Please download my novel 'Whiskey Gut', by L.J. Dematteo At Amazon.com

HIRING, NO EXPERIENCE REQUIRED, BIG MONEY. As soon as I read the ad in the newspaper, right away I could tell it was one of those gimmicky sales jobs, and the idea of it made me nauseous. Ever wonder what kind of scoundrel can sell a four thousand dollar water filter to a single old lady who can barely afford a week’s groceries? Ever wonder who those unscrupulous bastards are who talk mothers into spending the college savings on encyclopedia, hock defective vacuum cleaners, and force feed multi-level marketing schemes down peoples’ throats? Who are these rotten apples? College dropouts, who else! While others work in their labs with their precise instruments and statistical calculations, they sell exotic mortgages over the phone and invent natural cures using vinegar and salt. Got cancer? You’ve come to the right place.

It is naive to think that intelligence is an adequate substitute for a college education. Fifty years ago there was a chance. If you had drive you could make a living working in most fields. Today, without a college diploma you might as well save yourself the heartache and strangle your ego right away, because believe me there will be shame. The system was not born this way. It was manmade, built by the same hands that produced the atom bomb and the electric chair. They knew what they were doing. There is only one small glitch in their devilish scheme. Oddly, as if to purposefully contradict the value of the university, college dropouts make the very best sales people.

My only problem was that I didn’t have the heart to pull the trigger on something I didn’t believe in. Hesitation is not the word for it, I literally gagged. And then I picked up the phone and dialed the number in the newspaper ad. The job interview took place in a rundown office building near the Seattle waterfront. There was a large salmon head painted on the front door of the building, which was a little strange since none of the companies that had offices there had anything to do with fish. It was a bad omen, to be sure. Once inside, a well dressed woman with high heals and a hooknose motioned me toward a room in the back. There were about ten other interviewees facing forward in chairs looking miserable and hot, with half-ass smiles. I noticed my friend CJ’s half-ass smile right away. He always managed to look stoned and happy even in a place like this. His career as a professional skateboarder hadn’t turned out as planned, but he was lucky enough to carry the give-two-shits skateboarder attitude with him throughout his life. We were a couple of losers in a room full of other losers and they were going to teach us how to scam our friends and neighbors. It didn’t matter. CJ was a skateboarder, so maybe that meant that he was immune to their wicked sorcery and evil ways.

Before I could get CJ’s attention, the lady with the hooknose instructed us to stay seated and to keep eye contact with the speaker. “If you aren’t paying attention during the presentation you will be asked to leave,” she warned. The weather outside was cold that afternoon, which made me wonder if the heat was turned up on purpose. It could have been minus thirty degrees outside and I don’t think it would have mattered one degree. You get yourself inside of one of these rooms and you’re cooked. The pressure cooker, they called it. It was all part of training.

Before long a man wearing a very expensive business suit and tie strutted into the room. He was wearing a ridiculously arrogant expression to match his ridiculously arrogant way of speaking. The guy’s name was Curt Blitzkrieg. The first thing that he did was point to a slender man who was sitting next to CJ. “Sorry, but I’m going to have to ask you to leave.” he said. The man’s mouth had been gaping at the absurdity of his present state of existence. “Sorry, but this job isn’t for everyone. As for the rest of you, thank you for coming. I have no doubt that what you are about to hear today will change your life. Are you all ready to be rich? Are you ready to make big money? Well, I’m going to show you how.”

As the slender man slithered out of the room, Curt went on to tell us how much money we were going to make, tens or maybe even hundreds of thousands of dollars. He didn’t tell us much about the job at all besides how much money we were going to make - tens of thousands, at least. Every time he mentioned the pay, he would single one of us out by pointing his finger. Then he would nod his head and reassure us we could do it with just a little effort. Toward the end of his speech, he placed his hand in his pants pockets and he looked up thoughtfully. “You know, not long ago I sat there myself listening to another gentleman tell me I could make this kind of money, and I thought to myself, yes I can? That’s the same thing you have to tell yourself now. It doesn’t matter what your friends or anyone else tries to tell you. You can! Thank you for coming.”

