNA, that night, I didn’t know if he knew his own.


Even this Don Rickles… I’d spread across the country and been in souls of men and women, as they went on and on about Don. Everybody said he was innocent; Don was, no matter the nationalities he made light of with things he supposedly didn’t mean. Still at night, one man of Japanese descent that looked like this funny man’s wife must’ve lay in bed thinking of how Don called him out in front of everybody. He wondered in his soft pajamas, maybe just for a moment, did Don mean that shit about his slanted eyes. Has Don not gotten passed World War Two?


I decided that night that if I could I’d kill this funny man before he killed me, it’d be a good humor to his time and age.


And before anybody dare come to this louse’s aid, let me go on about the unthinkable of his actions. I knew what it meant this time of day when he put his plaid shirt on, his dark pants on, his wallet in his back pocket, his feet in his dress shoes, his gel in his hair, his badge over his neck, his scarf around his neck, his coat over it all. I’d been on that fiber-wood counter long enough to see through the blur him ready himself for work. Then dressed for work and all, funny man’s hand lifted me from the counter, his sunglasses looked a hard minute through the clear border that he knew he should not cross. But I convinced myself no soul lived on the other side of his dark brown shields when he consumed three, four, five, six glasses of me knowing he’d take me to work with him!


Some twenty-four hours later, he started to do the same thing. He did a shot of me, and then his cell rang a “aint that a kick in the head,” ring tone. Wallace put it to his ear.


“Hello?”


“Hello, Wallace, it’s Julio.”


“Hey, brotha. I’m just about to head to work.”


“I’m off, today. Remember I told you yesterday. Just don’t do the hand off with Carmella, today. She’s going to email you the shift notes.”


“Ok…What’s with the change?”


“She still doesn’t want to talk to you.”


“Wha-why?”


“You upset her. Best thing you can do is apologize. You know she’s Catholic. And I know she seems crazy and like a—how do you say it? A ‘sloot?’


“Slut”


“Yeah, slutt. But she’s still Catholic, and she didn’t like what you said about Jesus’ cock. Anyway, I got to go. Just warning you.”


Funny man paused and placed the part of me still in the glass back on the counter. I didn’t know what was richer to look at his opened mouth on the outside recalling his behavior or to look at the anxiety in his person recalling it. I loved the sub-conscience the best. I peeked in and Julio and Carmella colored in sepia sat in a triangle, just some carpet separating them from funny man, Wallace.


“Oh when I see him, I’m gonna say well, who put that fucking tree in the garden? Blame him for your nail scarred hands! Yeah, throw the guilt right on his fuckin’ dad” Wallace sneered as Carmella’s dark eyes shrunk. Wallace went on, “Seriously what kind of dad puts the root-cause right there and then goes—goes to his kid, you go clean this shit up.”


“You’d tell your hung savior that…” Carmella said shaking her head.


“Now, that’s the dandiest thing I heard any religious person say, yet.” Wallace retorted.


“What do you mean,” Carmella said.


“How do you know he had such a massive cock?”


“Que!”


“I don’t think he was so hung,” Wallace went on with words that were as good as throwing a rope around his own neck, “If he was on the cross and naked—ya know they weren’t really wearing cloths, they were up there nude—but if he had such a hung cock, don’t you think it’d been distracting everybody when they should be thinking about all the guilt and grief and shit? Big dicks are like big boobs, you just can’t take your eyes off them long enough to be solemn.” Wallace paused and while Julio and Carmella sat in silence, Wallace continued on with his set, “I mean if he’s up they’re hung as fucking John Holmes, can’t you see Mary Magdalene and Joseph of Arimathea right now just staring at his goddamn massive weaner when trying to mourn. Mary looking right at it saying, “such a shame, such a big shame.’ Joseph seeing her saying, ‘for a Jewish woman you can’t keep your eyes off the pork, can you?’ Serious, Carmella, nobody ever told me he was hung before. No wonder that Roman said, ’surely he must be the son of God.’ He was looking at his goddamn massive rod!”


