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HOW TO KILL YOUR FATHER AND LIVE OFF THE DOLE IN MADISON, WISCONSIN.

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HOW TO KILL YOUR FATHER AND LIVE OFF THE DOLE IN MADISON, WISCONSIN

My name's Brown, Uptown Derrick Brown. I'm a middle aged white guy and the Uptown in my name comes from the skid row neighborhood named Uptown on Chicago's Northside where I live in a flophouse because my old lady kicked me out.

If you don't know nothing about a flophouse, imagine your typical office cubicle.  Now line fifty cubicles side by side and put chicken wire on top and stick the mess on each floor of a four-story warehouse with overhead plumbing, and you got your basic flophouse.  Now add your feet and butt smells, your homosexuals groaning from anal sex, and about two hundred of your standard wigged out drug addicted psychos yelling during the night that Jesus is an alien and the white man brings them down, and now you got my flophouse.  Stick the crock of crap into the middle of a neighborhood where daily soup lines attract a hundred and fifty people lined up on a street corner and put a Salvation Army, rehab vocational center, and a homeless shelter on a grid of pigeon-turd covered streets, and you got Uptown. It's a big experiment where the dregs of grime society meet do-gooder ass wipes who think they can cure Americas poor people problems with a free can of tomato soup and a job lead as a dishwasher.

So seeing that I was kind of tired of that whole situation, I figured I'd go to my favorite moochspot -- Madison, Wisconsin.  It's about 120 miles north of the Shitter, and I usually take the bus and stay at a shelter near the capitol building in the center of the city.  The shelter shares a courtyard with a church that sponsors it, and when I get there, fifty black and white men dressed in brown and grey jackets line up single file in front of a plate glass door.

At exactly five thirty five p.m., the door opens and a Filipino case worker named Billy sits behind a desk in the hallway and makes you sign your name and checks it in a filebox to make sure you haven't been there past three months.

"Brown you back?" Billy asks and looks up at me.

"Yeah I'm just passing through", and I slice my hand through the air to show how I'm passing.

"Okay, dinner's served at six."  He gives me the okay sign, I give it back to him and then I go down a stairway into the basement.

When you get down there, it's dark, and you pass a bathroom where everybody showers, and steam clouds kick up in your face.  As you walk by the air smells like shampoo.

Then you enter the sleeping room.  The air changes to cigarette smoke and feet in about a half a second and you clap your hand over your nose so the smell don't gag you and make you retch your before you eat your dinner. There are about fifty bunk beds and about a hundred ex-convicts, wanderers, and fugitives laying in the dark playing with gaming cards and talking about how they nailed this one or that.  A little white guy dressed in a flannel shirt and cap had five black guys listening and laughing at him as he dry humped the mattress missionary style. He kept calling himself Big Daddy. "Yeah dat bitch was tight. Almost took my dick off. Bitch had a pussy, when I pull up on the upstroke, her snatch grab my dick and I lift her ass up off the bed. Yeah Big Daddy took her home."

In Chicago, only way a guy like that gets some pussy is if its January when Social Security kicks out its annual refund check.  If you don't know nothing about Social Security, it's the arm of the government responsible for giving four hundred dollar a month retard checks to any loon who comes into their office and claims mental disability because he thinks John Wayne is the President, or you can play like me and go to a caseworker at the shelter and tell him you want to jump onto the tracks of an oncoming subway train. He'll stick you in a mental health center for a month and when Social Security sees you've been in the loony bin, you're a shoe in for the retard check.  When January rolls around, Social Security figured they didn't give you enough money because of inflation and kick out a refund check for six hundred dollars to all the lames like me sponging off Uncle Sam.  When you get your check in the mail, you cash it at a currency exchange and go to North Avenue about midnight and pick up a whore.  She'll suck your dick or bend over for thirty bucks behind a dumpster in an alley.

Big Daddy finishes fucking his mattress and gives the black guys a big gapped tooth smile.  They laugh and I look at the rest of the guys in the shelter who are wrapping bundles of sheets and tightening straps on backpacks getting ready for the morning when they get up at six. I keep my hand cupped over my nose to avoid the smell and walk into the kitchen.

It's small, brightly lit, has a couple tables, seats,  stainless steel fridges, and about fifty of the cleanest homeless guys you ever saw.  Hair smelling like shampoo, pits smelling like deodorant, real nice too.

"Oh excuse me was that your bread? Sorry I'll get a new one."

"Much obliged sir."

In Uptown, imagine fifty of those underfed calves they use for veal climbing on top of each other trying to get at a trough full of the blandest rice and gravy crap you ever tasted and you got a typical Uptown soupline. One time in a soup line run by the Jesus People, a big black guy wearing a "Don't Ask Me 4 Shit" shirt didn't like the fact that the homeless people helping dish out the food got first dibs and he was the last in line. So he walks to a table that has on top a three foot high pot full of hot dogs, curls his fingers under the edge, flips the hot dogs onto the floor and runs out of the building.  Fifty homeless people yell "Get his ass", chase him down, knock him to the ground and surround and kick him for about ten minutes and leave him there to clutch his sides and wallow in broken glass in a deserted alley.

Two hours later I see him sitting on a bench talking to another black guy. 

He leaned his elbows on his lap.  "Man I don't know why I did it."