Once he finished his spiel his assistant signed us all up to start our first official day of sales training the very next day. What in hell’s fire we were going to sell, I couldn’t say.

I was finally able to get CJ’s attention outside on the sidewalk.

“What are you doing here,” he said surprised.

“Shit, man, how else am I going to make tens of thousands of dollars?” The statement was meant to be sarcastic, but CJ didn’t catch it. He nodded his head and we both watched as Curt Blitzkrieg zoomed by in a Mercedes. “Can you believe that guy?”

“I’ve got to get running, Ben, but I guess I’ll see you tomorrow.”

I was puzzled “What’s tomorrow?”

“Our first day of training”

“Oh yeah, right, training. I’ll see you there.” I couldn’t help giving my friend a big thumbs-up as he walked away. Curt’s speech had somehow fried the circuits in my brain. It was thumbs-up for most of the day. Whenever a person said something I agreed with, they got the thumb. I needed a hard slap across the face.

I decided to have drinks with Trish’s ex-boyfriend Isaiah that night. He was a psychopath, that guy, but I guess that is what I needed to balance out the Blitzkrieg I had just experienced. I hadn’t seen Isaiah since Trish moved to Paris, mostly because I was afraid that without her there we would try to skin each other alive.

We met over at Isaiah’s. He lived in a penthouse condo in the heart of downtown. The earth tone colored walls and hardwood cabinetry didn’t fit well with his personality. Within his mind raged the thoughts of a manic, and there inside his apartment it felt homey. The carpet was plush, the coffee table was green glass with a fruit bowl center and Ansel Adams photographs hung on the walls. This was his attempt to hide the madness within, I thought. What a freak. What a bloody madman. He stormed around the apartment in a painful frenzy, as he prepared to go out for the night. “I can never have enough whiskey! They should sell it by the barrel, you know. Pop the damn top and rub-a-dub-dub, there can never be too much.” He handed me a glass and threw the empty bottle at the kitchen counter, smashing it to pieces. “Guess who I spoke with the other night?” He didn’t have to say her name. We only had one mutual friend. “You want to know why I think Trish moved to Paris? She hates American man. She wants to get as far away from us as she can, and who can blame her. We’re a bunch of unsophisticated ass-holes. We’re animals really, compared to Europeans. She already has a boyfriend, can you believe it? Don’t even ask me his name because I can’t fucking remember my own name half the time.” He jerked his shoes on and smacked himself in the face. “Are you ready to go?”

I gave Isaiah a thumbs-up and we walked out the door.

“Anyway, our darling Trish has become little more than a trampy American and every Frenchman in Paris is having their way with her,” he said, as he locked the door. “Once they’ve finished her off, she’ll be back. And we’ll be waiting.” Laughter screamed from his lips and he clapped his hands together. “Now let’s have some fun!”

The club we went to was called the Aztec. There were three large dance floors, two levels, four bars, seven or eight big ugly fat bouncers standing at two entrances, and several hundred cheese-dicks packed in shoulder to shoulder. As far as the eye could see, nothing but cheese-dicks. Of course there were also a lot of young ladies desperate to become porn stars. That I didn’t mind so much.

The first thing that happened once I walked in the door was I got sucked in at the bar and I got crowded in with the rest of the cheese-dicks. They all reached over my shoulder trying to score drinks for the porn queens who lapped up the drinks, giggled, and disappeared onto the dance floor. Elbows were flying in my face and drinks were spilt on my back. Isaiah ran off onto the dance floor with a brunet, and I wished him good luck. As for me, I was forced to drink in order to tolerate the place I had come to drink. Strange, I know. Pointless and idiotic. Still, even amidst this void of humanity I oftentimes possess a hope I can not explain, something beyond sex and beer. Not love. Love is the gimp of Hollywood and it means nothing to me. But there is that something. That . . . something.

