Yeah I am ugly

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Not me but it could be

 

 

I’m the first to admit I’m no oil painting. The calendar has been  hard on me. I’ve been in some fights. I’ve had months where everything I ate came out of a can or a foil pouch. Years, really.

I started out skinny. A lot of guys do. But then I got older, which also happens to a lot of guys.  I am no athlete and never was. During all that high school football stuff I was the dude under the bleachers who sold weed. It was a miracle I ever got out of high school. It’s no mystery that I never went to college.

I worked at low jobs for a long time. I still do. I’m too ham-fisted to make much good at construction, and I can’t do restaurant work since all my charm is in these notebooks (not much there, either, and that’s if you can even read my penmanship. It looks like a cat wrote it).  I don’t like people and they generally don’t like me.

And I have a felony conviction. Think what you want, but our justice system is pretty heavily tilted toward the rich. If you don’t got the scratch, you’re gonna hear the latch. A poor man has a poor man’s pleasures, namely getting drunk whenever he can. And that can lead to more police and more tough times.

Last off, my teeth are shit. I haven’t been to a dentist since the Reagan administration. Seriously, who has time for that? I’ve been lucky because my teeth seem to be made of some kind of granite. They don’t hurt, anyway, but they don’t look good. I quit smoking, but the damage was done long ago. Plus my big front incisor got a chip in it, so there’s that.

Taken all around, I am what you might call “weathered.” I have all my hair and both eyes and all four limbs, but that’s about the best you can say about me. I dress in secondhand clothes that were cheap to begin with and haven’t had the best of care.

But of course I don’t say any of that in my Tinder profile. I figure by the time a girl sees me it’s likely too late.

I hear this blog might make me rich. Who can say?

Two Dogs I Saw

I was coming home from my job at the Denny’s at 4am. I was supposed to work until seven but it was so slow that Derby, my manager, cut me loose. He had me make sure the pans were all done and that there were no backed up plates in the Hobart. Not a problem because it was really slow, being Sunday night and everything. The AA people finally left around one and after that there was nobody.

I’ll say this about AA people. Those fuckers can really stretch a dime. I mean, at one point there must have been eighteen of them sitting around a table. Most of them drank coffee, but there was maybe one or two food orders between all of them. And even then they didn’t eat all the omelette or toast. And they stayed for hours. 

At least they were nice enough, and even though the check was less than thirty bucks they tipped Charise seven. She gave me two for clearing the table while she went out and smoked.

The dogs looked nothing like this but you would NOT want to see an actual picture, believe me

The dogs looked nothing like this but you would NOT want to see an actual picture, believe me

Anyway, I came home and saw these two dogs going at it. I know dogs have feelings because when I was a kid we had a dog who loved me, but I don’t think there was any romance in what I witnessed. It was animal and ugly and made bad sounds.

Still, it made me lonely. I live in a one-room apartment in a building that used to be a bum hotel. You can still smell the old dead wine and all the Top and Bugler that got smoked there over the years. It’s in the floorboards and the walls. I came back to my room and saw my little cot and I got real sad. You know how it is when you feel sorry for yourself?

Yeah, that was how it was with me. Bad, too.

I tried to sleep, but my brain is a bastard. It kept showing me the dogs. Worse yet, it kept saying mean stuff.

The mean thing it said was that dog has more than you, Speedway. You have a shit job but he’s out on the street getting laid.

I called in the next day and quit. My P.O is going to be pissed, but he said there might be something out at the airport. I knew a dude with a felony rap who worked out there, so maybe it’s still possible.

Pray for me, and please don’t feel sorry for me. I do enough of that for myself.

 

Rolling Like The Thunder

Yo dudes. Speedway Randy here. You may remember me from my long-running series on youtube Speedway Randy Stick It To The Man. You know, the one that got taken down after it got like a bajillion hits.

Or so I heard, since I was a guest of the county during that time. Anyway, it was a great how-to series about things like getting a free buzz from gasoline left in the hose (easily enough to saturate your sock) and the joys of free eating (like how they throw all the dough out at a pizza place when they close at night, plus the added bonus footage of my guy getting all swelled up with dough because it was too wet to light a cook fire).