And that’s all funny man, Wallace, could remember. What he didn’t hear as the memory stopped playing was one chuckle from Julio or Carmella, two devout Catholics. He just resolved he’d not take another drink of me till he got off work on that New Year’s Eve.


When he returned to my vision at night, he seized my neck before even removing his coat or scarf. He had two egg-rolls in his mouth and slid me in there with their inners. He drank, like a sailor, shots of me. And his wife bounced in, gawking at him.


“Don’t drink too much. We need to go to family’s for the party.” She said and exited the kitchen.


From the kitchen tile to the bathroom, he hollered, “Just drinkin’ a few to loosen up!”


He drank more until he stumbled and laughed and listened to Sinatra and yelled the lyrics over the reddish-brown visuals of disgust incarnating itself through Carmella raising her nose.


“Take a shower, Wallace, maybe the bath will sober you. You’re drunk!”


Wallace pushed the door open from the shower. He emerged naked with the shower head beating its song, still. I laughed from inside of him and laughed through the glass of the bottle. His wife took one glance as he left a puddle behind. “I’m going to the party by myself.” she said. “Stay here with your liquor!”


All the judgments hammered down on him, Carmella’s, Kassie’s, and his wife’s. He grabbed my container and with his two eyes made contact with me. Through his shades restricting certain light, those eyes looked into my sepia shapelessness dripping down each side of the bottle back into myself. Then from the area some would counsel with liquid for a reflection, I gave up a vision. I showed him the funny man, both loved and laughed with.


A real funny man, he wore a tux; his skin tan, his upper figure a triangle. He introduced himself saying, “Hello, I’m Wallace Carlson, and I’m an alcoholic.” He heard some laughing. He said, “Don’t mind that. To get off probation, I told them I’d say that in all my meetings!” He looked underneath his bowtie, and beneath the stage, on the other side of the spotlight, Chicagoans, old and young, male and female, fat and skinny threw their teeth out their mouths laughing.


He opened for certain comedian, Rico Amore. He had a glass table underneath him with an astray on it. He coughed from the withering camel cigarette between his core couple of fingers and deduced himself a cool “Rat Pack” like smoker. A real Dean Martin, he laid his weight to his left hand leaning on the glass table, and said “What’s wrong with you delinquents? I tell you I’m an alcoholic and on probation and you laugh?”


An old humped over bald head couldn’t open his eyes to a squint but smiled.


Wallace went on, “this old man. This Harry Bowden relic up here is smiling? He said he hasn’t seen anything this wild since the 1920’s when he got mooned by a flapper!”


The audience died, surrendering their last laughter.


Amongst them, I sat disguised as a black man with a cornrow and in a tux. He looked in my reddish-brown eyes as I touched the laughs in my stomach.


“This black fella is alright. Ya’ know I, like others, learned to appreciate black people by getting to know a black…a real dark one-my liver!”


For Wallace, I, wearing the black man's flesh, fell from my chair, held my stomach, squirming and dancing about the carpet with delight.


Wallace, stroked his handsome beard, his face felt ten years younger. Only he and Rickles could charm with this humor.


“You know what’s worse about drinking, “Wallace reasoned, “It’s not the hangover. It’s the judgment you get. And I’m just talking about the other people at the bar!”


He heard laughing and wailing.


“No, I’m serious. The bar tender always has to be a hero. She’ll do anything to be the damsel that has to stand up against some drunken heel, just so the regular recluses that get out— ya know, get out just there— will rescue her. Maybe, there’s no bigger jerk that day than you and you’re behaving just fine, she’ll still tell ya something like ‘you’re drinking all this Irish stuff and it’s only two a’ clock. Two a’ clock, Wallace! Sweetheart, its daylight and you’re drunk, already!’ Are you saying if it’s ten a clock and dark, I can get just as fucked up as I want, but doing it at two is some kind of cardinal sin? I’m really ok doing the same shit but just in the dark! The worst part is when some drunk comes to her aid.” Then, Wallace slipped into his best drunk dialect. He stumbled on his words like Foster Brooks. “The drunk will say something like, ‘G-go ho-ho…You’re dr—drunk, and it’s only two a’ (hiccup) clock.’”