I don’t know, really. If you spend enough time at bars and you spend enough time feeling ill and used, and everyone is oblivious accept you alone maybe, and they are all blood thirsty for their little piece of pleasure, but you bet the long shot that someone interesting will show up if you stick around long enough, keep drinking, and don’t be an idiot. Suck it up and keep waiting. Thing is, the person you’re looking for never shows. The same whores stare down phonies with designer jeans and trust fund accounts that can cut the moon, and every bastard you see, every cunt and crank in the place is so caught up exploring the intricacies of the mundane that it starts to look like action, and it is in a sense, but the sense is flawed and everything is lunacy.

The beers came easy, went down easy. Senseless drowning in the snake pit, siren screams, thoughtless words, and everything was flashing lights and oblivion; neon lipstick and powder faces, plucked eyebrows and mini-skirts. The mini-skirts offered some hope, but the eyes killed. They were dull hazel or blue puddles, but their focus was clear and clean, mirror’s sharp edge of exactness and execution, and in those eyes I saw everything I needed to know. Drink up.

I could only take so much. I skidded past the cheese and the mini-skirts, and stood for a moment watching the purple hair boys play needles in the alleyway. Then I went off into new places of nowhere. The lampposts dripped and people thumped the midnight streets to hell and back. It was cold and rainy and fog sank to the ground.

My plan was to jump a bus to University St., then walk five blocks to Josie’s new place. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do when I get there, but in my drunkenness I imagined it would be romantic. She would come to the door in her pajamas and I would be standing there in the rain with flowers. She would invite me to come into the warmth of her home and offer a towel, and I imagined lots of pillows for some reason, hundreds of pillows in every color. I imagined explaining my night at the bar, the cheese-dicks and the women with razor eyes, and I imagined she would understand all this. Nakedness would follow, and it all seemed very romantic the way I had it planned out. Of course I was totally wasted and I wasn’t thinking straight. I’ve known Josie long enough to know, flowers or not, she would not be happy to see me turn up drunk in the middle of the night.

It wasn’t a very good plan to begin with. The bus was late and I didn’t feel like waiting any longer so I started hitch hiking. About the only people willing to pick up hitch hikers these days are middle-age men hoping to score a cheap blow-job. Luckily I got picked up by a car load of eighteen year old kids first. They were real nice guys too. Of course they were all smashed drunk, but that didn’t bother me. What the hell did I care? Drunks are the nicest people in the world, I thought. Too bad there aren’t more drunks on the road.

The youngsters were on their way to a college party. I didn’t know if any of them went to college, but they surely enjoyed the parties. They invited me to come along, and I almost went, but I was serious about seeing Josie that night. I was very drunk. The kids had bottles of beers and we took long pulls, and we made a toast. “To love!” one of them said when I explained that I was going to see an ex-girlfriend. “Not love,” said another one. “Love of pussy.” We all tipped our bottles and laughed. The radio screamed and we wobbled in the back seat, skidded around a corner and damn near sideswiped a parked car. The driver was the drunkest of anyone. Instead of pulling into Josie’s driveway, he hopped the curb, skidded along the grass, and then backed over her mailbox. After the car came to a stop he fell out of the driver’s seat onto the grass and started vomiting. At the time we all thought this was hysterical.
As I stumbled up the steps to Josie’s place, I saw the boys roll the driver into the back seat and speed away, waving like mad men. I waved back. Nice guys, I thought.

I noticed flowers were blooming in the neighbor’s garden so I walked down again and pulled a few out. While walking back up the steps to Josie’s place, one of my feet slipped out from under me. I tried to brace myself but my foot landed in a large ceramic flowerpot, which fell over, tumbled down the steps to the sidewalk and exploded. I wasn’t far behind. A hole opened in my jeans and my knees turned to blood as I slide down and landed on the concrete. Shit!

