Goin' Down, Down, Down

The script was gathering dust. Finkie, who wasn't getting any video jobs, was back working in the shipping department at Uncle Hershie's boot factory. He also lost his motivation to push the project forward. Meanwhile Harry was mired in a perpetual state of inertia. Burnt out from the road, too lovesick to care about writing, avoiding Pauline and resenting Alvy, he hunkered down in his basement lair, fondling his gun, playing Dylan records and dreaming of everything he wasn't doing, shouldn't been doing and couldn't be doing.

But Finkie man, Finkie was going down fast. A couple of imbroglios at Uncle Hershie's set him down the path of self destruction:

Incident 1 - Hershie's Christmas Party

Every year Hershie threw his famous Christmas party for the guys at work. Strippers, booze, coke - fun and games for all. That year Hershie's party entertainment featured some homegrown talent. Hershie climbed on stage holding up a crisp $1000 bill.

"A gee note to anyone here to anyone who gets up on stage and balls the stripper," he announced.

The stripper turned her sweet bubble butt towards the audience, bent down holding her ankles and jiggled and gyrated.

The men cheered her on, but there were no takers to join her on stage.

"What's the matter," Hershie taunted. "No real men around here?"

Finkie sprung to life. "I'll do it," he selflessly volunteered and bounded up on stage. A thousands bucks and a chance to do a wicked hot stripper. A no-brainer. Okay, so the guys saw you with a hard on, big deal. Did it bother Long John Holmes or Ron "The Hedgehog" Jeremy?

Of course they had no problem performing live on cue.

But Finkie did, his lever wouldn't rise. O the shame, O the shame of it all! And he didn't even get the thousand bucks.


Incident 2 - In the Alley

Finkie had taken to slipping out to the back alley during break-time to smoke a joint. One day a trashy Carol Burnett look-alike saw Finkie smoking the joint and approached him.

Hot tramp, I love you so.

She smacked her glossy lips and asked, "Can I have a smoke, baby?" Finkie held out the joint and offered it to her, but she shook her head.

"Not that kind of a smoke, baby," and then tugged at Finkie's crotch which this time, had no trouble pointing to the seraphim above.

He laughed nervously and said, "That's the type of firm handshake that could get you a job."

"How about a job for you? One that starts with a blow," she said, then puckered her lips.

It didn't take the friendly gal too long to get Finkie off.

"Now your turn," she said while wiggling out of her tight skirt.

But she was a he and Finkie went running wee wee wee all the way home.

                                               ****

Then something in Finkie just snapped, as if he checked out of his body and into another zone. He quit working for Uncle Hershie and dropped his video business. And writing, forget about writing, forget about LA, all Finkie wanted to do was smoke weed. He dropped his trendy, arty friends and started hanging out with the dope-dealing duo, Lenny the Lizard and Cross-Eyed Fred.

"They're good guys, Harry. You should meet them."

Which Harry did, but only for the story. With those names, how could you go won? So he drove with Finkie to their genteel middle class brownstone duplex in midtown near the train tracks. He warned Harry that Lenny the Lizard and Cross-Eyed Fred were picky about their clientele, most of whom were rich and kikey, jocked-out, Jewish porn-freaks who barely made it out of high school, and thought that Las Vegas was the real promised land, and that everyone else on Earth outside their closed circles of privilege, were chattel.

Finkie gave the secret knock at the door, rapping to the chorus of Beethoven's Fifth. Da da da da, da da da da, which was rather appropos for two men of culture. Harry tingled with anticipation and fear. Sleazy situations scared the shit out of him. Harry imagined his obit:

Harry Starr, 25, suddenly, caught in the crossfire while buying hash chez Lenny the Lizard and Cross-Eyed Fred. Two Hells Angels enforcers stormed into the drug den and sprayed those present with gunfire, signalling the beginning of a turf war.

Cross-Eyed Fred answered the door, each of his chameleon eyes independently sizing up Harry and Finkie. He did not appear pleased or particularly welcoming.

"Finkie man, you know that you just can't bring along anybody new like this. First we need references."

"What references Fred? This is my best friend and he's a drug addict. What else do you need to know?"

That Finkie was full of shit? It was true that lately Harry was on a binge, but he certainly wasn't an addict. He was way too cheap to ever let that happen.

Cross-Eyed Fred looked over Harry and nodded. "Yeah, okay, he looks burn-out. Come in," he shrugged.

Cross-Eyed Fred led them through a purple haze of smoke and into a clean and well-lit kitchen. Lenny the Lizard was rolling a joint.

"Gentlemen," he said, while licking the rolling paper to finish the joint. "Care to partake in my herbal remedy?"

Harry was impressed by the Lizard's eloquence, but at the same time was grossed out with his awful case of facial psoriasis. What if a flake fluttered into the joint? Harry thought about passing on the joint, but then again, a free toke was a free toke.

When the Lizard licked the joint, Harry's throat constricted. Gefilte fish did the same thing to him. If he was fool enough to partake in that joint, then he deserved to die. Harry thought about his obit:

Harry Starr, 25, after a lengthy illness, no courageous battle, without dignity or any sechel, metamorphasized into a pile of psoriasis flakes. Serves him right for following Finkie.

Finkie passed the burning joint to Harry. Well, it was free, so Harry graciously accepted the peace offering and took a deep hall. Oh baby, oh baby, it was potent.

