Chapter 3

As The Man sipped his coffee in his Grey Tenement Apartment he heard the door open behind him. The Whore walked in and dropped herself down onto the extended hide-a-bed. With one corner of the bed supported by an empty plastic milk crate it threatened to collapse under her tiny frame as the long-shot springs squealed in protest.

“Take it easy,” The Man grumbled, placing his now empty mug on the counter that jut unceremoniously from the wall beside him. Their dwelling is a shared room, 12 feet by 10 furnished by only the hide-a-bed, and 2 more inverted milk crates. One supports a nearly antique television scavenged from behind their building, the other serving as a makeshift coffee table, littered with liquor bottles, drug residue and discarded food packaging. A sink with only a cold water tap is filled with cracked dishware and a multitude of stains, rust blood vomit oil nicotine wash down its inside like a rainbow of failure and entropy. The Man and The Whore are not lovers and to call them friends would be a gross misuse of the term. They are closer to symbiotes, in mutual reliance upon each other for survival. They fuck on occasion but neither gets much out of it.

The Whore turned on the television, ignoring The Man.



Lee Marvin's zombified corpse played poker with Charles Bronson's while Clint Eastwood groaned and creaked like an old staircase. Eastwood looked worse off than either of the other players but neither of them mentioned that he wasn't dead yet. Clint refused to ante up.

The Men drank raw crude oil from chipped highball glasses and smoked cigars packed with black powder with abandon. Marvin spat a gristly gob of blackened tar into a spittoon and a drizzle of high octane gasoline trickled down his chin from wind chapped and whiskey stained lips from whence it had been processed. Eastwood drew his Colt and shot the Zombie Lee Marvin whose gasoline filled filled mouth exploded, bone shrapnel piercing the eyes of Bronsan who continued to bet silently. As the fire spread Chuck grabbed onto Clint's face with his partially destroyed mouth and tore his cheek off. Eastwood still refuse to ante up.



3 nude white women ground their bodies against a Black Man sitting in a park wearing an Armani suit. He was spitting rhymes about the genocides in East Europe while all around him men and women in military garb appeared to blow themselves up. The blood and viscera rained down on The Black Man, bespeckling the ivory skin of The White Women and filling the bejeweld Pimp Cup that sat erect upon the picnic blanket that served as the centrepoint of this Dejeuner.



Sham-what?



“I'm off to work, I'll be back around 6,” grumbled the Man swinging the rickety door closed behind him. He walked down the hall stepping over drunks and inhaling noxious smells of urine, paint thinner and the residue of burnt crack cocaine.
“Dill pickle chips and burnt plastic,” he thought to himself, His stomach grumbled, empty but for 6 cups of coffee.
He greeted the manager on his way out but was unheard behind 3 inches of lexan that separated the managers office from the main lobby.
Exiting onto the street The Man was greeted by the sun poking up above the tenemant housing across the street and he averted his eyes from its accusing stare. He spat a widget of phlegm onto the cracked pavement disturbing an oily puddle of filth, turned to his right and headed to work.

It was 9am.