The lights quickly turned on and eyes peered through the windows. I had been introduced to one of Josie’s new roommates a few weeks before we broke up. She was a broad-shouldered, manly-looking woman named Beauty. She was one of four girls who lived together in the house Josie moved into. We immediately disliked each other. She hated most men because of her own ugliness and that is about all there was to Beauty. She was big, mean, and ugly, and of course she is the one who came out to take a look. She was wearing a blue robe that didn’t fit her stomach and she had a broom in one hand. She saw me laying on the concrete hurt and all she could say was “What are you doing hear? What did you do to my flower pot?”

I stood up and held my middle finger toward Beauty. I tried to brush some of the dirt off my jeans but my hands were cut from the fall and smears of blood covered everything I touched. Shit!

“What happened to the mailbox?”

“Is Josie here?”

“She’s sleeping.”

“Think you can wake her up?”

“No.”

We argued on the porch for several minutes. She kept telling me I was drunk and that I should go home. When I refused, she began to insult me. She called me white trash, drunken trash, etc., etc. So I called her a fat cunt and told her to move out of the way.

Beauty held out her broom in protest. “You’re not getting in this house!” Before I could respond she swung her broom and connected above my left eye. I went down on one knee. Then Beauty started sweeping dirt in my face. She was trying to push me off the porch but instead she swept dirt at me and into my many cuts. When that failed to work she swung her broom around and poked at me with the handle. That’s when I grabbed the broom from her hand, spun it back around and jammed her in the stomach. She made a groaning sound and then she fell over and began to cough and spit. I stepped over her and walked into the living room.

I found Josie standing in her pajamas. Her hair was in a pony-tail and she was standing with her back against the wall, flat against the wall, as if I had her cornered.

If you recall, I described Trish’s eyes as being large. They were large brown eyes that were like sponges. Josie’s eyes were also large, but they were harder to look into. They were more like the women at the club, reflecting what was outside instead of was inside. As I was taking note of all this, I felt a sting, a kind of throbbing pain shoot through my mind, followed by a heat and a redness. I wobbled a little and turned around. Beauty was standing behind me and there was blood coming into my eyes. Whatever she hit me with had shattered into hundreds of pieces. I remember looking at Halloween decorations that were on the windows. There were pumpkins, and a witch who sat upon a broomstick. The walls bleed black paint all around me and I lost my feet. That is the last thing I remember.

Everyone knows the morning after sex is supposed to be a happy morning, a coffee morning, with the smell of crapes frying and breakfast in bed. On the other hand, the morning following a night of hard drinking is pure hell. You’re dehydrated. You stink of cigarettes. If you fell down steps you are likely to have cuts on your hands and maybe dirt and blood on your jeans. Your head hurts. You can’t think straight, and there is a feeling you have like ten pounds of horse meat is rotting inside of you. The feeling is called whiskey gut. You’re queasy. Everything is shaky. Memories become a dry heave of broken thought, a swollen cow’s tongue, and you think, “Shit! What the hell happened to me last night?”

The other really miserable thing you can wake up to is jail. Nothing sucks as bad as getting drunk and waking up in the slammer. And the police, they suck too, and waking up and having to go to a suck job sucks; ugly people in your bed, pimples on your ass. I had a whole list of things I hated, but hangovers and jail were right at the top.

There was a kid who lived in my neighborhood who was born with a bashed-up looking face. He had flappy camel lips that were out of control and the poor sonofabitch had these tiny little arms that looked like they belonged on a doll. The arms didn’t work. They were just there for effect, I suppose. And the kid was young, nine-teen or twenty years old. He probably never had a woman and probably never would. Yet, he kept walking around my neighborhood like it was normal. I woke up with a killer hangover and here was this poor kid walking around my neighborhood with tiny arms and a bashed up looking face and flappy camel lips that looked like dead skin. He tapped the walk button with his forehead and went hobbling across the street, and what could I do but stand there and think “It sucks! It really does suck.”

Whiskey gut!