The other black guy had his arm around him and said,  "You know better than to touch a hungry man's food."

"Yeah guess I learned my lesson," he said as he turned to his friend.

His friend shrugged his shoulders. "Whattaya gonna do?"

That's a hell of a way to learn a lesson. That's why I learned mine and hiked my ass up to Madison and got the spread before me -- country chicken and rice and gravy. I finish eating and go to bed.

In the morning, we eat sausage and eggs. The black guys from Chicago are saying, "Man I ain't never been fed so well in my life. In Chicago shelters, you lucky if you gets a bologna sandwich but this place help a brother out with the whole continental breakfast."

Tubs of butter and fresh peach and apricot preserves sit next to a toaster and a bread loaf on a table in the corner. Some nice old white dude, probably a do gooder from the church, gets up at five in the morning and flips pancakes on a grill as bacon and sausage sit in a buffet steamer to keep the scrambled eggs and meat warm.

Soon as you finish you go to a smoking room where they got a TV and a table where you can read the newspaper. You open a door and walk into a cloud of bright light and cigarette smoke and sit there and choke your lungs out and look stupid until the caseworkers kick you out.  A couple black guys are in there talking shit. One of them's a big guy swole on parole with cornrows in his head. He starts thumping the table with his index finger while talking to his friend. "Yeah I gon wup his ass. That stanky motherfucker."

I read my newspaper and ignore him and look across the table to a white guy reading a newspaper. He shrugs his shoulders, gives me a look like "So fucking what". I give him a look back like "Eh don't look at me. I see that kind of shit in Chicago every day".  His name was Roger but later I called him Crazy Roger after I found out what he was about. He puts his hand out over the table. "Glad to meet you."

I say, "Likewise", and at eleven a.m, the caseworkers kick us out and give us a brown bag lunch. Me and Roger eat our sandwiches under a tree and then he pushes his glasses up on his nose and flips the bill up on his Greenbay Packers cap.  "Whattya say we go hit up the people at the Greyhound Bus Station for change?"

I shrug my shoulders and say, "Sure why not". We walk two blocks down and get to a brick building with a couple Greyhound buses parked in front and go inside.  About twenty people are sitting in plastic yellow chairs waiting to transfer over to Milwaukee or Janesville.  Roger takes his hat off and holds his hands together like he's praying, and walks up and down the rows of seats and gives people his pitch. "Please help someone. I am just one in alone by myself. Just a human being in need. I lost my ticket and wallet on the transfer bus that went to Milwaukee, and I have no money to buy a new one."

They give it up pretty good too. An old black lady in a  pink church dress reaches into her wallet and pulls out a five. "Here you go honey. I feel sorry for you."

A redneck in a dirty Levis jacket gives him a ten and pats him on the back with a loud thwack sound.  "Here you go lil' buddy."

I almost want to puke as Roger hugs them and whispers in their ears, "Thank you so much." 

I ain't seen money like that since I went seventy/thirty with a junior stock broker on this scheme he cooked up.  He printed up fake raffle tickets for a bogus handicapped kids fund and I would try to sell the tickets while I sold homeless newspapers across from the Chicago Stock Exchange. If you dont know nothing about a homeless newspaper, you buy it for twenty five cents a piece from a do-gooder publisher that fills the newspaper with stories about the hard luck homeless people got to go through.  He calls the paper some wise ass name like Streetwise to let you know its full of stories with broke ass people, and he goes running around the city telling the radio and TV stations that people should buy the newspaper because it will help out the homeless, so you the homeless Streetwise vendor can stand at a downtown street corner and sell Streetwise to the public for a dollar.  So when I started selling the raffle tickets and the paper at the same time, people thought I was on the up and up and I cleared about a hundred dollars a day. Eventually me and the stockbroker got caught, and he got time but the cops looked at my record and saw my trip to the mental health hospital.  They figured me a homeless retard and told me not to do it again but I couldn't sell the homeless newspapers anymore. I didn't care because I'd be lucky to make ten dollars a day off the shit.

Roger makes about twenty dollars in an hour and he cops a dime bag of weed with the money, and me and him smoke up by a lake next to a basketball court. While we're getting lit, Roger tells me this story about how at age fourteen he killed his dad Roger Little Sr.  Him and his mom and dad were in the house at midnight, and his dad was beating the crap out of her in the kitchen while Roger laid in the bedroom down the hall. I could imagine little Roger curled up and cowering under the bedsheets and kind of felt sorry for him.

He says, "I could hear my daddy's palm smacking her fleshy  cheek.  It really broke my heart."  He holds the joint by his side and pinches the bridge of his nose to hold back the tears and bows his head.  He stays like that for a couple seconds and holds his head up again and tells me he laid still while his father hit her.  Roger must have laid still like that many a night because his father beat her all the time he tells me.

I look at Roger like what is this buzzkiller telling me this crap for and feel like punching him because he's wrecking my high.  Then I get nervous and paranoid from the pot and act like if I don't listen to him, I might end up dead too.  My hands shake and I nod my greasy hair up and down in fake interest.  "Hey you killed your father? What a trip."

Roger couldn't take his dad beating the crap out of her anymore, so one night Roger up and left his bedroom, walked down the hall to his parent's room and took his daddy's loaded pistol from a nightstand.  With the gun by his side, he walked to the kitchen.

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