"I haven't tasted stuff like this since the old One-Ball Spiegel days," Harry said.

One-Ball Speigel, one of the Flunkers, was one of the St. Antoine neighborhood dealers.

"Oh yes, One-Ball," the Lizard said. "I remember him well. He used to buy from us, ergo, the same taste of product."

Cross-Eyed Fred took a couple of tokes and then walked over to his cello propped up against the wall in the corner of the kitchen. He clutched the neck of the instrument sat down and began to play Bach's Cello Suite #1.

"You know how Speigel lost his ball?" Finkie asked kind of rhetorically.

Who in St. Antoine didn't know that story?

One-Ball, who was just plain Speigel before the incident, was playing frisbee stoned and nude in Sunnydale Park, late that hot sultry August night. An errant toss sailed over his head and into the Shapiro backyard which bordered the park. Speigel, a former track star at Sir Robert Borden High, hopped the fence to recover the frisbee.

On the other side of the fence Nipsy stood guard, the Shapiro family's fiercely territorial Welsh corgi and at twelve inches high, the shortest graduate ever of Willy Kaiser's Shutzhund Training program. That dog had been waiting all its life for that moment: A UFO landing on the doorstep of his doghouse, a clumsy intruder and a couple of dangling balls.

Grrrrrrr...

Yap-yap-yap!!!

Jump-jump-jump!

Bite-bite-bite.

Twist, rock and roll.

Chomp-chomp-chomp.

Gulp.

Paw lickin' good.

Then Nipsy took a leak.

And da da da da, dadadada, the creation of a new Sr. Antoine legend:

One-Ball Speigel.

"The moral of the story dear friends, is never play frisbee au natural and buzzed," the Lizard said.

"And at the end of that school year Prinicpal DeWolfe flunks him! Like how could he expect Speigel to get through the year after losing his favorite ball? He should've cut him some slack, " Finkie put out there for discussion.

"It is indeed, a cruel cruel world, my friend. One-Ball told me that after that incident. he took up kung fu because he wanted to kill the world and in a way, he did," the Lizard said.

Harry sat at the edge of his chair amidst the purple haze, taking it all in. Cross-Eyed Fred was still playing Bach on the cello.

"You mean he really--? Is that story true?" Finkie asked.

"I'm afraid it is. In fact it happened the same night he came by my place to buy some supplies. You know, he confessed to me soon after it happened," the Lizard said.

"What are you talking about?" Harry asked, finally opening his mouth after sitting there like a dope-smoking statue.

"I shouldn't repeat it, but it doesn't really matter anymore," the Lizard said. "That night, One-Ball smoked a joint of Thai sticks here and started going nuts with his new numchuck. He almost killed Fred, so I kicked him out of the house and banned him from ever setting foot here again. So he's pissed at the world, goes downtown, spends a few hours at a strip joint, smokes more Thai sticks and rolls into his house at like three in the morning. Meanwhile his mother's worried sick, alone, waiting up for him. Remember his father took off to Florida with their Fillipino maid years before. So One-Ball is blitzed out of his mind, reeking of Thai sticks and then his mother starts yelling at him. 'Why are you taking drugs? Why are you doing this to me?" et cetera, et cetera. He just wants her to shut up, he can't take the yelling."

"Then something inside him snaps. One-Ball whips out his numchucks from his coat and fucking whacks his mother over the head, killing her instantaneously. He's freaked out, didn't mean it, but knows one thing: that he doesn't want to go to prison for life. His mother had warned him before to stop with the drugs before he ends up in jail with all the "scumbags." So even though One-Ball just killed her, he rationalizes that his mother, rest her soul, would do anything to keep him out of jail, so he gets the idea to fake her suicide."

"One-Ball actually ties a scarf around her neck and hangs her from the chandelier. Then he realizes that she's got this numchuck wound across the head, which would do him in. And then to his good fortune, if that's what you want to call it, the scarf rips and his mother's body goes crashing to the floor, ultimately decapitating the head from the body, but saving his ass. One-Ball then leaves the scene of the crime, drives back to my place and asks me if he can crash here for the night claiming that he got locked out. He goes home the next morning with his alibi, calls the cops and again to his good fortune, if that's what you want to call it, the cops rule the death a suicide and close the case. A few days later, he tells me the real story."

"And you never told the cops the truth?" Harry asked.

"What for? To make a tragic story worse? I figured his punishment was to live...at least for the short while he had left..."

"Oh right," Finkie said. "There was that kung fu demonstration at the St. ANtoine Mall."

"Right," the Lizard confirmed. "With his mother's inheritance, One-Ball opened up a martial arts studio and to attract new students, he'd do these road shows where he'd crack bricks with his head. He was doing one of those demonstrations at the St. Antoine Mall during an Israeli Independence Day celebration, but this time it didn't work out so well."

"Standing in the front row of the crowd watching the demonstration was Borden High's Principal DeWolfe, the same heartless prick who flunked him out. One-Ball spotted him just before he was about to break the concrete brick with his head and lost his concentration. When he tried to break the brick, his head cracked like an egg. And all the hospital's nurses and all the hospital's doctors couldn't put One-Ball back together again."

"Oh man, that's all so sad," Harry said and vowed from that day on, never to do drugs again. And with the Fate of the Flunkers now looming large, Harry understood that it was time to crawl out of his basement existence.