But the thing I had to realize, the thing I kept telling myself was that I’m lucky. Right? Lucky me. Of all the people on earth, I was one of the lucky ones. If nothing else, I had two good arms. For this I was thankful. So I got into a brawl with a fat woman and lost. So, my ex-girlfriend probably thought I was the scum of the earth. So I was once again unemployed as of 9am that morning since I didn’t show up for the sales job. So I lived in the same building as perverts. So the walls of old age were going to close in on me someday and the only thing I owned of relative value was a beatup 1991 Datson pickup. I felt that God hated me, and I thought I might lose my fucking mind at any minute. But the thing that I kept telling myself was that I’m lucky. Lucky me. Lucky me. I have two arms. Lucky me. I should have gone to jail that night but I didn’t. Lucky me. Lucky me.

The morning following the attack I woke up in my apartment. I call it an attack because that is the way the police would have written it. Never mind that I got bashed with a broom and hit over the head with a vase or whatever it was. I was drunk, and therefore I was the attacker and Josie and Beauty were the victims. This is the way it would have been written on my arrest report and I don’t see a need to deviate. So I’m an attacker; I’ll add it to my list of short comings.

If there was one positive amongst all the negatives, it was that I didn’t go to jail that night. Was it an act of kindness that sparred me? Had the ladies taken mercy on this poor attacker and waved there right to have me incarcerated. Hardly. Beauty’s strike gashed a hole in my head but it didn’t put me out completely. I must have managed to crawl my way to the sidewalk. My friend Buddy found me laying there just before the cops arrived, and he was the one who helped me make it home. Buddy was an old friend from this time I worked selling water filters. In the morning I woke up in my own bed. My hands were cut, I had a black eye, a hole in my head, and I had all the hangover I needed to remind me that it was not a dream. But I was free, not in jail. I was free.

I stood on my balcony in the rain and felt the bitter cold wind on my face, with the feeling of dead horse meat in my stomach. It felt like agony but it was alright considering where I should have been. The kid with doll arms was attempting to purchase a cup of coffee from a street vender and I couldn’t help watching. Having tiny arms, you can imagine how difficult this was for him. First, the young man tried to carry the cup by the lid, but the plastic wasn’t strong enough. It broke off before he got too far, and the cup tipped back and forth and settled on the vender’s cart. Next he tried to carry it by the rim of the cup. Easy enough, but the problem was the coffee was too hot. As he walked, the hot coffee splashed in his face. The vender offered the kid a straw and suggested that he sit on one of the wooden chairs and drink it before walking off. There were a few moments of dialogue between the two and what ended up happening was the vender placed the cup on the kid’s head and he went hobbling off balancing a cup of scolding hot java down the street.

So there I am, nine-thirty in the morning, hung-over like you wouldn’t believe, smoking a cigarette on my balcony, and I’m watching the kid pull off this great feat of balance. I almost started clapping. The kid had great form. He eased his way down the street, reached the stop, waited; he even did a little bob as a car full of women drove by. No sweat. Now, you think he would just wait for the light to change before walking. No, he wanted the walk signal. Our kid is no punk, he likes the signal. The signal tells him ‘man, I can walk. Check it out, I’ve got a cup of joe on my head and I’m going to offer it to my girlfriend.’ Sure, why not? He has a girl he has been eyeing and he is bringing her a cup of coffee. Nothing to it. The kid bent down, tapped the button with his nose, the light changed, and there he goes!

There is no one on earth or in heaven who wanted to see the kid get across the street with a cup of coffee balanced on his head more than I did. It was just a cup of coffee, you know. Why the heck not?

As soon as he was about to reach the other side of the street, a gust of wind pushed the coffee over and poured it down his neck. I watched the kid scream and hobble around in circles.

No arms.

No coffee.

No breaks.

Nothing.

Just a poor kid screaming and hobbling around in circles.

The horse meat began to tear at my insides again, and I ran to the bathroom and vomited for the rest of the morning. Then I went down to the plasma donation center and let them bleed me for a while.