Man, that was the shit. I wish I hadn’t had to give the camera back. I guess you could say I “borrowed” it.

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So part of my agreement with the courts I that I had to get a job. I got one all right. It’s at O’Hare driving the airport shuttle between the terminal and the parking lot.

Before you go all shitty-concerned-citizen on me let me say that
A. there a lots of felons who work at the airport, way more than you know and
B. technically, I am not a felon, at least as far as they think of a felon in county. In fact, they called what I did a “pussy charge.” We’ll leave it at that, but lemme just say that in county I wished I was a felon.

My job is serious boring. I drive a short bus in circles and listen to businessmen lie to their wives on their cellphones. But sometimes I get to be a hero. Well, not exactly a hero. More like a Samaritan.

Like the other night. There was this one chick who couldn’t find her car. She forgot to write her number the fuck down when she left and is getting panicky. This happens from time to time, and like as not the woman will get pissed at me, like it was my fault or something.

But the other night was this young mom who had a baby and two toddlers, twins I think. She might have been hot  under different circumstances, like at wet t-shirt contest. But there’s something sacred about mothers, even young, hot ones.

Anyway, she couldn’t  find her car to save her life. It was late on a Saturday, wicked cold and spitting ice like Chicago does for six fucking months of the year. As we drive around and around the lady starts getting more and more freaked out. We go to all the lots, twice.

Let me tell you about O’Hare parking lots. There are five of them, each packed with thousands of cars. Each lot is like a mile and a half square. They all look exactly the same. That’s why they have these signs that say BE SURE TO WRITE DOWN YOUR PARKING NUMBER.

One of the kids, maybe sensing the tension, hauls off and clubs the other one in the face. They both start screeching. The mother looks so fried I take pity and give her my second-to-last Zagnut which she splits between them.

The candy shuts them up and we drive around looking for her car. She’s pressing the remote over and over again, hoping for a mircale. Then the baby, who up to this point has been as silent as a doll. makes a weird face like Jonathan Winters taking a crap. Which, as it turns out, the kid was doing. Then he starts wailing.

The woman asks if I can pull over for a minute because she has a “poop emergency” on her hands. I swear to God that’s what she said. A POOP EMERGENCY.  I believe her. I can smell shit even though the baby is wearing a snow suit.

She trundles the kid to the back and starts unzipping him. Every layer she removes is like she’s spraying farts out of an aerosol can . Thank God there was nobody else but her and her kids. They were just about done with their Zagnuts, so I gave them my Hohos too. Anything to get the diaper change over with.

By now the woman has a pile of  wet brown baby clothes and her little boy–I could see it was a boy, because as soon as his stinky pants were off he jetted out a little stream of pee like a fountain and girls can’t do that–he’s happy as can be, like getting nude was the whole point of shitting in the first place. He giggles and coos and is pretty goddamned cute. And this from a guy who hates babies, usually.

But now the the whole bus reeks like a tipped-over portable toilet and mom is pulling clothes out of her suitcase looking for a plastic bag. She uses an entire box of diaper wipes and gets herself and the baby more or less clean.

I admired her speed, but I started getting calls from dispatch about my lateness. I told them my situation. It was Carl on the other end, and he hated my guts from day one, so he told me to have her call a taxi and get back to DOING MY GOLDARNED JOB. He would have said “fucking” but you can’t do that over the dispatch radio. He made up for it in real life, believe me. He sounds mean enough, though.

The woman hears  him and I think she’s thinking about the hundred bucks a taxi will charge to drive her around for an hour or too. She starts to beg me to take her around one last time.. All three kids caught her mood and pretty soon all of them were crying and carrying on and beseeching. That’s a Bible word that means “begging on steroids.”

Finally I agree. I yell over the noise

“WHAT KIND OF CAR DO YOU DRIVE?”

“A BLACK NISSAN.”

Great. 90% of the cars in the lot are black Nissans or Toyotas or Subarus. She had no idea if she left it in the E Lot or the G Lot or the F Lot. “It had a bus stop,” she says. That’s real helpful, since every one of them has two bus stops. We’re getting nowhere. Carl is calling me every three minutes. He still doesn’t swear, but I am pretty sure he’s going to make up some horrible shit to tell my P.O. I’m getting more and more desperate. I got no choice. Time’s up. Sorry about your three kids freezing to death.