A man in the audience squealed, it’s only two a’ clock!”


Wallace fished his eyes in the pool of that which was left of me, while the dream of all admiration for him disappeared. I pierced back in his baby blues; first time I’d seen them without the glasses. This youngin’ could’ve been special: eyes to fuckin’ die for, experience not half bad for someone who only prepared seventy-four days in the nutsack as opposed to my twelve years in the barrel. But, then the bastard killed us both. He picked me up and I saw his tonsil doing the charlatan. The last of me slid under it. He spared me this long and now he took me. I burned his throat and pumped his blood to get back to his wife to that New Year’s party. He grabbed the keys to that unregistered Saturn of his, that 2001 oddity. He pumped the gas, still tasting me to the very back of his tongue, and went down the alley with them shades on and struggled to see anything right, left, or behind. Just an eight minute drive somehow took him to Perryville Road instead of anywhere near that party!


Then, shit walloped Wallace’s brain; like did the Nazis understand their evil when they incinerated the children of Christ? And I realized he had some heart for somebody, at least. I felt something, too, that he'd never told a nine-eleven joke, a Pearl Harbor one, or a holocaust one. And, then, shit hit him harder, he had stranger thoughts about himself, his mother, and his grandmother and- and that's all he knew of her side of the family - but he thought of how all had been without siblings and he thought of how he and his wife had no children, while red stop lights and the green stop lights collaborated with the last drop of me. How could he consume me to the last drop? But when he did he didn’t know that I’d poke him in the eyes; make him not know red from green, and he kept going succeeding correctly at some lights and failing at others. And not me, but his own anger pushed the gas to eighty when he thought a red to be a green… A Volkswagen Beetle hit him from the left. He spun out of control, saw a large wooden pole, and some house lost its light. What funnier way to go for a funny man than to a punch bug. This soldier fell at little Germany’s doing.


Wallace opened his eyes to my last vision for him. His crushed body hung to the left hill next to a man he thought to be Jesus, himself; but this Jesus had my reddish-brown eyes, as funny man's joke laughed back at him. This Jesus next to him had no loin cloth and hung heavier wood than the cross of Calvary itself, and this Jesus next to him heckled him, hailing “Fuck you. You’re terrible. You’re after all, a self-centered louse, a sexist sicko, an alcoholic illiterate. No redemption for you! No redemption for you! Ya see that ol’ thief on my right?” I turned my head right and said, “Later, me, you, paradise. You’re cool” I turned left again at funny man and said, “no paradise for you, motherfucker!”


“Jesus” laughed, as he once said to a Peter, “When the cock crows three times you’ll deny me thrice. “ “Jesus” not known to be wanting or perhaps even homosexual measured for every inch of his cock twelve denials by a Peter. Wallace could hardly hear him, at first, over the embarking thoughts the ladies made of “King Jesus”’ rising bridge. Still, Wallace’s thirst for redemption caused him to look at “Jesus”’ lips over his chin and the bearing up wood. I, in my Jesus disguise, regurgitated the drug the soldiers forced in my mouth until it dripped down my chest and onto my fully erect twelve inch cock and inevitably from it. For a Jew, this “Jesus” paraded plentiful pork with wine and vinegar running down it. Still Wallace’s own jokes weigh too heavy, now, to make light of them.


Funny man, breathed and thirsted for life, or he thirsted for—even as desperate as it sounds— for the loneliness he experienced consuming me. However, his wrist’s blood that mixed with me tapped the wood beneath them, again and again. As “Jesus” denied him redemption, the laws of “all good things must come to an end” denied him I. He exhaled, once more, next to the jokes that he’d never be forgiven for. His ancestors, the Victorian woman and the sailor-suit dress wearing boy, at last, ceased from their quarrel.