Just when I am about to put them all out in the snow, son of a bitch… her remote triggers the lights on a car. A black Nissan, parked right by the bus stop. She cheers, thanks me, grabs up her kids and the nasty sodden diaper mess (she’d used a dry cleaning bag) and gets out, leaving only a ghost of the stench.

The rest of the shift was uneventful but I swear to God that shuttle still stinks. People notice it when they get on.

My Name is Speedway Randy.

 

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Not a bad likeness even though I quit smoking mostly

 

I guess I need to put an About page on this thing. Normally I am pretty reserved about my background, but since this is the Internet and everything I’ll just let it all hang out. Hide in plain sight, like a terrorist running from a drone by heading to a soccer stadium. If there’s one thing we learned from the drone wars it’s that there is no wedding large enough to hide you from automated death from the skies. I mean, isn’t always  at a wedding when these guys get hit? I didn’t even know Islamic terrorists even got married. I guess they’re re-thinking that policy now! Hell yeah! “We want a quiet wedding between Ali and Pashma. Just a few close family members. Oh, and it’s in a bunker.”

But I digress.

I thought the best way would be to open the floor to questions, but since as yet I have zero readers I will just go ahead and answer questions I ask myself. I would probably do that anyway no matter what questions I was asked. So here goes:

 

Why are you called Speedway Randy?

Jesus. What a stupid question. Why are called Jared? Because your parents conceived you in a Subway crapper, or because you’re fat and wear khakis ten sizes too big? I’m not even going to justify this one except by saying because that’s my goddamn name.

Are you datable?

I wouldn’t know. I don’t know that metric. I’m not a woman, and I don’t ever go to “woman sites” like Cosmo or Gwynneth Paltrow.org.  By the way, does she name everything after fruits and vegetables, or only her kids?

What’s the best way to cop a free buzz if you’re in jail?

With this one, I have some experience. There’s my favorite, which involves hanging your head down between your knees and hyperventilating, then standing up real fast and pressing your thumbs against your carotid while you push out with your lungs like you’re trying to pop your head off. The added bonus happens if you pass out and bang your head since shock is a pretty wicked buzz. Worth the nausea, even.

What’s your worst job?

That I ever had? I’d have to say being fourth dishwasher at a big Chicago hotel. I got all the shit jobs, like cleaning out the grease traps and scrubbing the range hoods with myriatic acid. That shit wore the skin of both hands right off. Nobody told me I head to wear gloves. I also cut up a bunch of chiles ones at this Nouveau Mexican restaurant and went to take a piss. I tell you, it was like I jammed my dick into a barbecue full of hot coals. Again, nobody told me. Now I always ask if i should wear gloves. With some jobs it’s weird, but I figure you can’t be too careful.

Are you fired a lot?

Yes

How old are you?

Next question.

Who is somebody in the Public Media you admire?

My answer will probably surprise and maybe disgust you (and it’s not Hitler). I have to say Charles Manson. Now hear me out… he may have been a psycho baby-killing cult freak who did his tags in movie star blood, but you must admit the guy has style. All that recent flap about him getting married to that super young chick was pretty cool, and also there was a scene in Mad Men when they had a guy who looked just like him. But the real deal with him is that when he was young he was in Alcatraz. This was way before he made a name for himself as a criminal.They called him Little Charlie on account of being so scrawny. Anyway, he wanted to be a country music star, so he asked Alvin Karpis, a former Public Enemy Number One who had been on The Rock (yeah, they really called it that) since 1936 and had learned to play every Hank Williams and Jimmy Rogers song on guitar, for lessons. Karpis turned him down flat, saying he was too lazy and sketchy to put in the work.

Actually, screw Manson. Karpis was probably right. I don’t admire sketchy people that much. The girl didn’t even marry him. I’ll say Kanye. He’s an asshole, but it works in his favor.

Any advice for a youngster just starting out?

Yeah. Bring a weapon. Especially if that weapon is your mind (taps head).